Churchill's Wizards

by Nicholas Rankin

  From Boulogne, Solomon returned to the Special Works Park at Wimereux, where he had begun two years before. He was shown around by Major F. J. C Wyatt, who had supplanted him. Solomon was appalled by the monotony of the production: standard flat-top camouflage nets of one familiar pattern without regard to terrain. These factories were boring – without artistry, inspiration or grasp of the function of camouflage. Wyatt must have found him the most galling of visitors.

  At the Officers’ Rest Club in Boulogne, Solomon wrote letters to officials and badgered other guests with his models and photos. He spent the morning on the beach, and slept in the afternoon. Tapping his feet to Boulogne bandstand music, he sketched disguised aerodromes. He telephoned the British Mission: there was no news of the summons to Belgium he was imminently expecting.

  Like a prophet, Solomon railed at the kings in command. The man had a burning vision that no one could see. How could people who did not even understand the meaning of strategic camouflage recognise it right before their very eyes? Back at Wimereux he received a letter from his wife that persuaded him to go home. Paget drove Solomon to Boulogne and endured photo analysis for an intense few minutes before the departure of the 2.30 ferry for Folkestone.

  By 20 August Solomon was sitting in Hampstead Hospital with his photographs of St Pierre Capelle and Sparappelhoek, sharing them with his kite-balloonist nephew Joseph Hubert Solomon who had obtained the originals while serving in Belgium. Solomon’s reading of the photos was ‘a revelation’ to the young observer. His uncle explained that the reason he had never seen any traffic along a two-kilometre stretch of the St Pierre Capelle–Nieuport road was because it was camouflaged. Solomon then wrote another letter to Lord Milner, the Secretary of State for War, urging him to direct some artillery fire on this road – this despite the fact that Milner had already told Solomon that in his opinion the absence of traffic was because it was travelling only at night, and moreover there was no reason why the Germans should make vast hangars the size of fields – think of the labour and the cost!

  Soon after, the commandant of the Camouflage School in Hyde Park, John Rhodes, brought a Captain Lejeune to Solomon’s studio to examine his evidence. Solomon thought Lejeune was ‘perhaps the most intelligent of all the readers and while at the studio he could find no crab in my reading. It was the first time that any official had thoroughly gone into the matter and he left, as I thought, impressed, but Rhodes afterwards told me he was still not convinced.’

  Now Solomon began feeling paranoid. ‘I was smiled at as a troublesome lunatic.’ He felt that ‘English gentlemen’ were acting with ‘sinister promptings’, and that there were people ‘behind the scenes making insinuations’. There is no hint from Solomon that any of this is anti-Semitic.

  At first, however, the commandant of the Camouflage School certainly tried to give Solomon J. Solomon a fair crack of the whip. On 5 September 1918, John Rhodes wrote a letter to GHQ in Great Britain, enclosing a map reference, an enlarged photograph and an attached transparency marking the key features, and headed ‘Suspected use of artificial area Camouflage by the Germans’.

  An unnamed Brigadier from MI3 at the War Office replied for GHQ Intelligence on 20 September 1918.

  A number of letters from Lt. Col. Solomon J. Solomon, on the subject of possible German camouflage in certain areas, have been referred to the General Staff for consideration during the last few months.

  Lt. Col. Solomon’s arguments have been most carefully considered and it is possible to state definitely from the examination of a large number of Photographs of the areas in question, taken under different conditions of light and at different times of year, that his conclusions are not borne out by facts …

  In these circumstances, it is not considered that it would be justifiable to ask for a special bombing raid round ST PIERRE CAPELLE suspected by Lt. Col. Solomon, more particularly in view of the fact that this area has been bombed already.

  In September 1918, John Rhodes was in France, visiting Special Works Parks. This time he discussed Solomon’s theories about Sparappelhoek and St Pierre Capelle with GHQ in France. Just before going on eighteen days’ leave, he wrote to Solomon:

  I saw two recent stereoscopic photographs which I am afraid do not support the idea of raised country.

  In the circumstances I do not think it of much use to apply to them again to bomb the area or to make any other tests. I, personally, was quite satisfied by what they showed me that the area referred to was not raised in any way.

