Churchill's Wizards

by Nicholas Rankin

  The Australian Private Henry Barnes is quoted on page 175 of Defeat in Gallipoli (1994) by Nigel Steel and Peter Hart. The Secret Battle (1919) is one of the outstanding novels of WW1; its author, A. P. Herbert, supplied additional dialogue for Anthony Asquith’s unsuccessful 1931 film Tell England, also known as The Battle of Gallipoli.

  Painting as a Pastime was reprinted for its fiftieth anniversary in the Sotheby’s catalogue for the 1998 show organised by David Coombs, ‘Winston Churchill – his life as a painter’. Norman Wilkinson’s autobiography A Brush with Life came out in 1969. John Masefield’s WW1 writings, including Gallipoli and his reviews of Nevinson’s book and Jacka’s Mob, were reprinted in 2007 in the excellent anthology John Masefield’s Great War, edited by Philip W. Errington. For more on Nevinson, see War, Journalism and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century (2006) by Angela V. John. Patrick Beesly’s Room 40: British Naval Intelligence 1914–18 was published in 1982.

  6 STEEL TREES

  Details about Malcolm Wingate, together with much information on early camouflage, come from the Royal Engineers’ interesting Library at Chatham. Philip Chetwode’s comparison of French and Haig appears in The Little Field Marshal: a life of Sir John French (1981) by Richard Holmes. Philip Warner’s Kitchener: the man behind the legend was published in 1985.

  Solomon J. Solomon’s correspondence about obtaining tree bark from King George V is in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle.

  I learned a lot about the revival of the steel helmet from Timothy Prus at the Archive of Modern Conflict in London. George Coppard’s With a Machine Gun to Cambrai: the tale of a young tommy in Kitchener’s army 1914–1918 was published in 1969.

  Some eyewitness details of Churchill’s days in the trenches come from Winston Churchill: his military life 1895–1945 (2005) by Michael Paterson. For more on the first tanks see Liddell Hart The Tanks: the history of the Royal Tank Regiment and its predecessors (1959), Patrick Wright Tank: the progress of a monstrous war machine (2000), British Mark 1 Tank 1916 (2004) by David Fletcher and Tony Bryan, and Christy Campbell’s excellent Band of Brigands: the first men in tanks (2007).

  7 GUILE AND GUERRILLA

  Figures on animals and lorries employed came from the Animals at War exhibition at the Imperial War Museum and Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire during the Great War 1914–1920, published by the War Office in 1922. The equine contribution has not been forgotten by British fiction: Michael Morpurgo’s well-known War Horse (1982) has now been joined by Rosalind Belben’s extraordinarily moving Our Horses in Egypt (2007).

  I found Joshua Teitelbaum’s The Rise and Fall of the Hashimite Kingdom of Arabia (Hurst, 2001) an invaluable guide to a complicated subject, backed up by A Peace to End All Peace: the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of the modern Middle East (1989) by David Fromkin, and Sowing the Wind: the seeds of conflict in the Middle East (2003) by John Keay. Details about Ibn Saud come from Lord of Arabia (Penguin, 1938) by H. C. Armstrong and The Kingdom (1981) by Robert Lacey. Sir Ronald Storrs’s Orientations, published in 1939, is a window into a vanished world of imperial diplomacy, as is Laurence Grafftey-Smith’s autobiography Bright Levant (1970).

  The literature on T. E. Lawrence is large and still growing. I have basically relied on Jeremy Wilson’s authorised biography, Lawrence of Arabia, and three books by Malcolm Brown: A Touch of Genius (written with Julia Cave in 1988), Lawrence of Arabia: the life, the legend (2005) and T. E. Lawrence in War and Peace: an anthology of the military writings of Lawrence of Arabia (2005), which includes ‘Twenty-Seven Articles’. I have also gleaned interesting details from the Journal of the T. E. Lawrence Society. The ‘Hindustani fanatics’ story comes from God’s Terrorists: the Wahhabi cult and the hidden roots of modern jihad (2006) by Charles Allen. Arab Command: the biography of Lieutenant-Colonel Peake Pasha CMG, CBE by Major C. S. Jarvis was published in 1942. The £11 million figure is in footnote 1 on page 160 of Storrs’ Orientations. Robert Irwin (author of a defence of Orientalists, For Lust of Knowing) reviewed the complete 1922 ‘Oxford’ text of Seven Pillars of Wisdom in the Times Literary Supplement on 2 April 2004. Oriental Assembly (1939) edited by A. W. Lawrence, includes ‘The Evolution of a Revolt’ as well as many of T. E. Lawrence’s photographs. See Xenophon and the Art of Command (2000) by Geoffrey Hutchinson for more on the Greek tactics as they fought their way out of Persia.

