16 A GREAT BLOW BETWEEN THE EYES
The Wavell quote comes from the introduction to Dudley Clarke’s Seven Assignments. There is a clear account of the Norwegian campaign by Major General J. L. Moulton in the 1966 Purnell partwork History of the Second World War. Ray Mears’s The Real Heroes of Telemark (2003) honours the endurance of the Norwegian resistance.
The Guy Liddell diaries (vol. 1: 1939–42; vol. 2: 1942–45) edited by Nigel West, were published by Routledge in 2005. John Colville’s diary of his time as Churchill’s private secretary, The Fringes of Power, was published in 1985. The ‘battleship built on land’ was General Sir Alan Brooke’s description after a visit to the Maginot Line in December 1939. The observations in Marc Bloch’s Strange Defeat: a statement of evidence written in 1940 (1949) are confirmed by the May 1940 diary in The Rommel Papers (1953) edited by B. H. Liddell Hart.
Dudley Clarke’s experiences are narrated in Seven Assignments. Airey Neave’s They Have Their Exits (1953) is one of the very best WW2 memoirs, edged with the irony of his visits to imprisoned Nazis at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal. (Neave was murdered by the IRA on 30 March 1979, at Westminster.) Dudley Clarke’s mission to Ireland features in Robert Fisk’s In Time of War: Ireland, Ulster and the price of neutrality 1939–1945 (1983). David Mure’s Master of Deception (1980) followed Practise to Deceive (1977). Danchev’s comments on Dill are from his entry in ODNB.
The most recent books on Dunkirk include Hugh Sebag-Montefiore’s excellent Dunkirk: fight to the last man (2006), Sean Longden’s Dunkirk: the men they left behind (2008) and General Julian Thompson’s Dunkirk: retreat to victory (2008). J. B. Priestley’s twenty BBC talks, Postscripts, were published at the end of 1940.
17 COMMANDO DAGGER
Fifteen-years’-worth of Churchill’s speeches are collected in ten volumes edited by his son Randolph. The Dunkirk speech is on page 215 of Into Battle (1941). Dudley Clarke was paid 25 guineas for his fifteen-minute talk, which was printed in The Listener. The producer was the future historian Ronald Lewin. The Green Beret: the story of the Commandos 1940–1945 (1949) by Hilary St George Saunders credits Dudley Clarke in chapter 2. Ernest Chappell’s account of the first raid is in Commandos: the inside story of Britain’s most elite fighting force (2000) by John Parker.
18 BRITISH RESISTANCE
The classic account of WW2 British internment is ‘Enemy Alien’ by the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Dr Max F. Perutz, OM, CH originally published in The New Yorker in 1985, and reprinted in Is Science Necessary? Essays on Science and Scientists (1989). For more on the ‘Fifth Column’ see Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism (2006) by Stephen Dorril.
You get a disturbing sense of what invasion meant in Occupation: the ordeal of France 1940–1944 (1997) by the late Ian Ousby. William L. Shirer’s account of Compiègne (and his global scoop for CBS) is in chapter 16 of The Nightmare Years 1930–1940, vol. 2 of 20th Century Journey, published in 1984. Keitel’s speech is from page 1012 of volume 3 of The Second Great War. Priestley’s comment came from the last Postscript, Sunday, 20 October 1940.
George Orwell’s ‘Patriots and Revolutionaries’ first appeared in Victor Gollancz’s Betrayal of the Left (1941), an indictment of the Communist Party, and was also the final piece in the last non-fiction book published by Gollancz in 1981: The Left Book Club Anthology, edited by Paul Laity. Tom Wintringham’s version of the Battle of the Jarama in English Captain (1939) should be compared with that of Jason Gurney in Crusade in Spain (1974). Picture Post 1938–50, edited and introduced by Tom Hopkinson, was published in 1970. Home Guard Socialism: a vision of a People’s Army (2006) by Stephen Cullen gets it all in fifty pages. The Maxwell memo is on pp. 57–8 of the most revealing vol. 4, ‘Security and Counter-Intelligence’, of British Intelligence in the Second World War (1990), written by Professor Sir Harry Hinsley with Anthony Simkins, formerly Deputy Director of MI5, with unrestricted access to the records. The photograph of Lee Miller as a camouflaged nude is on pp. 182–3 of DPM: Disruptive Pattern Material and I am grateful to its editor Hardy Blechman for the loan of a copy of Penrose’s Home Guard Manual of Camouflage.
Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s fictional film It Happened Here (1966) and David Lampe’s first class investigation of the Auxiliary Units, The Last Ditch (1968), prompted other speculations about German invasion. Norman Longmate wrote the book of the BBC1 television film If Britain Had Fallen in 1972, and The Real Dad’s Army: the story of the Home Guard in 1974, the same year that Duff Hart-Davis published Peter Fleming: a biography. Len Deighton’s brilliant vision of a Nazi-occupied UK, SS-GB, appeared in 1978, paving the way for other novels: Gordon Stevens And All The King’s Men (1990), Robert Harris Fatherland (1992) and Owen Sheers Resistance (2007).
The Home Guard: a military and political history by S. P. Mackenzie came out in 1995, and further details about the British Resistance can be found in the more excitable With Britain in Mortal Danger: Britain’s most secret army in WWII (2000) edited by John Warwicker. I am grateful to his daughter Julia Korner, encountered at the Special Forces Club, for a copy of Andrew Croft’s autobiography A Talent for Adventure (1991). The BFI guide to the film Went the Day Well? was written by Penelope Houston in 1992. Michael Korda’s memoir Charmed Lives: the fabulous world of the Korda brothers was published in 1980.
19 FIRE OVER ENGLAND
When The Big Lie by John Baker White, first published in 1955, was issued by Pan in 1958, its cover was subtitled The Art of ‘Political Warfare’ with the strapline ‘How the Allies Fooled the Nazi High Command’. Dennis Wheatley’s War Papers were published as Stranger than Fiction in 1959.
Peter Haining’s Where The Eagle Landed: the mystery of the German invasion of Britain, 1940 (dedicated to Dennis Wheatley) is less reliable than James Hayward’s excellent The Bodies on the Beach: Sealion, Shingle Street and the Burning Sea myth of 1940 (2001).
The Ironside Diaries 137–40 were published in 1962. The Göring boast comes from Trenchard (1962) by Andrew Boyle. There is a huge literature on the 1940 air war: Len Deighton’s Fighter: the true story of the Battle of Britain (1977) and Battle of Britain (1980) stand out as clear and vivid.
London bombing details come from The Night Blitz 1940–41 (1996) by John Ray and the 1942 HMSO publication Front Line 1940–41: the official story of the Civil Defence of Britain.
20 RADIO PROPAGANDA
Propaganda in War 1939–1945: organisations, policies and publics in Britain and Germany by Michael Balfour, published in 1979, is the classic account.
Sefton Delmer features prominently in The Secret History of PWE: the Political Warfare Executive 1939–1945 written by David Garnett (who edited the letters of T. E. Lawrence) in 1945–6 but which was first published in 2002.
Val Gielgud’s memoirs are called Years of the Locust (1947). Stephen Potter at the BBC: ‘Features’ in war and peace (2004) by his son Julian Potter throws interesting light on the BBC in wartime. Lord Haw Haw: the English voice of Nazi Germany (2003) by Peter Martland, Germany Calling: a biography of William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw (2003) by Mary Kenny, and Haw-Haw: the tragedy of William and Margaret Joyce (2005) by Nigel Farndale should sate curiosity about ‘Sinister Sam’. ITMA 1939–1948 by Francis Worsley was published in 1948, and Ted Kavanagh’s biography of Tommy Handley the following year.
Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre on the Air had been broadcasting classics of English Literature for CBS like Dracula and Treasure Island before they came to H. G. Wells. Broadcasts from the Blitz: how Edward R. Murrow helped lead America into war by Philip Seib was published in 2006. Kevin Jackson’s superb biography Humphrey Jennings was published in 2004.
Some of the ‘V’ campaign material comes from the BBC Handbook 1942, volume III of Asa Briggs’s great history of broadcasting, The War of Words 1939–1945, and Sir John Lawrence’s contribution to Sage Eye: the aesthetic passion of Jonathan Griffin (1992) edited by Anthony Rudolf. There is a photograph of the BBC ‘V’ signal and the Afr
ican drum used to record it in James Blades’ autobiography Drum Roll (1977). Anthony Rhodes’s Propaganda: the art of persuasion in WW2 (1987) shows visual uses of the ‘V’.
Sir Hugh Greene’s lectures, speeches and broadcasts are collected in The Third Floor Front (1969). For ‘black’ radio see Delmer’s Black Boomerang, Garnett’s Secret History of PWE, as well as The Black Game: British subversive operations against the Germans during the Second World War (1982) by Ellic Howe, and Black Propaganda in the Second World War (2005) by Stanley Newcourt-Nowodworski.
In 1998 and 2002, the late David Syrett edited two volumes of papers for the Navy Records Society about signals intelligence in the Atlantic battle against the U-boats.
