Churchill's Wizards

by Nicholas Rankin

  Losers are more susceptible to propaganda than winners, because more fearful and anxious. Nor was it only leaflets working on their minds. Many German newspapers translated interesting pieces from the neutral press – Dutch, Scandinavian and Swiss – and such papers were skilfully bombarded with ‘camouflaged articles’ from Crewe House that, without banging a drum, showed the social, economic, commercial and scientific conditions in Allied countries in a glowing light. German readers could make their own comparisons with drabness and depression at home. So the gnawing discontents and sapping of the will continued.

  A German trench newspaper appeared, Heer und Heimat, witha picture of the Kaiser between two oak-leaf clusters, and a subtitle Der Ruf zur Einigkeit, ‘The Cry for Unity’, which featured a front page cartoon showing the German political parties at home fighting each other rather than the enemy. This paper looked and seemed thoroughly German, but it too was produced by Crewe House. General von Hutier was perhaps right to warn his troops against British ‘ruses, trickery and other underhand methods.’

  The German awareness of British methods – triumphantly boasted about afterwards by people like Sir Campbell Stuart – had far-reaching consequences. Both Ludendorff in his memoirs and Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf believed that the British propaganda campaign had corroded the German will to resist; that the German armed forces were never really defeated at the front, but only stabbed in the back; and that devious foreigners were responsible, not decent Germans. Self-pity and self-deception would be stirred into the toxic resentments of the nascent German National Socialist Workers’ Party.

  * This anecdotal aside, lightly shielded by ‘I fancy’, ‘may have’, ‘might’ evidently hints at an actual event. The Scarpe is the canalised river that ran west from British-held Arras into German-held territory. It sounds like a trial run for one of the most famous of WW2 deceptions, operation mincemeat, ‘The Man Who Never Was’, a quarter of a century later, in spring 1943.

  11

  Deceivers Deceived

  As the war dragged on towards the end, Solomon J. Solomon brooded in London. In February 1918 he bought a radiographer, a kind of magic lantern that projected a flat picture on to a screen, for use with his camouflage students. Its combination of mirrors and powerful electric lights enabled Solomon to study enlarged and illuminated aerial reconnaissance photographs in considerable detail. He became obsessed with three of them in particular, taken in autumn 1917, because his painter’s eye had spotted curious anomalies. Some of the shadows seemed to be wrong in relation to the sun. As he pored over the pictures Solomon began to suspect that this was a landscape deliberately designed to fool the camera. New tricks were being used to see through camouflage as it became more sophisticated; colour-blind spotters, for example, sent up in aeroplanes, had been successful in picking out artificial greens from natural ones. But Solomon became convinced that German camouflage was still pulling the wool over Allied eyes.

  Solomon eventually laid out his ideas in Strategic Camouflage (1920), a book whose conspiratorial tone is set from the opening epigraph:

  When a man would commit a crime in a room overlooked from another the first thing he does is to pull down the blind; and if he is using a light, he closes the shutters too.

  War is a crime, and this war was, and henceforth every other war will be overlooked, and the first thing the participants need to do is to devise and prepare their blinds.

  The Germans did not neglect this precaution.

  Germany was a technically advanced country. Of the first hundred Nobel Prizes for Science, Germany won thirty-three to Britain’s eighteen, and Germans set the technological pace of twentieth-century warfare. Solomon insisted that the Germans had surpassed the Allies in their camouflage of men and equipment.

  ‘Camouflage and the interpretation of aerial photography were war babies, and are still in their infancy,’ he wrote in Strategic Camouflage, convinced that no official reader of photographs was as well equipped as a painter to do the job (early photographic interpreters included a diplomat and a stockbroker). Like Abbott Thayer, Solomon overrated the artist’s expertise. He was unimpressed by the carefully illustrated official manual, Notes on the Interpretation of Aeroplane Photographs, and remained convinced that the British had often been ‘fooled by the devices of the enemy’.

