Churchill's Wizards

by Nicholas Rankin

  Bernard’s baptism of fire with Second Army in the Ypres Salient came in early May 1916 after he was appointed the erecting officer of the second, third and fourth camouflage trees at Burnt Farm, Belle Alliance and Hill Top Farm respectively. He was determined that all his OP trees would be better designed and placed than Solomon’s had been, and that he would not lose face by showing fear. Bernard described his Wimereux-manufactured ‘Oh Pips’ as:

  hollow imitations of pollard willow trees, consisting of bullet-proof steel cylinders composed of elliptical sections, assembled and cased in outer jackets or blindage of thin sheet iron; the blindage being framed, contoured and hammered, finally dressed to reproduce the external appearance of existing trees which were so replaced to accommodate observers.

  The sun was setting as the camoufleurs cut through the springtime woods towards the canal barges at Essex Farm. There were stray shells bursting, splintering trees and blowing reeking holes in the ground. As the sky darkened, the violence became almost pretty: shrapnel shells burst orange in purple patches of smoke. Oliver Bernard noticed that his companion and reconnaissance adviser, the camoufleur André Mare, was sweating profusely. His own new Brodie ‘tin hat’ was heavy and uncomfortable, so he complimented the Frenchman on the design of his lighter shrapnel helmet. Mare shook his head gloomily, ‘Non, non, pas bon pour les petits morceaux, votre chapeau est le meilleur.’ (‘No, no, no good for little bits [of shrapnel], your hat is better’.)

  It took two nights’ quiet work to erect that first tree. After their moment of triumph Bernard and Mare were challenged by a British sentry not in the know, and taken along trenches to a battalion HQ in a rough-hewn dugout and questioned by candlelight. Only a telephone call to heavy artillery HQ at Vlamertinghe confirmed that they were not spies. On the third night their party of forty-odd sappers and gunners carrying nearly a ton of equipment for their second tree was shelled heavily, and the guide lost his way. Bernard got very angry. After swearing blue blazes and threatening to shoot anyone who left the kit or the trench, he stormed off with a stolid lance corporal called Kearvel who claimed to know how they could get to the line of pollard willows at Belle Alliance.

  The two men clambered over the parapet and stumbled eastward into a cratered moonscape fitfully illuminated by star shells, taking turns to fall into holes. Bernard was hard of hearing but even he could not miss the machine guns chattering like magpies and the deep baying of the big guns. On he went through an old communication trench, with Kearvel behind him. The trench deepened; turning to look back in the shadowy flicker of a fading star shell, Bernard glimpsed not his lance corporal but two figures with coal-scuttle German helmets. In momentary darkness he scrambled out of the trench and lay flat behind the enemy parapet. He carried a Browning .45 Colt automatic in his officer’s leather holster. Across his wrist, Bernard says, he shot the first man through his gas mask, and then his puzzled companion, who toppled sideways. The third man, an officer, took two bullets before a fresh shell blast sent Bernard jumping and stumbling back towards his own lines. He ran into Kearvel, who had located the tree site, and then they found the work party, with André Mare sitting sheltering beneath sandbags half sheared through by machine-gun bullets. Bernard says he never enjoyed a cigarette more. They moved the gear to the site, put up a protective breastwork and dug a sap for the following night, when the tree would actually be erected. Bending over a toolbox, the gallant Corporal Kearvel was shot clean through the buttock to much ribaldry from his mates.

  There were worse incidents. On his first job with the First Canadian Division’s heavy artillery in June 1916, Bernard stepped into the entrails of a sentry who had been blown apart while he was crawling around in no-man’s-land near Maple Copse trying to find a shattered fir tree that would accommodate an OP periscope. The smell of the sentry’s blood was ‘surprising’. The same month found Oliver Bernard at German House in Bois de Ploegsteert, sawing down a stout oak that Solomon had spotted months before as suitable for an ‘Oh Pip’. They dug a sap twenty feet out from the frontline trench; when they were ready to substitute their fake tree, which had to be three feet higher than the original oak in order to give them a better view, they also had to raise an entire parapet of sandbags in one night to look commensurate with it.