  Back from leave, however, Rhodes wrote to Wyatt, Officer Commanding the Camouflage Park at Wimereux, regarding ‘Suspected use of artificial area Camouflage by the Germans’:

  Now that the line is sufficiently advanced I shall be very glad if you will inform me definitely, and as early as you can, whether the areas alleged by Lieut. Colonel Solomon J. Solomon to have been covered by the Germans with Camouflage in order to form a concealed staging area, were or were not so covered … Iam very anxious to get this report as early as I can.

  MI3 wrote again to Rhodes on 27 October:

  The localities of SPARAPPELHOEK and ST. PIERRE CAPPELLE, suspected by Lt.-Col. S. J. Solomon, R. E. as being camouflaged camps, have now fallen into our hands and have been carefully examined. There is no trace at either of any of the work suspected by Lt.-Colonel Solomon …

  A copy of this was also sent to Solomon who wrote back on 5 November defending himself to the General Staff. Dropping the names of Marshal Foch, General Weygand, the Secretary of State for War and the Prime Minister, he now shifted tack, pointing to new evidence further south

  … that the valley between Bullecourt and Creisille is largely covered with exactly the type of camouflage I had described … The arcaded roads found at Quéant, since fully described, the Bertha emplacement falling into our hands, where the dummy gun-setting had been bombed and that of the real gun hard by untouched, and the fact that none of the German strategic Camouflage methods had been ‘read’ in spite of my repeated descriptions of them, since early in March, are sufficient evidence that neither in the British or the French Armies, are there men capable of interpreting a photograph of this order, with anything like scientific accuracy or thoroughness.

  When the Armistice came, Winston Churchill was in the Hotel Metropole on Northumberland Avenue, waiting for Big Ben to chime eleven, ending fifty-two months of war. The war ended for Philip Gibbs where it had begun for the British Army in 1914, at Mons in Belgium. It seemed a miraculous coincidence. At 11 o’clock on 11 November 1918 the batteries stopped firing. ‘No more men were to be killed, no more to be mangled, no more to be blinded.’ As the sun went down into a peaceful night, Philip Gibbs felt the fires of hell had been put out. He heard people talking happily, voices singing, bands playing.

  The end of the war saw the appearance of one of its greatest parodies, Charlie Chaplin’s film Shoulder Arms, released in October 1918. The strangest sequence is the six minutes that Charlie Chaplin spends camouflaged as a tree, running around in California’s eucalypt-filled version of no-man’s-land, knocking out big Germans with his sticking-out branched arms. Historically, this marked a change in the public consciousness of camouflage. What had been an official secret a few years before was now an open joke. Light-hearted Charlie Chaplin was getting laughs while Solomon Solomon was becoming more and more intense.

  On 13 November 1918, two days after the Armistice that ended ‘the war to end wars’, an experienced British camouflage officer arrived to survey the area of Belgium indicated by Solomon as heavily camouflaged. Taking along a photographer, this Royal Engineer camouflage officer visited a series of Flemish villages: Thourout, Ostend, Sparappelhoek, Middlekerke, Slype, St Pierre Capelle, Leke, Beerst, Vladsloo, Dixmude, Essen, Zarren, Staden and Roulers. This is the moment when Solomon’s theories would either be vindicated or vanquished, because only an expert camoufleur had the power to pass judgement. In fact, the man who had been selected to make the judgement was Solomon’s old protégé
and rival, Oliver Bernard.

  Bernard found some roadside brushwood screening, ‘wooden frames roughly 5' x 5' strung together, with brushwood applied vertically about 7' high’, used to mask junctions and crossroads under observation, but these were not German tunnels or ‘arched road covers’. Bernard also pointed out:

  ST PIERRE CAPELLE was under continuous observation of R.N.S.G, at RAMSCA PELLE, from early 1915 until the recent operations. An attempt to artificially raise road levels to sufficient height for traffic would be conspicuous in this extremely flat locality, especially to careful observers long familiar with every landmark.

