Churchill's Wizards

by Nicholas Rankin

  Solomon’s imagination, not for the last time, got out of hand. Because the building had once been leased by Germans, he decided that the railway must have been intended to bring to the factory’s raised floor a long-range giant gun which could have shelled all the shipping between Boulogne and Cap Gris Nez. When practical Oliver Bernard came to explore the building, he had no such fantasies. He mapped out where the carpenters’ benches would go, the machine shop, the sawmill, the paintroom, the drying room and so on, and ordered tool chests from Army Ordnance Depot, fuel from the Army Service Corps, timber from Boulogne. He got on well with Captain Foote, in charge of RE Works at Boulogne, who was mechanically minded like him, and Lieutenant Colonel Crofton Sankey, who was amused by the fanciful ‘artist officers’.

  Solomon came down with a general to Ploegsteert, where Churchill was in the line, to look for a site for the observation post trees he had made in England. He tramped through muddy trenches, up ‘Strand’, as they had renamed it, towards ‘Charing Cross’ and the wood. Near ‘German House’ a shattered oak looked like a good possibility, because it was taller than the seven-foot-high parapet of sandbags surrounding the bois. Peering through a glass periscope, Solomon reckoned it was only seventy yards away from the German front trench.

  Then Solomon was summoned to GHQ to meet the commander-in-chief himself, Sir Douglas Haig, at a lawyer’s house in the middle of St Omer. Solomon was pleased to get a handshake rather than a salute because it felt more like a social introduction. Solomon thought Haig was a well-groomed, handsome man who was rather shy, and later painted his portrait for his alma mater, Clifton College. Haig walked over to a huge map on the wall and pointed out where they needed better observation posts. ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ Haig asked solicitously. Solomon explained their art was in its infancy but he would like a field somewhere near St Omer where they could experiment on concealing guns and trenches from the air, and where staff officers could easily come and see the results.

  ‘The whole of Flanders is at your disposal.’

  ‘We only need a few acres nearby’.

  ‘Well, you go to General —, and he’ll let you have anything you need.’

  Solomon was very full of himself when he got back, repeating to the engineer-in-chief what the commander-in-chief had said to him: ‘You go to General — and get what you want.’ But Fowke the future adjutant general was not pleased at all. His face went as red as a lobster and he shouted angrily: ‘Everything has to go through me!’

  Solomon was amazed. He simply could not understand bureaucracy. But it was how the administrative system worked. When F. E. Smith, the Attorney General of HM government, came to visit Churchill at Ploegsteert around this time, he was locked up for not having the correct military pass. (A flaming row then ensued between HMG and the office of the adjutant general, responsible for martial and military law, who finally offered a stiff apology.)

  No one said sorry to Solomon. He felt further thwarted and aggrieved when his first ideas about covering the trenches leading towards camouflaged trees with mackintosh groundsheets were rejected by Fowke and Edmonds. Trenches soon filled with water and if you used mackintosh groundsheets the water pooled in them. Moreover, you could never quite match the smooth texture painted on the painted mackintosh to the natural surroundings. Solomon then tried making a cat’s cradle of string, linking the groundsheet eyelets, into which small bundles of hay could be tied. This was not really satisfactory and the civilian prop-man Holmes, looking at it, said he would make something to place over the groundsheet. In a couple of hours he had woven together a square yard of netting. Eureka, thought Solomon:

  I saw we were getting just what was wanted – not only for our immediate purpose, but for universal screening. Then men tied up into the meshes small bundles of long hay and this we coloured. It was all important to get back to St Omer with this sample to show Colonel Liddle, and I told my troupe that if we did nothing else, we had now justified our existence.

  A correspondent in The Times of 3 August 1927 said that early in the war Solomon had ‘extended his work to trench protection and introduced string network interwoven with branches and leaves for overhead cover’. Solomon is usually credited as the first to think of using fishing nets instead of canvas to stretch tautly over props and poles to cover guns, stores, dumps, trenches, etc. These nets, with an average size of thirty square feet, could be threaded with strips of canvas, rags of hessian, bunches of dyed raffia, and local vegetation (‘plaited leafy twigs through meshes’ as Seamus Heaney puts it) and then pegged at low angles to throw less shadow.

