Churchill's Wizards (29 page)

Later, snow was allowed to travel to Belgium with his new radical Welsh Nationalist colleague ‘G. W.' (a retired police inspector called Gwilym Williams) to meet his Abwehr controller, Major Nikolaus Ritter. From this expedition, MI5 learned the whereabouts of three more spies, what military and naval matters the Germans were interested in, their sabotage techniques and plans, and their secret communications via postage stamps and microdots. Most important of all, the RSS's monitoring of snow's German wireless control station led in April 1940 to the first breaking of the Abwehr codes. The decrypts of Abwehr signals that circulated among the secret services became known as Illicit (or Intelligence) Series Oliver Strachey (ISOS), after the section head at Bletchley Park, brother of Lytton Strachey, who had been breaking codes, including Japanese ones, since WW1.

Reading German intelligence signals enabled MI5 to arrest twenty of the twenty-one German spies who arrived in Britain by parachute, small boat, seaplane and U-boat between September and November 1940. (The twenty-first ran out of food and money and shot himself in despair in an air-raid shelter in Cambridge.) Twelve of the spies were interned for the duration of the war, five were executed and three became ‘double agents' for Tar Robertson and his section, B1A. This meant they would continue to work for, and be paid by, the Germans, but all their reports and movements were carefully controlled by the British. Some volunteered to do this, others ‘were volunteered' by the prospect of a grim alternative. Thanks to the breakthroughs from snow, the British Security Service controlled all German spies in Britain during WW2, knowing exactly who they all were and when and where new ones arrived. Moreover, by supplying
all the information the spies communicated to Germany, Britain gained many opportunities for deceiving the enemy.
*

After a row between MI6 and MI5 about who had jurisdiction and control over these channels, a coordinating committee evolved to make sure that credibility was maintained and wires did not get crossed. The initial W or Wireless Board, chaired by Admiral John Godfrey, brought together the heads of all the intelligence services. Later this task was devolved to a lower level organisation. Named officially the Twenty Committee and known colloquially as the Twenty Club, it was really the ‘Double Cross Committee', since the Roman numeral for 20 is XX. The Double Cross Committee first met at Wormwood Scrubs prison on 2 January 1941 and then every Wednesday for the next four years and four months that the war in Europe lasted.

Naval Intelligence's usual representative on the XX Committee was a Jewish barrister, Lieutenant Commander Ewen Montagu, RNVR, the son-in-law of Solomon J. Solomon. The day before the first XX meeting, Montagu had been seen, in uniform, drinking and chatting about yachts with a smooth-looking man in the American bar of London's Savoy hotel. This was a Yugoslav called Dusko Popov who, after twelve days in England being questioned and checked out by MI5 and MI6, was on the eve of flying back on the first of many regular trips to Lisbon to meet his Abwehr controller, who went under the name Ludovico von Karsthoff. In the Savoy bar, Montagu gave Popov a friendly letter that he could show as proof of their acquaintance. Every detail of what they talked about would be passed on, because Dusko Popov was starting his career as one of the most successful double agents of the war, code-named tricycle by the British, and ivan by the Germans. He fed false information to the Germans and brought back true intelligence on German rocketry and strategy.

Both German and British scientists had been working with invisible electromagnetic radio waves. British boffins, led by Robert Watson Watt, had been developing ‘radiolocation' since 1935, bouncing radio pulses back and using the blips to locate the range, height and bearing of approaching enemy aircraft. When the Home Chain of Radio Direction Finding aerials was linked to the RAF Ground Control Interception system, it helped win the Battle of Britain in 1940. Radar (RAdio Direction And Ranging) equipment fitted in RAF aircraft helped defeat the night blitz in 1941, and when installed in Royal Navy ships detected faraway enemy vessels and aided the laying of accurate gunfire at distance. Short-wave radar in ships and planes proved devastating against U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic in 1943.

German research centred on transmitting beams that aided bomber navigation, and using intersecting beams to indicate a bombing target. From scraps of intelligence – captured German pilots talking, a photographed aerial array, equipment on a crashed German aeroplane – the young scientist R. V. Jones worked out what the Germans were doing, told Churchill's Cabinet about it, and sent up a plane over Derby (where the vital Rolls-Royce aero-engine works were a key Lufwaffe target) to discover that the narrow directional beam was where two thicker radio beams, one of dots, the other of dashes, overlapped. Radio countermeasures could then be set in force, the
Knickebein
of beam bombing bent, the
X-Gerät
of precision bombing annulled. The British radio guidance system, known as ‘Gee', was developed in 1942 to guide fleets of British bombers to the Ruhr. After commandos were sent to capture parts of a German Würzburg radar at Bruneval in France in 1942, R. V. Jones and Joan Curran devised a way of ‘spoofing' German radar with a smokescreen of deceptive reflective material dropped from aeroplanes. These strips of paper and aluminium foil, now called ‘chaff', were code-named ‘Window' in WW2.

