The briefing officer produced copies of the Official Secrets Act and told them they had all to sign one. Now was the time for anyone to ask to be posted back to his old squadron. No one moved. He then told them that they would eventually be carrying agents who were now being trained for their missions. The briefing concluded with the officer saying the flying skills would be constantly tested; those who failed would be posted back to their squadrons. Only the best would fly with 138 Squadron. They would have a month to turn into competent Special Duties Lysander pilots.
That night in the officers’ bar those who had arrived at Newmarket as strangers to each other began to bond. They came from all over Britain, a cross section of men from the coal mining villages of Wales, a farmer’s son, and graduates of Britain’s public school system.
The following night under a waxing moon, they began an endless round of night flying at low altitude in the Lysanders over darkened villages, scattering cows in the process as they swooped over hedges to land in a field and then take off in seconds. Night after night over southern England, the pilots learned to find their way to an assigned field on their maps, where an SOE instructor waited with a flashlight to guide them down, noted their landing skills, and the speed with which the Lysander took off again. Back at the airfield their abilities were evaluated. They were given more road maps to study, by which they would navigate. Their Lysanders had been painted matte black to make them invisible at night. A ladder had been added on the port side to allow a passenger to climb in and out.
The training flights were extended over the hills of Wales where RAF aircraft, acting as German night fighters, sought the Lysanders. The pilots had to fly low enough to prevent the fighters from getting into a position to attack them. Back at the base there were more lectures and, this time, road maps of Europe to study. They were told those would be their flight paths to the fields where reception committees of the Resistance would be waiting with their signal lights. They were also told they would be called the Moon Squadron pilots.
Meanwhile the air minister’s surveyors had settled on an area where the SOE airfield would be built. It was close to the borders of Cambridgeshire and Bedfordshire and about fifty miles north of London. There were few agricultural communities, the largest being the village of Tempsford, and the chosen site was Gibraltar Farm, named after Britain’s victory in the Napoleonic Wars. The ground was flat and the soil free of rocks or stones; the surveyors agreed it was the ideal spot on which to build the airfield. On their maps it was classified to be built to “RAF Class ‘A’ Standard.”
Excavators, plows, and steamrollers began work. Draftsmen swarmed over the site marking out foundations and runways. Linemen maneuvered huge cable drums to connect lines. Work gangs uprooted trees and grubbed up acres of bushes and stacked them in huge piles to burn. Day and night, smoke drifted across the countryside, forcing the housewives of Tempsford not to hang their washing outside. No one complained. The site work had brought a new prosperity to the village shop, post office, and its two pubs. Villagers dug up their flower beds to grow vegetables that were sold to the field kitchens that fed the workmen on the site.
As building progressed, Churchill issued an order that the airfield must be disguised to resemble anything but an airfield. He cited the words of Carl von Clausewitz: “War has a way of masking the stage with scenery.” The prime minister added: “There is no better man to do that than Maskelyne.”
For sixty-five years the Maskelyne family had played to packed houses in their own theater on Regent Street in London’s West End. Jasper Maskelyne had been born into the world of illusions.
His own childhood had been spent in the workshop beneath the stage, learning such tricks as how his father made an assistant sealed inside a cabinet vanish only to appear flying across the stage into the wings. His father had told him that by using imagery and proper equipment he could create any illusion. Jasper was nine when his father founded the Magic Circle, an elite organization to protect the family’s secrets. At the age of ten, in his top hat and tails, Jasper gave his first Royal Command Performance for the king. Winston Churchill was in the audience. Since then Churchill had made frequent visits to the family theater with its billboard announcing MASKELYNE’S MAGIC MYSTERIES. Photos of Jasper and his father were in the lobby. After his father died in 1926, Jasper carried on topping the bill. Six feet four inches tall, with jet-black hair, a trim mustache, a handsome cleft in his chin, and deep-set dark green eyes, he was a dashing figure, with film star good looks.
In 1935 movie tycoon Alexander Korda built Denham Studios in Buckinghamshire and ran it with a style matching any Hollywood mogul. One of the first films the studio made starred Jasper as a detective using magic to solve crimes.
The war clouds deepened over Europe. First Poland, then Norway and the Low Countries fell to the Nazi blitzkrieg, followed by the French government surrendering and the Chamberlain government resigning in London to be replaced by Churchill. Luftwaffe bombers roared across the Channel, and the first bombs fell on London. Jasper became preoccupied with one thought: Would it be possible to adapt the power of magic to defend Britain?
He shared the thought with the one person he loved and trusted, Evelyn Enid Mary, his wife. She had been his stage assistant since 1924, spending her evenings arriving on stage on a motorcycle, which he made to disappear with her into a Chinese cabinet; she’d suddenly reappear at the back of the auditorium to ride her motorcycle back onto the stage. Over dinner one night Mary had suggested that he should devise an illusion in which Hitler suddenly disappeared. Shortly after war had broken out she had once more driven her motorcycle onto the stage, carrying a stuffed eagle. Jasper had sent the bird flying across the stage, clutching in its talons a dummy of Hitler before dropping it into what appeared to be the English Channel. The audience rose to their feet and cheered.
Next day Jasper received a hand-delivered letter asking him to come to the Ministry of Economic Warfare to meet Professor Frederick Alexander Lindemann, Churchill’s advisor on scientific matters. Lindemann wasted no time in saying the prime minister had asked him to see if Jasper could create more “tricks which would be a valuable asset to the war effort.”
Dressed in his finest suit, Jasper sat in Lindemann’s office and spoke with the certainty he had rehearsed with Mary the previous evening. The couple had discussed his ideas about bringing stage magic to the battlefield. “If I can stand in the focus of powerful footlights and deceive an audience on the other side of the orchestra pit, I can fool German pilots 15,000 feet above us in the air or Hitler’s soldiers miles away on land.”
Lindemann considered what Jasper told him. To deceive an audience in a theater under prepared conditions would be quite a different trick from fooling the Nazi war machine. What would Maskelyne propose to do?
Lindemann took notes as Jasper spoke. “There are no limits to the effects I can produce. I can create cannons where they don’t exist and make ghost ships sail the seas. I can put an entire army into the field when there is not a soldier there.”
Lindemann sat back in his desk chair and smiled. “Tell me more.”
The illusionist would recall, “I told him autosuggestion is the key to magic. It is not different from the scientific principles of deception when creating military camouflage. What I do is the fulfilment of creating carefully planned expectation. The Nazis will see guns where they don’t expect to see guns and tanks where there will be none. It’s delusion. Illusion creating delusion.”
Lindemann came to a decision. “Right now we need something new to show the Germans that we have a few surprises up our sleeves,” he said.
Lindemann handed Jasper a copy of the Official Secrets Act, told him to read and sign it, and said he would be commissioned into the army with a rank of a captain attached to the War Office Camouflage Development and Training Centre at Farnham Castle near Aldershot in Surrey. There he would demonstrate an illusion of his choice to a senior officer at the War Office.
In the following days, Jasper collected his officer’s uniform, went to an enlistment center, and swore to defend Crown and country. Afterward he went to the workshop below the theater stage to design the illusion he intended to demonstrate at Farnham Castle. Lindemann had told him that it would be observed by Lord Gort, commander in chief of the army. After spending days designing and testing every part of the illusion, Jasper was satisfied it would convince even the sharpest military eye.
He arrived at the castle in an army truck carrying his equipment and one of his stagehands to help rig the illusion. After walking the castle grounds, he chose a natural depression through which ran a stream. Helped by the stagehand, Jasper carefully positioned the pieces of mirror glass he had cut at various distances from the water so that viewed from a distance the stream appeared to be wider and more like a river.
He and his assistant began to place cutout stage props on the stream bank depicting the Thames running past the East End of London, Big Ben, and the Houses of Parliament. The reflection from the glass gave an impression of buildings lining the river banks. Finally they carried from the truck the model that would be the centerpiece of the illusion and placed it on the water. It was the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee. It was operated by a windup mechanism attached to a small clock that allowed its guns to turn and fire puffs of smoke. The effect was of the battleship in action on the Thames in the center of London. The farther from the stream they moved, Jasper and the stagehand saw, the more realistic the illusion became. Jasper reset the mechanism and hurried back to the castle. The stagehand crouched in the depression, ready to retrieve the model and the props.
Jasper joined Lord Gort at his vantage point in the castle as he scanned the grounds with his binoculars and asked what he was looking for. Jasper said he hoped it would be a surprise. Gort grunted and turned back to scanning. Suddenly he stopped. “My word,” he whispered.
Jasper would recall, “Lord Gort lowered his glasses and stared at me. ‘That’s the Graf Spee sailing down the Thames. There is no river anywhere near here,’ he said. I politely told him there was a stream. He looked at me, shaking his head, and said it was one mighty trick.”
Over dinner Lord Gort questioned Jasper as to whether there was anything he could not do. The response was a polite head shake.
Gort poured them another drink and asked Jasper if he could disguise an airfield so the Luftwaffe wouldn’t spot it from the air.
That was no problem for Jasper. That evening he was given a set of the surveyor’s blueprints of the airfield that had been chosen for the SOE, which was now known as RAF Tempsford.
He spent six weeks there supervising a team of film set builders from Denham Studios. Roof slates were removed from Gibraltar Farm buildings so they would look derelict from the air; rainproof canvas protected the rooms below. Weatherboarding was stripped from sheds; windows were left without glass, with outdoor doors swinging on their hinges. Other buildings were expertly painted to give the impression that their walls were covered with mildew and cobwebs. Nissen huts were given thatched roofs to look like cow barns. Other huts had the appearance of abandoned pig stalls. Hangars and barracks were camouflaged to give them the look of old haylofts from the air. In various parts of the farm, Maskelyne placed pieces of old farm machinery: a plow, a couple of tractors, and a hay cart.
Particular attention was given to the farmhouse. It was to be the airfield’s nerve center. While the outside would appear as run-down as the other buildings, the inside would have an operation room linked to the SOE headquarters. The barn behind the house would be the departure waiting room for agents going on missions. It, too, was given a shabby exterior and a pond occupied by a few ducks.
Maskelyne spent considerable time deciding how to conceal the two runways. Finally he ordered that they should be painted black. He then added patches of green and brown paint to resemble clumps of grass on the tarmac.
When finished, the runways looked like hedges of brambles and weeds. To complete the illusion, farm gates were painted on the runways to give the impression of access to the adjoining field where cattle would graze. An old shed was erected close to the illusion to complete the camouflage. At night, when missions would take place, the cows would be herded inside.
The work complete, Gubbins asked the Air Ministry to send a plane to overfly the base. A photo analyst interpreted the aerial pictures as depicting a “not very active farm.”
4
Slipping into the Shadows
IN WASHINGTON, DONOVAN HAD set up his Office of the Coordinator of Information, COI, with $450,000 from Roosevelt’s secret fund. He had created it after Churchill had told him about the British Treasury fund for MI6 and MI5. “It’s their no questions asked money box,” the prime minister said.
Having decided his post as COI would require his full attention, Donovan divided his law practice clients between his senior partners, but he took his secretary with him. Eloise Page had managed his office diary, booked his luncheon appointments, and organized his travel plans in her soft southern accent. Five years had passed since she had graduated from the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, where she had learned typing and shorthand.
Donovan was her first and only employer. After a short interview and a typing test, which consisted of him dictating a page of a legal document and checking it, he had given her the job. It came with a generous salary, birthday and Christmas bonuses—and learning to cope with his moods and standing up to his Irish temper. Bringing her with him to the Office of the COI as his executive secretary, he told her, “Better salary, more glamour, more interesting work.”
Her first task in the COI’s temporary office in the Apex Building near the White House was to contact the list of names Donovan told her would be the nucleus of his staff. They included journalists and broadcasters who could gather and analyze information from all over the world. Others were lawyers he had met in the courts of New York and Washington who would summarize the latest government reports. Some names she recognized from their visits to his law office. One was David Bruce, a lawyer who had told her he had been in London and had watched RAF fighters dueling with the Luftwaffe over the cliffs of Dover in August 1940, a curtain-raiser for the London Blitz. Next to his name Donovan had scribbled INTELLIGENCE ANALYSIS. Eventually Bruce would become Donovan’s station chief in London.
Edward Buxton, who had served in the Great War with Donovan, was marked down to be an assistant director to organize a unit to interview “friendly foreigners arriving in Washington with useful information.”
One name on the list particularly impressed Eloise Page: Marine Captain James Roosevelt, the president’s son. He would become Donovan’s can-do fixer in Washington. Soon his brusque demands could be heard in government offices from dawn to dusk: “COI needs it now not today.”
In the meantime Donovan had persuaded the navy department to loan him its latest Buick sedan and to install a shortwave radio, which allowed him to make calls while driving. He used it to talk to his staff in what was now COI’s new headquarters on E Street NW. The three-story building was fronted by impressive granite columns and had housed the Public Health Service.
Throughout the summer of 1941, Donovan’s organization became the talk of Washington. More than one newspaper columnist speculated why he could walk into the White House to see FDR at all hours. The Washington Star began to run a comic strip, The Exciting Adventures of Wild Bill Donovan, which became breakfast table must-read in Georgetown homes. When Secretary of State Cordell Hull sniffed at the strip, the president told him, “Bill is doing a good job.”
Donovan had also come to the attention of General Friedrich von Boetticher, the military attaché at the German embassy in Washington. Of average height, blond, heavyset, and genial, Boetticher was fifty-eight years old when the war started, and in Berlin he was seen as one of the most important of the forty-three military, naval, and air attachés serving the Third Reich in thirty countries.
Boett
icher had at his command the German consuls in America who eagerly performed the task he set them of obtaining military intelligence. In New York there was Eduard Kurtz, Erich Windels in Philadelphia, Georg Krause-Wichmann in Chicago, Karl Kapp in Cleveland, and Georg Gyssling in Los Angeles. All clipped local newspaper stories on political, cultural, and military affairs. Boetticher would often receive a hundred cuttings in a day. He would compile the information into reports that he would transmit by cable or send in the embassy’s diplomatic bag by air, depending on how important he judged the information to be for the Foreign Office in Berlin. At Wilhelmstrasse 76, at desks in the political or commercial branches, these reports were read by diplomats looking to shape the future foreign policy of Germany. Many were passed on to Adolf Hitler, and Boetticher knew that his reports were among those read by the führer.
He not only used the printed sources from consuls about America’s military forces but also received information in response to questions he put to government departments. He attended maneuvers and parades and military lectures. The State Department also regarded him as one of the most important military attachés in Washington.
His post gave him a comfortable house, a housekeeper, and a cook to host dinner parties in return for invitations to important social engagements. He became a guest at parties at the White House, State Department, and other government departments. His social calendar had given him contact with General Douglas MacArthur and General George C. Marshal, enabling him to tap into their rich sources of information.
Boetticher had taken up his appointment in 1936, when MacArthur was still the only four-star general, on a salary of $10,000 a year and had the exclusive use of the army’s only limousine. Major Dwight Eisenhower, his aide, received $3,000 and acted as the army’s lobbyist in Congress.
Shadow Warriors of World War II Page 8
