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Top Secret Exchange: The Tizard Mission and the Scientific War. By David Zimmerman. Montreal and Kingston/Buffalo: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1996. ISBN 0-7735-1401-5. Bibliography. Notes. Index. Pp. 241. $29.95.
In August 1940, a year after the outbreak of the war, at a time when Britain stood alone against Hitler, a delegation of British scientists led by Sir Henry Tizard flew to Ottawa, thence in September to Washington, D.C., in the still-neutral United States. With instructions from Winston Churchill, they were to share with Canadian and American colleagues a top-secret collection of drawings and devices that almost overnight transformed their capacity to wage war. At the same time, the mission altered irrevocably the rules and customs of Allied collaboration in defence science, and gave a new dimension to the "special relationship" between Churchill and Roosevelt. Today, the "Tizard Mission," as it became known, forms part of the mythology of the "secret war." Only now is that war, on its many fronts, giving up its secrets. In the hands of David Zimmerman, this equinoctial moment in Anglo-American relations has at last found a historian to do it justice.
Justice, in this case, is best served by a wealth of detail, which reduces some of the myths to more manageable meanings. The book places the Tizard mission in the context of British and American diplomacy before, during and immediately after the war-from its roots in the Great War, when British (and, for that matter, French) scientists first lent their accumulated expertise to American colleagues, still officially neutral, yet already committed to the Allied cause-through the "great exchange" of 1940, with its many consequences for the war against Hitler. Between 1917-19, by several and repeated acts of generosity, some relayed through official channels, America...