Churchill's Wizards

by Nicholas Rankin

  NICHOLAS RANKIN

  CHURCHILL’S WIZARDS

  The British Genius for Deception

  1914–1945

  This book is for my dearest darling wife of twenty-five years

  Maggie Gee

  who helped so much

  War has a way of masking the stage with scenery crudely daubed with fearsome apparitions.

  CARL VON CLAUSEWITZ, On War

  War is a game that is played with a smile. If you can’t smile, grin.

  WINSTON S. CHURCHILL, in the trenches near Ploegsteert

  ‘Then why have you been so hard to find?’

  ‘Isn’t this what the twentieth century is all about?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘People go into hiding even when no one is looking for them.’

  DON DELILLO, White Noise

  There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.

  MR SHERLOCK HOLMES in The Boscombe Valley Mystery by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Preface

  PART I

  1 The War of Nerves

  2 The Nature of Camouflage

  3 Engineering Opinion

  4 Hiding and Sniping

  5 Deception in the Dardanelles

  6 Steel Trees

  7 Guile and Guerrilla

  8 The Twice-promised Land

  9 A Dazzle of Zebras

  10 Lying for Lloyd George

  11 Deceivers Deceived

  PART II

  12 Wizards Of WW2

  13 Curtain Up

  14 Winston is Back

  15 Hiding the Silver

  16 ‘A Great Blow Between the Eyes’

  17 Commando Dagger

  18 British Resistance

  19 Fire Over England

  20 Radio Propaganda

  21 ‘A’ Force: North Africa

  22 Impersonations

  23 The Garden of Forking Paths

  24 The Hinge of Fate

  25 MINCEMEAT

  26 The Double

  27 OVERLORD AND FORTITUDE

  28 V for Vergeltung

  Epilogue

  Source Notes

  Author’s Note and Acknowledgements

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  1 Winston Churchill in the British Army School of Camouflage’s training trenches in Kensington Gardens, 1917. © Imperial War Museum (IWM), London. Q95971.

  2 Dummy dead German from the Camouflage School. © IWM, Q17688.

  3 Australian troops carrying a wood and canvas dummy British Mark 1 Tank in France in 1917. © IWM E (Aus), 4938.

  4 The legendary ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, Captain T. E. Lawrence, photographed in 1917. © IWM, Q59075.

  5 Propaganda in war. The German execution by firing-squad of Nurse Edith Cavell used in a poster. © IWM, Q106364.

  6 & 7 American 77th Division soldiers learning field camouflage at a British school for scouts, observers and snipers in France, May 1918. © IWM, Q10316 and Q10317.

  8 Stacks of silhouette figures used in the fake or ‘Chinese’ attacks of trench warfare in France, May 1918. © IWM, Q95959.

  9 A special studio set up by marine artist Norman Wilkinson at the Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, London, during WW1. © Norman Wilkinson Estate.

  10 ‘The object of camouflage is to give the impression that your head is where your stern is.’ SS Olympic, painted in ‘razzle-dazzle’, is seen from the port stern quarter. © IWM, Q68435.

  11 1940: Prime Minister Winston Churchill inspecting coastal defences against Nazi invasion near Hartlepool. © IWM, H2639.

  12 WW2 British Local Defence Volunteer emerging from cover, about to throw a bomb. © IWM, HU931.

  13 1940: Adolf Hitler jigs for joy after signing the armistice at Compiègne. © IWM, NYF37082.

  14 Cartoon from The Sketch, 10 September 1941. Courtesy of the Cartoon Museum, London; © Lawrence Pollinger Ltd, London.Reproduced with permission.

  15 The ‘Prop-Shop’ at the Special Operations Executive’s Station XV in the Thatched Barn roadhouse near Elstree film-studios. © The National Archives, Richmond, Surrey. HS 7/49.

  16 Dummy British aircraft at El-Adem airbase near Tobruk, part of an ‘A Force’ deception scheme in the Mediterranean. © The National Archives, CN 26/1.