The population of Great Britain had been alarmed, among other things, by the sci-fi film written by H. G. Wells,
Things to Come
, in which fleets of bombers devastated an English Everytown. For them, rearmament meant building more fighter aircraft and anti-aircraft guns, and civil defence meant air-raid precautions, concealment and camouflage. Winston Churchill, however, thought that public anxiety about aerial bombing was roused both by pacifists eager to promote their anti-war cause, and by Air Ministry officials exaggerating out of self-importance.

On 30 March 1939, the same day the government pledged 8 per cent of its £25 million Civil Defence budget to ‘obscuration of glare, and camouflage',
The Times
had run a long and authoritative article on the subject. ‘Camouflage: Nature's Hints to Man' stated: ‘In view of the revolutionary methods of modern aerial warfare, concealment has now assumed a new and most vital function.' The author of the piece, anonymously credited as ‘a Scientific Correspondent', was the zoologist Dr Hugh Cott of Cambridge University, then completing his masterly study
Adaptive Coloration in Animals
, which Methuen published in 1940. Cott gave a biologist's overview of counter-shading and ‘dazzle', disruptive patterns contradicting structural features, and, pointing out some errors in modern military camouflage, made a plea for more science to be applied to the art, which was ‘still in its infancy – a child suffering from arrested development'.

Cott's piece prompted a slew of letters to
The Times
throughout April 1939. Camouflage was no longer secret, and the sort of people who write to newspapers had lots of points to make about its usefulness or its earlier history. A. J. Insall wrote from the Imperial War Museum, mentioning ‘armoured snipers' posts made to represent natural tree trunks' and other ‘excellent examples' of camouflage from
the sniping schools of WW1. But the debate re-aroused old rivalries. Norman Wilkinson wrote to defend the culture of dazzle painting, saying that its purpose was not ‘diminishing visibility' as Cott alleged, and pointing out that 5,000 wartime vessels had been successfully painted. Professor Sir John Graham Kerr then wrote from the Athenaeum to point out that camouflage was biological, not cultural, and that he had been the first to lay out the distractive functions of ‘dazzle' in a memorandum of September 1914. What the Government needed now, he said, was ‘a special Department, presided over by someone possessing high scientific qualifications' (not a million miles from himself, perhaps), to guide the camouflage activities of civilians and military on land, at sea and in the air. This spurred Wilkinson on to state that ship disguise was
not
biological camouflage, and tartly to remind ‘Mr Graham Kerr' that when the Royal Commission of Awards to Inventors had thrashed out the history of ‘dazzle', Wilkinson was the only one to receive an award. (This was a twenty-year-old battle: Wilkinson and Kerr's first print spat had been in
Nature
in 1919.) In May 1939, Graham Kerr also popped up in Parliament to ask the Secretary of State for Air whether he was using the biological principles of camouflage to diminish the conspicuousness of aircraft hangars, and once again in
The Times
where he reminded readers that a recent picture of a panda's ‘patchwork of violent contrasts' constituted the kind of ‘dazzle' that was potentially useful in war camouflage.

The British military was already thinking about this. In December 1937, a Camouflage Research Establishment (CRE) had been set up at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough. Its director was Lieutenant Colonel Francis Wyatt, formerly of the Royal Engineers, the man who had taken command of Wimereux ‘Special Works Park' in 1916. The man who appointed Wyatt, Reginald Stradling, had also been with the RE in WW1, when he won the MC and two mentions in dispatches. Stradling was a civil engineer with a doctorate in building materials, and an expert on steel structures. He became head of ARP research inside Sir John Anderson's Department of Civilian Defence, looking particularly at how to protect from bomb damage. From April 1939, when the Ministry of Supply that Churchill had been pleading for was finally established, the CRE helped with technical advice on camouflaging ‘Military Establishments, Fixed Permanent Defences,
Royal Ordnance Factories (excluding agency factories run by civil firms) [and] Ministry of Supply Establishments'. The Royal Engineer Board's ‘E' Committee was also concerned with camouflage, and developed steel wool (now used for scouring) as a useful material to attach to rolls of wire netting. Steel wool could be painted, and did not rot or burn.

