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A Genius for Deception.Pdf A Genius for Deception This page intentionally left blank A GENIUS FOR DECEPTION How Cunning Helped the British Win Two World Wars nicholas rankin 1 1 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2008 by Nicholas Rankin First published in Great Britain as Churchill’s Wizards: The British Genius for Deception, 1914–1945 in 2008 by Faber and Faber, Ltd. First published in the United States in 2009 by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rankin, Nicholas, 1950– A genius for deception : how cunning helped the British win two world wars / Nicholas Rankin. p. cm. — (Churchill’s wizards) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-538704-9 1. Deception (Military science)—History—20th century. 2. World War, 1914–1918—Deception—Great Britain. 3. World War, 1939–1945—Deception—Great Britain. 4. Strategy—History—20th century. I. Title. U167.5.D37R36 2009 940.4'8641—dc22 2009018155 135798642 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper This book is for my dearest darling wife of twenty-five years Maggie Gee who helped so much War has a way of masking the stage with scenery crudely daubed with fearsome apparitions. carl von clausewitz, On War War is a game that is played with a smile. If you can’t smile, grin. winston s. churchill, in the trenches near Ploegsteert ‘Then why have you been so hard to find?’ ‘Isn’t this what the twentieth century is all about?’ ‘What?’ ‘People go into hiding even when no one is looking for them.’ don delillo, White Noise There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact. mr sherlock holmes in The Boscombe Valley Mystery by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ᇶᇶᇶᇶᇶᇶᇷᇸᇸᇸᇸᇸᇸContents List of Illustrations ix Preface xi part i 1 The War of Nerves 3 2 The Nature of Camouflage 24 3 Engineering Opinion 34 4 Hiding and Sniping 49 5 Deception in the Dardanelles 60 6 Steel Trees 77 7 Guile and Guerrilla 94 8 The Twice-promised Land 109 9 A Dazzle of Zebras 125 10 Lying for Lloyd George 142 11 Deceivers Deceived 160 part ii 12 Wizards of WW2 177 13 Curtain Up 201 14 Winston Is Back 211 15 Hiding the Silver 226 16 A Great Blow Between the Eyes 233 17 Commando Dagger 246 18 British Resistance 254 19 Fire over England 278 20 Radio Propaganda 285 21 ‘A’ Force: North Africa 312 22 Impersonations 336 contents 23 The Garden of Forking Paths 353 24 The Hinge of Fate 360 25 Mincemeat 373 26 The Double 384 27 Overlord and Fortitude 392 28 V for Vergeltung 409 Epilogue 414 Source Notes 423 Author’s Note and Acknowledgements 441 Index 445 viii ᇶᇶᇶᇶᇶᇶᇷᇸᇸᇸᇸᇸᇸIllustrations 1 Winston Churchill in the British Army School of Camouflage’s training trenches in Kensington Gardens, 1917. © Imperial War Museum (IWM), London. Q95971. 2 Dummy dead German from the Camouflage School. © IWM, Q17688. 3 Australian troops carrying a wood and canvas dummy British Mark 1 Tank in France in 1917. © IWM E (Aus), 4938. 4 The legendary ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, Captain T. E. Lawrence, photographed in 1917. © IWM, Q59075. 5 Propaganda in war. The German execution by firing-squad of Nurse Edith Cavell used in a poster. © IWM, Q106364. 6 & 7 American 77th Division soldiers learning field camouflage at a British school for scouts, observers and snipers in France, May 1918. © IWM, Q10316 and Q10317. 8 Stacks of silhouette figures used in the fake or ‘Chinese’ attacks of trench warfare in France, May 1918. © IWM, Q95959. 9 A special studio set up by marine artist Norman Wilkinson at the Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, London, during WW1. © Norman Wilkinson Estate. 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. © IWM, Q68435. 11 1940: Prime Minister Winston Churchill inspecting coastal defences against Nazi invasion near Hartlepool. © IWM, H2639. 12 WW2 British Local Defence Volunteer emerging from cover, about to throw a bomb. © IWM, HU931. 13 1940: Adolf Hitler jigs for joy after signing the armistice at Compiègne. © IWM, NYF37082. 14 Cartoon from The Sketch, 10 September 1941. Courtesy of the ix illustrations Cartoon Museum, London; © Lawrence Pollinger Ltd, London. Reproduced with permission. 15 The ‘Prop-Shop’ at the Special Operations Executive’s Station XV in the Thatched Barn roadhouse near Elstree film-studios. 99© The National Archives, Richmond, Surrey. HS 7/49. 16 Dummy British aircraft at El-Adem airbase near Tobruk, part of an ‘A Force’ deception scheme in the Mediterranean. © The National Archives, CN 26/1. 17 Dummy landing craft moored in North Africa, purportedly for the invasion of Greece in 1943. © The National Archives, CN 26/1. 18 Dummy tank to fool German and Italian observers in North Africa in 1943. © IWM, MH20759. 19 Lt Col. David Stirling, founder of the SAS, with patrol commander Lt Edward McDonald (with Fairbairn Sykes Commando dagger) and Cpl Bill Kennedy. © IWM, E21339. 20 Lt Col. Dudley Clarke, head of ‘A Force’ in Cairo and Britain’s top deceiver, in drag in Madrid in October 1941. Churchill Papers, CHAR 20/25/52. © Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge. 21 Fluent German-speaking Daily Express journalist Sefton Delmer, the maestro of British ‘black’ propaganda. Reproduced by permission of Felix Delmer. 22 The genuine corpse of ‘The Man Who Never Was’, before shipping by submarine to Spain in April 1943. © The National Archives, WO 106/5921. 23 A still from the film I Was Monty’s Double. © IWM, HU47556. 24 Barcelona-born Juan Pujol García, the most successful double agent of WW2. © The National Archives, KV 2/70. 25 Juan Pujol’s crucial message as received by teleprinter at German HQ on 9 June 1944. © The National Archives. 26 Prime Minister Winston Churchill sets foot on liberated France on 12 June 1944, six days after D-Day. © IWM, B5357. x ᇶᇶᇶᇶᇶᇶᇷᇸᇸᇸᇸᇸᇸPreface The British enjoy deceiving their enemies. When the Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz defined war in 1833 as ‘those acts of force to compel our enemy to do our will’, he missed out the dimension that the British political philosopher Thomas Hobbes had spotted nearly two centuries earlier: ‘Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.’ Sir Alan Lascelles called Winston Churchill ‘the Arch-Mountebank’ and he certainly had a penchant for display. No other British twentieth- century politician was photographed in so many different kinds of headgear as Churchill: whether in boater, bowler, cocked hat, flying helmet, homburg, peaked cap, sombrero, sola topi, sou’wester, Stetson, topper or Tommy’s tin hat, he always dressed the part. Acting is a long-established area of British talent. ‘The British like to pretend,’ observes a former US Ambassador, Raymond Seitz. ‘They seem to prize few things so much as a good performance.’ And the theatre director Richard Eyre notes the national ‘love of ritual, procession . and dressing-up’. ‘On the surface they are so open,’ writes novelist Geoffrey Household of his countrymen, ‘and yet so naturally and unconsciously secretive about anything which is of real importance to them.’ British self-deprecation, wit and irony are also forms of concealment. The British do not say what they mean, or mean what they say, and often mask seriousness with jokes as a cover for shyness or sentiment. Jorge Luis Borges says of Herbert Ashe in Ficciones: ‘He suffered from unreality, like so many of the British.’ On 10 February 1910, a party of six well-bred young people conned their way on to the flagship of the Royal Navy’s Home Fleet, HMS Dreadnought, by impersonating the Emperor of Abyssinia and his suite. A guard of honour met the train at Weymouth, and an admiral and a commander showed them over the ship. Among these xi preface impostors was a ‘Prince Mendax’, blacked up and false-bearded by the famous theatrical costumier Willie Clarkson of Wardour Street, and complete with turban, caftan and heavy gold chain. Prince Mendax was in fact the future modernist novelist and literary heroine Virginia Woolf. It was a good hoax to play on the Royal Navy that sustained the British Empire at its height. But aristocratic bluff was also a deceptive performance skill that helped the people of a small island nation to rule a vast worldwide empire. Of course, military deception (MILDEC), which the US Joint Chiefs define as ‘actions executed to deliberately mislead adversary decision makers as to friendly military capabilities, intentions and operations’, has been used all over the world. In China 2,400 years ago, Sun Tzu said in The Art of War that ‘All warfare is based on deception’. The hadith or proverb, ‘al-harb khuda’, attributed to the Prophet Muhammad – peace be upon him – also means ‘war is deception’. The famous stratagem that toppled Troy was the Greek gift of a wooden horse – with a special force, including the wily Odysseus, hidden inside.
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