While spared fighting during WWII, few cities saw more intrigue and espionage than Lisbon. Neutral Portugal maintained economic ties to both Axis and Allied powers, and was the world’s largest exporter of wolfram, a metal crucial to producing armaments. The capital, previously a provincial backwater, suddenly bulged with arms dealers, profiteers, opportunists, spies of every nationality, and tens of thousands of refugees, primarily Jews seeking passage to America or Palestine. Lochery, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at University College London, tells the gripping story of the city known as “Casablanca II,” which is largely the history of António de Oliveira Salazar, the tireless prime minister whose first priority was to maintain Portugal’s neutrality to avoid “economic sanctions from the Allied powers, and outright invasion by the Germans.” Lochery’s portrayal of Salazar is broadly sympathetic while not hagiographic, a corrective to the popular image of an authoritarian Franco-lite. While engrossing and rewarding, the book exhibits problems with pacing and structure, introducing characters and concepts in a pointillist fashion; in four pages, Lochery discusses an honorary degree Cambridge University bestowed on Salazar, British efforts to prevent Germany from obtaining wolfram, the prevalence of prostitution and sexually transmitted diseases, and a rally for national unity held by Salazar. (Nov.)
Lisbon: War in the Shadows of the City of Light, 1939-1945
Narrated by Robin Sachs
Neill LocheryUnabridged — 8 hours, 31 minutes
Lisbon: War in the Shadows of the City of Light, 1939-1945
Narrated by Robin Sachs
Neill LocheryUnabridged — 8 hours, 31 minutes
Overview
Throughout the Second World War, Lisbon was at the very center of the world's attention and was the only European city in which both the Allies and the Axis powers openly operated. Portugal was frantically trying to hold on to its self-proclaimed wartime neutrality but in reality was increasingly caught in the middle of the economic, and naval, wars between the Allies and the Nazis. The story is not, however, a conventional tale of World War II in that barely a shot was fired or a bomb dropped. Instead, it is a gripping tale of intrigue, betrayal, opportunism, and double-dealing, all of which took place in the Cidade da Luz and along its idyllic Atlantic coastline. It is the story of how a relatively poor European country not only survived the war physically intact but came out of it in 1945 much wealthier than it had been when war broke out in 1939. Although much of this wealth was considered by the Allies to be “ill-gotten gain,” the Portuguese were allowed to retain the vast majority of it.
Lisbon was a city in which an apparent German plot in 1940 to kidnap the Duke and Duchess of Windsor was foiled and one in which much of the royalty of Europe lived and played in either temporary or permanent exile. Over one million refugees flooded into the city seeking passage to the United States on one of the ships that sailed from the neutral port or, for the super-rich, via the Azores on the Pan-American Boeing B314 Clipper service. Most, however, had to wait months or even years in the city before securing their onward passage. Among the refugees were prominent Jews such as the writer Arthur Koestler, the artists Marc Chagall and Max Ernst, and art collector Peggy Guggenheim. On the run from the Germans since the fall of France in the summer of 1940, many of the refugees survived on a clandestine network of financial and organizational support originating from the offices of Solomon Guggenheim in New York.
Hundreds of Allied and German agents operated openly in the city and monitored every move of the enemy. Their role was to log enemy shipping movements in and around the busy port of Lisbon, to spread propaganda, and to disrupt the supply of vital goods to the enemy. Among the agents was a young Ian Fleming busy devising Operation Golden Eye and playing blackjack against German agents at the Estoril Casino-a location that was to later provide the inspiration for a number of James Bond films. The two hundred or so British agents operating in Lisbon were controlled from London by the Iberian Desk of the Special Operations Executive, which was led by the brilliant spy chief, and traitor, Kim Philby. Writers Graham Greene and Malcolm Muggeridge worked at the same desk as Philby before Muggeridge was posted to Lisbon and eventually on to the Portuguese colonies.
