Churchill's Wizards

by Nicholas Rankin

  Before playing his part Clifton James needed to study Montgomery’s bird-like gestures and mannerisms, the way he pinched his cheek, the way he ate his vegetarian food, his impulsive visits to schools, his boyishness, and the rigid rituals of deference and procedure around him. James finally met the general, in person, on a holiday near Dalwhinnie in the Scottish Highlands, aboard his private train.

  As we stood facing each other it was rather like looking at myself in a mirror. The likeness struck me as uncanny … On the stage it is something if you can resemble a man after using every artifice of make-up, but in this case there was no need for false eyebrows, padded cheeks, or anything of that kind. I was extraordinarily like the General, and as I afterwards discovered, the two of us were remarkably alike when we were boys.

  They were both Antipodean: James grew up in Perth, a son of the chief justice of Western Australia, Montgomery in Hobart, a son of the Bishop of Tasmania. Though James at 46 was eleven years younger than Montgomery, he looked older because he smoked and drank heavily. (Monty was teetotal and detested cigarettes.) Now the younger man studied the older’s high-pitched, incisive way of talking, and his voice as parched as the desert. ‘Everything will be all right. Don’t worry about it,’ said the general to the actor.

  The RAF took James up for a spin to make sure that, like Monty, he did not get airsick, and then Wing Commander Dennis Wheatley of LCS drove him back from RAF Northolt. There were costume-fittings for the right uniform with five rows of medals. A gold breast-pocket watch chain was bought from Woolworth’s and James’s missing middle finger was covered up with a dummy finger strapped to the others, ready for the final rehearsal with a man from MI5 who called himself Brigadier Heywood. James trimmed his moustache shorter, greyed his temples with greasepaint and put on Monty’s leather flying jacket and black beret at the right angle to pose for the photographs Churchill wanted to see. He was given khaki handkerchiefs monogrammed with the initials B.L.M. to leave around, and a small Bible like the one Monty always carried. Whenever he felt paralysed with fear, the equivalent of Hyde had to master Jekyll: ‘With a violent effort I pushed James aside and became Monty.’

  James landed at Gibraltar early on 27 May. As Sefton Delmer had observed with Hitler, a famous man is ‘on’ as soon as there is a public. The curtain went up at the top of the aircraft steps. James thought that the Rock looked like a painted backcloth on a Drury Lane stage set. Other actors – top brass, troops, drivers with cars – were drawn up to greet the leading man. In the background, hidden among real Spanish workmen, were the villains of the piece, Hitler’s secret agents, watching and noting as they were supposed to. James went through the meeting and greeting with ‘a curious sense of unreality. It was if everything were taking place in a dream.’ As they drove through the streets of Gibraltar, troops came running and shouting ‘Good old Monty!’ The Guard of Honour saluted at Government House: the Governor of Gibraltar was now Lieutenant General Sir Ralph ‘Rusty’ Eastwood, who had been at Sandhurst with Montgomery and was in on the secret. ‘Monty’ saluted the Guard, shook hands and, chatting with Eastwood, walked into the Governor’s Palace holding him by the arm. In the Governor’s study, Eastwood took off his hat and sat down at his desk, staring fixedly at James, then smiled, jumped up, and warmly shook his hand again. ‘I wouldn’t have believed it possible,’ he exclaimed. ‘You’re simply splendid. I can’t get over it. You are Monty. I’ve known him for years.’

  ‘Monty’ and the Governor were positioned in the garden, in front of the stone frieze depicting Nelson’s victory at the Battle of Trafalgar, when two Spaniards, clean-shaven businessmen in dark suits, came through the garden gates on their way to talk to Lady Eastwood about the ancient Moroccan carpets in the house. Clifton James says they were known to be ‘two of Hitler’s cleverest agents, Gestapo-trained and quite ruthless’. He was babbling about the War Cabinet and ‘Plan 303’ when the pair approached and were introduced. They looked at him with awe and respect before going into the house, from which a ‘workman’ had also been studying him through a telescope. For the last act in Gibraltar, James talked more nonsense about ‘Plan 303’ and gave audible orders and instructions near the airport canteen where a Norwegian contact of the Germans worked.