  The flat-top net garnished with raffia is also claimed as a French invention. In April 1913 at Saint-Cyr, Major Anatole Kopenhague demonstrated its successful use to hide a platoon of men from a low-flying aeroplane. Unfortunately, Kopenhague’s idea was formally rejected as ‘lacking practical application’ by the bureaucrats of the French Ministry of War (in August 1914, of all months).

  Whoever invented camouflage fish netting – Holmes, Kopenhague or Solomon – nearly seven and a half million square yards of the stuff, tufted with plant products, outdid six million square yards of wire netting and a mere million square yards of painted canvas sheets to become the most used screening of WW1.

  At the end of February 1916, the blindages that Solomon had ordered from the Holborn firm arrived. The steel was lighter than that of the French models and Solomon reckoned the oval sections could be fitted together and carried in one piece. If seven hundredweight were in a cradle hoisted by a dozen men, each man still had to heft sixty-three pounds. On 1 March he informed Lord Cavan, General Officer Commanding (GOC) 14th Army Corps in Fifth Army, that the tree was ready and he wanted to come out to the Ypres Salient.

  At 3 a.m. on 5 March 1916, Solomon set out in a car with Generals Gathorne-Hardy and Wauchope to check out the tree site. They drove towards the Yser canal with the lights out and parked behind the ruined walls of the Moulin Rouge estaminet. The duckboards of Coney Street communication trench took them into the Ypres Salient leading towards the mushroom pillbox on Pilckem Ridge. Over the canal, Solomon intended to sketch and measure a willow tree and to trace where the sap should be dug. It was muddy and cold; their breath plumed. Solomon was crossing a fallen tree when he slipped and fell into the pond below. ‘That’s bad!’ said the general. The artist waded out laughing, thinking how his children would have enjoyed seeing their old dad in this plight. His coat had kept his body dry but his rubber boots were sloshing full and icy water had gone up his sleeves and down his neck. Sleet blew in blizzardy gusts. At long last, the chauffeur emptied his boots. Covered up in the back of the car, Solomon worried about pneumonia. He went to bed with ‘quinine tabloids and a good nip of whiskey’.

  The night that saw the raising of the first British observation post tree was Tuesday, 12 March 1916. Corporal Bryant bedded in the foundation of the tree over the dugout the week before. It was a steel plate, with a raised collar and boltholes around the oval opening in the middle. In the evening, fifteen men left the factory in a truck containing the tree and the lifting tackle, and Solomon and Walter Russell went by car. The truck went into Ypres, picked up the guide from a sandbagged bunker in the square and drove out past the ‘DIAMANT’ sign spelled in lighter bricks on the long red wall of a ruined jeweller’s shop.

  At a place called ‘White Hart’ they unloaded the tree into its cradle and the men carrying it got underneath. Other forces were moving into the Salient on their own business: a battalion in tin hats and gas capes, medieval in the moonlight. The tree-men crossed Bridge 4, went a hundred yards along the road beside Coney Street and turned into their own route. Fresh men were waiting to relieve the carriers. A flare went up and everyone froze till the swinging blue light burned itself out. German machine guns rattled in the distance. The British soldiers crossed streams on planks and struggled up the clayey canal bank with the heavy burden. At the top they tipped the cradle over and levered the weighty eight-and-a-half-
foot tree upright. Solomon got into the dugout with his torch to illuminate the foundation collar’s holes as the men turned the tree to align them. Greased bolts slid through into tightening nuts. Mud and grass were plastered over the plate and up the base of the tree as a man squeezed up inside (the oval measured only twenty-two inches by eighteen inches) to check the observation loopholes and their bulletproof shutters. Solomon thought it an excellent reproduction: from a few paces away you could not tell the tree was not real. Back at the barn in Poperinghe, the sappers celebrated with hot food and beer. The later official history, though, was rather sour about the first tree: ‘In practice it proved of little use; it was too small to admit any but a most determined and enthusiastic man, and was too far off for good observation – faults due to inexperience.’