  17 Dummy landing craft moored in North Africa, purportedly for the invasion of Greece in 1943. © The National Archives, CN 26/1.

  18 Dummy tank to fool German and Italian observers in North Africa in 1943. © IWM, MH20759.

  19 Lt Col. David Stirling, founder of the SAS, with patrol commander Lt Edward McDonald (with Fairbairn Sykes Commando dagger) and Cpl Bill Kennedy. © IWM, E21339.

  20 Lt Col. Dudley Clarke, head of ‘A Force’ in Cairo and Britain’s top deceiver, in drag in Madrid in October 1941. Churchill Papers, CHAR 20/25/52. © Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge.

  21 Fluent German-speaking Daily Express journalist Sefton Delmer, the maestro of British ‘black’ propaganda. Reproduced by permission of Felix Delmer.

  22 The genuine corpse of ‘The Man Who Never Was’, before shipping by submarine to Spain in April 1943. © The National Archives, WO 106/5921.

  23 A still from the film I Was Monty’s Double. © IWM, HU47556.

  24 Barcelona-born Juan Pujol García, the most successful double agent of WW2. © The National Archives, KV 2/70.

  25 Juan Pujol’s crucial message as received by teleprinter at German HQ on 9 June 1944. © The National Archives.

  26 Prime Minister Winston Churchill sets foot on liberated France on 12 June 1944, six days after D-Day. © IWM, B5357.

  Preface

  The British enjoy deceiving their enemies. When the Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz defined war in 1833 as ‘those acts of force to compel our enemy to do our will’, he missed out the dimension that the British political philosopher Thomas Hobbes had spotted nearly two centuries earlier: ‘Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.’

  Sir Alan Lascelles called Winston Churchill ‘the Arch-Mountebank’ and he certainly had a penchant for display. No other British twentieth-century politician was photographed in so many different kinds of headgear as Churchill: whether in boater, bowler, cocked hat, flying helmet, homburg, peaked cap, sombrero, sola topi, sou’wester, Stetson, topper or Tommy’s tin hat, he always dressed the part.

  Acting is a long-established area of British talent. ‘The British like to pretend,’ observes a former US Ambassador, Raymond Seitz. ‘They seem to prize few things so much as a good performance.’ And the theatre director Richard Eyre notes the national ‘love of ritual, procession … and dressing-up’. ‘On the surface they are so open,’ writes novelist Geoffrey Household of his countrymen, ‘and yet so naturally and unconsciously secretive about anything which is of real importance to them.’ British self-deprecation, wit and irony are also forms of concealment. The British do not say what they mean, or mean what they say, and often mask seriousness with jokes as a cover for shyness or sentiment. Jorge Luis Borges says of Herbert Ashe in Ficciones: ‘He suffered from unreality, like so many of the British.’

  On 10 February 1910, a party of six well-bred young people conned their way on to the flagship of the Royal Navy’s Home Fleet, HMS Dreadnought, by impersonating the Emperor of Abyssinia and his suite. A guard of honour met the train at Weymouth, and an admiral and a commander showed them over the ship. Among these impostors was a ‘Prince Mendax’, blacked up and false-bearded by the famous theatrical costumier Willie Clarkson of Wardour Street, and complete with turban, caftan and heavy gold chain. Prince Mendax was in fact the future modernist novelist and literary heroine Virginia Woolf. It was a good hoax to play on the Royal
Navy that sustained the British Empire at its height. But aristocratic bluff was also a deceptive performance skill that helped the people of a small island nation to rule a vast worldwide empire.

  Of course, military deception (MILDEC), which the US Joint Chiefs define as ‘actions executed to deliberately mislead adversary decision makers as to friendly military capabilities, intentions and operations’, has been used all over the world. In China 2,400 years ago, Sun Tzu said in The Art of War that ‘All warfare is based on deception’. The hadith or proverb, ‘al-harb khuda’, attributed to the Prophet Muhammad – peace be upon him – also means ‘war is deception’. The famous stratagem that toppled Troy was the Greek gift of a wooden horse – with a special force, including the wily Odysseus, hidden inside.

