Churchill's Wizards: The British Genius for Deception

Kyt · Oct 4, 2008

Now this does look like a fun book to read

Review: Churchill's Wizards by Nicholas Rankin | Books | The Guardian

The use of deception in warfare is at least as old as the Trojan horse. According to Nicholas Rankin, however, the British developed a rare gift for it during the two world wars. Churchill himself provided an inspiring example. He loved cloak-and-dagger exploits and butcher-and-bolt tactics. He was fascinated by cryptography and military wizardry, championing everything from tanks to artificial harbours. He promoted unorthodox figures who excelled in the crucial fields of camouflage, propaganda, secret intelligence and special forces operations. And he lived up to his famous declaration that in wartime the truth should be protected by "a bodyguard of lies".

As Rankin shows in this entertaining book, Germany suffered defeats in both conflicts at the hands of "General Bluff" - Hitler's term. While TE Lawrence's guerrillas tore at the Turkish flanks, Allenby masked his final thrust in Palestine with a sham force complete with "dummy camps, dummy horses and dummy troops". On the western front the artist and camouflage expert SJ Solomon planted steel observation posts disguised as trees. Ships were made more visible not less, painted with garish stripes, curves and zigzags to break up their shape and confuse U-boats about their course. Meanwhile Lord Northcliffe demoralised Germans with the new weapon of propaganda, which they compared to poison gas.

It became more toxic during the second world war. Then Lord Beaverbrook's star reporter Sefton Delmer (known as Seldom Defter) disseminated "black" propaganda from a powerful radio transmitter nicknamed the "Dreadnought of the Ether". Pretending to be a rogue German station, and assisted with detailed information gleaned from POWs, it could dupe its listeners in ways that "white" (ie official) British propaganda could not. Delmer sowed subversion and gained large audiences by "exposing" the sexual peccadillos of the corrupt Nazi elite. A shocked Sir Stafford Cripps said that if this sort of filth was "needed to win the war, I'd rather lose it".

Rankin's other great hero is Colonel Dudley Clarke, who devised a whole series of ruses to con the enemy, the most celebrated of which was the creation of Monty's double. Shortly before D-day this lookalike appeared in the Mediterranean to distract the Germans' attention from the Channel. Clarke specialised in summoning up phantom armies. None was more vital than General Patton's in south-east England, which aimed to convince Hitler that the Allied invasion was headed for Calais. The illusion was maintained by means of phoney signals traffic, bogus supply dumps, cardboard tanks, plywood aeroplanes and canvas landing craft. There were even genuine royal visits.

While Rankin covers acres of familiar ground, he vividly illustrates the courage and ingenuity of those fighting the secret war against Germany. They won important victories, especially in areas such as codebreaking and electronic beam-bending. But did the British really have a genius for deception? Rankin undermines his own subtitle by revealing how the deceivers themselves were deceived. Solomon, for example, became convinced that the Germans had constructed field-sized hangars to conceal their armies behind the trenches. He badgered the top brass with this theory, pointing to suggestive shadows in aerial photographs, but it turned out to be a delusion.

Dudley Clarke's scheme to make the Italians believe that Wavell intended to retake British Somaliland in 1940 backfired completely. Far from reinforcing their position, they retreated into Eritrea, which was the real British target. The following year, moreover, Clarke discredited himself by being arrested in Madrid wearing women's clothes. When released he persuaded his superiors that he had adopted this costume to carry out a secret mission in neutral Spain. But Rankin, who hails Clarke as a genius, plausibly surmises that he was also a transvestite.

Alternatively Clarke may have been a frustrated thespian, like many who inhabited the world of espionage. But Rankin does not acknowledge that this world was (and is) a magnet for frauds and fantasists, from Robert Baden-Powell and Sidney Reilly, via Richard Meinertzhagen and TE Lawrence, to Guy Burgess and Peter Wright. Such agents sometimes misled their masters for the sake of cash or kudos, sometimes confused themselves by succumbing to the allure of Buchanesque romance and adventure.

Churchill himself had a weakness for flamboyant charlatans and he indulged the likes of Lawrence, Orde Wingate and Mountbatten. He was so keen to make the Germans bleed and burn that he forgot the 18th-century lesson that commando raids on the continent, however gallant, were usually a matter of "breaking windows with guineas". He was dedicated to scientific warfare but stimulated by Wellsian science fiction. He placed inordinate faith in boffins, whose experimental weapons often failed to work. Some of these "funnies" were as much of a danger to friends as foes, particularly the huge, destructive rocket-propelled wheel known as the "Great Panjandrum".

Rankin describes many measures taken to baffle the enemy but he doesn't always indicate how flawed they were. Q-ships, decoy vessels with hidden guns designed to sink submarines, were much less effective than mines. The removal of road signs caused such chaos on the home front - drivers had to navigate with maps and compasses, even by the stars - that they had to be put back. Rankin does note that the Luftwaffe once paid tribute to a dummy railhead in Egypt by dropping a wooden bomb on it. He also points out that British propaganda boomeranged on its inventors. It helped, for instance, to substantiate the myth that Germany was not defeated but stabbed in the back during the first world war.

But Rankin evidently thinks that, before the Bush/Blair Iraq war, official deception was intended to fool the enemy and not "our own people". This is a mistake. Atrocity stories fabricated by British intelligence, such as the 1917 report about the German factory for turning corpses into soap, were designed to whip up hatred for the Hun here. The exposure of this lie made it hard to tell, or to believe, the truth about Nazi concentration camps. Mendacity blurred reality. If the British lacked a genius for deception, perhaps they possessed a talent for muddle.
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Amazon.co.uk: Churchill's Wizards: The British Genius for Deception, 1914-1945: Nicholas Rankin: Books

spidge · Oct 4, 2008

They certainly had more wins than losses.

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Churchill's Wizards: The British Genius for Deception

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