About This Book:
A thrilling WWII middle-grade narrative nonfiction account of Operation Bodyguard, in which the Allied forces used spies and double agents to deceive the Nazis about their true plans for D-Day.
“Throws you right into the action―real spies playing for the highest possible stakes!” ―award-winning author Steve Sheinkin
In the fall of 1943, German troops controlled nearly all of continental Europe. The one chance the Allies had of punching through the German front meant keeping the enemy distracted and in the dark. They had to take the Germans by surprise on “D-Day.”
The mission: trick the Germans into believing the Allies would strike anywhere but their true target, the beaches of Normandy. Featuring historical photos and breathtaking true accounts, Double Crossed tells the exhilarating story of Operation Bodyguard, the mind-boggling effort to lay a false trail for the Germans using fake armies, decoy landings, and the covert work of double agents and spies who risked their lives. With millions of lives hanging in the balance, victory―or defeat―in World War II depended on the Nazis being caught unaware.
*Review Contributed By Karen Yingling, Staff Reviewer*
Fascinating Look at WWII Espionage
Two of these people, Johnny Jebsen and Duško Popov, were wealthy and looking for adventure. Juan Pujol Garcia was a poultry farmer who had a lot of trouble being accepted, and only got taken on when his wife approached the US with his “credentials”. Perhaps my favorite is Lily Sergueiew, who was Russian, and was recruited by the Abwehr. She wanted to be sent to Britain so that she could be a double agent, but really wanted to take her small dog, Babs, with her. She was promised that she could, but this didn’t work out, and she harbored a lot of ill will against the British when she had to leave the dog behind.
I’m not sure how it occurs to someone that it’s a good idea to be a “XX agent” (double cross; this tripped me up when I read it!). The stakes are high, and the amount of lying one would have to keep straight would be enormous. Since the British had managed to crack the codes developed by the German Enigma machine, but the Germans didn’t know this, there was a lot of work involving codes.
Operation Bodyguard was essentially a plan to distract the Germans from fortifying the area around Normandy ahead of the planned Allied D Day operation. The planning surrounding this was enormous. Not only were there the messages and misleading information passed by the double agents, but a vast infrastructure of fake harbors and equipment. I’d read about the soldiers parachuting into areas with gramophones and records of gunfire and talking, but even with the pictures in the book and Barone’s excellent descriptions, it’s hard to imagine how vast the operation was.
While WWII is not my favorite thing to read about, (and I struggled mightily to keep all of the moving pieces of this narrative straight!) there are always students who want more information. Double Crossed is a great length, has plenty of pictures and facsimiles of things like the initial plan for Project Bodyguard, and ends with resources for additional reading. The teachers at my school are requiring that students read more narrative nonfiction, so this is a perfect book to purchase for a middle school or high school collection, along with Barone’s other titles like Race to the Bottom of the Earth: Surviving Antarctica, Unbreakable: The Spies Who Cracked the Nazis’ Secret Code, and Mountain of Fire: The Eruption and Survivors of Mount St. Helens. Of course, what I am really looking forward to is her Mind Not the Timid, a fictional book about the women’s suffrage movement in 1917, set to potentially come out in 2027!