  Oliver Bernard worked with the 1st Canadian Division until October, often in company with Major Norton, DSO, a tall Survey Officer, Royal Artillery (SORA). Bernard thought of them as ‘the big and little wizards’ of the Ypres Salient, crawling on reconnaissance missions, helping to erect snipers’ hides, periscopes, and fake tree observation posts in sites from Boesinghe to Arras.

  On 4 July 1916, the fourth day of the Battle of the Somme further south, Bernard made his first examination of the remains of a shattered windmill, Verbranden Molen, near Krustaat, which had a vertical oak beam sticking up like a fingerpost from its rubble of ruins. Bernard had discovered that the Ross company of London (who made the best spyglasses for the Lovat Scouts) also manufactured excellent periscopes ten feet six inches long. He reckoned that if they could dig a concealed observer’s cabin under the mill, sink a further eight-foot well down which they could lower the periscope for lens cleaning, then hide a couple of periscopes in the upright beam, they could establish a panoramic view of the German batteries hidden behind Wijtschate (or ‘Whitesheet’) hill.

  Delicate jobs were not easy. The special works sappers might have to work for sixteen nights in a conspicuous, elevated position only a few hundred yards from the German lines. They had to try not to be seen or heard as they gouged and hacked two channels in the tough oak, deep enough to accommodate ten-foot lengths of periscope in bulletproof casing, which was then sealed up flush with hammered sheet iron treated to look like weathered wood. Every time a star shell or Verey light went up in the darkness they froze. There was no talking. And yet the rest of the British Army remained amazingly noisy. Lorries came roaring up to the trench tramway to the skeleton mill and then dumped engineering supplies with the kind of din that drew down enemy gunfire. Oliver Bernard sometimes reflected bitterly that there were three kinds of military clients for his camouflage: the very few who believed in making things difficult for the enemy; a greater number who believed in making things difficult for everybody but the enemy; and a great lump of rigid intractables who thought that any form of concealment was somehow a breach of King’s Regulations. These idiots were facing German enemies who did not hesitate to copy all camouflage ideas from the French and British.

  But Lieutenant Bernard came from the theatre, where the show must always go on. Early one summer morning in 1916 the job at the windmill was done. On the campbed in his hut, a few hours later, Bernard was woken from the sleep of the just by the general and his brigade major. ‘The mill is finished,’ they said. He agreed it had been completed at 2.30 a.m. ‘No, the mill is finished,’ they said. ‘The Boche finished it.’ After the German artillery blitz, all Bernard could do was collect the object glasses and eyepieces of the bent periscopes, and curse the fortunes of war.

  The little wizard got around the Salient unscathed, until a place called Vormazalee. There, on 4 August 1916, the day after his brother Bruce was killed with the New Zealanders, a machine-gun bullet hit Oliver Bernard just below the left kneecap. After a spell in hospital at Wimereux, he was shipped back to England. ‘I’m not from the Somme,’ he said to the lady who pushed a basket of fruit into his ambulance at Charing Cross Station. Major Rhodes got Bernard into the efficient Clock House hospital on Chelsea Embankment.

  One day, Bernard hirpled out on crutches to see Solomon J. Solomon at Hyde Park Gate. At the front door he hesitated, wondering whether the artist would appreciate his old ‘business man’ dropping in, but Solomon was genial and friendly, inviting Bernard into his studio and settling him down to paint his portrait. Beneath the affable conversation, Bernard could sense that Solomon was hurt and disappointed by what had happened to him in the army. The cynical and worldly Bernard had always wondered what motiv
ated Solomon. Was his energy fuelled by ambition or greed? Now, as Bernard talked to him in his studio, Solomon ‘revealed a man with the heart of an irrepressible child, gifted, generous, spoiled, unaccustomed to hard knocks and opposition which are the common enemy of all pioneers’. In Bernard’s opinion, although Solomon was not fitted to run a military unit and his political tactics were unwise, he had been the first person to grasp the potential of the new French idea and to press it energetically on the authorities. Solomon would have received more recognition had he been prepared to advise rather than dictate.

