Summary of William Stevenson's A Man Called Intrepid

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 Billy Stephenson, the future partner of FDR and Churchill, was born in 1896 in Winnipeg, Canada. He grew up on the prairies of western Canada, and was always restless and inquisitive. He loved boxing.
#2 During World War I, Stephenson was commissioned in the field and went straight to the trenches. He saw men die in convulsion or lose sight and mind. He was crippled in another gas attack and sent back to England as disabled for life.
#3 Stephenson was a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps, and he was noted for his valuable and accurate information on enemy movements. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for conspicuous gallantry and skill in attacking enemy troops and transports from low altitudes.
#4 Stephen Stephenson, the aviator, was recommended for the British intelligence service by his cool assessment of enemy aircraft. He had also proposed to eliminate key enemy fliers, and practiced what he preached.

Sujets

• Political Science
• Espionage
• Intelligence

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 12 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798822508651
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on William Stevenson's A Man Called Intrepid
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Billy Stephenson, the future partner of FDR and Churchill, was born in 1896 in Winnipeg, Canada. He grew up on the prairies of western Canada, and was always restless and inquisitive. He loved boxing.

#2

During World War I, Stephenson was commissioned in the field and went straight to the trenches. He saw men die in convulsion or lose sight and mind. He was crippled in another gas attack and sent back to England as disabled for life.

#3

Stephenson was a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps, and he was noted for his valuable and accurate information on enemy movements. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for conspicuous gallantry and skill in attacking enemy troops and transports from low altitudes.

#4

Stephen Stephenson, the aviator, was recommended for the British intelligence service by his cool assessment of enemy aircraft. He had also proposed to eliminate key enemy fliers, and practiced what he preached.

#5

The air war that began over Flanders was new. It bred a new kind of warrior. No aviator contributed more to the English-speaking cause than Stephenson. He was shot down on July 28, 1918, and spent the rest of the war in a German prison.

#6

Stephenson was a test pilot for the Royal Flying Corps, and he was transferred to the neutral zone of test-flying foreign warplanes. He was still test-flying when he became entranced by the whole range of new ideas associated with aviation.

#7

The end of the war did not mean the end of danger, as Admiral Blinker Hall pointed out. His warnings were swept away in the postwar wave of revulsion to war and disenchantment with military leaders.

#8

The war demanded the dismantling of the war machine, and the public wanted it so. Military budgets were slashed. Aviation in England was returned to private enterprise. Test pilots were out of jobs.

#9

The British intelligence community had been severely reduced after the war, and Admiral Hall tried to keep it alive through groups of civilians in politics, international affairs, and scientific development. He built up contacts in industry, commerce, and the universities, where he could tap resources of intellect.

#10

In the 1920s, Stephenson was drawn into a circle of scientists gathered by Winston Churchill, through his personal force of character, around the person of Professor Frederick Lindemann, later Lord Cherwell, but always the Prof to Churchill and Stephenson.

#11

Steiny was a mathematical genius who had already covered a wide range of electronics before the end of the nineteenth century. He had been working for a large corporation in America, which had stifled his creative powers. I knew his work, heard of his discontent, and offered him freedom in my own labs.

#12

There was no American equivalent to the British Secret Intelligence Service. The only intelligence service was the United States Army’s Signal Intelligence Service, which was charged with the interception and solving of enemy communications in wartime.

#13

Donovan reported on the popularity of the German military caste, their determination to rearm, and the opportunities offered to fanatics willing to lead the people out of their economic chaos. Hitler’s autobiography expressed hatred for the Jews, denounced the Bolsheviks, and offered a disturbingly perceptive study of mass propaganda.

#14

In 1924, Stephenson went to Germany to seek business partners, scientific brains, and opportunities to expand his interests. He met a pretty young girl from Tennessee named Mary French Simmons. They fell in love, and she agreed to marry him.

#15

By the time Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, in 1933, he had already developed a Big Lie strategy that he would use to spread his nation’s propaganda. He would not attack his next victim until he had undermined them first.

#16

The Radio Intelligence Division of the Federal Communications Commission was peering into Nazi secret-radio traffic. They were the American counterpart of the British Radio Security Service, which was watching for pirate radio stations that broke the law.

#17

There was a widespread belief in Britain and the United States that the manufacture of arms was in the hands of Merchants of Death. Stephenson was building planes, but his fellow flight-commander from 73 Squadron A. H. Orlebar won the coveted aeronautical trophy, the Schneider Cup, in the plane that sired the Spitfire.