  He argued that the Germans had managed to construct, in back areas five to nine miles behind their lines, low hangars the size of whole fields to conceal thousands of men by day. These barely sloping structures blended with the hedges and roads of Flanders and hoodwinked both aircraft spotters and photographic interpreters that all they were seeing was a patchwork of cultivated fields. Solomon thought the Germans understood exactly what would show up in the Allied aerial photographs. ‘Keep everything low’ was one of the camouflage instructions found on a German prisoner. Bridges, for example, stuck out as clear targets for bombs or artillery. But a dark-painted bridge, dropped three or four inches below the surface of the river it spanned, was still navigable and far less conspicuous. Solomon thought German camoufleurs had managed to cover roads over completely with wire and canvas, so that a hasty spotter would see only a route empty of traffic. This was the equivalent of a conjuror’s false bottom, Solomon reckoned. Enemy transport could continue to flow underneath painted buckram and mosquito-netting.

  Solomon claimed to spot errors in German ‘skiagraphy’ or painting of shadows. When a house cast no shadow on the ground, he was convinced that the Germans had erected an imitation field alongside it, coming up to its eaves. He pointed out houses that were too small, tree shadows that did not move with the sun, pipes pretending to be paths. Strategic Camouflage becomes dizzying as Solomon asks us to scrutinise muddy blow-ups of black-and-white photographs as well as his own impressionistic colour paintings of the wobbly shapes, odd shadows and dim contrasts in certain photographs.

  Solomon also made coloured drawings, sketches and models to prove his point. In March 1918, he began pestering his superiors in the Royal Engineers, men at the Air Ministry, the General Staff, the Prime Minister’s office, and fellows at the Athenaeum Club like Sir Martin Conway, who said, ‘This is the most important find since the beginning of the war,’ and went off to tell General Hugh Trenchard, chief of the RFC and future father of the RAF. In a hurried survey under poor light, ‘Boom’ Trenchard peered at Solomon’s evidence and saw only fields. But the matter should be looked into, he said, and fresh photographs procured. ‘Are you prepared to go to France?’ Trenchard asked Solomon.

  But it seemed to be nobody’s business to send him. Solomon became depressed. Back home, he stared again at the photos taken of St Pierre Capelle: the worked fields now looked astonishingly like undulating hangars, the haystacks were fake, the tree shadows all wrong. The whole area seemed to him to show a vast hidden camp for reserves, barely eight kilometres east of Nieuport, on the only rising ground in a marshy district north of Ypres.

  When Trenchard sent his aide, Major John Moore-Brabazon – Britain’s first-ever certified pilot, the inventor of the aerial camera and Churchill’s future minister of aircraft production in WW2 – to see Solomon’s evidence in his studio, the painter failed to persuade this sceptical aviator. Solomon managed to get to see the new CIGS, Sir Henry Wilson, who did not say much, but according to Solomon, ‘seemed to think there was something in it’.

  Hesketh Prichard, the king of the snipers, was called by people on his own side ‘The Professional Assassin’. It was said in an admiring way, but he paid a high psychological price for the title. Although it was his job to kill Germans, the hours his grey eyes spent studying the enemy through a Ross glass were also extended exercises in empathy. Another man, seen with his unshaven face and scruffy cap magnified twenty times, cannot long remain the bestial baby-eating ‘Hun’ of propaganda. Prichard observed the enemy’s all-too-human habits and bodily needs, trying to survive in the squalor of the trenches on the other side of the barbed wire, and saw mon semblable, mon frère. His sen
sitivity was what made him such a good hunter and sportsman. It is true that after he heard on 3 October 1915 that his great friend Alfred Gathorne-Hardy had been killed with many of his men at Loos, ten yards from the German wire, he wrote: ‘If it is any satisfaction, I shot a German between the eyes at 5 o’clock today’; and that after Nurse Cavell was executed later that month he said: ‘It makes me so glad when I shoot a German, and especially an officer.’ But for the most part, Prichard was not motivated by revenge. He knew the Germans were both brave, and human. His work was plainly necessary, but it began to trouble him more and more that it was murderous.