  In France, deceptive camouflage work continued as the two sides shelled each other over no-man’s-land. Early in 1917, Oliver Bernard limped back to his post, sporting a wound stripe next to his Military Cross. He dug Oh Pip observation posts into chalk near Vimy Ridge, and behind brick walls by Mount Kemmel. A few days before Easter in April 1917, aged just 36, Bernard became the camouflage officer of IX Corps in Sir Herbert Plumer’s Second Army. This force was preparing and training for a massive assault on the Messines-Wijtschate Ridge overlooking the Ypres Salient from the south. Sappers and gunners paved the way for the infantry: British, Australian and Canadian tunnellers were secretly digging through the clay to place twenty-one giant mines under the German positions, listening through microphones to the ordinary sounds of enemy life that would soon be cut short. At a place the British called the Bluff, the tunnellers had bravely dug underneath waterfilled craters. Now the camoufleurs assisted by poking up disguised periscopes only seventy yards from the German lines. Meanwhile, over 2,200 howitzers and big guns were assembled, and coordinated with 400 heavy mortars and 700 heavy machine guns. The Second Army also had air superiority: eight tethered observation balloons were backed up by II Brigade Royal Flying Corps whose 300 aircraft were already attacking airfields, railways and German reserve camps as well as patrolling and photographing the enemy lines. An enormous scale model of Messines Ridge and its defences, the size of two croquet lawns, was constructed in detail from RFC reconnaissance evidence. Officers studied the model from scaffolding built up around it.

  When Bernard was summoned to tell his corps commander, Lieutenant General Sir Alexander Hamilton Gordon, about camouflage, he took some aerial photographs with him. Gordon’s lugubrious disposition had earned him the ironic nickname ‘Sunny Jim’ but Bernard really did feel ‘as if a ray of sunshine had unexpectedly penetrated the unhappiest depths of his weary but persevering soul’ as he at last was able to explain what he thought was going wrong to somebody who could do something about it. Camouflage had to be a forethought, not an afterthought, said Bernard; built-in from the beginning. If the enemy spotted your first diggings for an ammunition dump or an artillery emplacement, all later attempts to hide it would only advertise its importance the more. The wrong sort of camouflage was worse than none, Bernard added, showing Hamilton the aerial photographs of gun-pits being prepared in the open and then covered with extraordinary wigwams, square tents of hessian and light green canvas with sloping sides that were as conspicuous as block houses. ‘What damn fools we all are!’ exclaimed the corps commander. (Those sites were left in place as excellent decoys when they quietly relocated the guns.)

  The subsequent assault on Messines or Mesen Ridge was perhaps the greatest British success so far in the stalemated, deadlocked war. At 3.10 am on 7 June 1917, nineteen of the twenty-one mines buried by the tunnellers under the German lines went off in a rolling sequence that lasted an appalling twenty-eight seconds. Great pillars of flame reached up to the sky and then collapsed in dirt and debris and smoke. Philip Gibbs said it was ‘as though the fires of hell had risen’. A million pounds of explosive produced a shockwave that could be heard and felt on the other side of the English Channel by the sleepless lying awake in London. Huge craters, 250 feet across, punctured the blasted landscape. Perhaps 8,000 German soldiers perished immediately in their shattered bunkers and trenches. Walking behind a massive creeping barrage of artillery, mortars and machine guns, 80,000 British and Anzac infantry moved forward, took the entire ridge and moved down the other side. More than 7,000 dazed Germans surrendered. Philip Gibbs noticed the camouflage sacking on the helmets of the Germans as well as their complete ignorance of how much Germany was hated. After four days’ fighting, half of the 25,000 British killed and wounded were Anzacs.

  After June 1917, when the Anzacs took over the Canadian sector of the Ypres Salient, camouflage stepped up from retail to wholesale. The First Australian Division, who had fought at Gallipoli, asked Special Works if all visible roads from Poperinghe to Ypres could be screened from German observation balloons. They did not want to lose more men, equipment and transport through visual carelessness. From this date onwards, there is photographic evidence of banners of hessian, ranked in arches across roads, forming overlapping layers against a distant observer. Production of road screening materials shot up to 25,000 square yards in June and July, from nil in May. By Christmas 1917, 112,000 square yards were flapping in the wind.

