Churchill's Wizards

by Nicholas Rankin

  In this testing environment, Major General Archibald Wavell, the soldier who lost an eye near Ypres and walked through the Jaffa Gate into Jerusalem with Lawrence in 1917, had been reviving Lawrence’s guerrilla tactics, using cunning, deception, mobility and tiny ‘mosquito columns’ against elephantine Italian forces. Wavell had been appointed British commander-in-chief of the Middle East Command a month before WW2 broke out. He was now in the same post once held by General Allenby, whose biography he was writing. Just like Allenby confronting the Ottoman Turks in WW1, he was facing a numerically superior enemy.

  Wavell had a gift for picking good people. One was Major Ralph Bagnold, an officer in the Royal Signals, one of a select band who knew and respected the great desert that lay behind the cultivated coasts of North Africa. Bagnold had been exploring the Sahara since 1926. He had improved the sun compass for desert navigation, discovered the best way of driving up dunes (full-speed, head-on), invented rope ladders and steel channels for getting unstuck in soft going, and even written a treatise on ‘The Physics of Blown Sand’ which got him elected to the Royal Society. Bagnold foresaw that the Italians might send reconnaissance and raiding parties out of the enormous Libyan desert to sever British military communications between Cairo and Khartoum and, when Fascist Italy finally declared war on the Allies in June 1940, got carte blanche from Wavell to set up, equip, supply and prepare a new Long Range Desert Group (LRDG).

  Bagnold located old companions from pre-war desert explorations, plucking Pat Clayton from Tanganyika and Bill Kennedy Shaw from Palestine, and put them in charge of young men from the backcountry of New Zealand who had lost all their guns and kit in a torpedo attack at sea. Their commander, Major General Bernard Freyberg, VC (the man who swam ashore before the Gallipoli landings), was reluctant to let them go, but the New Zealanders – as always the best troops in the Dominions – took to the desert as though born to it. They became mainstays of the LRDG, doing what Wavell called ‘inconspicuous but invaluable service’.

  From the beginning, Wavell had been creating the illusion for the Italians that he was stronger and better equipped than he actually was. In June 1940, the Daily Mail correspondent Alexander Clifford was able to deduce the ‘routine of bluff’ by British forces on the Libyan–Egyptian frontier, 300 miles west of Cairo, and made one of the earliest references to the use of dummy tanks:

  I saw, gradually, what was happening. Subtly and systematically Wavell was doing his sums and faking his figures. These tiny British patrols were staging big demonstrations. Continually they were making nuisances of themselves, moving rapidly from place to place, shooting up convoys, flinging ambushes across roads, attacking forts and positions, always pretending they were much bigger than they were. Dummy tanks were toted about to give the idea that we had strong armoured units … In every way that tiny army set itself to gain time by frightening the enemy.

  The dummy tanks were the responsibility of the fake 10th Battalion Royal Tank Regiment (10 RTR) under a Major Johnston. The unit, actually formed from men of the 1st Battalion Durham Light Infantry, deployed and operated primitive dummy tanks and lorries made out of wood and canvas which they carried folded in the unit transport.

  In late October 1940, Wavell was in Khartoum with Sir Anthony Eden, the British Secretary of State for War, and other generals, coordinating his attack on the Italian Empire in East Africa, Africa Orientale Italiana. The British were keeping close tabs on the Italian forces in Libya by deciphering their Air Force communications, reading captured documents and mail, questioning prisoners of war, doing photographic air reconnaissance and above all sending armoured Rolls-Royce patrols to probe the gaps between the scattered outposts and minefields that made up the Italian front line. From November 1940, Wavell initiated a deception operation encouraging the Italians to think that he was really preparing an Expeditionary Force to Greece rather than an attack on them; Wavell’s Middle East Intelligence Centre set in motion a paper trail to this effect, spreading rumours and planting false information on a Japanese source in Egypt. (Japan had joined the Axis with Germany and Italy in late 1937.) Compared to later deception operations it was fairly basic, but it prepared the ground. Wavell had further deception operations in mind, but he needed a really good man to oversee them. It was now that he summoned Dudley Clarke to Cairo.

