Churchill's Wizards (58 page)

The literature on T. E. Lawrence is large and still growing. I have basically relied on Jeremy Wilson's authorised biography,
Lawrence of Arabia
, and three books by Malcolm Brown:
A Touch of Genius
(written with Julia Cave in 1988),
Lawrence o
f
Arabia: the life, the legend
(2005) and
T. E.
Lawrence in War and Peace: a
n
anthology of the military writings of Lawrence of Arabia
(2005), which includes ‘Twenty-Seven Articles'. I have also gleaned interesting details from the
Journal o
f
the T. E. Lawrence Society
. The ‘Hindustani fanatics' story comes from
God'
s
Terrorists: the Wahhabi cult and the hidden roots of modern jihad
(2006) by Charles Allen.
Arab Command: the biography of Lieutenant-Colonel Peake Pasha CMG
,
CBE
by Major C. S. Jarvis was published in 1942. The
£
11 million figure is in footnote 1 on page 160 of Storrs' Orientations. Robert Irwin (author of a defence of Orientalists,
For Lust of Knowing
) reviewed the complete 1922 ‘Oxford' text of
Seven Pillars of Wisdom in the Times Literary Supplement
on 2 April 2004.
Oriental Assembly
(1939) edited by A. W. Lawrence, includes ‘The Evolution of a Revolt' as well as many of T. E. Lawrence's photographs. See
Xenophon and the Ar
t
of Command
(2000) by Geoffrey Hutchinson for more on the Greek tactics as they fought their way out of Persia.

David Lloyd George's attitudes to the Middle East feature in Barbara W. Tuchman's
Bible and Sword: how the British came to Palestine
(1956) and
God
,
Guns and Israel: Britain, the First World War and the Jews in the Holy City
(2004) by Jill Hamilton.

Richard Meinertzhagen's seventy-six volumes of diaries are in the Rhodes House Library in Oxford, and the forty-two-volume catalogue of his bird collection at the British Museum (Natural History) Tring.

The Trojan horse image is from John Marlowe
Rebellion in Palestine
(1946). The D-Notice on the Balfour declaration is quoted in ‘The Last Crusade? British Propaganda and the Palestine Campaign, 1917–18' by Eiten Bar-Yosef, published in the
Journal of Contemporary History
, vol. 36, no. 1 (January 2001).

In his 1959 memoirs,
Not in the Limelight
, Sir Ronald Wingate, the elder son of the Sirdar Sir Reginald Wingate, blamed the ‘ill-informed enthusiasm' of T. E. Lawrence and the ‘romantic penchant' of Gertrude Bell for the ‘continually unstable political situation in Iraq', later made worse by the growing importance of oil. Mahomed bin Abdillah Hassan, the ‘Mad Mullah of Somaliland' was actually chased and defeated by ground troops, according to the 1960
Memoirs o
f
Lord Ismay
, who was there as a young cavalry subaltern in the Somaliland Camel
Corps. Ismay saw all the aeroplane bombs miss, but acknowledges that the RAF did a brilliant political ‘snow job' in London which saved them as an independent air force.
Churchill's Bodyguard
(2005) by Tom Hickman is based on the memoirs of Walter H. Thompson of the Metropolitan Police.

Politics, Press and Propaganda: Lord Northcliffe in the Great War 1914–1919
(1999) is by J. Lee Thompson, who is also the author of the fine biography
Northcliffe: press baron in politics 1865–1922
, published in 2000. Barbara Tuchman's
The Zimmermann Telegram
(1959) remains an exemplary historical study: the number of OB40's wireless operators and clerks comes from there, and the number of German communications they dealt with from p. 278 of
Th
e
Codebreakers: the story of secret writing
(1968) by David Kahn.

Norman Wilkinson featured in the Scottish Arts Council touring exhibition ‘Camouflage' in 1988, as well as the Camouflage exhibition organised by James Taylor at the Imperial War Museum in 2007. Edward Wadsworth was prominent in the 1974 Hayward Gallery show ‘Vorticism and its allies', organised by Richard Cork, also author of
A Bitter Truth: avant-garde art and the Great War
(1994).

‘La Guerre Inconnue', a special edition of Le Crapouillot published in August 1930, features large-scale camouflage in Paris.

The catalogue of the 1998 show organised by Nicole Zapata-Aubé at the museum at Bernay in France, ‘André Mare: Cubisme et camouflage 1914–1918' is richly detailed.
The War the Infantry Knew 1914–1919
, Captain James Churchill Dunn's chronicle of service with the 2nd battalion Royal Welch Fusiliers was first published in 1938.

‘Smiling pictures …' comes from S. J. Taylor
The Great Outsider: Northcliffe
,
Rothermere and the ‘Daily Mail
' (1996), as quoted in the ODNB article on Alfred Harmsworth by D. George Boyce. The Arnold Bennett quote comes from his remarkable novel
Lord Raingo
, based on Beaverbrook's wartime propaganda work.

George Bernard Shaw's WW1 writings,
What I Really Said in the War
were republished in 2006, edited by J. L. Wisenthal and Daniel O'Leary. Shaw's views on his escort at the front appear in
C. E. Montague: a memoir
(1929) by Oliver Elton, and Philip Gibbs's memories of Shaw in
Life's Adventure
(1957).

The Stewart Menzies story comes from
The Secret Servant
(1988) by Anthony Cave Brown.
The Secret Corps: a tale of ‘Intelligence' on all fronts
by Captain Ferdinand Tuohy was published in May 1920.