  Only very slowly was the BEF beginning to understand that the key idea of camouflage was deception, not just concealment. But new ideas were slowly getting through. Bernard was moved up to the coast near Dunkirk to help camouflage naval guns in sand for a major coastal attack in July 1917 which in the event was thwarted by a massive German pre-emptive strike, using mustard gas. Part of Bernard’s duties involved disguising an RFC airfield. He managed to persuade an RFC officer not to build any new huts, but instead to occupy existing farm buildings, neither altering the grounds nor making new tracks. ‘Damn good idea, and better than any camouflage,’ said the squadron commander. ‘Not at all, that is camouflage,’ replied Bernard. When Plumer was sent to northern Italy in November 1917 to prop up the flagging Italian Allies against the Austrians, Bernard went along as camouflage officer.

  Of course, the enemy was using camouflage, too. Bernard wrote of his ‘magnificently trained and perfectly equipped opponents who designed the most scientific means for protecting and concealing themselves in and behind their own lines throughout the western front’. In April 1917, after the Germans withdrew from Adinfer Wood to the Hindenburg Line, Captain J. C. Dunn recorded how they made use of the whole wood:

  On its front, hidden in the beech hedge, are machine-gun emplacements of concrete and armour-plate, like large letter-boxes. Within it are gun-emplacements and shelters built of large boles, planted over with ferns and grasses for concealment; smaller shelters are woven cleverly of branches, some growing and some partly or wholly cut. Its trees are erect and unbroken. Moss and ivy, violets, bluebells, anemones and wild strawberry carpet it. The relics of its occupation are unobtrusive …

  By 1917, the Special Works Parks in France were not only using their French female workers to produce screening and netting but also artistically creating a wide range of realistic hollow dummies as hides: trees, walls, dead horses, human corpses. In July 1917, when King George V and the Prince of Wales came up from Cassel to visit the Special Works Park on the Wormhout–Wylder road, the Daily Mail reported: ‘The King saw all the latest Protean tricks for concealing or, as we all say now, for ‘camouflaging’ guns, snipers, observers.’ The Times special correspondent also followed that ten-day tour of the Western Front:

  On Friday, July 6, the King drove first to the home of the high priests of the great mysteries of camouflage, a magician’s palace in a Belgian farm, where nothing is what it seems to be. It is a bewildering place, which, of course, cannot be described in detail – a land on the other side of the looking-glass, where bushes are men and things dissolve when you look at them and the earth collapses, where visions are about and you walk among snares and pitfalls … It is the grown-up home of make-believe. Here the King was received by the chief magicians, who showed him their black arts and made him privy to all their secrets.

  10

  Lying for Lloyd George

  Lloyd George was a Liberal, but his manoeuvrings brought down the last Liberal government that Britain
would ever have. After the press helped to get rid of Asquith and to bring him to power in December 1916, Lloyd George rewarded the great press barons by giving them jobs in government and changing the whole publicity machine. Under this Prime Minister, propaganda became mass-market.

  A crucial figure in presenting the right stories and managing public perceptions was that genius of British newspapers, Lord Northcliffe, who was born Alfred Harmsworth in 1865 in Chapelizod, Dublin. He was self-educated, working as a freelance journalist to support his mother, brothers and sisters after his barrister father declined into alcoholism. He learned from George Newnes’s publication Tit-Bits in the 1880s that the newly literate classes wanted information made accessible and entertaining. Emotionally impulsive himself, Harms-worth had a knack for understanding people’s crazes and curiosities, and so excelled at popular journalism. ‘Smiling pictures make people smile,’ he said. ‘People like to read about profiteering. Most of them would like to be profiteers if they had the chance.’ He started with Bicycling News, and his stable of popular magazines, including Comic Cuts and Marvel, was selling a million copies a week by 1892.

  The first daily newspaper Harmsworth acquired was the ailing London Evening News in 1894. He turned around its fortunes by changing the format, simplifying the reporting (stressing human interest), making the subbing and headlines snappier, and adding a woman’s column. On 4 May 1896, he launched an entirely new paper, the Daily Mail, priced at only half a penny. The first issue sold nearly 400,000 copies, almost as many as all the penny papers combined. Skilful use of Britain’s railway network pushed its distribution right across the country, and made the Daily Mail the first truly national mass-market newspaper, more attractive than the stodgy broadsheets. Although Lord Salisbury snobbishly complained that the new rag was ‘run by office boys for other office boys’, it had bright short paragraphs that made things simple and clear.