  On 18 December 1940, Tony Simonds of British military intelligence was instructed to go in plain clothes to meet an old friend off a civil aeroplane landing just before midday at Cairo airport, and to greet him without surprise. This became a challenge when Clarke arrived looking like a golfer from Chicago, wearing loud black and white plus-fours, a check cap and dark glasses, claiming to be an American journalist called Wrangel. This seems more like showing off than disguise, a trait which would later get Clarke into trouble. He had been travelling for ten days, his journey from England to Egypt made complex by the need to avoid enemy territory.

  At 9 a.m. on 9 December 1940, just as Clarke was leaving Lisbon for West Africa, the seven or eight British war correspondents in Cairo were summoned to General Wavell’s office at the end of an upstairs corridor at ‘Grey Pillars’ which housed GHQ Middle East in Garden City. As ever, the commander-in-chief’s desk in front of the ten-foothigh map on the wall was bare of papers. ‘The Chief’ was smiling slightly that morning. He announced ‘an important raid’, code-named compass, by the British, Indian and Anzac soldiers of General Richard O’Connor’s Western Desert Force on the Italian Tenth Army. Taciturn Wavell, described by Alan Moorehead of the Daily Express as ‘an island in a sea of garrulousness’, asked the journalists if they had known an operation was imminent; none had heard a thing.

  The little band of reporters, honorary officers dressed in khaki with a shoulder flash that read ‘British War Correspondent’ in gold letters on green, scrambled to get to the front a day and a half away to the west. No travel arrangements had been made by the Public Relations Unit, so when their cars broke down, they hitch-hiked; they ate what they scrounged and slept when they could. It took them days to catch up to the front because the British Empire troops were going too fast for them, with the infantry division acting as the assault force and the tanks of the armoured division slipping round behind, a method that Richard Dimbleby of the BBC likened to hauling a man up with one hand and punching him in the jaw with the other, again and again. On 16 December they took Sollum and Helfaya Pass and the Libyan escarpment, where British troops could put aside briny tea, biscuit and bully beef to gorge on luxurious Italian rations – ham, cheese, bread, fresh fruit and vegetables, washed down with wine and sweet bottled water. They were amazed to find that every Italian soldier was issued with his own little espresso coffee pot. Their 38,000 prisoners included five Italian generals.

  When Dudley Clarke presented himself, in uniform, to his old chief on the morning of Thursday, 19 December 1940, Graziani’s army was being bundled out of Egypt, and for the first time in more than a year of war the British were not retreating, as they had from France, Norway and Somaliland, but driving forward. Clarke’s life as a ‘freelance’ roving staff officer was ended, as Wavell gave him the secret and ‘most gratifying’ eighth assignment that would last the next five years. Clarke camouflages his role as just ‘being a working part in the smooth-running engine of a General Headquarters at war’, because he was obviously not allowed to talk about it. In fact Wavell put Clarke in charge of all bluffs, cover plans and deceptions for his military operations. He remained chief deceiver for all the Mediterranean commanders – Wavell, Auchinleck, Alexander, Wilson – throughout the North African advances and retreats of 1941–2, and did the same job at Eisenhower’s Allied Force Headquarters in Algiers from 1943 onwards, ending his war service in northern Italy. Clarke’s ideas about strategic and tactical deception would help drive the Axis out of Africa and aid the seaborne landings that led the Allies back into southern and then north-western Europe. Few men of his rank wielded such influence behind the scenes in Cairo, Algiers, London, Wa
shington DC and New Delhi, and when WW2 ended in 1945, Field Marshal Harold Alexander reckoned that Dudley Clarke had done as much as any single officer to win it.

  Wavell and Clarke stood before the map on the wall in Cairo. Wavell’s 4th Indian Infantry Division had just retaken Sidi Barrani in Egypt. Wavell now planned to pull them back southward and ship them, together with the 5th Indian Division, to Gedaref and Port Sudan for an attack on Italian East Africa. Wavell’s other plans included the use of Orde Wingate to lead the Ethiopian Patriot guerrillas of Gideon Force back into Ethiopia from exile in the Sudan.