  8 THE TWICE-PROMISED LAND

  David Lloyd George’s attitudes to the Middle East feature in Barbara W. Tuchman’s Bible and Sword: how the British came to Palestine (1956) and God, Guns and Israel: Britain, the First World War and the Jews in the Holy City (2004) by Jill Hamilton.

  Richard Meinertzhagen’s seventy-six volumes of diaries are in the Rhodes House Library in Oxford, and the forty-two-volume catalogue of his bird collection at the British Museum (Natural History) Tring.

  The Trojan horse image is from John Marlowe Rebellion in Palestine (1946). The D-Notice on the Balfour declaration is quoted in ‘The Last Crusade? British Propaganda and the Palestine Campaign, 1917–18’ by Eiten Bar-Yosef, published in the Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 36, no. 1 (January 2001).

  In his 1959 memoirs, Not in the Limelight, Sir Ronald Wingate, the elder son of the Sirdar Sir Reginald Wingate, blamed the ‘ill-informed enthusiasm’ of T. E. Lawrence and the ‘romantic penchant’ of Gertrude Bell for the ‘continually unstable political situation in Iraq’, later made worse by the growing importance of oil. Mahomed bin Abdillah Hassan, the ‘Mad Mullah of Somaliland’ was actually chased and defeated by ground troops, according to the 1960 Memoirs of Lord Ismay, who was there as a young cavalry subaltern in the Somaliland Camel Corps. Ismay saw all the aeroplane bombs miss, but acknowledges that the RAF did a brilliant political ‘snow job’ in London which saved them as an independent air force. Churchill’s Bodyguard (2005) by Tom Hickman is based on the memoirs of Walter H. Thompson of the Metropolitan Police.

  9 A DAZZLE OF ZEBRAS

  Politics, Press and Propaganda: Lord Northcliffe in the Great War 1914–1919 (1999) is by J. Lee Thompson, who is also the author of the fine biography Northcliffe: press baron in politics 1865–1922, published in 2000. Barbara Tuchman’s The Zimmermann Telegram (1959) remains an exemplary historical study: the number of OB40’s wireless operators and clerks comes from there, and the number of German communications they dealt with from p. 278 of The Codebreakers: the story of secret writing (1968) by David Kahn.

  Norman Wilkinson featured in the Scottish Arts Council touring exhibition ‘Camouflage’ in 1988, as well as the Camouflage exhibition organised by James Taylor at the Imperial War Museum in 2007. Edward Wadsworth was prominent in the 1974 Hayward Gallery show ‘Vorticism and its allies’, organised by Richard Cork, also author of A Bitter Truth: avant-garde art and the Great War (1994).

  ‘La Guerre Inconnue’, a special edition of Le Crapouillot published in August 1930, features large-scale camouflage in Paris.

  The catalogue of the 1998 show organised by Nicole Zapata-Aubé at the museum at Bernay in France, ‘André Mare: Cubisme et camouflage 1914–1918’ is richly detailed. The War the Infantry Knew 1914–1919, Captain James Churchill Dunn’s chronicle of service with the 2nd battalion Royal Welch Fusiliers was first published in 1938.

  10 LYING FOR LLOYD GEORGE

  ‘Smiling pictures …’ comes from S. J. Taylor The Great Outsider: Northcliffe, Rothermere and the ‘Daily Mail’ (1996), as quoted in the ODNB article on Alfred Harmsworth by D. George Boyce. The Arnold Bennett quote comes from his remarkable novel Lord Raingo, based on Beaverbrook’s wartime propaganda work.

  George Bernard Shaw’s WW1 writings, What I Really Said in the War were republished in 2006, edited by J. L. Wisenthal and Daniel O’Leary. Shaw’s views on his escort at the front appear in C. E. Montague: a memoir (1929) by Oliver Elton, and Philip Gibbs’s memories of Shaw in Life’s Adventure (1957).

  The Stewart Menzies story comes from The Secret Servant (1988) by An
thony Cave Brown. The Secret Corps: a tale of ‘Intelligence’ on all fronts by Captain Ferdinand Tuohy was published in May 1920.

  Meinertzhagen’s memorandum, AIR 1/1155, appears in chapter 5 of The British Army and Signals Intelligence in the First World War (1992), edited by John Ferris. Secrets of Crewe House: the story of a famous campaign (1920) and Opportunity Knocks Once (1952) by Sir Campbell Stuart tell the story of British propaganda against the Central Powers. The Inner Circle: the memoirs of Ivone Kirkpatrick was published in 1959, three years after he retired as head of the Foreign Office, having interpreted for Halifax and Chamberlain with Hitler and interrogated Hess after his bizarre flight. Wickham Steed’s The Fifth Arm was published in 1940 and G. M. Trevelyan’s Scenes from Italy’s War in 1919. See www.psywarrior.com for ‘British Forgeries of the Stamps and Banknotes of the Central Powers’ by SGM Herbert A. Friedman (Ret.)

