Churchill's Wizards (23 page)

Lord Northcliffe, rebuffed by Lloyd George, resigned on 12 November, the first full day of peace. His megalomania grew worse and tipped into paranoia. Poisoned by an infection in his teeth which affected his brain and then his heart, the greatest genius the British press has ever known went mad and his last weeks in the summer of 1922 were spent raving in a hutch on the roof of the Duke of Devonshire's house in Carlton Gardens.

As soon as WW1 ended, propaganda became a dirty word. Crewe House was shut down and cleared by Sir Campbell Stuart by 31 December 1918, and the government hurried to wash its hands of its own publicity machine. Lord Beaverbrook had resigned in October, with no one replacing him, and his Ministry of Information was the very first wartime Ministry to be completely closed down, also by the end of 1918.

The ‘liquidator' was John Buchan. He bequeathed the Art and Photography sections of the Ministry to the Imperial War Museum which would be established by Act of Parliament in 1920. As the nation rejoiced in victory, Buchan turned his attention to peacetime, and began lobbying for the release of 1,500 conscientious objectors who were still in prison.

Unlike so many others, John Buchan had not been damaged or
deranged by deception. At Christmas 1918, perhaps he remembered his hero Richard Hannay in
Greenmantle
, a disguised fugitive in Germany, spending Christmas 1915 in an enemy household:

The twin avatars of British strategic deception and black propaganda in WW2, Dudley Clarke and Sefton Delmer, were both men pulled between two worlds. Dudley Clarke was an artistic type, inventive and theatrical, who had to find an outlet for his creative ingenuity within the rigidities of the British army. Sefton Delmer was brought up in Germany. During the First World War he was the sole British pupil in his Berlin school; when his family moved to Britain, he became the only German-accented boy in a wartime English public school. Both men's lives were shaped by WW1.

Lieutenant Colonel Dudley Clarke, RA, the man who was to become the
éminence grise
of WW2 strategic deception, seemed a conventional enough colonel, with his left-parted hair brushed back from the widow's peak, and his courteous manner. He liked to appear in rooms, or disappear from them, silently, and his pale oval face, with quick glances from under drooping eyelids, gave him the disquieting look of a sardonic butler. ‘Sphinx-like' was how someone described the ivory mask quality of a man who became, in the words of his biographer David Mure, ‘the Compleat Military Jeeves', solving his masters' problems.

He was not eccentric, but he was original, and the distinction mattered in the conformist world of the British Army. He never married, did not like children, and was conventional in his prejudices and his romantic conservatism: he later wrote a WW2 history of an elite regiment, the 11th Hussars, which won more battle honours than any other cavalry or tank regiment. ‘Good old Dudley' was socially affable but quietly calculating. He said he always wanted to be ‘one of those in the inner circle, watching the wheels go round at the hub of the British Empire at some great moment of history', and he camouflaged his hard work in getting there as luck, hiding his ambition under amusing, self-deprecating stories of accidents and mistakes.

Clarke could charm senior officers brilliantly, but he also got things done. His intelligence was allied to an ingenious imagination and a photographic memory. He did his best work at night, and in public places always sat with his back to a wall. You would not notice him in a crowd and he was never famous, yet Field Marshal Harold Alexander believed that he did as much to win the war as any other single officer. He ended up as Brigadier Dudley Clarke, CB, CBE, the greatest British deceiver of WW2, a special kind of secret servant.

Born Dudley Wrangel Clarke in Johannesburg on 27 April 1899, (with a caul over his head), he was the eldest son of a Yorkshireman who had gone out to South Africa to make his fortune and came back to a permanent job in a gold-mining finance company in Pall Mall. In 1912, he began his three years at Charterhouse public school, described by one old boy, Osbert Lancaster, as ‘an extensive concentration camp in Early English Gothic'. It was not far from the military establishment at Aldershot where Dudley fell in love with the gorgeous full dress uniforms, glittering marching bands and jingling cavalry that had also appealed to the young Winston Churchill. Charterhouse was close to the flying base at Farnborough where the schoolboy made friends with the air mechanics of the Royal Engineers Balloon Section and the newly formed Royal Flying Corps.

The outbreak of the Great War in August 1914 found 15-year-old Dudley Clarke already in uniform, at his school's Officer Training Corps (OTC) camp in Staffordshire. Of the six boys in his tent, two would be killed in the war, one would lose a leg, and their sergeant instructor would die at Gallipoli. Dudley's father Ernest Clarke would be knighted for his voluntary war work organising motor ambulances for the Red Cross (having started out with eight, he ended up with 4,000.) Dudley's younger brother Tom, then aged 7, had a letter published in the
Daily Telegraph
in October 1914 describing how he had made little flags with the colours of the Allies and sold them to raise five shillings for ‘the poor Belgian refugees'. The proud father showed this around at a Red Cross committee meeting and soon the Red Cross were selling little flags and shaking collecting tins. In his autobiography,
This is where I came in
, Tom apologised for inflicting flag days on the world.

