The adventurous soldier David Smiley commanded a ‘squadron’ of eighteen such dummy Crusader tanks, and found the life congenial. Hot days and cold nights were healthy, and co-operating with real tanks was good fun. Once a map error by Divisional HQ sent them too close to an Italian fort. They had been shadowed by a German reconnaissance plane, popularly known as the ‘shufti-wallah’, who duly summoned Stuka bombers to attack them. But to Smiley’s delight and amazement the German planes accidentally bombed the Italian tanks that had sallied forth from the Rotunda Segnali to see what was going on. When Smiley’s unit, 101 Royal Tank Regiment, were equipped with some of the first dummies of the new American Grant tanks, they were so secret that they were wrapped in sacking before they left Cairo, and were unveiled at night, 500 miles away in the desert, so they cropped up like mushrooms in the morning.
On 2 April Trevelyan talked with Sykes, ‘the most intelligent and sympathetic camouflage officer that I have yet met out here’, and then drove the long and bumpy road to ‘one of Camouflage’s show-pieces in the desert’:
The dummy railhead looks very spectacular in the evening light. No living man is there; but dummy men are grubbing in dummy swill-troughs, and dummy lorries are unloading dummy tanks, while a dummy engine puffs dummy smoke into the eyes of the enemy.
Trevelyan was with another camouflage officer the next day when enemy fighter planes machine-gunned them by their broken-down car. Armour-piecing bullets splintered the stones beside him as he squirmed into the ground. Shaken, the two men returned to find the camoufleurs’ camp in commotion, a wrecked lorry burning and everything shot up except the dummy railhead. Trevelyan said the Germans ‘later paid it the compliment, I believe, of dropping a wooden bomb on it’.
But Tobruk fell on 21 June and a week later two British corps were shattered at Mersa Matruh. There was a disorganised retreat east to the Nile Delta; the Royal Navy left the harbour at Alexandria causing ‘panique’ in the city’s high society. Privileged and well-connected womenfolk were evacuated from Cairo to Palestine, and everyone else had contingency plans to evade German occupation. So much paperwork was torched in Cairo during what became known as ‘The Flap’ that 1 July 1942 was dubbed ‘Ash Wednesday’. You could buy peanuts in twists of paper headed ‘MOST SECRET’. They had gone up unburnt in the hot smoke and then fluttered down all over Cairo.
When all seemed lost, Auchinleck boldly took personal command of the Eighth Army. He reorganised them into battle groups, and with his back to the Nile, halted Rommel’s advance at the First Battle of El Alamein in July 1942. Dudley Clarke’s deception plan for 1st Alamein was called operation SENTINEL. As usual it drew on his well-stocked chest of ‘notional’ forces. ‘A’ Force whirled up a khamsin of camouflage and deception to buy the British some time. SENTINEL managed to persuade German Intelligence that there was an army camped in the sandhills before them. Through the dust of bogus activity the Germans seemed to glimpse at least two motorised divisions and a light armoured brigade. Faced by such a force and with his supply lines stretched, Rommel could not press forward. Auchinleck did not win a decisive victory, but he held the pass.
British security had to grow tighter now. The British captured Rommel’s radio monitoring station ‘Schildkrote’ (Tortoise) at Tel al Aysa the same month, and discovered that Rommel’s SIGINT unit (621st Signals Battalion) had learned about British plans and the Allied order of battle from careless wireless traffic. The Germans had also broken the US military attaché’s code. Two German signallers were both found to possess copies of Daphne du Maurier’s best-selling novel Rebecca in English, although they didn’t speak a word of the language. The books were in fact being used for coding and decoding messages from two German spies who had been working in Cairo with the Egyptian Army officer Anwar El Sadat. Driven across the desert from Rommel’s HQ in May by the explorer Laszlo Almasy (fictionalised in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient), the spies, code-named kondor, now lived on a sleazy houseboat near Cairo’s Zamalek Bridge with a transmitting wireless hidden inside a large radiogram. They had been spending Abwehr-forged English £5 notes in Shepheard’s Hotel, Groppi’s, the Turf Club and the Kit Kat Club. Sansom of Field Security managed to track them down and in a raid on their houseboat at 2 a.m. on 25 July, the agents failed to throw their matching copy of Rebecca, with an already encoded message, into the Nile. The British then turned this to their own advantage by using the spies’ radio to send false messages to Rommel as if from KONDOR, expressing ‘British fears’ of an attack on the vulnerable Alam el Halfa Ridge (which in fact was heavily defended). The false messages were accompanied by a classic haversack ruse. A bloodstained British armoured car was left half wrecked and abandoned on the edge of a minefield for the Germans to find. It yielded for the eyes of enemy intelligence a map deceptively marked up for armoured vehicles: hard ground was deemed ‘impassable’ while the soft sift that drained three times as much precious fuel was indicated as ‘good going’.