  Wavell’s forces were outnumbered by the Italians on paper, but he knew attack was the best form of defence. Clarke’s new mission was continually and systematically hoodwinking the enemy about British aims, intentions and capabilities. As ‘Personal Intelligence Officer (Special Duties) to the Commander-in-Chief’ he reported directly to Wavell and got clerical help from his private secretary, but he had no staff and no ‘establishment’. The work was ‘Most Secret’, so his official cover story and additional duty from 5 January 1941 was a role in MI9, Escape and Evasion by Allied servicemen. He was taken to his office: the door opened on a very small converted bathroom. Action This Day.

  Wavell’s attack on Africa Orientale Italiana was now the occasion of Clarke’s very first deception operation, code-named CAMILLA, focused on British Somaliland. This British protectorate at the top of the Horn of Africa had been evacuated in August by the small British Empire garrison in the face of overwhelming Italian forces. Though British Somaliland was strategically unimportant, Wavell wanted the Italians to believe that Allied troops from Egypt were going to retake it. The Indian Divisions were indeed moving south, but their target was Eritrea on the Red Sea.

  Clarke sat down and worked out the staff-work, logistics and communications if British forces really were going to try and take back British Somaliland. Then he constructed a model of the operation for the benefit of enemy intelligence. This elaborate deception involved bogus administration in offices at Aden (which he knew well from his time there in 1935), air and sea raids across the Gulf of Aden apparently designed to ‘soften up’ Italian naval and military targets around Berbera, the issuing of campaign maps and pamphlets on British Somaliland’s climate, culture, clans and customs, sibs spread in civilian Egypt and among the armed forces, more false information planted on the Japanese consul at Port Said and ‘indiscreet’ fake telegrams and wireless telegraphy traffic. Beginning on 19 December, the plan was intended to peak in early January 1941.

  In one sense it succeeded brilliantly. The Italian commander swallowed the bait hook, line and sinker, and started evacuating British Somaliland. Unfortunately this was the exact opposite of what the strategic deception plan intended him to do. He was meant to reinforce his east: instead he moved more troops north to Eritrea, which was of course precisely where the real British attack was targeted. Clarke learned his first lesson the hard way: the point of deception was not getting the enemy to think the way you would like, but getting them to do what you wanted.

  Other parts of Clarke’s deception worked much better. He used bogus wireless traffic to make the Italians think there were two Australian divisions in Kenya. This successfully held Italian troops in the wrong place while three coordinated attacks by the multi-racial armies of the British Empire began liberating Ethiopia from five years of Fascist occupation. Emperor Haile Selassie returned to his people in Addis Ababa on 5 May 1941.

  Another of Clarke’s ideas bore long-term fruit. On 14 January 1941, he met Colonel William J. ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, President Roosevelt’s personal military emissary, future founder of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency), on his six-week strategic tour of the Mediterranean. Clarke told him about the commandos, and wrote a seminal paper for Donovan suggesting the formation of an American commando force. Clarke’s love of film served him well. Having recently seen the western, North-West Passage, in which Spencer Tracy led a force of buckskinned frontier fighters called ‘Rogers’ Rangers’, he suggested ‘Rangers’ as an appropriate name for the American commandos. The US Rangers were duly founded in May 1942.

  Years later, in 1953, when Clarke wrote a proposal for the sequel to Seven Assignments, a book which he wanted to call The Secret War, he described his wartime deception work as ‘a war of wits – of fantasy and imagination – fought out on an almost private basis between the supreme heads of Hitler’s Intelligence (and Mussolini’s) and a small band of men and women – British, American and French – operating from the opposite shores of the Mediterranean Sea’. In the event, he was never granted official permission to write that book, but it is clear that Dudley Clarke’s deception was aimed high, at the minds of the few, in contrast to Delmer’s psychological warfare, which was directed lower, at the guts of the many.

  The first four professional British camoufleurs to arrive in the Middle East in WW2, led by Captain Geoffrey Barkas, disembarked at Port Said on New Year’s Day 1941. Leaning over the rail of the Andes in the Suez Canal they surveyed their task with sinking hearts: ‘This was the Army we were supposed to know how to camouflage; these huge workshops, depots and store dumps; hutted and tented camps, antiaircraft batteries and defence works; men and vehicles by the thousands … with all the shy unobtrusiveness of a red vest on a fat man.’ One answer to their problem was berthed nearby. The huge battleship HMS Centurion looked formidable, but was actually a dummy hulk, whose 13.5-inch guns were made of painted wood.