  By the time he took the final salute and flew off, James was really into the part: ‘While actually impersonating Monty I felt calm and sure of myself, but these off-stage intervals between the scenes were nerve-racking.’ There was the fear of the plane being shot down, of assassination or kidnap. There was no cast of fellow-thespians to buoy him up backstage, no proper audience response out front, just the man he knew as Brigadier Heywood briefing him about the next act in Algiers, ‘a regular hot-bed of intrigue with dozens of enemy agents posing as free Frenchmen and loyal Italian collaborators’.

  One of the ‘spies’ notionally employed at Algiers airport was an ‘A’ Force channel, a wireless operator recruited by the Gestapo in Paris and parachuted into Algeria in 1943, who had promptly given himself up to the British and been ‘turned’. The double agent duly reported the arrival of General Montgomery to his Abwehr controllers in Dijon, excited by Montgomery’s reception by British, French and American officers and his high-speed twelve-mile journey with a siren-wailing motor-cycle escort to Allied Force Headquarters. Two Italian spies in the crowd asked what was going on and a Frenchman (sent there especially to follow them) said, ‘Monty was coming to North Africa to form a great new army that would strike the soft under-belly of the Germans in the south.’

  According to Clifton James’s narrative, he spent a week in a sort of recurring dream, flying to various airports, ‘landings, official receptions, guards of honour, bogus talks on high strategy; crowds of civilian spectators, no doubt with enemy agents among them; the streets lined with cheering troops’. He met various people believed to be spies and slipped into his role ‘so completely that to all intents and purposes I was General Montgomery … Even when I was alone I found myself playing the part.’ James could never escape; asleep, he dreamed of Monty. So the let-down, the fall from celebrity, came hard:

  I drove up to General Wilson’s headquarters as Monty, in a blaze of glory, but the moment I passed through the door the glory was gone for ever.

  Upstairs I changed into the uniform of a Lieutenant in the Pay Corps …

  When you are khaleef for an hour you have at least the borrowed splendour of your position to bear you up, but when you shed the trappings of exalted rank and return to your humble station with all the backwash of the strain through which you have just passed, you certainly need all the courage and stamina you have.

  James was smuggled out through the kitchen back door, up a lane and into a small villa which was promptly locked. The impersonation was over. He felt tired and overwrought: ‘I could only see again and again the scenes which had just taken place as if I were chained to my seat in the cinema.’ A sergeant brought a ‘high tea’ of sausage, egg and chips, and then James met the real brigadier who had planned his exploit: ‘the famous Brigadier Dudley Clarke who founded the Commandos’.

  He was the man who early in the war thought of the idea of training a gang of tough young men to strike at the enemy behind the lines: men who would stop at nothing, and who would use every appropriate ‘un-English’ means to gain their ends. This bold plan did not appeal to the pundits at the War office who told him it was ‘not cricket’. But he refused to take no for an answer and was so persistent that at length he was given a hearing. When Mr Churchill heard about it he at once gave orders for Dudley Clarke to go ahead.

  James says he was left alone in the villa on his last night, with strict instructions to lie low, and that he talked like Montgomery to two parrots who then embarrassingly shrieked ‘Monty! Monty! Monty!’ In the morning, Clarke saw James sitting openly on the balcony of the villa in the sunshine and told him off – if he were seen, all his good work would be endangered.

  There is also a more malicious account of what happened.
In 1979, Jock Haswell alleged that the deception operation was ‘abruptly switched off and Monty’s Double disappeared’ because, according to rumour, Clifton James got drunk, and ‘was seen to be drunk while wearing the famous double-badged beret, uniform, insignia and medals of the teetotal Montgomery’. In this version, James was eventually taken back to England and threatened with court martial if he opened his mouth. A similar rumour had appeared in 1946 in My Three Years with Eisenhower by General Eisenhower’s long-time friend and naval aide Harry C. Butcher, where there is a report of Monty’s double seen ‘staggering about in Gibraltar, drunk, smoking a large cigar’.

  As Dennis Wheatley tells the story in The Deception Planners (1980), the ending of the story was ‘rather pathetic. James was flown on to Algiers. Dudley met him, had him taken to a small hotel where he exchanged his gorgeous plumage for an ordinary Lieutenant’s battledress, gave him a bottle of whiskey and told him not to leave his room until further notice.’

