27 OVERLORD AND FORTITUDE
Geoffrey Pyke features in Pyke: the unknown genius (1959) by David Lampe, the ‘Science in War’ section of Max Perutz’s Is Science Necessary? (1989) and Paul Collins’s ‘The Ozzard of Whizz’ in Fortean Times 197, June 2005. The ice-shooting incident is recorded in Alanbrooke’s War Diaries 1939–1945 for 19 August 1943. Rommel’s report is quoted on page 453 of The Rommel Papers (1953).
Bodyguard of Lies is also the title of the 1975 book on WW2 deception by Anthony Cave Brown which although pioneering is not always accurate. The modified COSSAC plan is described in Chapter 13 of Operation Victory (1947) by Major-General Sir Francis de Guingand. A clear and concise outline of the planning and execution is in D-Day (2004) by Martin Gilbert.
Part of the Soviet Russian help to BODYGUARD was a feint towards northern Norway, and a purported amphibious assault from the Black Sea on Rumania. The classified official history, Fortitude: the D-day deception campaign was written by Roger Hesketh in 1945–8, but not published until 2000.
Allied Photo Reconnaissance of World War II (1998) edited by Chris Staerck shows aerial reconnaissance pictures of the Normandy beaches before and after D-Day. A picture of René Duchez with an account of his activities is on page 94 of D-Day: June 6, 1944 – the Normandy Landings (1992) by Richard Collier.
PLUTO: Pipe-Line Under the Ocean (2nd edition, 2004) by Adrian Searle tells the definitive story. More engineering ingenuity is displayed in Churchill’s Secret Weapons: the story of Hobart’s Funnies (1998) by Patrick Delaforce and in Gerald Pawle’s The Secret War 1939–1945 (1956) about the ‘Wheezers and Dodgers’ of DMWD, the Admiralty’s Department of Miscellaneous Weapon Development.
Sonic and wireless deceptions around D-Day feature in chapters 6 and 7 of Trojan Horses: deception operations in the Second World War (1989) by Martin Young and Robbie Stamp. King’s Counsellor (2006), the wartime diaries of Sir Alan Lascelles, edited by Duff Hart-Davis, record a visit by ‘two MI men’ on Friday, 3 March 1944 to explain how the King’s visits could help ‘to bamboozle the German Intelligence’.
For a critical, pro-Crossman view of Nachrichten für die Truppen and Delmer’s work see Sykewar: psychological warfare against Germany, D-Day to VE-Day (1949) by Daniel Lerner.
TAXABLE AND GLIMMER feature in ‘Deception, technology and the D-Day invasion’ by R. W. Burns in Engineering Science and Education Journal, vol. 4, issue 2, April 1995. The Far Shore (1960) by Rear Admiral Edward Ellsberg, USN gives a clear account of what went wrong. Robert Capa was not the only one to lose his images: most US motion-picture footage of the landings was lost when the ship holding it was sunk. Ernie Pyle’s syndicated dispatches appeared six times a week across the USA and were collected in three books: Here is Your War: the story of G.I. Joe (1943), Brave Men (1944; the quote here is from chapter 26) and the posthumous Last Chapter (1945). The Smuts story comes from chapter 31 of The War and Colonel Warden (1963) by Gerald Pawle, based on the recollections of Commander C. R. Thompson.
GARBO’s message, as received by teleprinter at Hitler’s HQ on 9 June 1944, is reproduced (and translated) at the start of Roger Hesketh’s Fortitude: the D-Day deception campaign.
28 V FOR VERGELTUNG
Chapter 337 in vol. 8 of The Second Great War is an illustrated account of the German ‘reprisal weapons’ in action. Many words have been written about the bombing of Germany, for which 45,000 Allied airmen gave their lives. For a literary response see On the Natural History of Destruction (2003) by W. G. Sebald, for a moral inquiry see Among the Dead Cities (2006) by A. C. Grayling, and for case studies of two individual cities see Inferno: the destruction of Hamburg 1943 by Keith Lowe and Dresden: Tuesday 13 February 1945 by Frederick Taylor.
To the Victor the Spoils: D-Day to VE-Day – the reality behind the heroism (2004) by Sean Longden is a superbly researched account of what soldiering with 21st Army Group into Germany was really like: grim, grimy, and grinning. Richard Dimbleby’s account of Belsen was partially printed in War Report: D-Day to VE-Day (1946) and more fully in the 1975 biography of him by his son, Jonathan Dimbleby.
Acknowledgements
‘Let thinks be thanks,’ wrote Auden. Everyone in the team at Faber and Faber has been very kind. I am grateful to Julian Loose for nurturing and protecting the book, and to his assistant, Kate Murray Browne, who was always a tonic when gloom descended; to Jon Riley for provoking an extension of my original notion; and to Lucy Davey, Gavin Morris, Anne Owen, Anna Pallai, Paula Turner at Palindrome, proofreader Peter McAdie and indexer Alison Worthington for all their careful work.