The Air Ministry in London had also been concerned about the possible bombing of its own aircraft factories and aerodromes as well as other prominent civil structures. At the end of 1938, it opened a camouflage design section at the ministry offices, Adastral House, on the north-east corner of the Aldwych where it meets Kingsway, opposite the large American-style office block, Bush House. Captain Lancelot Glasson, MC, who had lost a leg as one of Wyatt's
camoufleurs
in WW1, was in charge there. Himself a painter, Glasson started gathering visual artists who knew something about flying. Among them was Captain Gilbert Solomon, a former pilot in the RFC who happened to be the nephew of the first British
camoufleur
Solomon J. Solomon (who had died in 1928). Another was Richard Carline who, with his brother Sydney, had also flown in the RFC and made sketches from the air over the Middle East which they later turned into superb oil paintings for the Imperial War Museum. (Their sister Hilda married the artist Stanley Spencer.) In May 1939, Tom Monnington, a future President of the Royal Academy, joined, and Leon Underwood, first inducted by Solomon J. Solomon at Wimereux, came forward with a sculptor's three-dimensional ideas. Lieutenant Colonel C. H. R. Chesney, DSO, also formerly of Wimereux, started writing
The Art of
Camouflage
(Robert Hale, 1941) partly to continue his old disagreements with Solomon about the effectiveness of paint in camouflage, and to stress the importance of deception. Remnants of the old team were re-assembled to face the new threat.

Adastral House had a large studio and a viewing room, rather like Wilkinson's former studios at the Royal Academy, where models of hundreds of ‘key points' in Britain's industrial infrastructure – factories, power stations, gasworks, oil tanks, water reservoirs, docks, railways, etc. – could be painted and looked at from various angles. Special matte paints in fourteen prescribed tones were manufactured. In July 1939, ARP Handbook No. 11 recommended two painting techniques that could be combined for large buildings: distortion of
form, and imitation of surroundings. Thus, aided by a 50 per cent government grant, a factory roof could have its symmetries disrupted and imitations of neighbouring streets, houses and back gardens painted upon it. Clause 36 of the 1939 Civil Defence Bill gave the Government the power to require factories and public utilities to be camouflaged, so a new industry sprang up to satisfy the need. The Ministry of Supply also started encouraging ‘groups of fishermen and their families' to braid fishing nets for camouflage purposes: ‘Nets are needed for obscuring guns, ammunition wagons, tanks, buildings, stores, and many other things which it is desirable to conceal from enemy aircraft.' A Camouflage Advisory Panel including the distinguished artist Paul Nash and the biologist Hugh Cott was set up on 2 August 1939 to identify key areas for emergency camouflage. (Cott's piece in
The Times
had been noticed.)

The paint manufacturers were, for their own commercial reasons, obviously keen to encourage everyone to paint everything everywhere, and non-governmental organisations and individuals also stepped forward with ideas for ‘misleading the bomber'. Among the consultancies was the Industrial Camouflage Research Unit, who worked from the architect Ernö Goldfinger's offices in Bedford Square. Despite the grand name, this was actually just some young painters scuffling about trying to do something after the outbreak of war. Among them was Julian Trevelyan, a British Surrealist and Mass Observer who had taken hallucinogens three times under medical supervision to get a revelation of universal beauty: ‘I had, under Mescalin, fallen in love with a sausage roll and with a piece of crumpled newspaper from out of the pig-bucket.' He had been at the opening of the Spanish Republic's pavilion in Paris in June 1937 when Picasso's
Guernica
was first shown, and thought it the shining peak of the Spaniard's genius. He had marched with the Surrealists on May Day 1938 in a top hat and a Neville Chamberlain mask, wearing the sign ‘Chamberlain Must Go'. Trevelyan was on the last peacetime ferry out of St Malo to Southampton, together with the beautiful photographer Lee Miller and her future husband, the Surrealist, artist, writer and collector, Roland Penrose, who had just been staying with Max Ernst in Avignon and Pablo Picasso in Antibes. Their train arrived at Waterloo Station on Sunday morning, 3 September, to the wail of the first air-raid sirens and the sight of ARP wardens in white
tin hats carrying wooden football rattles to sound in case of gas. Watching the silver barrage balloons rising into the blue sky, Trevelyan wondered if Surrealism could outdo the oddity of war. In fact, the arcane literary and cultural movement barely survived the outbreak of hostilities.

