“A tremendous tale of hushed and unhushed uproars in the linked fields of war and diplomacy” ( The New York Times ), from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Guns of August In January 1917, the war in Europe was, at best, a tragic standoff. Britain knew that all was lost unless the United States joined the war, but President Wilson was unshakable in his neutrality. At just this moment, a crack team of British decoders in a quiet office known as Room 40 intercepted a document that would change history. The Zimmermann telegram was a top-secret message to the president of Mexico, inviting him to join Germany and Japan in an invasion of the United States. How Britain managed to inform the American government without revealing that the German codes had been broken makes for an incredible story of espionage and intrigue as only Barbara W. Tuchman could tell it. The Proud Tower, The Guns of August, and The Zimmermann Telegram comprise Barbara W. Tuchman’s classic histories of the First World War era. “A true, lucid thriller . . . a tremendous tale of hushed and unhushed uproars in the linked fields of war and diplomacy . . . Tuchman makes the most of it with a creative writer’s sense of drama and a scholar’s obeisance to the evidence.” — The New York Times “The tale has most of the ingredients of an Eric Ambler spy thriller.” — Saturday Review The average person thinks that it was the sinking of the Lusitania that brought the United States into World War I. Not so! In this slim volume that reads like a whodunnit, Barbara Tuchman reveals the little known secret of The Zimmerman Telegram. Basically, Germany wanted to keep the U.S. and its industrial might out of the European conflict by convincing Mexico and Japan to attack the U.S. Germany even promised Mexico it would get back Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona! What the Germans didn't know is that as soon as war was declared, the first thing the British did was cut Germany's transatlantic cable. All telegrams or telephone calls to North America had to travel over Britain's cable. And the British intercepted every telegram out of Germany. Even though the Zimmerman telegram was sent in code, it was broken. But the shrewd British held onto it, not revealing its contents until it was absolutely necessary, and in such a way that they didn't have to reveal that they were intercepting German messages! Brilliant! When the New York Times published the telegram in 1917, it was but a short time until pacifist Woodrow Wilson got a declaration of war from Congress, and the U.S. began sending troops "over there." A great read! Doug Grad, Editor Barbara W. Tuchman (1912–1989) achieved prominence as a historian with The Zimmermann Telegram and international fame with The Guns of August —a huge bestseller and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Her other works include Bible and Sword, The Proud Tower, Stilwell and the American Experience in China (for which Tuchman was awarded a second Pulitzer Prize), Notes from China, A Distant Mirror, Practicing History, The March of Folly, and The First Salute . One A Telegram Waylaid The first message of the morning watch plopped out of the pneumatic tube into the wire basket with no more premonitory rattle than usual. The duty officer at British Naval Intelligence twisted open the cartridge and examined the German wireless intercept it contained without noting anything of unusual significance. When a glance showed him that the message was in non-naval code, he sent it in to the Political Section in the inner room and thought no more about it. The date was January 17, 1917, past the halfway mark of a war that had already ground through thirty months of reckless carnage and no gain. On duty that morning in the inner room, the most secret in Whitehall, were two civilians diverted to cryptographic work masked under the guileless name of Room 40. One was the Reverend William Montgomery, a tall gray-haired scholar of forty-six, and the other Nigel de Grey, a young publisher of thirty-one borrowed from the firm of William Heinemann. Neither knew they were about to midwife a historic event. De Grey spread open the intercept, revealing rows of numerals arranged in four- and five- and a sprinkling of three-figure groups. Mute and passive on the paper, they gave forth no hint that a key to the war’s deadlock lay concealed in their irregular jumble. De Grey noticed only that the message was of unusual length; more than a thousand groups, he estimated. The gray morning was cold as Britain’s fortunes, dingy as her hopes in this third winter of the war. The ghastly losses on the Somme—sixty thousand British casualties in a single mad day, over a million Allied and enemy losses in the five-month battle—had been for nothing. The Hindenburg Line was still unbreached. The whole war had been like that, regiments of lives spent like water, half a million at Verdun alone, without either side’s winning a strategic adva