  Solomon J. Solomon’s oil painting of the event, Our First O.P. Tree, was shown at Burlington House in the Art of Camouflage exhibition that he organised in October 1919. It still hangs in the Imperial War Museum. In dim bluish moonlight, Russell and Solomon, in caps and greatcoats, look on from the right as the pollard ‘tree’ is tilted into place. Another Imperial War Museum painting from 1919, Erecting a Camouflage Tree by Leon Underwood, shows ten men, half with their shirts off but their steel helmets on, labouring to fit a curve of bark to a shiny drum under the guidance of an anxious sergeant with a wrench. This is a daylight scene. You can see the brown.303 rifle lying next to the hammer, and the muscles in their white backs.

  On 22 March 1916, Guirand de Scévola hosted a dinner for the British camoufleurs at the little hotel in Wimereux. The Frenchmen sang songs, made witty speeches and stayed up late. It was a bittersweet occasion for Solomon, because that day he ceded command of the British camouflage section, now authorised by the War Office as Special Works Park, RE, and officially integrated into the BEF, to Major F. J. C. Wyatt, RE. The unit had a nominal establishment of ten officers and eighty-two other ranks, which was increased on 1 July 1916 to fifteen officers and 157 ORs.

  The heavy metalwork for OPs and the industrial production of nets and canvases, some involving Chinese labour, remained at the parent factory at Wimereux. There were two forward Special Works Parks, as the camouflage units were called: Aire covered the northern and Amiens the southern half of the British line. Major J. P. Rhodes was in charge at Aire from 8 November 1916, and it was his idea to start employing hundreds of French women in the net factories. There were labour problems, but Walter Russell proved to be good at soothing woes. At Amiens, Captain Paget was in charge, working with the French, until December 1916. There metal lathes and woodturning machinery were available in the workshops where L. D. Symington put his hands to good use. He developed the camouflaged Symien sniper suit for the SOS schools (nearly 4,800 of them were manufactured), and made the prototypes of some 3,000 dummy papier-mâché heads. The portable observation post was another speciality (armoured or unarmoured): a cowl of chicken wire covered in plaster of Paris with a slot of fine copper-wire mesh to see through, all of which could be camouflaged to fit any parapet. At Amiens they also made 12,000 cut-out dummy ‘Chinese attack’ figures that could be snapped upright by electrically exploded detonators to look and sound like British troops advancing and to divert attention away from real attacks. Symington also designed a new kind of machine-gun post that was completely camouflaged from both aerial photography and direct observation. An armoured box fitted into the terrain had a simple lever inside that raised the elaborately camouflaged roof just enough to open a narrow aperture through which a machine gun, set back far enough to show no muzzle flash, could fire unseen. The Canadians used this design with great success in the fighting around Monchy-le-Preux, near Arras.

  But Solomon, who had liked doing reconnaissance and showing new artist officers the ropes, became miserable as he declined into a more advisory role, detached from the practical work. In April 1916 he was in effect sacked and went home on leave. He came back in May and managed to nobble Sir Douglas Haig, busy preparing for the massive Battle of the Somme, on a visit to a camouflage factory:

  SOLOMON: ‘I hope my services will be retained.’

  HAIG: ‘We have to beat the Germans.’

  Solomon could not quite fathom this Delphic utterance.

  In May 1916, both Churchill and Solomon were back in England. Churchill returned to his parliamentary duties on 7 May, though he did not get back into government for another year and Solomon was summoned to talk to Colonel Ernest Swinton RE at Armament Buildings. The two men got on; Swinton was an imaginative soldier, and a fine draughtsman, who had once been the chief instructor in geometrical drawing at ‘the Shop’, the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. He was also a good writer: The Defence of Duffer’s Drift and The Green Curve turn military problems into enjoyable fiction. Swinton was Kitchener’s first official war correspondent, ‘Eyewitness’, and had always been interested in new technology – man-lifting kites, railways, machine guns. Captain Liddell Hart, in his two-volume history of the Royal Tank Regiment and its predecessors, The Tanks, credits Swinton and Churchill with the invention of the tank. During the early days of the war, Swinton saw almost naked men walking towards enemy fronts bristling with barbed wire and machine guns, and this impressed on him the need for armoured protection. Solomon wrote:

  Mr Winston Churchill, by a long way the best military mind among our statesmen, shared his views, and the outcome of their deliberations, with the assistance of engineers, was what is known as the tank.

