Churchill's Wizards (24 page)

In September 1936, Lieutenant General John Dill, former director of Military Operations and Intelligence, was appointed to supreme command in Palestine. An additional division of British troops – 17,000 men – was sent out to help quell what the Colonial Office called a ‘campaign of violence' with which ‘the Arab leaders are attempting to influence the policy of His Majesty's Government'. Dudley Clarke became Dill's chief of staff at his HQ in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, and began working late through the night, with his back to the wall and a gun to hand. Guerrilla war sharpened his wits; he fitted a clip for an automatic pistol to the steering column of his Delage and always reversed the car into parking bays to get away quickly.

In September 1937, Clarke got a new master. John Dill was replaced as military commander of British troops by a man who knew Palestine well, Major General Archibald Wavell, the biographer of Allenby and friend of T. E. Lawrence, a craggy taciturn figure who never talked when he had nothing to say. Some found Wavell's silences excruciating, but Clarke coped. Their first dialogue was on a drive from Jerusalem to Haifa:

Unconventional soldiering ran in Wavell's family. His grandfather was a mercenary who fought with the Spanish in the Peninsular War and then against them in Chile and Mexico. Having seen the stupidity
of many of the tactics in WW1, Wavell liked the unorthodox thinking of people like J. F. C. Fuller, T. E. Lawrence and B. H. Liddell Hart, and wanted infantry who were ‘quick-footed' and ‘quick-minded'. For fourteen seasons, from 1926–39, with only a brief gap for his time in Palestine, Wavell trained British soldiers for war in annual field manoeuvres far from the barrack-room square, trying to simulate some of the real conditions of battle, including muddle, chaos and surprise. Bernard Fergusson, Wavell's first ADC, tells how ‘the Chief' encouraged daring guerrilla tactics in his exercises and used two different versions of the ‘haversack ruse'. In the first, he fooled a fellow brigade commander by planting a marked map covered with bogus dispositions. In the second, some years later, the same officer was commanding a rival division in manoeuvres. This time Wavell had a map made that showed his dispositions completely correctly, and gave it to a cavalryman with instructions to blunder into captivity and then pretend to destroy the map. Wavell was hoping that the officer would say to himself: ‘Old Archie's … forgotten that he played this one on me once before. The one thing that we can be sure of is that not one single disposition shown on this map is genuine.' Everything went according to plan; the officer lapped it up and took a horrible beating.

Soon after Wavell arrived in Palestine, the District Commissioner for Galilee was murdered by ‘Arab terrorists' in Nazareth. Wavell cracked down hard on the Arab Higher Committee, and several Arab leaders were deported to the Seychelles. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haji Amin el Husseini, chief of the extremists as well as the leader of the religious community, hid inside the temple area in the centre of the Old City, finally escaping to join the Nazis in Berlin on the ancient principle that ‘my enemy's enemy is my friend'. The anti-imperial struggle always had international dimensions: the Mufti left behind on his desk the Arabic translation of an IRA handbook about fighting the British.

One day, Wavell was en route to visit a military post when his car was flagged down by a British officer from his Intelligence staff. A ‘dark, fiery and eager' captain called Orde Wingate, having ambushed the commander on the highway, abruptly laid out his plan for dealing with the armed Arab gangs: armed Jewish gangs or Special Night Squads, trained, organised and led by British officers. Wavell gave Wingate the go-ahead to fight fire with fire. Dudley Clarke, meanwhile,
wrote a long, thoughtful appreciation, ‘Military Lessons Learned from the Arab Rebellion', which was circulated in the War Office.

In his introduction to Dudley Clarke's first book,
Seven Assignments
, Wavell wrote:

When WW2 got under way, and Wavell became commander-in-chief, Middle East, he encouraged the development of special forces and secret fraud by picking Orde Wingate for guerrilla war in Ethiopia and Dudley Clarke for strategic deception.

Sefton Delmer was the physical opposite of Dudley Clarke, a ‘huge, breezy and bearded' rogue well known to most of the secret circles of wartime London as Mr ‘Seldom Defter'. Denis Sefton Delmer, always ‘Tom' to his family and friends, was born to Australian parents on 24 May 1904, in Berlin, where his father Frederick Sefton Delmer was a ‘Herr Professor' of English at Berlin University. Although his Australian parentage gave him British nationality, the boy grew up speaking German at home and as a young man retained a slight German accent. ‘Tom' did not start speaking English until he was five, when his mother Mabel Hook took him on an eighteen-month trip to Australia while Frederick Delmer completed
English Literature: from
Beowulf to Bernard Shaw
(1911), which became the standard textbook for students in Germany.