  The Trojan War was fought over a sexually attractive woman, and deception has deep roots in biology. Vladimir Nabokov observed that ‘Everything is deception … from the insect that mimics a leaf to the popular enticements of procreation.’ Deception also marks predator–prey relations. Weaker animals evolve disguises or camouflages to protect themselves against more powerful ones. Human animals, however, are uneasy with the idea of deception because it confers unfair advantage and destroys cooperation. In The Republic, Plato said that only the rulers of the city are entitled to tell lies, and then only in order to benefit the city and in direct response to the actions of enemies or troublesome citizens.

  The British developed deception in both World Wars as a response to dangers represented by new military technologies on land, at sea and in the air. This was especially true in WW2, when the weakened nation had its back to the wall after the rest of Europe had fallen into what Churchill called ‘the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule’. It is against Nazi Germany that Britain developed some of the most sophisticated and brilliant deceptions in history. Winston Churchill’s interest in secrecy and deception, however, goes back to the beginning of WW1.

  In July 1911, during the Agadir crisis, Churchill was Home Secretary, and was talking to the Chief Commissioner of Police at a Downing Street garden party. Germany was flexing some naval muscle in Morocco. The Chief Commissioner mentioned that the Home Office was responsible for guarding two magazines where the Royal Navy stored its explosives, and that only a few constables were on the job. Churchill asked what might happen if ‘twenty determined Germans in two or three motor cars arrived well armed upon the scene one night’, and was told such a force could not be held off. Churchill promptly ‘quitted the garden party’, armed and reinforced the Metropolitan Police and called out the British Army to help secure the cordite reserves. This set him thinking about espionage and counter-espionage, and he signed new warrants to allow the mail of suspected German agents to be opened. As First Lord of the Admiralty in 1914, one of his earliest ‘Most Secret’ memos of wartime gave instructions to build a dummy fleet of ten large merchant vessels mocked up in wood and canvas to look like far bigger battleships in silhouette, so as to baffle and distract enemy aeroplanes and submarines. Three of these ‘battleships’ were sent to the Dardanelles in February 1915 to lure the German fleet out into the North Sea.

  As a young man, he scorned dishonesty – ‘I had no idea in those days of the enormous and unquestionably helpful part that humbug plays in the social life of great peoples dwelling in a state of democratic freedom’ – but Churchill came thoroughly to approve of deception in warfare. This book argues that British twentieth-century military deception has four pillars: camouflage, propaganda, secret intelligence and special forces. Churchill was excited by T. E. Lawrence’s ideas about guerrilla warfare, based on disguise and surprise rather than frontal assault, and it was in Churchill’s prime ministership that the Commandos and the SAS were founded. He also became a master of propaganda who, as the broadcaster Edward R. Murrow said, ‘mobilized the English language and sent it into battle’.

  Native cunning links all Churchill’s wizards, creative people using their skills to help their country in a struggle for survival. The two World Wars recruited widely from the nation’s pool of talent, not just from the narrow caste of professional soldiers. This book is about artists and scientists, film and theatre people, novelists and naturalists, as well as daredevils, commandos and the Home Guard who disguised machine-gun posts as gentlemen’s toilets or genteel tearooms.

  The first half of the book is about WW1, in which the first British explorations of camouflage brought together the skills of the big-game hunter Hesketh Prichard, the theatre-hand Oliver Bernard and the society portrait painter Solomon J. Solomon. The Oxford archaeologist T. E. Lawrence dressed up in white robes and became ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, George Bernard Shaw (in khaki and tin hat) sent polemical dispatches from the trenches, and the popular author John Buchan became the head of British propaganda. The second half of the book is about WW2, and introduces two little-known geniuses, the larger-than-life, German-speaking Daily Express journalist Sefton Delmer and a hyper-observant, cinema-loving regular soldier called Dudley Clarke. Delmer, Clarke and their cohorts wove an ever more complex web of tactical trickery, strategic deception and black propaganda to help the Allies win the war.