21 ‘A’ FORCE: NORTH AFRICA
General Sir Archibald Wavell’s address to Australian troops in February 1940 in which he described Middle East Command is in Generally Speaking (1946). For more on Bagnold see Long Range Desert Group (1945) by W. B. Kennedy Shaw and ‘Bagnold’s Bluff’ by Trevor J. Constable in The Journal for Historical Review vol. 8, no. 2 (March/April 1999), also Bearded Brigands: the diaries of trooper Frank Jopling (2002) edited by Brendan O’Carroll and Desert Raiders: Axis and Allied Special Forces 1940–43 by Andrea Molinari (2007). Alexander Clifford’s Three Against Rommel was first published in 1943. The Dimbleby quote is from The Frontiers are Green (1943). The first book in Alan Moorehead’s African trilogy is Mediterranean Front: the year of Wavell, 1940–41, and his moving memoir A Late Education: episodes in a life (1970) is structured around his friendship with Alexander Clifford.
Brigadier Dudley Clarke’s Seven Assignments leaves off just where the ‘A’ Force Narrative War Diary (CAB 154/1 in the National Archives) begins. Clarke’s meeting with ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan is recorded on page 34 of Establishing the Anglo-American Alliance: the Second World War diaries of Brigadier Vivian Dykes (1990), edited by Alex Danchev.
Barkas’s road trip is in The Camouflage Story. With Rommel in the desert (1951) by Heinz Werner Schmidt and Rommel’s War in Africa (1981) by Wolf Heckmann are authentically detailed.
On the SAS, The Phantom Major: the story of David Stirling and the S.A.S. Regiment (1958) by Virginia Cowles is excellently researched, and Tim Jones has kept up to the mark with two fine books on Stirling’s legacy: SAS: the first secret wars (2005) and SAS Zero Hour: the secret origins of the Special Air Service (2006). Ghost Force: the secret history of the SAS (1998) by Ken Connor, who was twenty-three years in the regiment, knows what it is talking about. The Originals in their Own Words: the secret history of the birth of the SAS by Gordon Stevens was published in 2006.
Sir Michael Howard’s Strategic Deception in the Second World (1990), vol.5 of the official history of British Intelligence in WW2, singles out Dudley Clarke’s achievements in ‘notional’ forces, as does Thaddeus Holt’s comprehensive The Deceivers: Allied military deception in the Second World War (2004).
I Spied Spies by Major A. W. Sansom, MBE was published in 1965. Jasper Maskelyne’s ghosted Magic: top secret (1949) is fantastical; David Fisher’s The War Magician (1983) is fictional: ‘The events depicted in this book are true. Everything Jasper Maskelyne is credited with doing he actually accomplished’, says its disclaimer, but see the website run by Richard Stokes, www.maskelynemagic.com, for a more realistic view. Earlier magicians also laid claim to camouflage inventions: see chapter 7 of Horace Goldin’s It’s Fun to be Fooled for a WW1 example.
The Australian Chester Wilmot’s book Tobruk 1941: capture, siege, relief describes cheerfulness in adversity. Steven Sykes’s Deceivers Ever: the memoirs of a camouflage officer was published in 1990. For more on WW2 Mesopotamia, see Five Ventures (1954) by Christopher Buckley, Iraq and Syria 1941 (1974) by Geoffrey Warner and Iraq 1941 (2005) by Robert Lyman. George Steer lent me a copy of The Road Uphill: episodes in a long life (1997) by his stepfather Kenyon Jones, together with an undated typed account of ‘cheese’ that KJ sent to Dudley Clarke some time after the war.
22 IMPERSONATIONS
If Spain was the Axis neutral, Portugal was the Allied neutral. See Sympathy for the Devil: neutral Europe and Nazi Germany in WW2 (2001) by Christian Leitz. On the failure of Washington DC to fit many pieces of the Japanese jigsaw together see the opening chapter of The Secret War against Hitler (1989) by William Casey of the CIA.
Juan Pujol wrote his autobiography GARBO with Nigel West in 1985. The Far Eastern haversack ruse features in the biography of Peter Fleming by Duff Hart-Davis, in Wavell: supreme commander (1969) by John Connell, completed and edited by Michael Roberts, as well as in The Deceivers by Thaddeus Holt.
The Cabinet War Rooms are part of the Imperial War Museum, open to the public, and the Churchill Museum now occupies the rooms where the Deception Planners once sat.
The letters and photographs dealing with the consequences of Clarke’s arrest in Madrid are in the Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge (CHAR 20/25/42–52). Clothes, as Virginia Woolf observed in Orlando, do more than keep us warm: ‘They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us.’ See Dressing Up: transvestism and drag – the history of an obsession (1979) by Peter Ackroyd and Crossing the Stage: controversies on cross-dressing (1993) edited by Lesley Ferris.