  The writer H. M. Tomlinson in his 1930 memoir All Our Yesterdays remembered how Prichard went sick for some weeks after putting a bullet through the head of a particular German sniper who had been a deadly nuisance. This same incident is written up in Prichard’s own Sniping in France as a short story, ‘Wilibald the Hun’, rather than as reportage. Perhaps psychically troubling material needed to be disguised as fiction. Hesketh Prichard began getting splitting head-aches from the eye strain of spotting and shooting all day. Then he developed what was called ‘trench fever’ from the drains leaking excrement. But he battled on with his work, inventing new devices, developing the courses and tactics of camouflage and deception, saving thousands of lives by helping to take a few others. But the King of the Snipers was slowly sickening and wasting away from his mysterious illness: he endured fourteen operations before dying in June 1922, aged 44.

  H. M. Tomlinson wrote an obituary appreciation of Hesketh Prichard for the Liberal paper Nation and Athenaeum. He saw the man who first guided him at the front as ‘a gentleman’: a privileged person from a leisured caste whose code was honour and service. The war degraded what was noble in Hesketh’s philosophy, and its delicate notions were ruined by ‘the senseless waste of our own men’. Tomlinson said he was shocked by this ‘drainage of good life’, but also by

  the chicanery, the meanness, the stupidity, the intrigues, and the callousness of those of whom he wished to think well …

  What subtle infection of his body occurred through this terrible disturbance to his settled habits of thought I do not know. But one could see that he was mortally wounded. The Press called it ‘blood-poisoning’. I suppose that term will do as well as any other.

  The first day of spring, 21 March 1918, saw the opening phase of a massive German offensive designed to break out of the trenches and to drive the British back to the French coast. After the Russian Revolution of October 1917, the Bolsheviks had reneged on Russia’s alliance with Britain and France and sought a separate peace with Germany at Brest-Litovsk. With the Russians out of the picture and the Americans not yet arrived in Europe, this seemed to the Germans the right time to strike a decisive blow, so they quietly moved a million more men and 3,000 guns to the western front.

  The Allies knew a big attack was coming soon but they had no exact idea of its scale and location. In The Secret Corps, Ferdinand Tuohy says that the German General Erich von Ludendorff had ordered every department and branch not to convey any information whatsoever to the enemy, and that Ludendorff appointed special security officers to police the concealment:

  The Germans hid and even distorted their signal traffic to put us off the scent; faked road and rail activity elsewhere than in the projected area of operations; even built dummy dumps and hospitals and battery positions and aeroplane hangars at certain parts of the front so that our observers should photograph them.

  Major movements of men and stores were done at night or cloaked in camouflage. The Germans had created a phantom army in front of the French sector, using signals deception and dummy wireless traffic. Field Marshal Haig’s intelligence at GHQ was poor because Brigadier John Charteris told him only what he wanted to hear.

  Die Kaiserschlacht, the Kaiser’s Battle, began with the greatest artillery barrage of the war: 3.2 million shells in one day. The damp weather helped camouflage the Germans: their feldgrau uniforms were ghostly as they advanced over the misty fields. The bloodiest day of the war yielded 80,000 casualties on both sides.

  The second phase of the German attack, code-named ‘Georgette’, was launched near Armentières on 9 April 1918. Four German divisions under General von Arnim struck at a weak point where the dispirited 2nd Portuguese division held the line. German soldiers flooded through the gap and Armentières, Ploegsteert and Messines were all abandoned by the Allies on 10 April. What had taken four horrendous months to gain at Passchendaele was lost in a few days. The British front was crumbling on Thursday, 11 April 1918 when Haig issued an order to hold ‘to the last man’. The Germans seized a wilderness of mud, what Churchill called ‘the Dead Sea fruits’ of the Battle of the Somme, before they stopped, exhausted.

  There were major repercussions after the offensive. First, the Allies agreed to a unified military command under the French General Ferdinand Foch, just as, in WW2, all would agree to work under the American General Eisenhower. Second, gloomy news of the big German attack with British retreats and heavy casualties caused inevitable political fallout at home. Who would carry the can for the losses and setbacks? Lloyd George shook up his government. Lord Milner replaced Lord Derby as Secretary of State for War on 18 April and his place in the War Cabinet was taken by Austen Chamberlain. The reverberations reached as far away as Palestine, where Allenby was stripped of troops he was going to use in his final push against the Turks.