  11 DECEIVERS DECEIVED

  Strategic Camouflage by Solomon J. Solomon RA was handsomely published as a demy quarto volume in 1920. Churchill describes 21 March 1918 in chapter 17, vol. 3 of The World Crisis. Martin Middlebrook’s The Kaiser’s Battle was first published in 1978, All The Kaiser’s Men: the life and death of the German army on the Western Front 1914–1918 by Ian Passingham in 2003, and Martin Kitchen’s The German Offensives of 1918 in 2005. H. M. Tomlinson’s most scathingly angry anti-war book, Mars His Idiot (1935), is dedicated to ‘Unknown Warriors’.

  The correspondence about Solomon J. Solomon’s camouflage ideas is in the Royal Engineers’ Library at Chatham. Charlie Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms can be viewed free online at the Internet Archive.

  12 WIZARDS OF WW2

  The extensive papers of Brigadier Dudley Clarke, CBE, CB at the Imperial War Museum, Box 99/2/1–3, include letters and diaries as well as his unpublished memoirs A Quarter of My Century.

  Pieces of War by Lieutenant Colonel A. C. Simonds (‘This officer is a pirate; only useful in time of war’) is also in the Imperial War Museum. Max Hastings’s comments came in a Sunday Times review of Wavell: soldier and statesman by Victoria Schofield. Bernard Fergusson’s affectionate Wavell: portrait of a soldier was published in 1961; more details of Wavell’s exercises can be found in Part IV of his book The Good Soldier (1948).

  Denis Sefton Delmer published two volumes of memoirs, Trail Sinister (1961) and Black Boomerang (1962) and his papers have also been donated to the Imperial War Museum. The personal file (KV/2/2586) held on Sefton Delmer (and his father) by the Security Service is downloadable for a small fee from the National Archive. See also www.seftondelmer.co. uk.

  In following the chronology of the rise and fall of the Third Reich, the black and gold volumes 2, 3, 4 and 5 of Keesing’s Contemporary Archives, from 1 July 1934 to 31 December 1945, were an invaluable resource, continually consulted.

  Virginia Cowles wrote about 1937 Madrid in Looking for Trouble (1941). Sefton Delmer in Madrid is a notable character in Single to Spain (1937) by Keith Scott Watson, later the first British journalist to report the bombing of Guernica. A fine contextual study of the foreign correspondents in Spain is Paul Preston’s Idealistas bajo las balas (2007) from where the Constancia de la Mora quote comes.

  13 CURTAIN UP

  Clare Hollingworth’s autobiography, Front Line (1990) recounts her 1939 Polish adventure. See also Esther Addley’s profile of her in the Guardian, 17 January 2004. The Gleiwitz radio station incident is described in The Man Who Started The War (1960) by Gunter Peis and in Kommando: German Special Forces of World War Two (1985) by James Lucas. Alfred Naujocks’s sworn affidavit about Gleiwitz, Document 2751-PS, dated 20 November 1945, was evidence at the Nuremberg trials. Hugh Trevor-Roper’s views on Nazi reading come from the essay ‘Admiral Canaris’, appended to The Philby Affair: espionage, treason, and Secret Services (1968). Gerhard Klein directed an interesting East German feature film about this Nazi deception, Der Fall Gleiwitz, in 1961.

  The texts of four ‘bomphlets’ appear on page 68 of the nine-volume history The Second Great War, edited by Sir John Hammerton. The rebuffed American journalist was John Gunther; the story was told by Harold Nicolson in a letter to his wife Vita Sackville-West on 14 September 1939. Joan Bright Astley’s memoir The Inner Circle: a view of war at the top, first published in 1971, is a wonderful book, full of intelligence and insight. Having worked with the founders of British irregular warfare in WW2 and written two regimental histories, she also coauthored, with Peter Wilkinson, Gubbins and SOE (1993). Seven Assignments was first published in July 1948 and sold a respectable 5,000 copies.