The Tippexed and typed-over manuscript of my first book, twenty-two years ago, was thickened by literal ‘cut-and-paste’. There was no internet for civilians then – you researched in real libraries, posted letters and bought second-hand books in shops you actually visited. This new book, of course, also owes much to Abebooks, Google and Hotmail as well as other online resources like the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, available through my borough library service in Brent. Older institutions I am grateful to include the British Broadcasting Corporation, the National Archives at Kew and the Imperial War Museum in Lambeth, all of whose staffs try to keep the flame of public service flickering. On the private side, it is always a pleasure to prowl the battleship decks of the London Library in St James’s Square.
I started writing this book in one writers’ retreat and added the final licks of paint in another. I am grateful to Mrs Drue Heinz and the Trustees of Haw-thornden Castle in Scotland for the Fellowship that allowed me to stay there in the spring of 2004, and to the Committee of the Fondation Ledig-Rowohlt in Lausanne, Switzerland for inviting me and my wife, in the summer of 2008, to stay at the Château de Lavigny, which once belonged to a great German publisher and his English wife. These places have been small heavens of cool green in a hot and thirsty terrain.
Among those I have talked to in the last four years I am grateful to the following for their help and encouragement: Julia Abel-Smith, Dr Paul Adamthwaite, Oliver Bernard, Anne Bingaman, Hardy Blechman, Jasper Bouverie, Malcolm Brown, Jimmy Burns, Anne Chisholm, Felix Delmer for trusting me with some of his father Sefton Delmer’s papers and stories, Aaron Delwiche, Michael Diamond, Moris and Nina Farhi, Roger Fenby, Maggie Fergusson, Professor M. R. D. Foot, Harriett Gilbert, Henrietta Goodden, Professor Barbara Goodwin and her husband Michael Miller QC (my pal, who died before he could read this book), Stephen Gottlieb and Jane Dorner, Colin Grant, Dr Toby Haggith, Roger Hardy, Caroline Herbert, Susannah Herbert, Hesketh Prichard’s grandchildren (whose full names are in a tragically lost black Alwych notebook), Sally Higgin, Thaddeus Holt for his friendship and guidance (his own book, The Deceivers: Allied Military Deception in the Second World War, was a major resource), Richard Ingrams, Robert Irwin, the brilliant David Jones, P. J. Kavanagh, Dr Douglas Kerr of Hong Kong, Wesley Kerr, Dr Alan Knox, Julia Korner, Shen Litznaisky, Andrew Lycett, Andrew Lownie and Kate Macdonald for help with John Buchan, Hugh MacDougall for ‘jiggery-pokery’ and Merlin’s stone, Margaret Macmillan, Nicholas Mays, Glenn Mitchell for gallantly enduring a first draft, Caroline Moorehead, Ingo Niebel (bruder im geist), Bob O’Hara, Drs Andrew R. Parker and Robert Prys-Jones of the Natural History Museum, Hayden Peake, Lawrence Pollard, Timothy Prus, Tom Read, Michael Redley, Zina Rohan, John Ryle, Anthony Rudolf, Dan Shepherd, George Steer for his memories of Dudley Clarke and the loan of Kenyon Jones’s autobiography, James Taylor, Claire Tomalin, Nigel West, the late Sir Charles Wheeler, Dr Andrew Whiten, Hugh Whistler, Caroline and Malcolm Winterburn, and Patrick Wright, the son of my old Shrewsbury Headmaster. Forgive me if I have forgotten your name here. Of course, all errors are my own: ‘Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance’, as Dr Johnson explained.
Most of all I want to thank family. First, my dear siblings: Charles in Malvern, Sarah in Ipswich, Trina in Bury St Edmunds and my elder brother, John, for the long-term loan of Buchanalia and for our battlefield trips to France, to Crécy and Le Cateau, to Ypres an
d Dunkirk. I particularly wish to remember our late and always beloved great-aunt, Gwynneth Constance Stallard, an Englishwoman of the old school, who died in 2005 at the age of 103. Our grandfather, Colonel Geoffrey Page, was her only brother, and their ashes are scattered on the Ashdown Forest less than a mile away from the secret ‘Aspidistra’ site. Since Winston Churchill was her hero, it felt apt to write some of Churchill’s Wizards in her home, Gorse Cottage, where all our family found such happiness. I thank my lovely, witty daughter Rosa Rankin-Gee and, above all, her mother, my wife.
The author and the publisher are grateful to the following for use of copyright material. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders of material quoted in the text. The publisher would welcome the opportunity to rectify any omissions brought to their attention:
Citation of King George V’s personal diary (RA GV/PRIV/GVD/1917: 8 March) and the use of other material from the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle (RA PPTO/PP/WC/MAIN/NS/95) by the gracious permission of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
Extracts from Sir Winston Churchill’s letters, speeches and books, including My Early Life, Thoughts and Adventures, The World Crisis and The Second World War, are reproduced by permission of Curtis Brown Ltd, London on behalf of The Estate of Winston Churchill, © Winston S. Churchill.
Extracts from the BBC Handbook 1941 are reproduced by permission of the BBC Written Archives, Caversham; from Oliver Bernard’s Cock Sparrow, Oliver Bernard; from the writing of John Buchan, including The Thirty-Nine Steps, Greenmantle, Mr Standfast, The Three Hostages, Nelson’s History of the War, John Macnab and Memory-hold-the-Door, by A. P. Watt Ltd on behalf of Jean, Lady Tweedsmuir, and the Executors of the Estate of Lord Tweedsmuir; from Sefton Delmer’s autobiographies, Trail Sinister and Black Boomerang, by Felix Delmer; from Richard Dimbleby’s description of Belsen, by Jonathan Dimbleby; from the journalism of Sir Philip Gibbs, by Martin Gibbs and Frances McElwaine; from A. P. Herbert, by A. P. Watt Ltd on behalf of the Executors of the Estate of Jocelyn Herbert, M. T. Perkins and Polly M. V. R. Perkins; from Aubrey Herbert’s letters and Mons, Anzac and Kut, by Claudia FitzHerbert; from the script of Desert Victory, written by James Lansdale Hodson, by the Trustees of the Imperial War Museum, London; from Ted Kavanagh’s scripts for ITMA, by P. J. Kavanagh; from the letters of T. E. Lawrence, by the Seven Pillars of Wisdom Trust; from Gallipoli Memories by Compton Mackenzie, by the Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of his Estate; from The White Cliffs, by Pollinger Limited and the Estate of Alice Duer Miller; from the works of George Orwell, Animal Farm (Copyright © George Orwell, 1945), Patriots and Revolutionaries (Copyright © George Orwell), Notes on the Way (Copyright © George Orwell, 1940), A Review of The Thirties (Copyright © George Orwell), The Lion and the Unicorn (Copyright © George Orwell, 1941), by Bill Hamilton as the Literary Executor of the Estate of the Late Sonia Brownell Orwell and Secker & Warburg Ltd; from Roland Penrose, by A. P. Watt Ltd on behalf of the Executors of the Estate of the late Sir Roland Penrose; from copyright material by J. B. Priestley, by Peters, Fraser and Dunlop (www.pfd.co. uk) on behalf of the Estate of J. B. Priestley; for Crown Copyright material on early camouflage, by the Royal Engineers’ Library at Chatham; from ‘Joy-Riding at the Front’, by the Society of Authors, on behalf of the Bernard Shaw Estate; material © The Times 1917 & 1939, by News International Syndication and Times Newspapers; from The Letters of Evelyn Waugh © 1980, the Estate of Laura Waugh; from Put Out More Flags by Evelyn Waugh (first published by Chapman & Hall 1942, published Penguin Books 1943, reprinted with a new Introduction Penguin Classics 2000), copyright 1942 by Evelyn Waugh, by Penguin Books Ltd; from A Brush with Life, by Camilla Wilkinson and the Norman Wilkinson Estate.
Index
‘A’ Force: establishment, 1;
and Normandy landings, 1;
North African operations, 1, 2;
origins of name, 1;
and Sicily, 1;
spies in North Africa, 1
Abdulla (son of Sharif Hussein), 1, 2, 3, 4
Aboukir, HMS, 1
Abwehr: and Clamorgan’s crash, 1;
and GARBO, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;
and Monty’s double, 1;
and Normandy landings, 1, 2;
and snow, 1; and TRICYCLE, 2, 3
Adastral House, 1
Aden, 1, 2
aerial reconnaissance: Normandy landings, 1;
possibilities, 1;
WW1, 1, 2;
WW2, 1
Africa: British colonialism, 1;
interwar, 1, 2, 3;
WW1, 1, 2, 3; see also Ethiopia; North Africa
Agadir crisis (1911), 1
Aiken, Frank, 1
air power: Churchill on, 1;
WW1 air support, 1;
WW1 dogfights, 1;
WW1 reconnaissance, 1, 2;
see also Royal Air Force; Royal Flying Corps
air raids: ARP wardens, 1;
Blitz, 1, 2, 3;
British precautions and decoys, 1, 2, 3, 4;
on Germany, 1, 2;
navigation aids, 1
aircraft: British WW2 production, 1;
dummy, 1, 2, 3,
Plate 1;
Handley-Page bomber, 1
Aire: Special Works Park, 1
airfields: camouflaged and dummy, 1, 2;
K sites, 1;
Q sites, 1
airships 1, 2, 3, 4
Aitken, Max see Beaverbrook, Lord
al Faruki, Lt Muhammad Sharif, 1
Alanbrooke, Lord see Brooke, Gen Sir Alan
ALARIC network, 1, 2
Albert I, King of the Belgians, 1
Aldington, Richard, 1
Alexander, FM Harold: on Clarke, 1, 2;
and Dunkirk, 1;
in Far East, 1;
and MINCEMEAT, 1;
in North Africa and Middle East, 1, 2, 3;
on surprise, 1
Alexandra, Queen, 1
Alhama, 1
Ali (son of Sharif Hussein), 1, 2
Ali Dinar, Sultan, 1
Allenby, Gen Sir Edmund, 1, 2, 3, 4
Almasy, Laszlo, 1
Amery, Leo, 1
Amiens: Special Works Park, 1, 2
Anderson, Sir John, 1, 2
Anzacs: Dardanelles, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;
Western Front, 1
Arab Bureau, 1
Arab Revolt (WW1), 1, 2, 3
ARABEL see GARBO
Arandora Star, 1
arap Samoei, Koitalel, 1
Archer, Col Liam, 1
Archer, William, 1
Ariosto, 1
Armistice (WW1), 1
Arnold, Gen ‘Hap’, 1
ARP wardens, 1
artillery: and aerial reconnaissance, 1; camouflaged and dummy, 2, 3, 4, 5
artists: official war, 1
Aspidistra radio transmitter, 1, 2, 3, 4
Aspinall-Oglander, Col, 1
Asquith, Herbert, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Asquith, Margot, 1
Asquith, Raymond, 1
Astley, Joan Bright, 1, 2
Atlantic, Battle of the see U-boats
Atlantik sender, 1
Attlee, Clement, 1
Auchinleck, Gen Claude, 1, 2, 3, 4
Audah abu Tayi, Sheikh, 1
August Wilhelm, Prince, 1
Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1, 2
Auxiliary Units, 1
Ayrton, Tony, 1
Bagnold, Maj Ralph, 1
Baker, John, 1
Balchin, Nigel, 1
Baldwin, Stanley, 1
Balfour, Arthur, 1, 2
Balfour Declaration, 1
Balkans: Serbian hatred of Austro-Hungarians, 1;
WW2, 1
balloons: barrage, 1;
and leaflet dropping, 1;
observation, 1, 2
Barkas, Geoffrey: background, 1;
becomes camoufleur, 1;
in North Africa, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Barnes, Henry, 1
&
nbsp; Barrie, J. M., 1
Barrington, Jonah, 1
Bawden, Edward, 1
BBC: air-raid precautions, 1;
and Aspidistra transmitter, 1, 2;
Broadcasting House hit by bomb, 1;
Delmer on ethos and atmosphere, 1;
and Dimbleby’s Belsen report, 1;
propaganda broadcasts, 1, 2;
radio documentaries, 1;
and Radio Luxembourg, 1;
services for overseas, 1;
wartime control, 1;
working-class broadcasters, 1;
WW2 censorship, 1;
WW2 staff numbers, 1
Beaverbrook, Lord (Max Aitken): and Delmer, 1, 2, 3;
WW1, 1, 2, 3, 4;
WW2, 1
Beckett, John, 1
Beda Fomm, 1
Beddington, Col Frederick, 1
Beddington, Jack, 1
Bedouin, 1, 2, 3
Beersheba, 1, 2, 3
Beesly, Patrick, 1
Belgium: WW1, 1, 2, 3, 4;
WW2, 1, 2, 3, 4
Belgrave, Lt Col J. D., 1
Bennett, Arnold, 1, 2, 3
Bergonzoli, Gen, 1
Bernal, J. D., 1
Bernard, Oliver Percy, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Bernelle, Agnes, 1
Bernstorff, Count, 1
Best, Capt Sigismund Payne, 1
Bethmann-Hollweg, Theobald von, 1
Bevan, Lt Col John: after the war, 1;
background and character, 1;
becomes head of LCS, 1, 2;
and Normandy landings, 1, 2;
and Sicily, 1; and torch, 2
Beveridge, William, 1
Bevin, Ernest, 1
Bignold, Sir Arthur, 1
Bioy Casares, Adolfo, 1
Birdwood, Gen, 1
Birmingham, HMS, 1
Bissy, Capt De, 1
Blades, James, 1
Bletchley Park see Government Code and Cipher School
Bitz, 1, 2, 3
Bloch, Marc, 1
Churchill's Wizards Page 55