As the British and German agents watched each other, their movements were, in turn, shadowed and recorded by the hugely feared Portuguese secret police, the PVDE, led by the Berlin-educated and strong anti-Communist Captain Agostinho Lourenco. His reports and decisions drew the lines that determined which espionage and propaganda activities in the city were tolerable to the authorities and which were not. As a number of British, German, and Italian secret agents and journalists found to their cost, if you tried to cross Captain Lourenco, your stay in Portugal was severely shortened. Such was the reputation of the PVDE during the 1930s that it became the model used by the Nazis to develop the Gestapo.
Editorial Reviews
’Lisbon’ is a valuable source of information about an astonishing time and place.”
Columbia Daily News
featured in roundup of history books: “A fascinating account of one of the back stages of the War. Lisbon was a hotbed of intrigue and espionage while remaining neutral as the world fought around it.”\
Macleans
“Like Casablanca, only 20 times more.”
Express Milwaukee
“Fascinating.”
The Scotsman, four-star review
“Intrigue, betrayal, opportunism and double dealing’ Lochery promises us – and his engrossing book delivers all those things and more.”
Literary Review
"The twists and turns of Salazar's tight-rope diplomacy form the central thread of Neill Lochery's impressive account of wartime Lisbon and its leader... The personalities, plots and counterplots within that tale are absorbing... The book's principal worth lies in its illumination of Salazar, who emerges from Lochery's pages as a fascinating, tireless and single-minded figure."
Jill Jolliffe,
Publishers Weekly
“Lochery tells the gripping story of the city known as ‘Casablanca II’…engrossing and rewarding.”
Booklist, September 20, 2011
“Lochery recounts wartime happenings in the Portuguese capital of Lisbon, where the Allies and the Axis conducted the war through espionage, propaganda, and diplomatic pressure on Salazar to relinquish Portugal’s neutrality. A cloak-and-dagger atmosphere accordingly suffuses Lochery’s account…. A productive archival sleuth, [he] makes original contributions to the literature of neutrality in WWII.”
Shelf Awareness
“A lively, accessible and hair-raising history revealing every sordid detail of Lisbon during World War II—a time and place that many have chosen to forget in order to save face.”
Wall Street Journal
“Evocative…. [Lochery] skillfully documents the experiences of the rich and glamorous as well as the less fortunate and even sinister of the city’s war time arrivals… Distilling an enormous quantity of research, he has rendered a fascinating and readable account of this small country’s role in World War II, protected, as it was, by its wily champion.”
Seattle Times
The only European city where Allied and Axis powers both operated openly during World War II, Lisbon sheltered not only exiled royalty, escaped POWs, and a million refugees seeking passage to America but spies, secret police, and black marketeers. A historian fluent in Portuguese, Lochery lets the amazing facts speak for themselves.
An engaging account of the city of Lisbon during World War II, as dictator António de Oliveira Salazar navigated treacherous diplomatic waters in order to ensure the neutrality of Portugal. Middle East expert Lochery (Loaded Dice: The Foreign Office and Israel, 2008, etc.) chronicles the city's importance to the war on both sides, portraying it as a sort of Casablanca, complete with an entrenched gambling establishment. Salazar worked hard to ensure that his country was neutral and managed to improve its economic condition during the war by playing each side against the other. Both rich and poor fled to Lisbon from continental Europe in hopes of procuring passage off the continent, whether by selling jewels and gold or by more desperate means. Lochery presents a flashy city while also reminding readers of the plight of poorer refugees and Portuguese citizens who did not have the resources of the rich. Though the author mostly portrays Salazar in a positive light, he emphasizes the leader's lack of sympathy toward the Jews fleeing the Nazis. Lochery keeps the pages turning, never allowing his narrative to become dry or difficult; as a result, it is ideally suited to the interested layperson. However, the author does assume that the readers have knowledge of the major events of the time period, particularly those preceding WWII. Well-researched enough for an academic, but still accessible to general readers.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940169573824 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Blackstone Audio, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2011 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
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