  Oliver Bernard could find no officer who had entered the area soon after evacuation, nor were any photographs taken: ‘there appeared to be nothing worth recording in evidence of or against the question raised in this matter.’ Signing his damning report of 14/11/18, ‘O. P. Bernard, Major RE, Army Camouflage Officer, 2nd Army’, the scenic artist finally squashed the portrait painter, and the practical ‘business man’ had the last word:

  Debris of existing or demolished Camouflage and structural work on roads and country side were carefully sought without a particle of evidence being found to denote either area or road camouflage.

  But Solomon was unable to give up now. He made his own way to St Pierre Capelle which was largely destroyed, and to the house with no shadow. Nailed on a green board under the eaves he found a scrap of tarred brown paper which he was sure must have made up the surface of the sloping fake field. He found more paper in the rubble, some grey felt, a hardened bag of plaster of Paris, some squares of canvas over wire, but he was convinced the Germans had tried to destroy the most incriminating evidence.

  It was enough for Solomon to keep his campaign going. John Rhodes became more and exasperated by what he came to call ‘the wisdom of Solomon’. Everyone had taken a great deal of trouble to consider his claims, but there were limits. ‘I consider his letter’, Rhodes had written to GHQ on 10 November 1918, ‘besides being quite unjustified by the facts, to be a gross and unwarrantable reflection on the integrity, intelligence and capacity of the officers to whom he refers. I recommend that he ceases to act as honorary adviser to the Camouflage School.’

  When Solomon’s book Strategic Camouflage was published in 1920, John Rhodes’s anonymous and devastating critique appeared in the right-wing Morning Post under the headline ‘Camouflage Gone Mad’.

  As the Armistice of 11 November 1918 approached, war propaganda turned into political jockeying. Northcliffe, increasingly grandiose, wrote his own ‘Peace Propaganda Policy’ of unconditional surrender and demanded a seat at the Paris Peace Conference, while setting on his newspaper, the Daily Mail, to attack Lord Milner at the War Office.

  On 7 November, the Ulsterman and QC Sir Edward Carson had stood up in the House of Commons. The man who once destroyed Oscar Wilde in cross-examination now turned his forensic attention on the newspaper tycoon:

  It is almost high treason to say a word against Lord Northcliffe. I know his power and that he does not hesitate to exercise it … It seems to me nothing but indecent that the gentleman engaged in foreign propaganda on behalf of His Majesty’s Government should make part of his propaganda an attack on the Secretary of State for War in the Government under which he purports to serve … to drive him out of his office. For what? In order that Lord Northcliffe may [himself] get into the War Cabinet, so that he may be present at the Peace Conference … The whole thing is a disgrace to public life in England and a disgrace to journalism.

  Lord Northcliffe, rebuffed by Lloyd George, resigned on 12 November, the first full day of peace. His megalomania grew worse and tipped into paranoia. Poisoned by an infection in his teeth which affected his brain and then his heart, the greatest genius the British press has ever known went mad and his last weeks in the summer of 1922 were spent raving in a hutch on the roof of the Duke of Devonshire’s house in Carlton Gardens.

  As soon as WW1 ended, propaganda became a dirty word. Crewe House was shut down and cleared by Sir Campbell Stuart by 31 December 1918, and the government hurried to wash its hands of its own publicity machine. Lord Beaverbrook had resigned in October, with no one replacing him, and his Ministry of Information was the very first wartime Ministry to be completely closed down, also by the end of 1918.

  The ‘liquidator’ was John Buchan. He bequeathed the Art and Photography sections of the Ministry to the Imperial War Museum which would be established by Act of Parliament in 1920. As the nation rejoiced in victory, Buchan turned his attention to peacetime, and began lobbying for the release of 1,500 conscientious objectors who were still in prison.

  Unlike so many others, John Buchan had not been damaged or deranged by deception. At Christmas 1918, perhaps he remembered his hero Richard Hannay in Greenmantle, a disguised fugitive in Germany, spending Christmas 1915 in an enemy household:

  That night I realised the crazy folly of war. When I saw the splintered shell of Ypres and heard hideous tales of German doings I used to want to see the whole land of the Boche given up to fire and sword. I thought we could never end the war properly without giving the Huns some of their own medicine. But that woodcutter’s cottage cured me of such nightmares. I was for punishing the guilty and letting the innocent go free. It was our business to thank God and keep our hands clean from the ugly blunders to which Germany’s madness had driven her. What good would it do Christian folk to burn poor little huts like this and leave children’s bodies by the wayside? To be able to laugh and to be merciful are the only things that make man better than the beasts.

