The time-frame of Mr. Stafford’s history is roughly three months centered on the formal end of the war in Europe. He notes that the war continued after Germany’s surrender. Some notable events at that time, as well as events before the war are viewed through the eyes of individuals who lived through them as prisoners, reporters, soldiers, intelligence agents and relief workers in Germany, Poland, Russia, Italy and France and in other nations. The individuals he mentions are presented with a pointillist touch that captures a vivid, I-was-there, personal element in his history. They include Fey von Hassell, the daughter of a conspirator of the failed attempt to kill Hitler. She spent the war in many concentration camps. Robert Ellis, a member of the Tenth Mountain Division who fought as an infantryman in the Appennines; Bryan Samain, who fought as a commando from Normandy to the Baltic Sea and who served also as an intelligence operative; Geoffrey Cox, a frontline, British intelligence officer in Italy; Leonard Linton, who was a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division; Geoffrey Cox, who fought with the New Zealand Second Division in Italy; Robert Reid, a BBC war correspondent who provided some of the most informative and depressing public accounts of Nazi behavior; Francesca Wilson, an Englishwoman who was a relief worker at a displaced persons camp in Bavaria and who visited several concentration camps at the end of the war; and others.

As an UNNRA representative, Ms Wilson went to Fohrenwald, built originally as a model Nazi workers village in Bavaria, where her job was to supervise the schools for eight hundred children whose languages included Estonian, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Serb, Polish and German. She found one school, headed by an Estonian, “a woman with a genius for handling small children.” The schools included Holocaust survivors. She traveled to Munich to find books for her school. She opened a mathematics textbook, and she read: “Germany has 100,000 epileptics and 250,000 mental defectives. It costs 2 .50 marks a day to keep each one of them. How many babies could go to nursery school at a cost of 1 mark daily for the same sum?” Nazification infected everything in Germany. Ms Wilson had to search widely for appropriate books for children.

Fey von Hassell was a political prisoner, a Sippenhafte, whose fate was to be shuffled with thousands of other political prisoners from concentration camp to concentration camp. The evacuations became death marches. The Third Reich used a variety of ways to kill upwards of a quarter of a million of these people; they burned some in barns; they machine-gunned others; they shot them when they stopped to tie their shoelaces – if they weren’t barefoot; they starved them; many froze to death; guards shot the exhausted. The Gestapo made no distinction between German prisoners and those from other nations.

These savage marches happened a few days, weeks and months before the end of the war, and after it. Ms. von Hassell’s last camp was Dachau. She and other political prisoners had a grand tour of concentration camps throughout the war. She survived.

Inevitably and properly, Mr. Stafford gives us a guidebook, if you will, to life and death in German concentration camps. Even though most of us will be depressed by increasing our knowledge of some of them, we will be alarmed by the depth of Nazi depravities. Concentration camps were not a wartime invention. Heinrich Himmler, on March 21, 1933, just two months after Hitler came to power, announced that Dachau had been selected as the location of a “detention camp for the enemies of National Socialism. Early on, its first inmates were Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, clergymen, and gypsies. Nazis began stocking Jews there after Kristallnacht in 1938. Once the war started, many other groups, including dissident Polish priests, dissident Wehrmacht officers, and anti-German émigrés captured in Paris, Prague and Amsterdam, were imprisoned. (About fifty thousand Dutch collaborators were given prison sentences after the war and more than one hundred and fifty were condemned to death, and only forty were executed.)

Robert Reid’s BBC reports were far-ranging and incisive. He covered battles and knew many of the Allied military leaders, including General Patton. Reid was smart and fearless. As the war neared its end and Nazis were trying to cover their tails, he concentrated on concentration camps. And David Stafford concentrates on him and his reportage.

I’ll observe that Mr. Reid’s wartime reports – and there are many of them in this book – are far superior to Edward R. Morrow’s. Let Mr. Stafford introduce Mr.Reid: “Victory brought jubilation to thousands, but for other victims of Hitler’s Third Reich, liberation dawned amid death and despair. And Reid was determined that in the flush of victory this story should not be lost. It offered a somber and sobering counterpoint to the otherwise benign scene he had been reporting recently from the lush Bavarian countryside.”