I am grateful to Dr Paul Adamthwaite of Ontario for supplying me with David Syrett’s account ‘The Battle for Convoy HG-75, 22–29 Oct 1941’ which appeared in The Northern Mariner, vol. 9, no 1.
23 THE GARDEN OF FORKING PATHS
For a full account of Borges’s anti-fascist credentials see Borges: a reader (1981) edited by Emir Rodriguez Monegal and Alastair Reid, and Borges: a life (2004) by Edwin Williamson. MI9: escape and evasion 1939–1945 (1979) by M. R. D. Foot and J. M. Langley is the classic account of wartime escaping. Clayton Hutton’s story of escape aids, Official Secret, was published in America in 1961. Its last three dozen pages are about his fights with British Air Ministry bureaucrats in the 1950s trying to block its publication on grounds of ‘security’.
For SOE kit see the PRO’s Secret Agent’s Handbook of Special Devices (2000) and SOE Syllabus: lessons in ungentlemanly warfare (2001) as well as SOE: the scientific secrets (2003) by Fredric Boyce and Douglas Everett.
Tomás Harris’s summary of the Garbo case was published in GARBO: the spy who saved D-Day (PRO, 2000) edited by Mark Seaman.
24 THE HINGE OF FATE
Dr Hugh B. Cott began a long association with Africa at the Camouflage School, Helwan, Egypt. Later work on the ecology of the Nile crocodile took him thousands of miles through the continent. The second of the 109 marvellous pen drawings in Uganda in Black and White (1959) is a Jackson’s Chamaeleon whose ‘expressionless face’ and ‘hesitant gait’ give it the look of ‘a robot’. The undress of soldiers in the Middle East is captured by Cecil Beaton, who arrived in March 1942 on photographic commission from the Ministry of Information, and some of whose photographs can be seen in Near East (Batsford, 1943).
Rick Atkinson’s An Army at Dawn: the war in North Africa, 1942–1943 (2003) covers TORCH. Carlo D’Este has written two superb biographies of the key American generals: A Genius for War (1995) about George S. Patton, and Eisenhower: a soldier’s life (2002).
For how Sir Arthur Harris distorted the Casablanca Directive about the bombing of Germany see pp. 201–2 of The Bomber War (2001) by Robin Neillands. Macmillan’s Greek/Roman analogy is cited in volume 1 of Alastair Horne’s official biography, Macmillan, 1894–1956; ‘Supermac’ was still using it as the wise old UK PM when he courted the young US President John F. Kennedy in the early 1960s. Stories of 30 Assault Unit RN/RM Commando are told disjointedly in Attain by Surprise: capturing top secret Intelligence in WWII (2003), edited by David Nutting, and the splendid Arctic Snow to Dust of Germany (1991) by Patrick Dalzel-Job, which has photographs of the young and handsome Charles Wheeler.
25 MINCEMEAT
The detail about Patrick Leigh-Fermor comes from his afterword to the 2001 Folio Society edition of the classic Ill Met By Moonlight by W. Stanley
Moss, telling how two SOE officers kidnapped General Kreipe on Crete in 1943.
‘Deception history is more complicated than we are more normally inclined to believe’: Klaus-Jürgen Müller in ‘A German Perspective on Allied Deception Operations in the Second World War’, in Strategic and Operational Deception in the Second World War (1987), edited by Michael I. Handel, warns of the dangers of exaggerating the success of MINCEMEAT.
The Unknown Courier by Ian Colvin (with a note on the Axis situation in the Mediterranean in spring 1943 by Field Marshal Kesselring) was published by William Kimber in 1953, after Ewen Montagu’s The Man Who Never Was (which had an introduction by General the Rt Hon. Lord Ismay, Secretary General of NATO, formerly Churchill’s Chief of Staff, ‘Pug’.) A combined edition of Operation Heartbreak and The Man Who Never Was, with an introduction by Duff Cooper’s son, John Julius Norwich, was published by Spellmount in 2003.
26 THE DOUBLE
Borges y yo appeared in El Hacedor in 1960 and Dreamtigers in 1964. Borges reviewed Victor Fleming’s 1941 film of Jekyll & Hyde in the magazine Sur, saying that two completely different actors would have been preferable to the solo Spencer Tracy overacting. Borges had written the story of another failed impersonation in ‘The Implausible Impostor Tom Castro’ in 1933. Dennis Wheatley writes about ‘the False Montgomery’ in chapter 17 of The Deception Planners: my secret war (1980). The drunkenness story is on page 140 of Jock Haswell’s The Intelligence and Deception of the D-Day Landings (1979). He says the Germans paid no attention to copperhead at all, but a kindlier version of James’s treatment and achievement is on page 562 of The Deceivers by Thaddeus Holt.
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