  Amid the recrimination and blame, Solomon J. Solomon suddenly did not seem quite such a mad obsessive in London clubland and society. The Germans had made a surprise attack en masse; perhaps they had been camouflaged in the way that Solomon suggested. The painter now cranked up his campaign. He drafted a letter to the Prime Minister and took it round for his neighbour, Sir Edward Carson, to check. Carson wrote a forceful letter to Lord Milner pointing out the importance of Solomon’s discovery that German camouflage was helping to hide troops in the landscape.

  A week or so later, Solomon presented his case to Lloyd George and the Secretary of State for War while lunching at Sir Alfred Mond’s house. ‘There is no doubt about it,’ affirmed the Prime Minister. Solomon says, ‘He saw at once that the March surprise had been effected in some such way by the Germans.’ Lloyd George then passed Solomon on to General J. C. Smuts and Lord Rothermere, President of the Air Council. Solomon also tried to see Major General George Macdonogh, the director of Military Intelligence, to find out if any information on camouflage had been gleaned from enemy prisoners.

  In May 1918, the famous American portrait painter John Singer Sargent, RA was back in London, about to be commissioned as a war artist. Solomon saw a chance to warn the American Army. According to Solomon,

  ‘[Sargent] came to my studio, and went most carefully through the photographs and was quite satisfied that my reading of them was correct … the camouflage was so clever that only an artist could make an initial logical analysis of the puzzle pictures they presented to the airmen.’

  In early July, Solomon heard from Professor Mantoux that General Foch was interested in his discoveries and wanted to see him at French GHQ at Versailles. Solomon underwent a blizzard of red tape, officials and bumf before starting a muddled, hopeless journey to France. Three trains, a hotel for the night and a car finally got Solomon to the British Mission at Château Breau. General Weygand arranged for Solomon to drive on to Chalons to meet the chief French expert reader of photographs, Captain De Bissy.

  At Chalons, a German big gun began firing every ten minutes and everyone trooped down into the cellars. The Fête de la République, 14 July, was on a Sunday so the Germans enlivened the party with a big attack. Solomon’s weekend ran into his usual problem: a grudging acceptance by the French of some points, but rejection of his idea that the Allies had been fooled for three years. Their attitude boiled down to ‘the French are cleverer than the Boche, so how could they do anything better?’

  Tired from lack of sleep, and having failed to persuade Captain De Bissy, Solomon
began the long rail journeys back to Paris. Dirty and bedraggled, he got a twelve-franc room at the Hotel Terminus. His luggage had been lost; he had to buy a barber-shop shave and a clean collar. While waiting around, he wrote more letters and went to see people who were often out. Lying in bed on Thursday night, Solomon heard an air-raid warning, the sirens ‘like a spider’s web of sound throughout the city’, but nothing happened. The Ministère de la Guerre sent him on to the Section de Camouflage et Inventions at 23, rue de l’Université.

  The next Sunday Lieutenant Colonel Solomon J. Solomon, the first British camoufleur, had lunch at Chantilly with Captain Guirand de Scévola, the first French camoufleur. In the sunny garden afterwards, Solomon explained to de Scévola and his staff the photographs and models that he had brought with him. There is an over-insistent note in Solomon’s report:

  None of themdissented … All saw quite clearly every point, and expressed astonishment that no attempt had been made to test the validity of my findings … De Scévola wishes me to join the Conference of Allied Camoufleurs that they hope will soon take place.

  Solomon saw more generals and their aides as he tried to get permission to go to the Belgian front to prove his theory. He wanted planes to bomb the area, and another aircraft to photograph the results. In early August he was at Rouen where Walter Russell took him to a Special Works factory at Marowne. Solomon thought that Royal Engineers camouflage was now run by staff who knew nothing. At Abbéville he breakfasted with Lyndsay Symington and asked him what he thought of the camouflage being made in France; Symington said that in his opinion 75 per cent of the stuff made was utterly wasted, through lack of knowledge and too much standardisation of the product.