  Clifton James later flew to Cairo in an American cargo plane and stayed in the Cairo flat of Terence Kenyon who worked for ‘A’ Force. He was kind to the actor, who had become a nervous wreck. ‘A’ Force’s Betty Crichton also looked after him. She told Thaddeus Holt, years later, that Clifton James was ‘a very nice man who always got a bad press. He was under terrible pressure and strain, and coming out of that part was very difficult for him.’ James was afflicted by toothache, and the heat, flies, smells and squalor of Cairo in June appalled him. He eventually made his way back to Leicester via Gibraltar after a five-week adventure, still having to tell lies about what he had done.

  But he was also mysteriously changed by the experience. Timidity and diffidence had been replaced by confidence and a feeling of superiority. Although he saw out the rest of the war without promotion in the Pay Corps and was ‘treated shabbily’ (Wheatley’s phrase), receiving no official recognition for his services, James was eventually rewarded. He was allowed to have a ghostwriter tell his story in a book called I Was Monty’s Double, which in 1958 was made into a film directed by John Guillermin. In it, James took the roles both of Monty and his Double. The script by Bryan Forbes contained a wholly fictitious action-packed attempt by submarine-borne German commandos to kidnap the fake General Montgomery, heroically foiled by John Mills as his minder Major Harvey, but in other respects it largely followed James’s book, and gave him a special celluloid immortality. And he appeals to theorists, too. As Harry Pearson points out in Achtung Schweinehund! (2007), by playing himself being himself, as well as playing the man he had been playing at being, M.E. Clifton James became postmodern.

  27

  OVERLORD and FORTITUDE

  When an eccentric genius called Geoffrey Pyke proposed constructing unsinkable aircraft carriers or freighters from enormous icebergs, Churchill ordered him to proceed – no idea that could conceivably help the Allies to win the war was too outlandish for this Prime Minister. Pyke’s team of scientists invented a kind of super-ice, made by mixing in 4 per cent cotton wool or wood pulp to a slurry of freezing water, making an incredibly tough substance that melted very slowly which was called in Pyke’s honour ‘pykrete’.

  Pykrete became an exhibit at the Quebec conference of August 1943 at which the Allied leadership discussed the plan for the final liberation of Europe, operation OVERLORD. Churchill had crossed the Atlantic on his way to the conference on one of the world’s largest liners, the Queen Mary, which weighed 86,000 tons; but Pyke was proposing something even bigger, a 600-metre long, self-refrigerating aircraft carrier made from Pykrete, to be called Habbakuk, which would weigh more than two million tons and could carry and launch 200 aeroplanes. You could use it to invade Japan! Pyke was already building a prototype on a lake in Ontario.

  Admiral Louis Mountbatten, the head of Combined Operations, used showmanship to demonstrate the power of Pykrete to the Americans. Two cold blocks were produced, one of ice, one of Pykrete, and burly General ‘Hap’ Arnold of the US Army Air Corps was invited to demolish each with an axe. Arnold shattered the brittle ice with a mighty blow. Then it was the Pykrete’s turn: but the American general howled with pain as the axe-head jarred off the Pykrete, leaving the block intact. Mountbatten then drew a pistol and finished off the ice, but once again the Pykrete stood firm and a spent bullet ricocheted uselessly off it, narrowly missing a senior RAF officer. Churchill roared with laughter. The demonstration was a propaganda triumph, though in the event Pykrete was never used.

  Churchill had come to Quebec to put on a brave show, and he was flanked by two fire-eating British warriors who he hoped would impress the Americans as much as the Pykrete had: the handsome and much-decorated air ace Wing Commander Guy Gibson VC, DSO and bar, DFC and bar, famous for the ‘Dambusters’ raid, and Brigadier Orde Wingate, ferocious leader of Patriot guerrillas in Abyssinia and now of bearded Chindits in the Burmese jungle.

  The main item on the agenda was the forthcoming attack on what the Germans called Festung Europa, Fortress Europe. Where was the best place to enter the Continent if you were setting off from the UK? There were several options, but the American and British team led by Lieutenant General Frederick Morgan, called Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander or COSSAC, charged with planning OVERLORD, had actually decided on Normandy. Yet Normandy’s fifty miles of beaches did not seem suitable for a massive invasion. The swirling currents and the daunting difference between low and high tides (up to 21 feet or 6.4 metres) made unloading heavy gear on sandy beaches implausible. Conventional wisdom said you required a proper deep-water harbour with wharves and cranes to disembark the 50-ton tanks, huge guns, and great pallets of stores necessary for an invasion. Hence the raid on Dieppe on 19 August 1942 – a trial run at seizing a port.