Unlike Dudley, Tom Clarke was a born civilian who dropped his rifle on parade in the OTC and slipped off from school to go racing at
Sandown Park; his favourite uncle was a chairman of the Magic Circle who could conjure half-crowns from ears. After a varied career, Dudley's brother T. E. B. Clarke took up screen-writing for Michael Balcon at Ealing Films and ended up as the Academy Award-winning writer of such great British films as
The Lavender Hill Mob, Passport
to Pimlico, The Blue Lamp
and
The Titfield Thunderbolt
.

Young Dudley shared his brother's creative imagination, which fuelled the inner man as he stamped about on parade grounds, curried in stables, box-wallahed in barracks. In February 1916, Dudley joined the Royal Horse Artillery and a month after his seventeenth birthday he was in the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, being taught to ride by tough sergeants. Commissioned second lieutenant in November 1916, he was too young to go to France with the British Expeditionary Force and applied to join the Royal Flying Corps.

On Monday, 5 November 1917, Dudley Clarke arrived at the School of Military Aeronautics in Reading with a huge valise with no handles that he called ‘the green elephant'. He was 18 years old, lively and full of himself, and keeping a diary. This shows that Dudley Clarke was already a precise man, exact about train times. But there is nothing about the war in the diary; instead he likes the glamour of showbiz. He is becoming a ‘stage-door Johnny', waiting outside for the Gaiety chorus and blown away by a Theatre Royal revival of a famous melodrama called
The Whip
which simulated the Derby with a real horse race on a revolving travelator. The first thing he noticed in Reading, apart from his thrilling first encounter with girls in uniforms astride motorcycles, ‘very dashing numbers', is the Hippodrome. That night he headed straight for the Reading Palace where he spent two shillings on the last seat in the house and watched Sharp's Tromboneers bring the house down with ‘Yaka Hula Hickey Dula' and Perry and his Pert Pianiste attempting to twinkle, though her front teeth were missing.

One night, unable to sample the joys of Reading for lack of cash, Dudley (who once edited a home newspaper called
Knutty Knews
and enjoyed his ‘brain waves'), amused himself in his room by ‘raising an apparatus composed of a bootlace, a lanyard and some straps off my valise, by which I am enabled to turn out the light without getting out of bed'. He showed the same ingenuity when he was posted to Egypt for seven months in 1918, setting up ‘The Problem Club', a series of
enjoyable challenges for other young airmen in Egypt who, like him, were saving money of an evening by not going out.

Clarke first flew solo in Egypt, in early July 1918. The flying hours of the training squadron at Suez were 4.30 a.m. to 10.30 a.m., and thereafter Clarke acquired his lifelong taste for swimming and sunbathing. He chewed Chiclet gum and read seven-penny novels in his tent, wearing a white cricket shirt and Charterhouse football shorts with no stockings, his chair a Nestlé's Milk crate and his desk made of Haig & Haig whisky boxes. He was still an aesthete, though; his tablecloth of pale blue silk matched his muslin curtains and bedspread, and he enjoyed others admiring his room and the hookah he had haggled for. After Clarke got his wings at No. 5 Fighting School, Heliopolis, he thought it ‘great fun' to go out and strafe Egyptian camels in the desert – much later he regretted such arrogance – and at the Armistice he watched the Cairo celebrations turn into a drunken riot of arson and looting.

There were two strands to Dudley Clarke's military career between the wars. One was active. In the absence of major conflict, ambitious soldiers like Clarke or the young Churchill who wanted to shine had to find interesting scrapes to get into. In 1920 Dudley Clarke was stationed in Mesopotamia, learning polo and pigsticking, when the four-month Iraqi uprising occurred. Clarke evacuated Europeans and cash boxes down the Tigris on a steamer, repelling potential boarders with small arms. In September 1922, he found himself on leave in Turkey, caught up in the Chanak crisis which ended Lloyd George's political career. As British occupying troops resisted the Turkish nationalist leader Mustafa Kemal's threat to take back Constantinople and the Dardanelles by force, Clarke's job was to feed scraps of false information into the ear of his landlord, a Kemalist spy. In late 1925, again on leave, Clarke went to Morocco to cover the French and Spanish suppression of Abdel Krim's Riff rebellion for the
Morning
Post
. (He found a publisher and joined the Society of Authors intending to write a book but, unlike Churchill, did not complete it.) In 1930 he joined the Transjordan Frontier Force and swaggered
about black-booted in
kalpak, kurtah
and cummerbund; he learned to ride a camel, chased Ikhwan marauders, and sat with the founder of the Arab Legion in Jordan, John Bagot Glubb, over coffee in the desert. However, Glubb Pasha, in his dark, four-button suit, stiff collar, tie and fedora, seemed to Clarke disappointingly like a character from H. G. Wells, with ‘none of the flamboyant fancy-dress favoured by Lawrence'.

