Churchill's Wizards

by Nicholas Rankin

  Thirty years before, Philip Gibbs and the other journalists had been barred from the front by Lord Kitchener. But by 1944, media-savvy generals like Montgomery were welcoming news organisations like the BBC. At D-Day, Richard Dimbleby had eighteen reporter colleagues: Guy Byam jumped with the paratroops, Chester Wilmot went in on a glider, Richard North in a landing-craft, Stanley Maxted in a minesweeper, and other BBC correspondents were with different units and at SHAEF HQ with their 40-lb ‘midget’ recorders, getting actuality and eyewitness accounts from the battlefield. War Report, broadcast nightly after the nine o’clock news from 6 June 1944 until 5 May 1945, was a new kind of radio reportage. The war correspondent joined the combatants in the field on behalf of the citizens at home, bringing the front line into the back parlour.

  Sefton Delmer’s radio scooped the world with its report of the landings at 4.50 a.m. on D-Day, taken almost verbatim from a teleprinter flash on Goebbels’s DNB news service, but augmented with extra disinformation. Delmer was also proud of that night’s edition of Nachrichten für die Truppen, which reported that the Atlantic Wall was breached in several places, and that attacks were taking place at the mouth of the Seine and at Calais. This claim was carefully coordinated with the deception planners to spread maximum confusion.

  In operation TITANIC in the darkness before the dawn of D-Day, handfuls of SAS men from Fairford in Gloucestershire were dropped from the sky at four sites behind the German lines, attended by scores of dummy parachutists, the simple sacking ones known as ‘Paragons’, the more elaborate inflatable rubber ones christened ‘Ruperts’. They parachuted down with assorted pyrotechnics that simulated the sound and the chemical smell of battle. The few real SAS men shot off flares and fireworks, stirring up the ants’ nest with plenty of noise, and then slipped away to join the French resistance or to make their way back to the British lines. Because the best way to deal with parachutists is to tackle them as soon as they land, thousands of German troops were out scouring woods and fields inland, and so were not ready to fight the forces landing on the beaches.

  Electronic and electromagnetic deceptions also played their part. Dr R. V. Jones, the head of British Scientific Intelligence, had kept a watchful eye on all German radar developments – the Bruneval Raid by Commandos in February 1942 was a scientific swoop on a radar station in Normandy made at his request – and now organised a massive fraud upon the German system. After RAF and USAAF fighter planes destroyed 85 per cent of the German radar chain, what remained was duped in two operations called TAXABLE and GLIMMER. As the huge invasion fleet pulled out from behind the Isle of Wight, it split. The bulk of the ships turned south towards Normandy, but a decoy flotilla continued eastwards. Above them, Leonard Cheshire’s 617 Squadron of Lancaster bombers flew back and forth in a moving grid, eight miles long by two miles wide, continuously dropping reflective tinfoil to create the radar image of a large fleet moving south-easterly at 8 knots towards Fécamp at the mouth of the Seine. Their sparkling snowfall of ‘Window’ was supported on the sea surface by a few launches using ‘Moonshine’, a device that produced multiple radar images, which gave the same impression of a large assault convoy to any airborne radar reconnaissance. At the same time, the Stirling bombers of 218 Squadron created a similar ghost image on the approaches to Boulogne.

  Winston Churchill was not aboard the great armada sailing for France, but Norman Wilkinson was. The painter who had watched the Suvla Bay landings at Gallipoli in 1915 was now on the destroyer HMS Jervis, still wearing his old WW1 jacket but astonished by the thousands of vessels of every imaginable type. Nearly 350 British, Canadian and US minesweepers led the way, clearing ten approach channels, closely followed by the bombarding ships, including Jervis. Wilkinson was the only professional artist there on D-Day and he worked busily as 800 naval guns opened fire at 6.27 a.m. on the Normandy coast over six miles away.

  Off OMAHA beach, Allied rocket ships fired 9,000 explosive projectiles. More than 300 B-24 bombers swept through grey cloud to drop 13,000 bombs. All of them missed the German defenders. The amphibious Sherman tanks were launched too early, and 27 out of 29 foundered in heavy seas and sank with their crews, as did 23 of the 32 howitzers in amphibious ‘Ducks’. An ‘inhuman wall of fire’ met the first Americans ashore. The photographer Robert Capa reached the Easy Red sector of OMAHA beach, but got out as quickly as he could. The photo lab accidentally destroyed all but eight of Capa’s ‘slightly out of focus’ pictures of men crawling though bullet-torn surf to shelter behind German beach obstacles. US Rangers who risked life and limb to climb up Point du Hoc found the big guns replaced by wooden dummies.

  When the American reporter Ernie Pyle got ashore on the day after D-Day (known as D+1), he found the wreckage of equipment ‘vast and startling’ and the human litter poignant: ‘In the water floated empty life rafts and soldiers’ packs and ration boxes, and mysterious oranges.’ From a high bluff he overlooked the littered beach and ‘the greatest armada man has ever seen. You simply could not believe the gigantic collection of ships that lay out there waiting to unload.’ German prisoners also stood watching, on their faces ‘the final horrified acceptance of their doom’.

  The invasion did achieve surprise. By the end of ‘the longest day’, 156,000 men had landed by sea in France as well as 23,000 from the air, although none of them had reached their planned objectives. The airborne and seaborne forces met up on 10 June, the beachheads did not link up till the 11th, and chaotic fighting went on for many days. Montgomery did not take Caen for six weeks, and the Americans did not manage to break out to the south-west for two months. In those first days, the Normandy bridgehead was only a toehold; the German Army’s resistance was fierce and the bocage backcountry of small fields and thick hedges made tank and infantry advance difficult.

  The camouflage officer Captain Basil Spence had landed on Sword Beach. On D+2, the day that Montgomery came ashore, he watched British tanks destroy two beautiful Norman churches at Ouistreham and Hermanville by shelling their belfries to kill the German snipers up there. In their dugout that night, a friend asked him what his ambition was. ‘To build a cathedral,’ said the architect who was to remake Coventry.

  Steven Sykes was also a camoufleur with No. 5 Beach group, helping to conceal stores from German bombing and shelling. He was putting a belching smokescreen canister into a beached landing-craft when he came across its occupants, a closely packed mass of corpses still pressed together the way they had all died twenty tides before. On D+30 he went to help 6th Airborne Division who had reverted to a static sniper war. He found himself making dummies dressed in Airborne camouflage smocks and demonstrating ghillie hoods, just like Hesketh Prichard in WW1. Mines, booby traps and snipers made progress slow, and cautious.

  A huge storm, one of the worst of the century, blew up in the Channel on 19 June and raged for several days, wrecking the American Mulberry harbour and delaying the landing of vital supplies. The storm exposed the vulnerability of the forces ashore: lifelines could be snapped; the cable was fraying. In these early stages, if the Germans had thrown all their forces at it, the D-Day invasion could still have failed. Eisenhower’s ‘Great Crusade’ hung in the balance, and events could have tipped the scale either way. For example, when Churchill visited the Normandy beachhead on 12 June 1944 (see plate 26), he went to Montgomery’s HQ at Creully. As senior officers stood outside with the Prime Minister, South African Field Marshal Smuts sniffed the air and said, ‘There are some Germans near us now … I can always tell!’ Two days later two fully armed German paratroopers emerged from a nearby rhododendron bush, where they had been hiding all along. Had they used their guns and grenades on Churchill, everything would have changed.

  Now came the culminating moment of all the lies and the spies, the ruses, dupes and lures that make up British military deception in the twentieth century. This is when deception changed the course of history. In the crucial days after the Normandy invasion, the second phase of the deception plan FORTITUDE SOUTH
came into play. The genius of Dudley Clarke’s pupil David Strangeways revealed itself, because the FUSAG bluff did not evaporate, it continued to grow.

  The German Army Group B in France comprised two forces: 7th Army in Normandy and 15th Army away to the east in the Pas de Calais. When the Allied Expeditionary Force landed in Normandy they had to deal with the German 7th Army. ‘Just keep the 15th Army out of my hair for the first two days. That’s all I ask,’ Eisenhower had said to the deceivers months before. He was requesting only hours. But every single day that the German divisions stayed away, fewer Allied soldiers died or were injured, and more Allied men and kit managed to get ashore, building up eventually to a force of nearly two million men.

  Two days after D-Day Pujol hosted a fictitious conference of his imaginary agents – including three of Agent SEVEN’S sub-agents, DONNY, DICK and DORICK – and, just after midnight, sent his Abwehr masters in Madrid a two-hour-long coded message with a summary of his conclusions, laying out the entire FORTITUDE SOUTH gambit. In essence, he pretended to surmise that the Normandy invasion was part of a two-pronged attack. The landings had just been a feint, a diversionary manoeuvre designed to draw German reinforcements west. If Rommel’s 15th Army moved west from the Pas de Calais to reinforce the 7th in Normandy, Pujol warned that they would fall into the trap. The currently inactive FUSAG – with twenty or twenty-five divisions – would cross from south-east England to land the second blow behind them in the Pas de Calais. The implication was that this entirely fictitious second invasion, code-named MARS, would cut the German Armies off in Normandy, leaving the Allies and General Patton free to plunge towards Germany’s heartland.

  The Spanish message from their trusted agent ARABEL went through several hands and translation into German in the eighteen or so hours it took to travel from London via Madrid to Berlin and arrive by teleprinter in Adolf Hitler’s headquarters at Berchtesgaden. Colonel Krummacher, the Ober Kommando Wehrmacht Intelligence chief, read it and handed it to General Jodl, who thought it was important enough to pass to Adolf Hitler himself. ‘Diversionary manoeuvre’ … ‘decisive attack in another place’ … ‘probably take place in the Pasde Calais area’ … ‘proximity of air bases’. It all made sense. Cancel the counter-attack on Normandy. Hold back the troops.

  Sefton Delmer thought the FUSAG deception was brilliantly tailored to Hitler’s psychology, ‘his long-displayed lust for self-dramatisation’. Here he was, the hero Führer, confronting many enemies just like the heroic King of Prussia, Frederick the Great, at the end of the Seven Years’ War. And just as Frederick II in the eighteenth century was saved at the critical moment by the accession of the pro-Prussian Tsar Peter who pulled his troops back from Berlin, so now a providential spy, Pujol, had appeared like a deus ex machina with a message to save him. Hitler would never fall into Eisenhower’s trap by moving his forces west to Normandy! The great hero would be ready and waiting to crush the arrogant Patton at Calais. Hitler would still win the war.

  And so twenty-one German divisions – two armoured and nineteen infantry and parachute crack troops – were retained in the Pas de Calais area, not for the two days that Eisenhower had asked for, nor for two weeks, but for nearly two months, until the end of July – by which time the Allies had established themselves in north-west France, and the Germans’ chance had gone. When the German forces did finally move west, Eisenhower called it ‘a belated and fruitless attempt to reinforce the crumbling Normandy front’.

  In the conclusion of his Report by the Supreme Commander to the Combined Chiefs of Staff on the Operations in Europe of the Allied Expeditionary Force, Dwight Eisenhower wrote that the enemy ‘was completely misled by our diversionary operations, holding back until too late the forces in the Pas de Calais which, had they been rushed across the Seine when first we landed, might well have turned the scales against us’. In his history, Winston Churchill wrote, ‘Our deception measures both before and after D day had aimed at creating this confused thinking. Their success was admirable and had far-reaching results on the battle.’ And Bernard Montgomery wrote in 21 Army Group: Normandy to the Baltic, ‘These deception measures continued, as planned, after D-Day and events were to show that they … played a vital part in our successes in Normandy.’

  28

  V for Vergeltung

  ‘We may also ourselves be the object of new forms of attack from the enemy,’ Churchill warned, and a week after D-Day came the advent of the ‘pilotless plane’. The first of more than 8,000 German V-1 flying bombs was launched at London on 13 June 1944, bringing back the Blitz and prompting, once again, the evacuation of London’s children. The ‘buzz-bomb’ or ‘doodlebug’ was a twenty-one-foot-long robot plane with stubby wings and a tail that flew at about 360 mph with an orange flame jetting out from the back. When the puttering engine cut out, it fell silently to the ground. V-1s weighed two tons and carried fifteen hundredweight of high explosive. In three months they destroyed 23,000 houses and damaged over a million, killing nearly 6,000 people and wounding over 18,000.

  The V-1 flying bomb and the later V-2 rocket, which was twice the size and flew six times faster with a ton of explosive, were called Vergeltungswaffen, ‘retaliation’, ‘reprisal’ or ‘revenge’ weapons, because they were a response to the increased Allied firestorm bombing of German cities which killed up to half a million civilians. The V weapons showed that the Germans were neither defeated nor going to give up easily. They worried Churchill, who in July 1944 briefly considered drenching the Ruhr with poison gas.

  Juan Pujol had been warned in December 1943 by his Abwehr controller to get out of London, and moved to Taplow in Buckinghamshire. When the V-1s started falling the Germans wanted to know exactly where they landed so the launchers could adjust their aim. Pujol, as ARABEL, replied that his sources in the Ministry of Information told him that the V-1s were falling all over the place, from Harwich to Portsmouth. This was calculated to deceive: by telling the Germans the bombs were overshooting, they might adjust their aim so the bombs would in fact fall short of London.

  On 22 June, Pujol and Harris composed a long and strictly personal letter to his ‘friend and comrade’ CARLOS, Karl-Erich Kühlenthal, his Abwehr controller in Madrid. The tone is that of a pompous National Socialist unbuttoning into cautious frankness. He asks himself, has the V-1 a military aim? ‘No! Its effect is nil. Is it then intended for propaganda? Possibly, yes!’ ARABEL says how much he had looked forward to ‘the destruction of this useless town which surrounds me’, but confesses the results are very disappointing, both as a military weapon and as propaganda. Life goes on, traffic is the same, and people can see with their own eyes that the German claims that London is burning and Big Ben destroyed are lies. Is this the best use of military resources? he asks. He wonders if the V-bomb could be improved or made faster, and then, fishing, asks if it is really the ‘rocket weapon’ referred to earlier. His letter ends:

  I feel more than ever a sensation of hatred, more than death, for our enemy, and an ever increasing irresistible urge to destroy his entire existence. The arrogance of this rabble can only be conceived when you live among them. Receive a cordial embrace from your comrade and servant, JUAN.

  In July 1944, when the real First Canadian Army and the real Third US Army began to move over to Normandy (potentially breaking the spell of the imaginary FUSAG, which was still notionally in Kent and Sussex) MI5 decided to switch off Pujol/ARABEL for a while. This involved another pantomime. On 5 July 1944, imaginary Agent THREE told Madrid he was worried because ARABEL had not arrived for their regular meeting. The next day he reported that ARABEL was missing, and ARABEL’S wife was about to go to the police to find out if he had been killed by a bomb, which would be disastrous if ARABEL had in fact gone somewhere prohibited. What should he do?

  The fiction culminated in the ‘discovery’ that ARABEL had been arrested by a plain-clothes police detective while asking questions near a V-1 bomb site in Bethnal Green. Madrid advised the whole ALARIC network to li
e low for a while. Agent THREE eventually reported that ARABEL was freed. His forged Spanish republican papers and his friend in the Spanish Section of the Ministry of Information had saved him. Pujol added a further layer of deception. He pretended that he had complained to the Home Secretary about his unlawful detention, and then, having secured a (forged) letter of apology from this luminary, passed it on to Madrid. It all convinced. On 29 July 1944, Madrid was delighted to inform ARABEL that the Führer had awarded him the Iron Cross.

  As the Allied ring tightened around Germany in 1945, Sefton Delmer used the giant transmitter Aspidistra as a weapon of psychological warfare. If there was an Allied air raid heading towards a particular German city, genuine German radio transmitters in the locality would be switched off so the bombers could not use the frequency as a homing beacon. Forewarned of the coming raids, Aspidistra could pick up and hold the national signal from another regional transmitter and broadcast it the instant the local one was switched off, so the listeners did not notice any transition. Then Delmer’s crew seamlessly inserted their ‘black’ broadcast or news announcement, while German listeners still thought they were listening to Nazi state radio. Aspidistra thus became a giant pirate radio ship taking over other vessels. This counterfeiting was first used on 24 March 1945, the day Allied forces crossed the Rhine. Delmer’s announcer, a PoW who had the perfect official technique from his time in German services radio, gave out evacuation instructions over Reichsender Cologne. The following night it was Reichsender Frankfurt’s turn for panic measures. Later, Hamburg and Berlin were ‘officially’ told that the devious Allies were monkeying with Reich communications and that no orders or instructions received by telephone were ever to be obeyed without calling back first to check.