From 1914–16, as the only English boy in a German school, the Friedrichs Werdersche Gymnasium, during ‘an orgy of war-hysteria', young Tom Delmer sometimes had to defend himself with his fists. But many Germans were kind when his father was interned for refusing to become a naturalised German. The landlord lowered the rent, former students repaid old loans, the dentist would not charge, and the school did not expel him as an enemy alien. Half a lifetime later, Tom paid back one kindness. Revisiting his old neighbourhood in the wrecked and ravaged Berlin of summer 1945, Delmer found himself back in his old schoolyard, now a hospital for lung patients, crunching over the gravel in his large British Army uniform and calling out the name of ‘Herr Harry Deglau'. When a frightened man in a bath chair
responded, Delmer was able to hand over a carton of Players' cigarettes and a block of precious chocolate to Harry Deglau, the boy who had saved him from a beating-up thirty years before when young Tom cheered the news of the Australian battleship
Sydney
sinking the German cruiser
Emden
.

Delmer's father was found not guilty of spying and let out of gaol in the spring of 1915. The family endured the starvation winter of 1916–17 and were finally allowed to leave Germany for Holland on 23 May 1917. Tom ate five rich ice creams in the refreshment room at Oldenzaal station and was promptly sick. Soon after his thirteenth birthday he redeemed himself by telling an intelligence officer at the British Consulate in Amsterdam just how many empty trains he had counted travelling east and how many full ones travelling west, confirming that Imperial Germany was switching forces to the Western Front – his first but not his last contact with the British secret services.

The refugee boy with odd clothes adjusted to new life (rowing, not cricket) at St Paul's School in Hammersmith in a London being bombed by Gotha aircraft from his old home in Germany. His father survived a quizzing about his loyalty by Admiral Reginald Hall of Naval Intelligence himself and went on to write articles for Lord Northcliffe's
Daily Mail
and
The Times
. Delmer did not see Germany again until after WW1, when he was nearly 17. He stepped off the Warsaw Express in Cologne to meet his father who was by then working in the Inter-Allied Commission of Control, monitoring Germany's compliance with the Versailles Treaty's demands for disarmament.

Young Tom was charmed by the Weimar Republic in the spring of 1921. Drinking wine in the sunshine beside the Rhine, watching wandering Hansels and Gretels, healthy youths with knapsacks on their backs and bosomy girls in flowered dirndl dresses, singing the songs that he knew from school in the warm, blossom-scented air, he knew that the Germans would never ever want to make war again. ‘All was peace, all was beauty.'
Nie wieder Krieg
. No more war. He would describe the decay of this hope in his 1972 book
Weimar
Germany
, a survey of the Weimar Republic from 1918 to 1933.

Delmer read German at Lincoln College, Oxford, just missing a first, but he spent many of his 1920s vacations in Germany, where he saw his happy adolescent dream shrivel. The subtitle of his book is
Democracy on Trial
, and from its opening page, in which the Social Democrat leader Friedrich Ebert makes a secret pact with the officer corps of the
Reichswehr
, the German Army, two days before the Armistice of 1918, Delmer argues that ‘Germany's democracy was … a democracy with a hole in its heart'. The penultimate illustration of his book is a John Heartfield collage showing three insects on an oak tree: Ebert the caterpillar, Hindenburg the chrysalis and Hitler the butterfly. Delmer thought German democracy was merely a bit of temporary camouflage to trick the Allies. ‘It would vanish when they vanished.' He also explored the cynical military pact between Germany and Russia. From 1924, Germans built weapons on Russian soil, and trained military personnel there; in exchange, the Russians got access to technical skills, new patents and manufacturing processes.