  PART II

  12

  Wizards of WW2

  The twin avatars of British strategic deception and black propaganda in WW2, Dudley Clarke and Sefton Delmer, were both men pulled between two worlds. Dudley Clarke was an artistic type, inventive and theatrical, who had to find an outlet for his creative ingenuity within the rigidities of the British army. Sefton Delmer was brought up in Germany. During the First World War he was the sole British pupil in his Berlin school; when his family moved to Britain, he became the only German-accented boy in a wartime English public school. Both men’s lives were shaped by WW1.

  Lieutenant Colonel Dudley Clarke, RA, the man who was to become the éminence grise of WW2 strategic deception, seemed a conventional enough colonel, with his left-parted hair brushed back from the widow’s peak, and his courteous manner. He liked to appear in rooms, or disappear from them, silently, and his pale oval face, with quick glances from under drooping eyelids, gave him the disquieting look of a sardonic butler. ‘Sphinx-like’ was how someone described the ivory mask quality of a man who became, in the words of his biographer David Mure, ‘the Compleat Military Jeeves’, solving his masters’ problems.

  He was not eccentric, but he was original, and the distinction mattered in the conformist world of the British Army. He never married, did not like children, and was conventional in his prejudices and his romantic conservatism: he later wrote a WW2 history of an elite regiment, the 11th Hussars, which won more battle honours than any other cavalry or tank regiment. ‘Good old Dudley’ was socially affable but quietly calculating. He said he always wanted to be ‘one of those in the inner circle, watching the wheels go round at the hub of the British Empire at some great moment of history’, and he camouflaged his hard work in getting there as luck, hiding his ambition under amusing, self-deprecating stories of accidents and mistakes.

  Clarke could charm senior officers brilliantly, but he also got things done. His intelligence was allied to an ingenious imagination and a photographic memory. He did his best work at night, and in public places always sat with his back to a wall. You would not notice him in a crowd and he was never famous, yet Field Marshal Harold Alexander believed that he did as much to win the war as any other single officer. He ended up as Brigadier Dudley Clarke, CB, CBE, the greatest British deceiver of WW2, a special kind of secret servant.

  Born Dudley Wrangel Clarke in Johannesburg on 27 April 1899, (with a ca
ul over his head), he was the eldest son of a Yorkshireman who had gone out to South Africa to make his fortune and came back to a permanent job in a gold-mining finance company in Pall Mall. In 1912, he began his three years at Charterhouse public school, described by one old boy, Osbert Lancaster, as ‘an extensive concentration camp in Early English Gothic’. It was not far from the military establishment at Aldershot where Dudley fell in love with the gorgeous full dress uniforms, glittering marching bands and jingling cavalry that had also appealed to the young Winston Churchill. Charterhouse was close to the flying base at Farnborough where the schoolboy made friends with the air mechanics of the Royal Engineers Balloon Section and the newly formed Royal Flying Corps.

  The outbreak of the Great War in August 1914 found 15-year-old Dudley Clarke already in uniform, at his school’s Officer Training Corps (OTC) camp in Staffordshire. Of the six boys in his tent, two would be killed in the war, one would lose a leg, and their sergeant instructor would die at Gallipoli. Dudley’s father Ernest Clarke would be knighted for his voluntary war work organising motor ambulances for the Red Cross (having started out with eight, he ended up with 4,000.) Dudley’s younger brother Tom, then aged 7, had a letter published in the Daily Telegraph in October 1914 describing how he had made little flags with the colours of the Allies and sold them to raise five shillings for ‘the poor Belgian refugees’. The proud father showed this around at a Red Cross committee meeting and soon the Red Cross were selling little flags and shaking collecting tins. In his autobiography, This is where I came in, Tom apologised for inflicting flag days on the world.