#18

In Britain, a small movement resisted further compromise with Hitler. They were called Churchill’s activists, and their voice in Parliament was Churchill. But the public ignored his warnings.

#19

The British had a secret alliance with Washington to pool the results of their unofficial eavesdropping. Their clandestine method of cooperation provided useful experience for the hard times to come.

#20

Stephenson was in the public eye, seemingly contradicting his secret work. This was purposeful. If war came, such men would be scrutinized by enemy intelligence, but largely dependent on newspaper files.

#21

The American government wanted to build a network to track Japanese units, and they turned to Churchill for help. Churchill knew that the Americans had no power, but he knew that they had courage.

#22

The field of cryptanalysis had a aura of sorcery, but the basis was highly scientific. Stephenson had a natural interest in this field, and a talent for abstract mathematics that would be needed in meeting the challenge of Enigma.

#23

In1937, Stephenson learned through his contacts in the German communications industry that Enigma was being used by the Nazi party to send secret messages. It had come under the control of a few men with all the powers of spying, police interrogation, and execution.

#24

Heydrich was a German spy who was useful to Hitler, and he was the one who warned the German factories that the Allied Control Commission was coming to inspect to see if Germany was adhering to the Treaty of Versailles.

#25

The discovery of the portable Enigma was as valuable as the knowledge that Heydrich was in charge. The machine had a keyboard like a typewriter. The keys were linked electrically through a system of drums. The sender would hit the keys as if typing routinely, and the machine would switch each letter to a different one.

#26

The terms of the agreement between Adolf Hitler and Neville Chamberlain were studied by a retiring but exceedingly honest man, Alfred Duff Cooper. He was First Lord of the Admiralty, loyal to his prime minister, and the kind of Englishman upon whose sense of fair play Hitler had counted in his policy of deceit.

#27

After the Czech disaster, Stephenson said that war was coming, and that you should work with the Nazis now.

#28

Roosevelt’s support for Churchill’s rebels must have begun almost unconsciously. Hitler’s intentions became clear in a four-hour speech to his military chiefs and the ministers of war and foreign affairs. He talked about the solid racial nucleus of German Aryans, who must breed selectively and prosper on resources now held by inferior tribes.

#29

The report reached Churchill and Roosevelt about a month after Hitler’s briefing, which took place on November 5, 1937. The sources had to be protected, and neither Churchill nor the President could risk betraying their knowledge.

#30

The British intelligence mission to Warsaw was led by Colonel Colin Gubbins, who had written three books on guerrilla warfare. They scooped Mao Tse-tung and North Vietnam’s unconventional warfare guides by several years.

#31

In early 1939, Gubbins discussed resistance with his old comrades in the Polish Secret Service. He warned them that their country would be crushed between Hitler and Stalin. Then Hitler would bring his frontiers right up to those of the Soviet Union, the enemy he planned to eliminate.

#32

The Second World War began with wirelessed intelligence. The Nazi-Soviet Pact sealed Poland’s fate. But Gubbins had to go to Warsaw again. One of his colleagues, Eric Bailey, commented, It seemed madness. Only Stephenson and a few others knew that Gubbins had to do it.

#33

The amateurs of intelligence helped a few obscure and badly paid civil servants of the Government Code and Cipher School. They listened to messages between German units, which were sent in ever-changing gobbledygook over stations transmitting at low strength.

#34

When Stephenson returned from Germany in 1933 with independent confirmation of the new portable Enigma, the task of trying to build a replica was assigned to a taciturn little Scot who had been a professor of German before working in Room 40.

#35

The real Enigma machine was sent to Warsaw, and it was exchanged for some dirty shirts and some weighty but otherwise dispensable books. The gesture of passing this knowledge and the machine to the British was that of a warrior flinging his sword to an ally before he fell.

#36

The team that was tasked with decoding the Heydrich-Enigma was the most important and difficult of all the missions that Bletchley Park was responsible for. They were going to have to pull out of the ether the faintest of enemy murmurings, and then figure out what those figures and letters meant.

#37

The British priests at Bletchley Park, who were trying to read Hitler’s orders to his generals, were only able to read the responses from the Germans. They had no idea that they only had 150 days to solve the riddle before Hitler smashed his way to the English Channel.

#38

During the war, Stephenson was involved in the first intelligence operation in the new style. He used his commercial interests to help defense. He was tasked w