On 8 August, Churchill’s impatience for movement drove him to a controversial decision: he sacked Auchinleck. In some people’s view, Auchinleck had saved the entire Middle East by outmanouevring Rommel at 1st Alamein, but halting the German advance was not, in Churchill’s view, enough. He made General Harold Alexander, the man who successfully brought out the rearguard from Dunkirk, the new Commander-in-Chief, Middle East, and on 13 August 1942 the egotistical General Bernard Montgomery took over Eighth Army.
The controversial Montgomery was alert enough to understand that this army – the first real Commonwealth army – was evolving its own characteristics, particularly as regards dress, or the lack of it. The style of the ‘Desert Rats’ is well caught in ‘The Two Types’, cartoons by Jon (W. J. Jones) that appeared in various British Army newspapers at the end of the war. Monty came out wearing a conventional red-banded officer’s peaked cap, but soon, seeing that other ‘Desert Rat’ officers found suede boots, silk scarves, and sheepskin jackets more comfortable than service-issue uniforms in the heat and cold of the dusty Western Desert, he swapped his cap for an Anzac bush hat, finally settling for his characteristic double-badged tank commander’s black beret, worn with jerseys and corduroys. Appearances in Cairo, though, were deceptive. If you saw casually dressed officers in Cairo, they were probably ‘gabardine swine’, desk-bound box-wallahs disguising themselves in scruffy camouflage to look authentic, whereas the real fighters from the desert or Special Service were more likely to show up in Shepheard’s or the Mohammed Ali Club in immaculately correct uniform. Montgomery already knew Dudley Clarke, having taught him infantry tactics when Clarke was one of the candidates re-sitting the Staff College exams in 1931. Montgomery was a good teacher, for ‘the whole thing became plain and simple’ to Clarke, who scored well in the exam. A dozen years on, he told Clarke that ‘A’ Force now needed to prepare deception plans for the Second Battle of Alamein, which was due to begin on 23 October, the night of the full moon.
Clarke delegated the spadework for the deception that helped to win this battle. He had just had a visitor from LCS, a rather brilliant regular soldier called Lieutenant Colonel David Strangeways who let him into a big secret. In early November, the Americans were going to be landing at the other end of North Africa, on the coasts of Algeria and Morocco. This was operation torch, and lots of strategic deceptions would be needed to avert enemy eyes from the area. Clarke was to go to Washington DC and London to help with that.
The camoufleurs Geoffrey Barkas and Tony Ayrton had to take over. On 16 September, two days after Clarke talked to Montgomery, they went to see Montgomery’s Chief of Staff, Brigadier Freddie de Guingand. They heard the plan of attack, which was rather like WW1, face to face with no open flanks. The battle would have to be stage-managed so as to blast a hole in the enemy front through which forces could pour. Montgomery needed the help of the camoufleurs, and said they would be given full resources and ‘Operational Priority’. In the north, Montgomery needed concealment for the real attack: in the
south, he needed a big display to suggest the attack was really coming there, delayed until November by problems with the American Sherman tanks. The goal was to hold up half of Rommel’s armour in the south.
Operation BERTRAM, the overall deception plan for the Second Battle of Alamein, was made up of seven subsidiary operations which all interlocked in a complex version of the three-card trick, or pea-and-thimble. The deceptive camouflage experts had learned that the objects they were using did not have to stay the same: both appearance and reality could change, especially if the switch was performed at night. The netted coves at Tobruk first hid real ships, then half-concealed fake ones. A supply dump could be made to look like a lorry, the lorry could look like a tank, and a tank could hide itself inside an apparent supply dump. A ‘Cannibal’ was a device which from the air looked like a lorry in a dispersed park of other lorries. When the poles and canvas of each ‘lorry’ were pulled down, however, they revealed either a 25-pounder gun-howitzer with its limber, or the Quad gun-tractor that towed them. There were 400 such guns, in batteries increasingly coordinated by wireless.
