Secret Files from World Wars to Cold War: Intelligence, Strategy and Diplomacy

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Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group are pleased to announce the launch of their new digital resource, Secret Files from The National Archives, UK. This resource provides access to British government secret intelligence and foreign policy files from 1873 to 1953.

Gill Bennett, OBE, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, London, comments: 'This unique collection means that the crucial intelligence dimension to history in the first half of the 20th century is no longer missing.'

The range of documents, from daily signals intelligence reports to government-directed policy and strategy, span four key 20th century conflicts; and provide an almost day-by-day, in-depth study of history of the Second World War, its causes, course, and consequences, and the early Cold War, from a high-level government and secret intelligence perspective.

Significant files include the Hess files, containing transcriptions of conversations and interrogations with Rudolf Hess, during his wartime captivity in Britain. Other highlights in the resource relate to Operation Overlord (the Battle of Normandy), Operation Husky (Allied invasion of Sicily) and the series HW 1, which contains German, Japanese, Italian and other nation's signals, that were intercepted, deciphered and translated by the British Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. This series runs from late 1940 to 1945 and, in many cases, Winston Churchill's own handwritten annotations, questions and comments are on the files.

The intuitive resource allows users to browse and filter options by: series, conflict, theme, time period, regions, document types, and organisations that allow searching within the document.