Secret Warriors

Starred review from February 9, 2015
Downing (Spies in the Sky), a British TV producer and writer, offers an ingenious history that sets aside WWI’s immense slaughter in order to concentrate on those who labored behind the scenes (primarily in Britain). Though he fails to provide a unifying theme (an introductory chapter attempts to do so by describing the world-changing 19th-century advancements that defined the pre-WWI era), few readers will complain as they proceed through five unrelated but completely engrossing sections on aviation, intelligence, weapons, medicine, and communication. Even readers familiar with Bletchley Park’s dazzling feats in WWII will marvel at how Britain was able to decipher Germany’s military and diplomatic codes nearly from the start of WWI. Downing’s fine history of the war’s most notable weapons—machine guns, tanks, poison gas—precedes chapters giving even finer histories of vast advances in surgery (90% of wounded soldiers in WWI survived, versus 60% during the American Civil War) and sanitation (10% of deaths stemmed from disease in WWI, versus 70% in the Civil War). He also outlines how Hitler and Goebbels admired and emulated Britain’s surprisingly effective journalism and propaganda operations during WWI, which have been adopted by countries at war ever since. For better or worse, these military developments remain with us, and Downing delivers a riveting account of how they happened. B&w photos.