John Broich explores a less familiar Middle East battleground in Blood, Oil and the Axis, focusing on the World War II struggle between the Allies and the Axis in Iraq and Syria. Broich goes beyond the military campaigns and locates the voices of participants through diaries, letters and memoirs. The political objectives involved a familiar theme—control over Iraq’s rich oil fields—but the political divisions are surprising. Arabs supported the Nazis and the British in roughly equal percentages, sometimes from affinity but often from calculation. Especially startling: a small pro-Nazi Jewish group in Palestine who dreamed of an Israel within Hitler’s New Order. Among the book’s outstanding personalities is Freya Stark, a British woman whose charm and fortitude enabled her to conduct intelligence impossible for most men.
