Cover of The Zimmermann Telegram

The Zimmermann Telegram

The Proud Tower, the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Guns of August, andThe Zimmermann Telegramcomprise Barbara W. Tuchman's classic histories of the First World War era

Read more

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.

Praise for The Zimmermann Telegram

"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

Audience
adult
Length
medium · 244 pages

Click a tag to see books like this one that share it. Point at it (on a phone, tap it) for less of it instead.

Read it? Sign in to help tag it.

Liked The Zimmermann Telegram? Here’s where I’d start.

These suit anyone who liked The Zimmermann Telegram. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.

  1. Dreadnought Shares history, nonfiction, wwi
  2. A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 Shares history, nonfiction, wwi
  3. The First World War Shares history, nonfiction, wwi
  4. The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century Shares history, wwi, nonfiction

“People who read The Zimmermann Telegram tend to reach for these next.”

  1. In Flanders Fields: The 1917 Campaign
  2. The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916
  3. No Man's Land: 1918, the Last Year of the Great War
  4. Somme

“If you want more of the same (history), start with these.”

  1. The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War
  2. World War I
  3. The Englishman's Daughter: A True Story of Love and Betrayal in World War I
  4. The First World War

“If it was the wwi that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War
  2. To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918
  3. The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914
  4. The War That Ended Peace: The Road To 1914

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. The German Agent
  2. Great True Spy Stories
  3. The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet
  4. State of Terror