Book Review – Hitler’s Spies: Lena, The Prelude to Operation Sealion – Mel Kavanaugh (2020)

The Book

Hitler’s Spies: Lena, The Prelude to Operation Sealion; Mel Kavanaugh; Pen & Sword Books, 2020.

Summary

This book was not what I expected. Given it’s title, I thought it would cover all of the Operation Lena spies, but it was focused solely on the first four who landed along the coast of Kent in early September, 1940. Waldberg, Meier, Pons and Kieboom where four hapless young men who were sent in pairs to guide the invading German forces as they stormed the coast of Britain. They thought the invasion would happen within two weeks of their arrival. They were poorly trained and equipped (no water bottles) and were all captured within 24 hours.

All four were brought to trial and only one escaped death. Pons claimed coercion by the Nazis and convinced the jury that it was never his intent to spy. He was the lucky one. Waldberg, who was possibly the most experienced “spy” of the lot, pleaded guilty on the advice of his lawyer and was sentenced to death without a second glance. Meier and Kieboom were also sentenced to death, despite the fact that Kieboom also claimed coercion.

Theirs is a sad tale and there is a lot that one could do with the files at the National Archives. The big elephant in the room, for example is this… the vaunted British legal system allowed a foreigner with a very poor grasp of English to plead guilty to a guaranteed death sentence. Mind-blowingly crazy and worthy of a deep dive and yet the author chose to do something rather pedantic and incredibly boring.

Review

From what I can gather, the author accessed the case files at the National Archives, arranged all of the documents in chronological order and then simply summarized each document… B13 wrote a memo to B2 and questioned the location of the code…. Special Branch phoned and asked to speak to Hinchley-Cooke… Someone at Camp 020 (name unknown) wrote a summary of the case. The four men landed on the coast… etc, etc.

I don’t even know where to begin. The book is full of minutiae that takes up pages and pages, when it could have been covered by a sentence or two, or omitted altogether. There is a LOT of repetition as multiple summaries of the case are presented over and over again by various agencies. There is virtually zero analysis on the part of the author. It is simply a paraphrasing of all of the documents, every single one. The chapters are insanely long and there is no index. In this day and age, a non-fiction book such as this desperately needs an index. The book has citations but they lack folio and/or page numbers. Simply saying “KV 2/12” is like saying “needle in this haystack”. Some of the sources are websites of questionable accuracy.

The author provided an introductory chapter for the context of Operation Sealion and Operation Lena, but brings out the old chestnut that Admiral Canaris (head of the German Abwehr) had communicated with Stewart Menzies (head of MI6) during the war. That was simply a red herring bandied about after the war to explain how the British knew so much about Germany’s plans during the war. The truth was the Brits had broken Germany’s secret Enigma code and wanted to keep that under their hat, even after the war. Better to throw Canaris under the bus (he was dead, anyhow).

The author also makes some basic errors. Through the MI5 documents and reports, various officers refer to the GSS or simply the SS. This is not, as the author assumes, the Nazi SS or Schutzstaffel. It is simply MI5’s acronym for the German Secret Service (GSS) or simply the Secret Service (SS) – i.e. the Abwehr. The Nazi Schutzstaffel were essentially the “political soldiers” of the Nazi regime and had nothing to do with the Abwehr or Operation Lena.

There are also numerous typos and grammatical errors in the book. Overall, I found the book a very tough slog and can’t recommend it.

Review Score

2 out of 5 – useful in that one gets a summary of the case documents in chronological order but that is all