Churchill's Wizards (56 page)

11 1940: Prime Minister Winston Churchill inspecting coastal defences against Nazi invasion near Hartlepool. The sandbagged gun emplacement has been camouflaged as an innocent seaside roundabout.

12 WW2 British Local Defence Volunteer emerging from cover, about to throw a bomb. Amateur defenders might have been overwhelmed had the German army invaded in 1940/41.

13 1940: Adolf Hitler jigs for joy after signing the armistice at Compiègne. The total surrender of France was sweet revenge for the humiliating defeat of Germany in 1918.

14 Cartoon from
The Sketch
, 10 September 1941. The national treasure W. Heath Robinson (1872–1944) imagined wonderfully absurd camouflage and deception schemes in both world wars.

15 The ‘Prop-Shop' at the Special Operations Executive's Station XV in the Thatched Barn roadhouse near Elstree film studios. SOE's camouflage section disguised secret agents as well as their special devices for sabotage and subversion in Axis-occupied territories.

BUILT TO DECEIVE:

16 Dummy British aircraft at El-Adem airbase near Tobruk, part of an ‘A Force' deception scheme in the Mediterranean.

17 Dummy landing craft moored in North Africa, purportedly for the invasion of Greece in 1943.

18 Dummy tank to fool German and Italian observers in North Africa in 1943, made by Royal Armoured Corps engineers from painted canvas stretched over a metal framework rigged on a lorry chassis.

19 Lt Col David Stirling, founder of the SAS, with patrol commander Lt Edward McDonald (with Fairbairn Sykes Commando dagger) and Cpl Bill Kennedy. The famous Special Air Service regiment was at first a wholly imaginary unit, originating in a Dudley Clarke deception that there were British paratroops in North Africa in 1941, when there were actually none.

20 Lt Col Dudley Clarke, head of ‘A Force' in Cairo and Britain's top deceiver, was arrested in drag in Madrid in October 1941, while disseminating false information to reach German agents in Spain.

21 Fluent German-speaking
Daily Express
journalist Sefton Delmer became the maestro of British ‘black' propaganda broadcast to Nazi Germany in WW2.

22 The genuine corpse of ‘The Man Who Never Was', before shipping by submarine to Spain in April 1943, with a false identity and a briefcase full of forged papers intended to deceive the Germans about the forthcoming invasion of Sicily.

23 A still from the film
I Was Monty's Double
, in which actor M. E. Clifton James impersonates Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery in Gibraltar, just as he did in late May 1944. The impersonation allowed the real ‘Monty' to prepare for the 6 June invasion of Normandy.