  14 WINSTON IS BACK

  The merchant seaman statistics come from page 383 of A New History of British Shipping by Ronald Hope. The Scapa Flow dummy-ship story comes from Churchill’s Bodyguard. John le Carré’s interview, ‘The Art of Fiction CXLIX’, was in Paris Review 39 (1997). Patrick Beesly’s Very Special Intelligence: the story of the Admiralty’s Operational Intelligence Centre 1939–1945 (1977) and Very Special Admiral: the life of Admiral J. H. Godfrey CB (1980) augment Donald McLachlan’s Room 39: Naval Intelligence in action 1939–45 (1968), and their British Naval Intelligence papers are together at the Churchill Archives Centre. For more on the creator of James Bond, see The Life of Ian Fleming (1967) by John Pearson, 17F: the life of Ian Fleming (1993) by Donald McCormick, Ian Fleming (1995) by Andrew Lycett, and For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond (2008) by Ben Macintyre, accompanying the centenary exhibition at the Imperial War Museum. For more on the murkier history of wireless see ‘An Improper Use of Broadcasting … The British Government and Clandestine Radio Propaganda Operations against Germany during the Munich Crisis and after’ by Nicholas Pronay and Philip M. Taylor, in Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 19, no. 3, (July 1984), and the interesting and opinionated Truth Betrayed: radio politics between the wars (1987) by the late W. J. West.

  I have relied on Christopher Andrew’s Secret Service and the biography of Claude Dansey, Colonel Z: the life and times of a master of spies (1984) by Anthony Read and David Fisher, for information about SIS. The Partisan Leader’s Handbook is Appendix 2 in SOE in the Low Countries (2001) by Professor M. R. D. Foot whose SOE: the Special Operations Executive 1940–1946 is the classic outline history. Details about Section D, Electra House and MI (R) are also in The Secret History of SOE (2000) by William Mackenzie and Special Operations Executive: a new instrument of war (2006), edited by Mark Seaman.

  On GC&CS, see Thirty Secret Years: A. G. Denniston’s work in signals intelligence 1914–1944 (2007) by Robin Denniston. There are many books about Bletchley Park: I consulted Battle of Wits: the complete story of code-breaking in World War II (2000) by Stephen Budiansky, Action This Day (2001) edited by Michael Smith and Ralph Erskine, and Station X: the code breakers of Bletchley Park (2003) by Michael Smith. The Essential Turing, edited by B. Jack Copeland, was published by Oxford in 2004. For the repercussions of the Venlo incident see Nigel West’s preface to Invasion 1940: the Nazi invasion plan for Britain by SS General Walter Schellenberg (2000) introduced by John Erickson. This bizarre volume, which includes the names of those to be arrested, also gives the title to Tom Paulin’s interesting cut-up/collage of 1918–1940, The Invasion Handbook (2002). See also Militärgeographische Angaben über England, 1940, published by the Bodleian Library in 2007 as German Invasion Plans for the British Isles 1940.

  I learned a great deal about RSS and other matters from The Secret Wireless War: the story of MI6 Communications 1939–1945 (2006) by Geoffrey Pidgeon. John Masterman’s The Double-Cross System 1939–1945 was originally published by Yale in 1972, but the 1995 Pimlico edition has a useful introduction by Nigel West. MI5’s WW2 successes feature in the official history The Security Service 1908–1945 by John Curry (1999) and Camp 020: MI5 and the Nazi spies (2000) edited and introduced by Oliver Hoare. Dusko Popov is the subject of Codename Tricycle (2004) by Russell Miller. Professor R. V. Jones’s Most Secret War: British Scientific Intelligence 1939–1945 (1978, called The Wizard War in USA) was rightly des
cribed by A. J. P. Taylor as ‘the most fascinating book on the Second World War that I have ever read.’ His Reflections on Intelligence (1989) is also most worthwhile.

  15 HIDING THE SILVER

  An excellent, well-illustrated study of the WW2 return of the camoufleurs is Camouflage and Art: design for deception in World War 2 (2007) by Henrietta Goodden of the Royal College of Art. The painter Julian Trevelyan’s Indigo Days was published in 1957, and details about Roland Penrose came from Visiting Picasso: the notebooks and letters of Roland Penrose (2006) by Elizabeth Cowling. The film-maker Geoffrey Barkas’s The Camouflage Story (From Aintree to Alamein) was published in 1952. A classic study of the visual arms race is To Fool a Glass Eye: camouflage versus photoreconnaissance in World War II (1998) by Colonel Roy M. Stanley II, USAF (retd). See also Eyes of the RAF: a history of photo-reconnaissance (1996) by Roy Conyers Nesbit. W. Heath Robinson’s WW2 cartoons were collected in Heath Robinson at War (1942), The Penguin W. Heath Robinson (1966), Inventions (1973), The Best of Heath Robinson (1982) and Heath Robinson’s Helpful Solutions (2007), which is Simon Heneage’s catalogue of the London Cartoon Museum show curated by Anita O’Brien.