And now Mr. Reid: “There is a trail of death one hundred and twenty-five miles long across Germany – not the death of soldiers killed in combat but the murder of those luckless inmates of the concentration camps of Buchenwald and Flossenburg who were forced by their Nazi jailers to take to the road when the Americans approached both camps.” Roughly twenty-five hundred out of five thousand prisoners from Buchenwald had been killed by the time they arrived at Flossenburg concentration camp near the Czech border. A large number of prisoners had been hanged in front of other prisoners at Flossenburg. By the site of the gallows, there was a decorated Christmas tree. Similar bestialities occurred at most of the other camps. Need I say more?

After I finished reading Endgame, 1945 I made a walkthrough of it with my coach of history, Edward Hallett Carr, to ascertain my high opinion of Mr. Stafford’s book. On all counts, Mr. Carr helps to confirm my respect for this book. “Study the historian before you begin to study the facts.” “History cannot be written unless the historian can achieve some kind of contact with the mind of those about whom he is writing.” “What is history? It is a continuous process between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past.” Based on these guideposts of Mr. Carr, I have no doubt that Mr. Stafford has written an outstanding book and that his previous books reinforced his capabilities to write this one. It ranks with historian John Lukacs’s The Last European War: September 1939-December 1941.

Formerly the director of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs and an Adjunct Professor of History at the University of Toronto, Stafford is now the project director at the Center for the Study of the Two World Wars at the University of Edinburgh. Among his previous books are Camp X: OSS, “Intrepid,” and the Allies’ North American Training Camp for Secret Agents, 1941-1945; Britain and European Resistance 1940-45; Ten Days to D-Day; and Secret Agent: The True Story of the Special Operations Executive.

I greatly enjoyed being challenged by his book, mainly because I’m one of those skeptical experts who feels that he knows what may have taken place in China and I’m cynical enough to doubt almost all authorities. Even though I believe I ventured into as many points of the compass in China, as all but a few other Americans, from French Indochina to north of the Great Wall, and from the mountains in the west to the South China Sea in the east, and had many singular adventures, I still quote Pearl Buck whenever I’m invited to talk about China. She said: “There are no experts on China, only varying degrees of ignorance.” I was provoked by this book and by Mr. Mu’s conclusions. Often, I talked back to him as I turned the pages. I’m not as ignorant as I was before I met Maochun Yu. He is a good teacher and he compelled me to question some of my comfortably soft-headed assumptions. You can’t ask for more than that.

His overriding conclusion based on his interpretation of historical records --I choose to let him state this in his own words – is: “In essence, this book attempts to illustrate how these foreign operations served to challenge the authority and legitimacy of the Chinese Nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek to successfully handle and control foreign operations during World War II greatly contributed to its own demise four years after the war ended.” His conclusion warrants respect. But it’s hugely debateable. Although the British and the French had only one goal in their Chinese efforts: to secure their postwar, overseas empires, and they, in fact, pursued their own selfish goals in Nationalist China and Asia throughout the war, the United States provided substantial help in many sectors. Without our help, China might well have been totally defeated by the Japanese before the end of the war. After all, China was fighting two wars, one against the Japanese and the other against the Chinese Communists. This may be debatable, too. But it’s sensible to recognize that, despite so many lamentably poor diplomatic and military American leaders making a miserable hash of our joint work with the Chinese, we still made a noble effort. And, in its mysterious way, so did the Nationalist Chinese who fought from 1931 to 1945, and after the end of the Second World War, from 1945 to 1949, in fighting the Chinese Communists who were supported by the USSR. We know that we didn’t lose China. The Chinese lost China.

China, as we know, was a graveyard of reputations of some outstanding Americans. In his research, Mr. Yu adds President Roosevelt and Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morganthau, to the list of those leaders who, either by omission or commission, succeeded in shortchanging the Nationalists by making promises of funds and materiel they never kept. (China received 3.2 per cent of all countries receiving Lend-Lease material or $1,548,794, 966). We might recognize the accuracy of General Chennault’s observation after the war, quoted by Mr. Yu: “I always found the Chinese friendly and cooperative. The Japanese gave me a little trouble at times, but not very much. The British in Burma were quite difficult sometimes. But Washington gave me trouble night and day throughout the war.”