Dishonesty and self-delusion stalk the pages of
Weimar Germany
, crackpots, charlatans and Spartacist revolutionaries in a land of rampant inflation where just to buy a cabbage, your money was not counted but weighed. When inflation ended on 20 November 1923, one US dollar was worth 4,200,000,000,000 marks. But Delmer thought inflation was partly a matter of self-interest. Because the war debt was computed in marks, inflation freed Germany from its reparations; it was also something that could be blamed on the wicked Versailles Treaty, democracy and the Jews. Delmer describes how, after the mark stabilised in 1924, there was a five-year ‘golden' period of art and culture until the Wall Street Crash, but he also sees the work of Weimar artists like George Grosz and Otto Dix as documentary evidence of a rancid stew of resentment and thuggery.

After Sefton Delmer left Oxford in the summer of 1927, he was living with his parents in Berlin and preparing for the Foreign Office exams to become a British diplomat when the course of his life changed. His father was by now the ‘stringer' for various British and American newspapers, but had gone off on holiday leaving his son to hold the fort. When Tom got a tip-off from the porter of the Adlon hotel that Lord Beaverbrook had arrived, he immediately rang the owner of the
Daily Express
and offered his services. ‘Come and see me,' growled Churchill's friend Max in his rasping voice.

Lord Beaverbrook came accompanied by the novelist Arnold Bennett (who wrote a novel around Beaverbrook as a WW1 propagandist,
Lord Raingo
) and some aristocrats travelling in connection with a film-
project that never got made, cigar-chomping Valentine Castlerosse, Mrs Venetia Montagu and blonde, blue-eyed Lady Diana Cooper. Tom Delmer was slim, dark and tall – he stood six feet one in his socks – and made himself useful answering the telephone and chattering about the erotic and exotic Berlin nightlife. Later Castlerosse toured the transvestite night clubs, and Bennett asked to see some of the nudist and homosexual magazines young Delmer had mentioned. After Delmer's third trip to buy stacks of porn in Potsdamerplatz, he began to get strange looks from the woman at the news-stand. Delmer showed Lord Beaverbrook around Berlin and told him that the Germans were secretly rearming. When asked what he wanted to be, young Tom replied, ‘I want to be a newspaperman, sir.' He rewrote one of his stories at Lord Beaverbrook's dictation, and Beaverbrook's secretary phoned it through to the
Daily Express
with a message from the owner: ‘Tell the editor that I advise him to put it on the front page.' And so ‘D. Sefton Delmer' got his first byline and joined the
Daily
Express
, for whom, over the next thirty years, he would become a legendary foreign correspondent. Within a year, aged only 24, he was back in Germany running the paper's new Berlin bureau.

Berlin in the twenties was fun for a young reporter: a fount of good stories, violence and vice mixing ‘in a ferment of ultramodernism and get-rich-quick hysteria'. Delmer's sense of humour did not always go down well. When he turned up at a fancy-dress ball in a child's pickelhaube helmet, a toy sword and a popgun with a cork on a piece of string plugging the barrel, he was almost lynched for insulting the German army. And when he presented both weapons ‘in aid of your next war' he was forcibly ejected. But usually his fluent demotic German and enjoyment of wine, women and song made him liked everywhere, in high society, among the politicians, the rich, the bohemian, in bars and night clubs. Delmer distributed his visiting card to all the petrol-station men in Berlin, and paid them for tip-offs. The efficient German telephone system was the key to his scoops. He had phones in every room and could also put his calls through to whichever nightclub he was visiting so that he could dash off at short notice to the riot or murder scene.

Sefton Delmer witnessed first-hand the rise to power of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP). When he first saw Adolf Hitler speaking, in February 1929, in a small hall, Delmer walked out.
The man was obviously just another Weimar crank, denouncing oranges as foreign fruit and urging Germans to eat German food. But a year later, the NSDAP or Nazi party had expanded from twelve seats in the Reichstag to 107. When Delmer went again to see Hitler speak, he sat as close as he could, fascinated by the man's hypnotic staring blue eyes, popping out of his head as he worked himself into a fury. As Hitler shrieked and gestured, sweat poured off him and the dye from his cheap blue serge suit stained his wet collar a dirty purple colour. Delmer looked around at the comfortable middle-class audience: Hitler ‘stirred them into a state of aggressive exultation. It was frightening.' When Delmer neither sang nor gave the Nazi salute at the end, the man next to him wanted to knock him down: ‘Just you wait till after. We'll show you. We'll teach you.'