Ayrton and the illustrator Brian Robb were in charge of what Churchill called ‘a number of ingenious deceptive measures and precautions’. In the north, the Royal Army Service Corps had 6,000 tons of stores and supplies to hide near the front, over half of it near El Alamein railway station. On the ground Ayrton and Robb found a hundred sections of slit trench, nicely lined with masonry. An extra facing of War Department petrol tins, stacked three high, hid two thousand tons of fuel undetectable from the air, with good ventilation for the notoriously leaky containers. The food stores were stacked at night in the shapes of three-ton trucks and covered with a standard camouflage net pegged properly so extra stores could fit under the wings. Other stores went into ordinary soldiers’ bivouac tents. From the air, the whole dense assemblage looked just like any other congregation of thin-skinned vehicles dotted about the desert.
The placing of 722 ‘Sunshields’ or dummy truck covers were vital to one of the subsidiary operations, MARTELLO, which was to mask the move of real tanks towards the front. First, hundreds of real lorries were parked in the area often enough to get enemy reconnaissance used to their presence. Then the lorries were driven off at night and replaced by dummy Sunshields. Each Sunshield was numbered and earmarked for an individual tank to drive up to and hide inside the next night before dawn. The tanks had come from a rear area code-named MURRAYFIELD, and when they left, they too were replaced by dummy tanks.
This was all part of concealing the real attack in the north, but Ayrton and Robb also had to coordinate the ‘distraction’ display in the south, supplied with material and devices by Barkas and his deputy and successor as head of camouflage, Major R. J. Southron. The camouflage centre at Helwan went into overdrive to supply 400 dummy Grant tanks, 100 dummy guns and over 2,000 dummy lorries. A camoufleur called John Baker designed a prototype truck that could be assembled from gerida palm hurdles, stitched into hessian and painted by teams from East Africa, Mauritius and Seychelles, helped on in the final days by the first British Camouflage Company from Palestine.
Operation DIAMOND was another subsidiary deception that started weeks before the battle. It involved the continuation of the genuine water pipeline, buried in a trench which ran from El Imayid into the MARTELLO assembly area, with a twenty-mile dummy pipeline made of beaten and shaped empty petrol tins, heading south and luring enemy eyes towards the dummy dumps code-named BRIAN where 700 tarpaulins had been draped over miscellaneous objects so they looked like 9,000 tons of ammunition, food, oil and ordnance.
From 15 October, three field regiments of dummy artillery were located at a site in the south code-named MUNASSIB. They had some signs of life and the camouflage was deliberately not quite good enough to hide their fakeness from the enemy, who therefore discounted them. But after the Battle of El Alamein began, the dummies were switched at night for real guns. Their crews lay hidden until a tank attack in their sector allowed them to start a surprise shelling.
Overall then, a German or Italian intelligence officer surveying the terrain south from El Alamein and considering his shufti-wallah or Fliegerführer reports on the morning of 22 October 1942 would have seen not much change. The big British tanks were still at the back, so there was surely two days’ grace before they could get into position. Large dumps, a completed pipeline, and radio traffic analysis indicated more activity in the south. Something would be coming there, maybe, but not yet.
In the first stage of the Second Battle of Alamein, ‘A’ Force’s deception plan BERTRAM gained for the British what General Alexander called ‘that battle-winning factor’: surprise. The attack began with an artillery barrage by nearly 900 guns which blasted two corridors through the enemy minefields and defences for British infantry and tanks to advance. The second and third stages went on for twelve long days, and the battle was won by grim and chaotic fighting.
Overwhelming force carried the day by 4 November. Rommel had 530 tanks, but 300 of these were Italian, whereas Montgomery had 1,200 tanks, 470 of them heavy Shermans and Grants from the USA. Above all, Rommel did not have enough fuel. Through Enigma decrypts the British knew exactly how much petrol he had and which tankers were coming to supply him, and they made sure to sink these individual ships. In September 1942, 33 per cent of Axis military cargo and fuel was sunk before it reached Libya, but in October the figure reached 44 per cent, and, in The Hinge of Fate, Churchill claimed the Germans lost 66 per cent of their petrol. In a disorderly rout, the defeated Germans and Italians fled west from Egypt along the coast road.
Historians today tend towards the view that the real pivot of the war against Hitler was not Alamein, where casualties were relatively light, but Stalingrad, where, between August 1942 and January 1943, the Russians lost half a million men, and killed or captured 250,000 Germans. Nevertheless, ‘The Battle of Egypt’, as Churchill told the House of Commons on 11 November 1942, ‘must be regarded as an historic British victory.’ Churchill ordered Sunday church bells to ring out across the nation. He added ‘a word about surprise and strategy’:
By a marvellous system of camouflage, complete tactical surprise was achieved in the desert. The enemy suspected, indeed knew, that an attack was impending, but where and when and how it was coming was hidden from him. The 10th Corps, which he had seen from the air exercising 50 miles in the rear, moved silently away in the night, but leaving an exact simulacrum of its tanks where it had been, and proceeded to its points of attack. The enemy suspected that the attack was impending, but did not know how, when or where, and above all he had no idea of the scale upon which he was to be assaulted.
Not an iota of this camouflage and deception could be described in the official 1943 Ministry of Information book The Battle of Egypt, nor could it be shown in Desert Victory, the film about El Alamein directed by Roy Boulting from footage shot by British Army and RAF Film Units. But then, like all films, Desert Victory was fake too. The grim handsome faces illuminated by the gun flashes of the opening artillery barrage were filmed at Pinewood Studios. Cameraman Peter Hopkinson told film historian Kevin Brownlow that the famous shot of the advance of the Australians through smoke was in fact staged behind the Ninth Divisional cookhouse in the Egyptian desert. British soldiers put on German uniforms to play corpses lying beside captured Panzer tanks. But in his 11 November speech Churchill confessed: ‘I must say, quite frankly, that I hold it perfectly justifiable to deceive the enemy even if at the same time your own people are for a while misled.’
Within days of the end of 2nd Alamein, an even bigger surprise hit the Axis: operation TORCH, the Allied landings in the Vichy-French-held colonies of North Africa. Apprised of TORCH in September 1942 by Strangeways, Clarke had flown to the USA and the UK in October to coordinate what the Americans and LCS were doing to divert enemy attention. This time there were eight different, overlapping deception plans. LCS and ‘A’ Force spread false information that the Allied objectives were
in places as far apart as Dakar in West Africa and Malta, east of Sicily. When TORCH began, therefore, half a dozen German and Italian Atlantic submarines were lurking south of Dakar, with another forty between Gibraltar, the Azores and Cape Verdes, rather than directly off Casablanca, where they could have wreaked havoc on the American invaders. Nor did the German Focke-Wulf reconnaissance aircraft find the US convoys. Hundreds of Axis bombers and fighters were too far to the east, on Sicily or in Southern Italy, waiting to bomb the armada on its way, as they believed, to relieve Malta. As a result, the three American convoys were not attacked from the air.
MI5’s ‘B’ Division, who ran the double agents, were beginning to liaise closely with the deceivers. From London, GARBO reported the unfortunate long illness and death of his invented agent two, William Maximilian Gerbers, who was supposedly based near Liverpool, a carefully arranged alibi for the lack of any reports from Gerbers of the torch convoys gathering on Liverpool’s River Mersey. The death notice was in the Liverpool Daily Post on 24 November.
In October 1942, John Bevan hosted a deception conference in London to which representatives came from Washington DC, Peter Fleming travelled from India and the by now legendary Dudley Clarke from Cairo. ‘We had all heard so much about Dudley Clarke that we were most intrigued to see the “great deceiver” in the flesh,’ wrote Dennis Wheatley. ‘He proved to be a small, neat, fair-haired man, with merry blue eyes and a quiet chuckle which used to make his shoulders shake slightly.’ From 8 October to 1 November 1942, Clarke also touched base in London with the CIGS Alan Brooke, General Ismay, the Admiralty, MI5, MI9, SOE, the whole secret kingdom. On Wednesday, 14 October, Churchill received Bevan, Clarke and Fleming in his private rooms.
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