  The word ‘tank’ was coined by Swinton to maintain secrecy by referring to the armoured vehicles as straightforward riveted metal containers. The Russian for ‘Handle With Care: Petrograd’ was painted in large white Cyrillic letters on the side of a prototype Mark 1 tank, to deceive people that it was just a tank of oil for the Russian army.

  Swinton took Solomon up to Thetford in Norfolk on 31 May to show him the secret battle-training area he had created on Lord Iveagh’s pheasant-shooting estate for what was then called the Heavy Branch of the Machine Gun Corps. Solomon’s job was to help hide these first hot, smelly, carbon-monoxide-poisonous tanks on their way to their objective. The artist thought that smokescreens or mist would accomplish this best, or perhaps silhouettes of perforated zinc. Mere paint was not really up to it.

  Solomon went back to France in early June 1916 to find out where the tanks might be used and to study soil and vegetation colours. By the middle of June he was back in Norfolk, at the tank battle-training area. Every day he rode his pony to the new work: ‘I had to take off my tunic and put on overalls, just like an ordinary house painter.’ Solomon painted the first tanks and their large canvas covers in Fauvist blotches of pink and grey and green and brown; tank officer Basil Henriques described the final effect as ‘a kind of jolly landscape in green against a pink sunset sky’.

  Solomon was present on 21 July when the politicians, including Lloyd George, the Secretary of State for War, and Edwin Montagu, the Minister of Munitions, and the military top brass, led by the CIGS, Sir William Robertson, came up to the Elveden Explosives Area in Norfolk to watch two dozen thirty-ton rhomboid tanks driving over trenches, bashing down trees, knocking through walls and sandbag parapets protecting wooden ‘enemy’ machine guns. As the tanks roared noisily over terrain once familiar to Boudicca’s chariots, Solomon spotted and picked up a clutch of pheasant’s eggs, smooth, brown and delicate.

  The tanks first crawled into action on the Somme on 15 September 1916. After a massive artillery barrage, three dozen tanks pressed home an attack. Most broke down, got stuck or were too slow, but nine of them did some damage to the enemy. Between Flers-Courcelette and Gueudecourt, where the British tanks D-5, D-6, D-16 and D-17 caused panic, German soldiers ran away.

  Philip Gibbs burst out laughing when he first saw the lumbering, smoking tanks, with their unsilenced engines roaring: ‘They were monstrously comical,’ he wrote, ‘like toads of vast size emerging from the primeval slime in the twilight of the world’s dawn.’

  7

>   Guile and Guerrilla

  The First World War marked the rise of the geopolitical region known as ‘the Middle East’. The term was first coined in 1902 by the American theorist of naval strategy, Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, to indicate the Arab and Persian area between the ‘Near East’ of the Mediterranean Levant and the ‘Far East’ of India and China. In WW1, Winston Churchill’s broad strategic vision naturally made him an ‘Easterner’ among the British policy makers, not a ‘Westerner’ solely concerned with France and Belgium.

  Another well-known ‘Easterner’ was T.E. Lawrence (1888–1935) who became world-famous as ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, leading the Arab Revolt. Thomas Edward Lawrence (‘Ned’ to his family) was a curious figure, described by Aubrey Herbert as ‘an odd gnome, half cad – with a touch of genius’. He still excites both vilification and hero-worship. He was not really ‘Lawrence’ at all, but the illegitimate son of a baronet called Chapman who ran away with a governess who was herself born out of wedlock. The elusive ‘T. E.’ kept making up stories and changing identity: ‘Ross’ and ‘Shaw’ were names he assumed later. The consummate actor who became ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ was known for his camouflage of Arab robes, remarking once in a letter: ‘The leopard changes his spots for stripes, since the stripes are better protection in the local landscape.’

  Among the ambiguities about Lawrence are his attitudes to time and technology. He looks backwards and forwards. An archaeologist and classical scholar, romance places him in an older way of life, among tents and camels in the desert. But the real T.E. Lawrence was fascinated by modernity. His cottage at Cloud’s Hill had no electricity but it did have industrially canned food and the latest wind-up gramophone for recorded music. He loved printing presses, tinkering with Rolls-Royce engines and RAF speedboats. He rode a Biblical camel but carried with him in the saddle a stripped-down ‘air-Lewis’ light machine gun in a canvas bucket. Lawrence was killed in 1935 riding his seventh Brough Superior motorcycle, powered by oil.