Trevelyan and Penrose joined the printmaker Bill Hayter and the engraver Buckland Wright in offering their services as
camoufleurs
. ‘In those early days it was easy to sell any kind of camouflage,' wrote Trevelyan. Penrose confirmed: ‘It was thought by many people that camouflage was simply a question of painting stripes over an object.' A rash of squiggly green patterns was breaking out across the country, along with a fanciful realism – palm trees on gasworks – of laughable conspicuousness. Trevelyan saw it as a kind of magical ritual, doing your bit to ward off harm. The apotropaic rites included criss-crossing paper strips across windows to stop glass blasting into splinters, and daubing dung-coloured wiggles and splotches on the house roof or the garden shed or over the car in order to aroint aircraft. Trevelyan admitted that few members of the Industrial Camouflage Research Unit had flown much and they knew little more about the planes they were trying to deceive than most amateurs.

There was no shortage of artists applying to do civil and industrial camouflage. By 5 October 1939
The Times
was announcing ‘No More Camouflage Workers Needed'. Sufficient candidates ‘have been examined by a selection committee, with a view to the compilation of a section of the central register which is now being prepared for the national service department of the Ministry of Labour'. In the House of Commons on 25 October, A. P. Herbert asked the Prime Minister to consider setting up a Department of the Arts, to maintain artistic effort and education, and to use artists' powers fully and effectively ‘for the purposes of war'. Neville Chamberlain did not think that was necessary, but he was pleased to note that a Central Institute of Art and Design had recently been formed to achieve such ends.

The Central Institute of Art and Design was set up by a panel that included Kenneth Clark, who had been director of the National Gallery and surveyor of the King's pictures since 1934, and Jack Beddington, the Jewish publicity manager of Shell-Mex and BP Ltd, an industrial patron who used artists of the calibre of Edward Bawden, Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, John Piper, Graham Sutherland and Rex
Whistler in his poster and press campaigns to market oil and petrol, and gave the director Paul Rotha his first leg-up as a documentary film-maker. Jack Beddington had positioned Shell cleverly in the 1930s, choosing not to deface the countryside with fixed advertisements but to decorate Shell's mobile lorries and tankers with colourful slogans instead, and had been canny enough to take up an idea from John Betjeman and start the popular Shell County Guides in 1934. Shell-Mex and BP thus in effect camouflaged themselves with ‘green' credentials, good practice for Beddington's later PR work in the national interest.

The declaration of war meant a cabinet reshuffle, and Sir John Anderson became Minister for Home Security, responsible for civil camouflage. In March 1940, Home Security reorganised it all under a Directorate of Camouflage, headquartered in Leamington Spa, under Wing Commander T. R. Cave-Brown-Cave. In May 1940 the War Office set up a Camouflage Development and Training Centre that eventually ended up at Farnham Castle, near Aldershot, not far from Wyatt's group of
camoufleurs
at Farnborough. The man put in charge of the War Office Camouflage Centre was Colonel Frederick Beddington, Jack's brother, who had been a sniper in the Great War before training at the Slade. From Beaumetz in France, he had been running the British Expeditionary Force's camouflage, which featured in the first dispatch by the first BBC radio war correspondent, Richard Dimbleby, on 11 October 1939. Everything worked through personal contacts in those days. Frederick Beddington's chief instructor was Colonel Richard McLean Buckley who had also worked with Solomon J. Solomon in the Great War. Another prospective
camoufleur
, Geoffrey Barkas, had been in the British film industry for years making features (
Palaver, Q-Ships, Tell England
) and documentaries (
Tall Timber Tales, Wings over Everest
) in Africa, India and Canada, before getting a job with Jack Beddington touring a Shell promotional show called ‘How Your Motor Car Works'. When Barkas telephoned Beddington to try and get into filming the war, Jack recommended him to his brother Freddie. Thus Geoffrey Barkas and Julian Trevelyan were picked to become Camouflage Officers in the Royal Engineers.

It was all something of a boys' club and much of the early work was amateurish. The artist who best catches some of the absurdity of British camouflage at this time was the graphic genius William Heath
Robinson, whose son Oliver Heath Robinson taught camouflage at Farnham. The outbreak of WW2 had brought 67-year-old Heath Robinson back to
The Sketch
, for whom he had done drawings in WW1, and his subject matter now became the English defence of the Home Front through ridiculously serious camouflage and seriously ridiculous deception.