  But the bold and imaginative answer that so appealed to Churchill was huge floating harbours. He had been thinking about this idea since July 1917, when he imagined a way of seizing two Frisian islands from a moveable atoll of concrete. In May 1942, he had written a note to Mountbatten: ‘Piers for use on beaches. They must float up and down with the tide. The anchor problem must be mastered. Let me have the best solution worked out. Don’t argue the matter. The difficulties will argue for themselves.’ On board the Queen Mary, on6 August 1943, there was a scientific demonstration in a bathroom by Professor J. D. Bernal, one of Mountbatten’s physicist boffins, who put a fleet of twenty paper boats at one end of a half-filled bath. At the other end, a naval lieutenant made waves with a loofah. The paper boats were swamped and sank. Then Bernal put more folded newspaper boats into the bath, but surrounded them with an inflated Mae West lifejacket. The lieutenant made vigorous waves, and this time the boats did not sink. ‘That, gentlemen,’ said Bernal, ‘is what would happen if we had an artificial harbour.’

  A fortnight later, the Quebec Conference approved the concept of two artificial harbours – one British and one American, code-named ‘Mulberries’, and said they should be constructed and fully operational two weeks after D-Day. The Quebec Conference also approved the outline OVERLORD plan. The team were told to plan in more detail for an assault by three divisions and three airborne brigades. A section called Ops (B) was set up to prepare ‘an elaborate camouflage and deception scheme’, but there was only one officer working on it.

  At the next Allied Conference, held in Teheran from 28 November to 1 December 1943, Joseph Stalin, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill concerted their ‘plans for the destruction of the German forces’. The American and British Allies promised to leave the Balkans alone but agreed to help relieve the pressure on Russia by opening ‘the Second Front’ in May 1944, invading northern France in operation OVERLORD and southern France in operation anvil (which in the event got delayed). Stalin agreed to coordinate his big push on the Eastern Front with the Allied attack in the west, and all agreed on the need for a deception plan.

  By now, the Wavell/Clarke thesis that major operations should have a cover plan, if practical and useful, was taken for granted. The Soviets believed
in military deception, which they called maskirovna. An American deceiver later sent to Moscow to coordinate OVERLORD deception plans with the Russians was talking to a Russian deceiver when the subject of the media came up. When the American said that in a democracy you could not use the press to fool your own people, the Russian shrugged, ‘Oh well, we do it all the time.’ It was at Teheran that Churchill said to Stalin, ‘In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies,’ and Stalin replied, ‘This is what we call military cunning.’

  On 6 December John Bevan of LCS was brought in to work up the strategic deception plan for OVERLORD, and gave it a new name, BODYGUARD, in a nod to the Prime Minister’s observation. Strategically, it aimed to make the Germans dispose their forces in the wrong places – in the Balkans, in northern Italy, in Norway and Denmark, anywhere but northern France. Later, the operational challenge would be to deceive the Germans about exactly when, where and in what strength the invasion was coming. This part of the deception plan would evolve down an endless series of forking paths as executive control shifted.

  Dwight Eisenhower was given command of OVERLORD (‘Over Lord and Under Ike’ was the joke) and he took up his responsibility in January 1944, when what had been COSSAC became SHAEF, Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force. Eisenhower brought his own chief of staff, Walter Bedell Smith, with him, so Frederick Morgan became his deputy. The Ops (B) or deception side of COSSAC expanded as bigger fish started to arrive at SHAEF. Dudley Clarke’s deputy in ‘A’ Force, Colonel Noel Wild, arrived from Tunis to take over, and also became the SHAEF member on the Double Cross Committee. Major Roger Hesketh of SHAEF intelligence worked closely with Tar Robertson and the other officers in MI5’s Section B1A which controlled the double agents. Hesketh and Wild were also in close touch with John Bevan and others at LCS. Deception was a small club in an old boys’ network; the official historian Michael Howard described them as ‘a handful of men who knew each other intimately and cut corners’.