  There is a well-known army saying, ‘Time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted’, and the camoufleurs soon arranged a flight over the Western Desert and found, looking down, that the terrain was not wholly monotonous. Regions of sand had distinctive patterns which they began to name: the Wadi, the Polka Dot, the Figured Velvet and so on. They noticed, too, how tanks and lorries left distinctive scars and tracks across the desert. Then Barkas sent John Hutton off to the Sudan and Patrick Phillips to camouflage the defences in Palestine, reserving Egypt and Libya for Blair Hughes-Stanton and himself. On 24 January 1941 the two officers and their two drivers set off from Cairo in a Chevrolet staff car with desert tyres to try and find what Churchill liked to call ‘the Army of the Nile’ somewhere along the coastal plain. Their other vehicle was a fifteen-hundredweight Fordson truck crammed with water, petrol, rations, tents, stoves, tools, canvas, rope, wire, camouflage nets, rolls of garnish, paints and kit for camouflage experiments.

  The camoufleurs were following the same campaign westward that Alan Moorehead and the other correspondents had pursued. They had some catching up to do because General O’Connor’s astonishingly successful attacks were now moving westward into the yellow dust of Libya, having taken the town of Bardia and 40,000 more prisoners in early January. At last they caught up with the Australian infantry (who had replaced the Indian divisions) and Brigadier Horace Robertson, a gingery old tough from Melbourne who had been with the light horse on Gallipoli and in Palestine during the Great War, and who was nicknamed ‘the Ball of Fire’ by the camoufleurs. With the permission of some gunners in a wadi, they continued their experiments with camouflage nets.

  Things went well until their staff car was smashed up in a violent head-on collision which left their faces cut and bruised. They continued in their truck to the charming town of Derna, which had been abandoned by the Italians and looted by local Arabs in long robes. Also in Derna, relaxing in greater luxury, were the journalists: Alan Moorehead of the Daily Express, Alexander Clifford of the Daily Mail and their conducting officer, Geoffrey Keating of the King’s Royal Rifles. Naked after a long bath, Moorehead was disconcerted to notice the telephone had the owner’s name set in the base: ‘His Excellency Marshal Graziani’. Two days later the three journalists had the unexpected pleasure of the entire fortress of Ain Mara surrendering to them, thanks to their uniforms and British car. From that glorious height they soon fell over what Moorehead called the ‘moving precipice’ of the front. Th
ere was an ambush by the Italians near Giovanni Berta in the Jebel El Akhdar; three British soldiers were killed and Clifford, Keating and the driver were wounded. The camoufleurs saw the point of their craft as trying to save the lives of British soldiers, and they stuck to the experimental work they had been doing all along, carefully garnishing a net to camouflage vehicles and then finding high ground to take photographs of it so they could see if the disguise would work from the air. They witnessed the surrender of Benghazi on 7 February 1941.

  Fifty miles south General O’Connor had trapped the remains of the Italian Tenth Army at Beda Fomm, where the 7th Armoured Division annihilated it. The Italian General Bergonzoli (nicknamed ‘Electric Whiskers’ for his startled beard) was captured, and then the campaign effectively ended. Field Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, known as the ‘Butcher’ for the ferocity of his tactics in Libya and Abyssinia, was now fleeing westward towards Sirte. O’Connor’s British forces could have chased him all the way to Tripoli, driving on in cannibalised or commandeered vehicles to knock the Italians right out of Libya. But it was not to be. Churchill thought he saw the bigger strategic picture, and he was worried about the Balkans. On 12 February he ordered Wavell to halt, change course, and send his best troops across the Mediterranean to assist the beleaguered Greeks.

  The camoufleurs now headed 900 miles back to Cairo along with the 7th Armoured Division. Though they had captured no flags, Barkas and Hughes-Stanton had acquired practical knowledge about how concealment worked best in the field from all branches of a fighting army. Barkas also remembered his own experience as an ordinary soldier in WW1, and how vulnerable he had felt moving up to the trenches knowing the enemy was watching. Even in an ‘uncooperative’ environment like the desert, he thought it should be possible ‘to blur the picture and confuse the judgment of the most alert enemy’. Slowly, a doctrine of the trade was emerging. Barkas wrote: