Warfare has been partly about deception since the days of the Trojan Horse, but it seemed to reach its peak of sophistication during World War II. And, according to Robert Hutton in this well-researched and often entertaining book, the most knowledgeable person was Dudley Wrangel Clarke; Thanks to his influence on two senior generals (Wavell and Dill), he found himself responsible for the Army’s attempt to use fraud to make up for it. Due to overuse of its resources.
Clarke’s father was a gold miner in South Africa, where Dudley was born in 1899, at the beginning of the Boer War. (It was testament to his sense of humor that he had been in a war zone as a baby, for which conflict he asked to be rewarded with a campaign ribbon.) His younger brother TEB (“Tibby”) Clarke, Ealing Studios, eventually earned Passport to Pimlico, The Blue Lamp and the Lavender Hill Gang and Dudley shared his imagination skills.
He had joined the Army when he was old enough during the Great War, but to his disappointment and despite strenuous efforts, he never saw action. He managed to travel to Palestine in the 1930s, where he impressed his seniors not only with his courage as a soldier but also with his charm, intelligence and ability to think originally. When he managed to get out of France in 1940, Wavell, then commander in chief in the Middle East, summoned him to Cairo.
Over the next few years, Clarke perfected various methods of tricking the Germans (and, even more easily, the Italians) into thinking that the British would either attack when and where they were not, or not attack when and where they were. He established entirely fictitious military formations, including something called the Special Air Service, which was adopted more concretely elsewhere. He invented spies and double agents to spread false information about these non-existent divisions and battalions; and its star invention (designed by one of Clarke’s colleagues) was a man named Paul Nicosoff, who, as Hutton puts it, reflected one of the inventor’s main interests in life.
Clarke understood that there was a fine line between providing the enemy with information reliable enough to be taken seriously and enhance the reputation of the “agent” and information that would jeopardize Allied plans. He also saw that the “agent” would be meaningless if the information conveyed was consistently nonsensical. These balancing acts, under Clarke’s leadership, were executed superbly. In 1943, such deception led the Germans to flood the Balkans with troops as the British prepared to invade Sicily; and when the invasion of Sicily actually took place (in the southeast corner of the island), boats equipped with speakers pumping out human voices and gunshots circled the west of the island to fool the Italians into believing the invasion was coming. When the Italians could not find an occupation force, they thought they had won a great victory.
Spreading misinformation about potential troop movements resulted in the Wehrmacht keeping 300,000 men in Norway until the end of the war; in which case 100,000 would have been more than enough to repel any (unlikely) Allied attempt to liberate the country, and the rest could have gone to Norway. They are fighting to save Germany from destruction. And the greatest act of deception was that the Germans were first persuaded to believe that the invasion of France would take place in Pas-de-Calais, not Normandy, and continued to dream of a second invasion even after D-Day. An attack on Northern France was to be launched.
The central plot of the book is how Clarke, together with a group of capable and genial lieutenants (including, at different times, David Niven and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) managed to buy time, first for Auchinleck and then for Montgomery, before the tide turned. Victory at El Alamein.
But none of that may have happened, thanks to the most inexplicable event of Clarke’s career. Clarke, who appeared to be quite successful among the ladies, was arrested by police in neutral Spain while walking down the street dressed as a woman in Madrid.
Clarke tried to convince his detainees that he was a novelist and that he was wearing clothes for research purposes. However, he could not provide a satisfactory explanation to the British authorities, who managed to release him. He was about to be recalled to London to explain himself – he was a colonel and male officers of this or any other rank were not expected to go around in women’s clothing – when an emergency in the east caused him to be recalled to Cairo. The past is in the past.
As it was, Clarke was ready to deceive Rommel. The trucks were disguised as tanks; Large numbers of imitation wooden tanks were built to fool the Germans into believing they were facing a much stronger enemy than they actually were. Behind the fake tanks, behind the bars of Cairo, as if teeming with German spies, were units of fake men whose presence was claimed by the “agents”. This was a rare example of well-spoken, life-saving careless speech.
The Illusionist is published by W&N, priced at £25. To order your copy for £19.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit: Telegram Books