  But our story begins in the summer of 1914.

  PART I

  1

  The War of Nerves

  When Winston Churchill read the newspapers in Portsmouth he had a sudden, vivid feeling that something ‘sinister and measureless’ had occurred. On 28 June 1914, the Emperor Franz Joseph I’s nephew and heir-presumptive, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his pregnant wife Sophie, had taken the wrong turning in Sarajevo. A faraway cloud no bigger than a man’s hand was about to become a great storm, embroiling millions of people from scores of nations.

  The Archduke Ferdinand was the hated symbol of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that had annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina in October 1908, tearing it away from Greater Serbia. The Black Hand, a Serb nationalist terrorist cell, intended to kill the archduke as he drove in his motorcade through Sarajevo. One of the conspirators threw a bomb from the crowd, but the chauffeur floored the accelerator and the black car shot over the device, which exploded behind, injuring dignitaries in the following vehicle as well as some bystanders. Hours later, driving back from a hospital visit to the injured, the chauffeur took his fateful wrong turn.

  As the car reversed slowly back up Gebet Street, it passed a tubercular and weedy-looking youth called Gavrilo Princip, consoling himself with a sandwich in Moritz Schiller’s cafe. The 19-year-old Bosnian Serb could hardly believe his luck, for he was one of the seven-strong gang disappointed by the failure of the earlier bomb. In one pocket Princip had a cyanide capsule and in the other a Belgian-made Browning 9 mm semi-automatic pistol. The open-topped Austrian car offered him a second opportunity for his cause to make its mark on history, and he shot the Archduke and his wife at close range.

  Throughout July 1914, the widening reverberations of this incident in the Balkans tipped other nations towards war. In London’s Fleet Street, where all Britain’s national newspapers were edited and printed, Philip Gibbs’s sensitive, well-bred face was a familiar sight. At 37, he had fingers yellow from chain-smoking, but he was a star journalist of many scoops who had written the first best-selling novel about newspaper reporters, The Street of Adventure. As events unfolded, Gibbs reported ‘dazed incredibility’ in middle England, uncertainty in Whitehall’s corridors of power, and ‘profound ignorance’ behind all the feverish activity of Fleet Street newspaper offices. In Paris, too, where Gibbs arrived on assignment for the last days of July, the word was ‘Incroyable!’

  In England, Much Ado About Nothing was opening the summer festival at Stratford-upon-Avon; Wimbledon was under way; there was racing at Goodwood and eights training for Henley. War seemed as stunningly unlikely as the heat on that August Bank Holiday weekend. The Scottish writer John Buchan was moving among the leading lights of the Liberal government, and breakfasted with the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, on Saturday, 1 August, findin
g him ‘pale and a little haggard but steadfast as a rock’. Buchan also recalled ‘Mr Churchill’s high spirits, which sobered now and then when he remembered the desperate issues’.

  Winston Churchill, approaching his fortieth birthday, had been the First Lord of the Admiralty since 1911. Britain would not be unprepared for war on his watch: ammunition dumps and oil depots were guarded, coastal patrols instituted, the First Fleet quietly sent from Portland to the North Sea in case of a sudden German attack. Churchill was playing bridge with F. E. Smith and Max Aitken at the Admiralty around 10 p.m. that Saturday, when a large red Foreign Office despatch box arrived with a small sheet of paper inside bearing a single line of news: Imperial Germany has declared war on Imperial Russia. Churchill rang a bell for a servant, changed out of his dinner jacket and left the room to go and see the Prime Minister. Aitken (the Canadian adventurer who later became Lord Beaverbrook, owner of the Daily and Sunday Express) remembered him as oddly calm and businesslike. Churchill entered 10 Downing Street ‘by the garden gate’ and found Asquith with Grey and Haldane and Lord Crewe. He told them he was going to decree full mobilisation of the Grand Fleet of the Royal Navy. From the Admiralty, Churchill wrote to his wife at one in the morning: