Churchill's Wizards

by Nicholas Rankin

Let the author lay some personal cards on the table at the end of the book. My thoughts about camouflage, deception and propaganda are not quite the same as when Churchill’s Wizards was first commissioned. Of course, deception is everywhere and we all practise it to some extent. Only adolescents are indignant at the white lies that politeness demands; there’s deception all through nature and in great art as well. I have loved actors’ performances all my life, yet we in the audience know they are not real, and willingly suspend our disbelief. Similarly, deception in warfare is not like deception in civilian life. War is an extraordinary state that changes the normal rules: a crime like killing may become a duty. Deception or deceitfulness in ordinary life is wrong because it corrodes trust, the basic glue of human relationships, but deceiving your enemy in wartime is common sense. If the war is just, then deception is also justified, because strategems increase your chance of victory many times over.

  Whenever I told anybody I was writing a book about British military deception they always said, ‘That’s interesting.’ We are interested in deception because we know we all do it when we have to, and we all feel ambivalent about it. The primal warrior/deceiver in Western literature, Odysseus, deviser of the wooden horse gambit at Troy, displays metis, cunning or intelligence, in order to get back to protect his wife and child. We understand that, in a fight for survival, his ends justify his means.

  But in real life we have to make continuing moral judgements on which ends justify which means. It happened that my last book, Telegram from Guernica, was published just three weeks after the ‘shock and awe’ attacks on Baghdad in March 2003. These were the opening salvoes of a war based on government claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was prepared to use them against us. Since then, in the years I have been working on Churchill’s Wizards, the word ‘deception’ has been hanging in the air like a bad smell.

  There is a difference between this twenty-first-century deception and those of WW1 and WW2 that you have been reading about. What C. E. Montague predicted in Disenchantment has come true. This time, the deceptive ‘story’ was aimed at our own people, on the brink of a possibly illegal war, and not at the despotic enemy. Moreover, it did not fool anyone for long.

  When a leader says that Gamal Abdel Nasser or Saddam Hussein or someone else is another Adolf Hitler, this does not make the speaker a new Winston Churchill. Other wars are not WW2; metaphors do not confer reality. The USA is not ‘our oldest ally’ as a British politician stated in 2008 (Portugal is); nor is the Anglo-American alliance the same as six decades ago. We have lost what moral high ground there was in WW2. The three trillion dollar war in Iraq has been a propaganda disaster for ‘the good guys’.

  Winston Churchill knew from grim experience that ‘jaw-jaw was better than war-war’ and when toasts were drunk, used to add under hisbreath‘… and no war’. He was also a great parliamentarian, ‘brought up’, as he told his beloved House of Commons on 29 November 1944, ‘never to fear the English democracy, to trust the people’ – who duly threw him out of office eight months later. Although as a wartime Prime Minister Churchill sometimes bent the truth when addressing the nation, what he and his wizards achieved by deceiving the Axis powers is indisputably justified.

  History will judge our generation.

  1 Winston Churchill (with cigar, as Minister of Munitions) in the British Army School of Camouflage’s training trenches in Kensington Gardens, 1917. He is inspecting a new armoured dome for a machine-gun post, which is concealed by painted cloth.

  2 Dummy dead German from the Camouflage School. Some fakes were used as sniper hides; others, in captured uniforms, were placed in no-man’s-land and their limbs moved by wire. Anyone deceived into rescuing such ‘wounded’ men would be ambushed.

  3 Australian troops carrying a wood and canvas dummy British Mark 1 Tank in France in 1917. Decoy tanks in disruptive pattern camouflage were used to draw enemy shell-fire or to add a false impression of strength to a feint attack.

  4 The legendary ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, Captain T. E. Lawrence, photographed above Feisal’s camp at Wejh early in 1917, wearing Arab clothing and a western wristwatch. The archaeologist and intelligence officer was a key liaison between British forces and the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Turks, pioneering new forms of guerrilla warfare.

  5 Propaganda in war. The German execution by firing-squad of Nurse Edith Cavell in Belgium was used in this 1916 Canadian poster as an emotional spur to recruitment. She was tried for the crime of helping British, Belgian and French soldiers escape into neutral Holland. But was the Norfolk spinster quite what she seemed, and was her death actually an atrocity?

  6 & 7 American 77th Division soldiers learning field camouflage at a British school for scouts, observers and snipers in France, May 1918. The instructor with the walking stick has brought them right up to a concealed sharpshooter who reveals himself in the second picture.

  8 Stacks of silhouette figures used in the fake or ‘Chinese’ attacks of trench warfare. When erected by pulley in half-light they diverted enemy attention and helped to waste his ammunition. The papier-mâché heads behind were painted and dressed realistically, then raised above a trench parapet in order to lure enemy snipers into giving away their positions by shooting at them.

  9 A special studio set up by marine artist Norman Wilkinson at the Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, London, during WW1. Models of ‘dazzle-painted’ ships were placed on a turntable and then viewed through a submarine periscope to test whether their visual effect was deceptive. Successful patterns were then transferred by ‘artist-officers’ to real ships in dockyards.

  10 ‘The object of camouflage is to give the impression that your head is where your stern is.’ SS Olympic, painted in ‘razzle-dazzle’, is seen from the port stern quarter. German U-boats were taking such a toll on shipping in 1917 that anything which might divert the aim of a submarine commander firing a torpedo had to be tried.

  11 1940: Prime Minister Winston Churchill inspecting coastal defences against Nazi invasion near Hartlepool. The sandbagged gun emplacement has been camouflaged as an innocent seaside roundabout.

  12 WW2 British Local Defence Volunteer emerging from cover, about to throw a bomb. Amateur defenders might have been overwhelmed had the German army invaded in 1940/41.

  13 1940: Adolf Hitler jigs for joy after signing the armistice at Compiègne. The total surrender of France was sweet revenge for the humiliating defeat of Germany in 1918.

  14 Cartoon from The Sketch, 10 September 1941. The national treasure W. Heath Robinson (1872–1944) imagined wonderfully absurd camouflage and deception schemes in both world wars.

  15 The ‘Prop-Shop’ at the Special Operations Executive’s Station XV in the Thatched Barn roadhouse near Elstree film studios. SOE’s camouflage section disguised secret agents as well as their special devices for sabotage and subversion in Axis-occupied territories.

  BUILT TO DECEIVE:

  16 Dummy British aircraft at El-Adem airbase near Tobruk, part of an ‘A Force’ deception scheme in the Mediterranean.

  17 Dummy landing craft moored in North Africa, purportedly for the invasion of Greece in 1943.

  18 Dummy tank to fool German and Italian observers in North Africa in 1943, made by Royal Armoured Corps engineers from painted canvas stretched over a metal framework rigged on a lorry chassis.

  19 Lt Col David Stirling, founder of the SAS, with patrol commander Lt Edward McDonald (with Fairbairn Sykes Commando dagger) and Cpl Bill Kennedy. The famous Special Air Service regiment was at first a wholly imaginary unit, originating in a Dudley Clarke deception that there were British paratroops in North Africa in 1941, when there were actually none.

  20 Lt Col Dudley Clarke, head of ‘A Force’ in Cairo and Britain’s top deceiver, was arrested in drag in Madrid in October 1941, while disseminating false information to reach German agents in Spain.

  21 Fluent German-speaking Daily Express journalist Sefton Delmer became the maestro of British ‘
black’ propaganda broadcast to Nazi Germany in WW2.

  22 The genuine corpse of ‘The Man Who Never Was’, before shipping by submarine to Spain in April 1943, with a false identity and a briefcase full of forged papers intended to deceive the Germans about the forthcoming invasion of Sicily.

  23 A still from the film I Was Monty’s Double, in which actor M. E. Clifton James impersonates Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery in Gibraltar, just as he did in late May 1944. The impersonation allowed the real ‘Monty’ to prepare for the 6 June invasion of Normandy.

  24 Barcelona-born Juan Pujol García, the most successful double agent of WW2. Code-named garbo by the British (because he was such a good actor), he was decorated by Germany with the Iron Cross for leading the extensive alaric spy ring in Britain, which was in fact wholly imaginary and coordinated with Allied strategic deception.

  25 Juan Pujol’s crucial message as received by teleprinter at German HQ on 9 June 1944. As top German V-Man or Agent arabal he suggested that the D-Day landings were a diversion from the real attack, which convinced Hitler to hold back nineteen divisions at Calais, thus saving the Normandy invasion.

  26 Prime Minister Winston Churchill sets foot in liberated France on 12 June 1944, six days after D-Day. The Normandy beachhead was not yet wholly secured and his wizards had to keep their spell working for many more weeks to achieve the triumphant apotheosis of British military deception in the twentieth century.

  Source Notes

  PREFACE

  Carl von Clausewitz’s Vom Kriege first appeared in 1832, and the Everyman On War was edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret in 1976. Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan was published in 1651. Quotes come from Alan Lascelles’s diaries The End of an Era (1986), Raymond Seitz’s memoir Over Here (1998), Richard Eyre’s history Changing Stages: a view of British Theatre in the 20th Century (2000), Geoffrey Household’s novel Watcher in the Shadows (1960), Jorge Luis Borges’s fiction ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ (1941) and Sun Tzu’s military manual, The Art of War, translated by Lionel Giles (1910). The Prophet’s hadith, cited in The Encyclopaedia of Islam in the British Library, is to be found in the Sahih of al-Bukhari, vol. 4, book 52, nos 267, 268 and 269. An entire 1971 book by William Woodin Rowe is dedicated to Nabokov’s Deceptive World and Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiography Speak, Memory (1966) has a superbly lyrical description of Batesian mimicry, confirming the observation in the writer’s 1964 commentary on Eugene Onegin: ‘Art is a magical deception, as all nature is magic and deception.’ Two British historians who have noted the contrast between Britain’s size and its standing are Linda Colley and David Cannadine; see their respective Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600–1850 (2002) and Ornamentalism: how the British saw their Empire (2001). Among copious Churchilliana, Martin Gilbert’s biographical work is indispensable: the paperback Churchill: a life was always to hand, Violet Bonham Carter’s Winston Churchill As I Knew Him (1965) is full of insight, and Speaking for Themselves: the personal letters of Winston and Clementine Churchill (1998), edited by their daughter Mary Soames, is fascinating. Winston Churchill’s account of the Downing Street tea-party comes from The World Crisis, his tremendous history of the First World War from 1911 to 1922, published in five volumes between 1923 and 1932, where the Most Secret memo ‘The Dummy Fleet’ appears in Appendix E of volume 1. There is a picture of SS Merion before and after its transformation into a dummy battleship on pp. 168–9 of The Imperial War Museum Book of the First World War (1991) by Malcolm Brown.

  1 THE WAR OF NERVES

  The books by Sir Philip Gibbs I used were The Soul of the War (1915), Realities of War (1920), Life’s Adventure (1957) and The War Dispatches, edited and introduced by his son Anthony in 1966. Gibbs reported the Western Front for the readers of the Daily Chronicle and the Daily Telegraph longer than anyone else. John Buchan’s twenty-four-volume Nelson’s History of the War is a remarkable exercise in contemporaneous synthesis. It is of course patriotic and propagandistic but not idiotic, for a first-class intellect is at work, marshalling documentary information. The emotional colouring of Buchan’s conservative mind is well caught in The King’s Grace, 1910–1935 from where I drew some personal touches. The Max Aitken observation came from the excellent biography Beaverbrook: a life (1992) by Anne Chisholm and Michael Davie. The Richard Harding Davis coverage of Brussels appears in The Treasury of Great Reporting, edited by Snyder and Morris, (2nd edition, 1962). Richard Harding Davis’s Notes of a War Correspondent (1910) covers five wars on four continents and has a splendid essay on the kit required which might have benefited William Boot in Ishmaelia.

  Winston Churchill’s ‘My Spy-Story’ is related in his collection of journalism Thoughts and Adventures (1932) which is as revealing of the man and as readable as My Early Life (1930).

  Cable-cutting details came from The Thin Red Lines (1946) by Charles Graves and Gentlemen on Imperial Service (1994) by R. Bruce Scott, histories of Cable & Wireless and the Pacific Cable Board. The John Keegan quote comes from page 162 of his Intelligence in War (2003).

  The RFC quotes are taken from volume 2 of War in the Air: being the story of the part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force (1922–37) by Walter Raleigh and H. A. Jones. The Fleet Air Arm Museum published Warneford, VC by Mary Gibson in 1979.

  2 THE NATURE OF CAMOUFLAGE

  Eric Partridge’s etymology of camouflage appears in ‘War as a Word-Maker’ in Words at War: Words at Peace (1948). The Gertrude Stein stories come from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) and were also cited in Roy R. Behren’s wonderful False Colors: art, design and modern camouflage. Another valuable and pioneering book on this subject is Camouflage: a history of concealment and deception in war (1979) by Guy Hartcup. For exhaustive illustration see DPM: Disruptive Pattern Material: an encyclopaedia of camouflage in nature, warfare and culture (2004) by Hardy Blechman and Andy Newman.

  Many details about Britain’s first camoufleur come from Solomon J. Solomon: a memoir of peace and war by Olga Somech Phillips [1933]. (She also wrote The Boy Disraeli, a sympathetic study of the early life of Britain’s first Jewish Prime Minister.) Edward Potton edited A Record of the United Arts Rifles 1914–1919 in 1920. For more on the shift in uniforms see The British Army on Campaign 4: 1882–1902 by Michael Barthorp and Pierre Turner.

  3 ENGINEERING OPINION

  Frank Lynch helped me via the internet to pin the Dr Johnson quote down to Idler No. 30, 11 November 1758. An absolutely invaluable source for much in this chapter is the excellent British Propaganda and the State in the First World War (1992) by Gary S. Messinger.

  For more on intelligence operations behind enemy lines in WW1, see The Secrets of Rue St Roch (2004) by Janet Morgan, and Christopher Andrew’s superb history Secret Service: the making of the British Intelligence community (1985).

  For much more on the Lusitania, see www.lusitania.net. Among several books, I found Diana Preston’s Wilful Murder: the sinking of the Lusitania (2002) the best. Oliver Percy Bernard’s remarkable autobiography Cock Sparrow: a true chronicle was published in 1936, three years before he died. After WW1, Bernard became the Art Deco designer of the interiors of the Lyons Corner Houses, the Cumberland, the Regent and the Strand Palace Hotels. He also fathered three sons: the poet and translator Oliver Bernard (b. 1925), the picture editor and photographer Bruce Bernard (b. 1928), and the legendary ‘Low Life’ columnist in the Spectator, Jeffrey Bernard (b. 1932). The Eyes of the Navy: a biographical study of Admiral Sir Reginald Hall (1955) by Admiral Sir William James is revealing although hagiographical. Margaret FitzHerbert’s excellent biography of her grandfather Aubrey Herbert, The Man Who Was Greenmantle, was issued in paperback in 1985.

  4 HIDING AND SNIPING

  John Connell’s biography to June 1941, Wavell: scholar and soldier (1964) is the source of the Archibald Wavell material. Details about Hesketh Vernon Hesketh Prichard come from Hesketh Prichard D.S.O., M.C., Hunter: explorer: naturalist: cricketer: author: soldier, a me
moir by Eric Parker [1924]. I am grateful to the Librarian of the Marylebone Cricket Club at Lord’s for details of H. P.’ s cricketing career. H. M. Tomlinson’s All Our Yesterdays was published by Heinemann in 1930. I quarried books on sniping by Adrian Gilbert, Peter Brookesmith and Andy Dougan as well as Martin Pegler’s history of the military sniper, Out of Nowhere, published in 2004. The Aubrey Herbert quotes come from his 1919 book Mons, Anzac and Kut ‘by an M.P.’.

  5 DECEPTION IN THE DARDANELLES

  The Duff Cooper Diaries 1915–1951, edited by John Julius Norwich, were published in 2005. Tell England by Ernest Raymond, the best-selling novel about naïve public schoolboys going to war, has none of the disenchantment of the Great War poets. The Roger Keyes quote appears on page 363 of Alan Moorehead’s Gallipoli. John Masefield’s sympathetic Gallipoli came out in 1916, Henry W. Nevinson’s The Dardanelles Campaign, with its Greek epigraphs and a frontispiece of Sir Ian Hamilton, was published in 1918, and Compton Mackenzie’s Gallipoli Memories a decade later, in 1929. Among those who also attended Rupert Brooke’s funeral on Skyros were two talented composers who did not live to fulfil their talents. The Australian F. S. Kelly (killed like George Butterworth in the battle of the Somme in 1916) wrote his haunting Elegy for Strings: ‘In Memoriam Rupert Brooke’ in hospital in Alexandria in June 1915, the same month that his musical friend W. Denis Browne was killed at Babi Acha. ‘Lancashire Landing’ is described in volume 1 of The History of the Lancashire Fusiliers 1914–1918 and in Geoffrey Moorhouse’s Hells’ Foundations: a town, its myths and Gallipoli (1992). Dick Doughty-Wylie’s entry in ODNB was written by J. M. Bourne. Albert Barnett Facey (1894–1982) wrote only one book, which was published nine months before he died, the best-selling A Fortunate Life. Whether novel or autobiography, it is now deservedly a classic of Australian literature.