The second strand of his early career was recreational. While stationed at the Royal Arsenal, Woolwich, in 1923, Dudley revived the pre-war Royal Artillery Officers' Dramatic Club. When General White asked him to take charge of the Royal Artillery display for the 1925 Royal Tournament at Olympia, Dudley came up with a grand pageant demonstrating 200 years of firepower and its transport, from Minden to the Marne. He talked to the circus proprietor Bertram Mills and costumier Willie Clarkson and set about hiring two elephants, two camels, sixteen oxen, eight Sikhs and fourteen of the biggest Nigerians he could find from the hundreds of black men who came to the audition. Dudley had a twelve-foot stock whip with a thirty-foot thong made at Swaine and Adeney, and used it to create a noisy and colourful half-hour show that ran twice daily for thirty performances, employing 37 guns, 300 animals and 680 men.

At the Staff College in Camberley in 1933–4, Dudley Clarke wrote and directed two Christmas pantomimes,
Alice in Blunderland
and
Al
Din and a Wonderful Ramp
, which played to appreciative full houses. In 1935, however, Clarke (by then Captain D. W. Clarke) put on another spectacle whose climax was so realistic that much of the audience fled. The Aden Silver Jubilee Display was performed to honour King George V at Holkat Bay in Aden, capital city of Yemen, on 6 May 1935. This was a time of growing tension in the region, because Mussolini was marshalling his Italian fascist forces to attack Haile Selassie's Ethiopia on the other side of the Red Sea. As a finale, the combined services presented ‘Invasion!' Dudley had roped in all the armed forces to simulate an attack. It started in darkness after the sounding of the Last Post. HMS
Penzance
and No. 8 Bomber Squadron RAF appeared as a hostile warship and aircraft, suddenly lit up by the searchlights of the Aden anti-aircraft section, shelling and strafing to cover enemy troops landing on the beach. The point of the show was meant to be that the valiant Aden Armoured Car section,
the Aden Protectorate Levies and the Aden Armed Police would drive the invaders back into the sea. But when the ship and the planes first appeared out of the darkness, someone yelled in Arabic ‘The Italians are here!' and the spectators took to their heels.

In February 1936, Clarke got the job he wanted: brigade major in Palestine. He bought a white two-seater 1929 Delage and shipped it to Port Said. In the Directorate of Military Operations he read a secret aide-memoire about Britain's military weaknesses. The tide was turning, though. On 3 March 1936 Stanley Baldwin's government issued a White Paper on Re-Armament, and the Army Estimates, published two days later, showed the fourth successive annual rise in defence spending, to £49 million from the low-point of £36 million in 1932.

In Gibraltar, Dudley Clarke visited his friend from the Staff College, fluent German-speaker Kenneth Strong (later Eisenhower's intelligence officer). After ‘interesting and revealing meetings at GHQ' in Cairo, Clarke drove his car from Egypt through the Mitla Pass to Jerusalem. In the twenty years since Allenby had walked through the Jaffa Gate, tensions in the Holy Land had been increasing. Britain now ruled the country under a Mandate from the League of Nations, but increased Jewish immigration, as advocated by the Balfour Declaration, was making the Arab inhabitants feel threatened, even though their own birth rates were high and they were in the majority. Anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish laws in Nazi Germany augmented Jewish immigration to Palestine.

In April 1936, the month the lid blew, Tony Simonds arrived in Jerusalem from Egypt with the simple order to ‘institute Military Intelligence'. In his autobiography,
Pieces of War
, Simonds says that intelligence was then abysmally low on the list of military priorities. Nor were the British in Palestine equipped for the outbreak of strikes, sabotage and Arab guerrilla warfare that ensued. The British armed forces consisted of two infantry brigades at Jerusalem and Haifa, commanded by Colonel Jack Evetts with only two staff officers, one of whom was Dudley Clarke. There was just one squadron of RAF planes and two troops of RAF armoured cars at Ramleh, as well as 500 British, 300 Jewish and 1,000 Arab Palestine police (who could not be trusted). They had to deal with a new kind of uprising in which hundreds got killed and over a thousand were wounded.

As senior operations staff officer, Clarke got the RAF and army
staffs working closely together, as they would do much later in Combined Operations. He sent an RAF wireless tender out with army convoys, so if they were attacked they could flash a signal and call in close air support to bomb or machine-gun the assailants. Clarke also saw that the regular army was too blunt an instrument to deal with the guerrillas, who had local support and could only be fought locally, by small units who would need good clear intelligence, which Simonds got from both Jewish sources and loyal Arabs.