The publisher of the AIIA’s Australian Journal of International Affairs, Taylor & Francis, has recently launched an exciting new resource which may be of interest to AIIA members. The collection is now available for institutional trial.

Spanning four key twentieth-century conflicts, with a spotlight on the Second World War, Secret Files from World Wars to Cold War provides access to British government secret intelligence and foreign policy files from 1873 to 1953.

At the heart of this resource are the files of the Permanent Undersecretary’s Department (PUSD). The PUSD was the point of liaison between the Foreign Office and the British intelligence establishment, and these files document intelligence activities and their influence on foreign policy from 1873 to 1951, providing new insights into key moments of twentieth-century history.

Content is primary, curated, and annotated which enables rich research into intelligence, foreign policy, international relations, and military history in the period of Appeasement, through the Second World War, and into the early Cold War.

Topics that can be researched in the PUSD files include: 

• Planning for major operations such as Overlord and Torch
• Civilian morale in Axis nations
• The policies of Vichy France
• Japanese wartime strategy
• The plight of prisoners of war
• The threat of nuclear war
• Anglo-American cooperation
• U.K. preparations for war with Soviet Russia

• Rudolf Hess Files:
  • Records of conversations with interrogators
  • Copies of letters from Hess to Hitler and to his family and friends in Germany
  • Documentation relating to his imprisonment
  • Medical reports that document Hess’s declining mental health and attempted suicide

• Hitler’s Last Will and Testament (both personal and political)

Topics covered by the documents in the collection include:

• Allied Military Operations, for example: Operation Overlord, Operation Torch, and Operation Husky
• Intelligence strategy and espionage
• Axis movements, operations, and Allied defence strategies
• British efforts to bring the U.S. into the war
• Japanese and German war crimes including accounts and reports of atrocities and deaths in concentration camps
• The Japanese invasion of China and the Sino-Japanese war
• Jewish insurgency in Palestine
• The rise of communism in China and the spread of communism to South-East Asia
• The Korean War
• The Cold War, weapons technology, and nuclear warfare post-1945

Material Classification
The types of material featured in the resource include:

• Correspondence
• Directives
• Financial Records
• Maps
• Meeting Minutes
• Memoranda
• Reports
• Signals Intelligence Reports

Twentieth-century conflicts represented in the resource include:

• Spanish Civil War
• Second World War
• Cold War
• Korean War

Users can browse, filter, and search the documents by the following themes:

• British Domestic Security
• Foreign Policy and International Relations
• Intelligence Funding and Finances
• Intelligence Gathering and Surveillance
• Intelligence Operations
• Intelligence Organisation and Administration
• Military Intelligence and Operations
• Propaganda, Censorship, and Psychological Warfare
• Signals Intelligence and Code-breaking
• Weapons Technology and Nuclear Warfare

A free 30 day trial is available for your library, please contact Kim Brooking (kim.brooking@tandf.com.au) for further information, or simply register your interest here: http://www.secretintelligencefiles.com/FreeTrial