Professor Yu praises Admiral Milton Miles, the head of SACO, and his nefarious colleague, Tai Li, the head of Chinese intelligence. He gives a failing grade to General William J. Donovan and to Richard Heppner, the head of OSS in China. He gives a passing grade to Ambassador Patrick Hurley. (Who among us would salute Hurley, who, being introduced to Chiang Kai-shek, said, “Hello, Mr. Shek.”?) Hurley was undoubtedy soft in the head.

Professor Yu cites the German contribution to Chiang Kai-shek and the prolonged Nazi involvement with the Chinese forces. German military aid (arms and instruction) began in earnest in 1928 and lasted until 1938. I don’t know how Germany contributed to Chiang’s inability to fight the Chinese Communists. General Alexander von Falkenhausen made sure that Chinese forces learned to march in the German goose-step. Mu cites William Kirby’s book, Germany and the Republic of China, published by Stanford University Press in 1984. Read it and believe it.

To add to the ingredients of the cockeyed world of Chiang Kai-shek, we should not overlook his own involvement with Moscow. As a member of the “fledgling” (Yu’s adjective) Chinese Communist Party, Chiang traveled to Moscow to gain Russia’s political and military help. With Lenin’s approval, he came back to China with two million rubles. In 1927, with Lenin dead as well as the founder of the Chinese Nationalist Party,Sun Yat-sen, Chiang went on a mission to purge and kill Chinese Communists. He slaughtered thousands of Communists in Canton. To add to this bouillabaisse of history, Mao Zedong, who began his professional life as a librarian and ended it as the killer of 60,000,000 of his own people, learned his craft of killing during the Second World War.

The evidence is that the war in China was an indisputable and direct benefit to us. There were roughly 60,000 Americans (a high estimate) in China. Roughly fewer than four to five thousand Americans died there (my estimate). This was fewer than the number of Americans killed at Iwo Jima. How did we gain from helping China? The answer is that more than 1 million Japanese soldiers remained in China during the latter part of the war. Without being tied up in China, the great majority of Japanese troops would probably have been sent to fight us in the Pacific. And many more Americans would have been killed.

I Was Trained To Be A Spy follows the story of an American-born boy who grew up in a small village on the Greek island of Crete. During his final years in high school, he is present during the German invasion of his island as WWII began. At the age of eighteen, he joined a resistance group and supplied crucial information to the SOE, the arm of the English Intelligence Service. This group, however, is uncovered, resulting in their hasty evacuation by the SOE, to Cairo, Egypt. There, Doundoulakis and his brother were asked to join the English Intelligence Service, only to pursue the American OSS (Office of Strategic Services) which was the newly formed American intelligence counterpart. As such, they were enlisted into the U.S. Army and attached to the OSS, where the author was trained for intelligence as well as other combat skills. After being oriented into a highly-skilled "spy," Doundoulakis was sent back to Greece along with a Greek naval intelligence officer, and later set up a communications cell with a wireless radio he smuggled in, hidden inside a can of olive oil!

Filled with historical references, I Was Trained To Become A Spy is a detailed and lively account of one young man's spy training that truly brings to life the daily routines and mentality of a real spy. Driving the reading experience is the constant danger of being caught, which will undoubtedly keep readers fascinated from one page to another. Highly-recommended to history enthusiasts, military personnel and fans of espionage, I Was Trained To Be A Spy is now available for ordering online at Xlibris.com and at your local bookstore.

About the Author

Helias Doundoulakis was born in Canton, Ohio, in 1923, of Greek-immigrant parents. At the age of two years old, his family returned to Crete, Greece, and there they lived uneventfully until the German elite paratroopers invaded Crete in 1941. After his two-year involvement with the Cretan Resistance and English intelligence Service, he and his brother, George, a leader in the Resistance, escaped to Cairo, Egypt with the help of an English torpedo boat, to avoid capture by the Gestapo. He enlisted in the American army and was trained as a spy in Cairo, by the newly created OSS, Office of Strategic Services and also by the English Intelligence Service, and was sent as a spy to Salonica, the second largest city in Greece, on a dangerous undergound mission. He was the only American soldier in that city for a period of nine months, sending daily messages to OSS headquarters in Cairo on German movements. With the information sent by these cryptic messages, many Axis ships were sunk, trains bombed, and thousands of Germans were killed. At the wars conclusion, he was decorated by the United States Army and the Greek Government.