Meinertzhagen's memorandum, AIR 1/1155, appears in chapter 5 of
Th
e
British Army and Signals Intelligence in the First World War
(1992), edited by John Ferris.
Secrets of Crewe House: the story of a famous campaign
(1920) and
Opportunity Knocks Once
(1952) by Sir Campbell Stuart tell the story of British propaganda against the Central Powers.
The Inner Circle: the memoirs of Ivon
e
Kirkpatrick
was published in 1959, three years after he retired as head of the Foreign Office, having interpreted for Halifax and Chamberlain with Hitler and
interrogated Hess after his bizarre flight. Wickham Steed's
The Fifth Arm
was published in 1940 and G. M. Trevelyan's
Scenes from Italy's War
in 1919. See www.psywarrior.com for ‘British Forgeries of the Stamps and Banknotes of the Central Powers' by SGM Herbert A. Friedman (Ret.)

Strategic Camouflage
by Solomon J. Solomon RA was handsomely published as a demy quarto volume in 1920. Churchill describes 21 March 1918 in chapter 17, vol. 3 of
The World Crisis
. Martin Middlebrook's
The Kaiser's Battle
was first published in 1978,
All The Kaiser's Men: the life and death of the German arm
y
on the Western Front
1914–1918 by Ian Passingham in 2003, and Martin Kitchen's
The German Offensives of 1918
in 2005. H. M. Tomlinson's most scathingly angry anti-war book,
Mars His Idiot
(1935), is dedicated to ‘Unknown Warriors'.

The correspondence about Solomon J. Solomon's camouflage ideas is in the Royal Engineers' Library at Chatham. Charlie Chaplin's
Shoulder Arms
can be viewed free online at the Internet Archive.

The extensive papers of Brigadier Dudley Clarke, CBE, CB at the Imperial War Museum, Box 99/2/1–3, include letters and diaries as well as his unpublished memoirs
A Quarter of My Century
.

Pieces of War
by Lieutenant Colonel A. C. Simonds (‘This officer is a pirate; only useful in time of war') is also in the Imperial War Museum. Max Hastings's comments came in a
Sunday Times
review of
Wavell: soldier and statesman
by Victoria Schofield. Bernard Fergusson's affectionate
Wavell: portrait of a soldie
r
was published in 1961; more details of Wavell's exercises can be found in Part IV of his book
The Good Soldier
(1948).

Denis Sefton Delmer published two volumes of memoirs,
Trail Sinister
(1961) and
Black Boomerang
(1962) and his papers have also been donated to the Imperial War Museum. The personal file (KV/2/2586) held on Sefton Delmer (and his father) by the Security Service is downloadable for a small fee from the National Archive. See also www.seftondelmer.co. uk.

In following the chronology of the rise and fall of the Third Reich, the black and gold volumes 2, 3, 4 and 5 of
Keesing's Contemporary Archives
, from 1 July 1934 to 31 December 1945, were an invaluable resource, continually consulted.

Virginia Cowles wrote about 1937 Madrid in
Looking for Trouble
(1941). Sefton Delmer in Madrid is a notable character in
Single to Spain
(1937) by Keith Scott Watson, later the first British journalist to report the bombing of Guernica. A fine contextual study of the foreign correspondents in Spain is Paul Preston's
Idealista
s
bajo las balas
(2007) from where the Constancia de la Mora quote comes.

Clare Hollingworth's autobiography,
Front Line
(1990) recounts her 1939 Polish
adventure. See also Esther Addley's profile of her in the
Guardian
, 17 January 2004. The Gleiwitz radio station incident is described in
The Man Who Starte
d
The War
(1960) by Gunter Peis and in
Kommando: German Special Forces o
f
World War Two
(1985) by James Lucas. Alfred Naujocks's sworn affidavit about Gleiwitz, Document 2751-PS, dated 20 November 1945, was evidence at the Nuremberg trials. Hugh Trevor-Roper's views on Nazi reading come from the essay ‘Admiral Canaris', appended to
The Philby Affair: espionage, treason, an
d
Secret Services
(1968). Gerhard Klein directed an interesting East German feature film about this Nazi deception,
Der Fall Gleiwitz
, in 1961.

The texts of four ‘bomphlets' appear on page 68 of the nine-volume history
Th
e
Second Great War
, edited by Sir John Hammerton. The rebuffed American journalist was John Gunther; the story was told by Harold Nicolson in a letter to his wife Vita Sackville-West on 14 September 1939. Joan Bright Astley's memoir
The Inner Circle: a view of war at the top
, first published in 1971, is a wonderful book, full of intelligence and insight. Having worked with the founders of British irregular warfare in WW2 and written two regimental histories, she also coauthored, with Peter Wilkinson,
Gubbins and SOE
(1993).
Seven Assignments
was first published in July 1948 and sold a respectable 5,000 copies.

The merchant seaman statistics come from page 383 of
A New History of Britis
h
Shipping
by Ronald Hope. The Scapa Flow dummy-ship story comes from
Churchill's Bodyguard
. John le Carré's interview, ‘The Art of Fiction CXLIX', was in
Paris Review 39
(1997). Patrick Beesly's
Very Special Intelligence: the story o
f
the Admiralty's Operational Intelligence Centre 1939–1945
(1977) and
Ver
y
Special Admiral: the life of Admiral J. H. Godfrey CB
(1980) augment Donald McLachlan's Room 39:
Naval Intelligence in action 1939–45
(1968), and their British Naval Intelligence papers are together at the Churchill Archives Centre. For more on the creator of James Bond, see
The Life of Ian Fleming
(1967) by John Pearson,
17F: the life of Ian Fleming
(1993) by Donald McCormick,
Ia
n
Fleming
(1995) by Andrew Lycett, and
For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming an
d
James Bond
(2008) by Ben Macintyre, accompanying the centenary exhibition at the Imperial War Museum. For more on the murkier history of wireless see ‘An Improper Use of Broadcasting … The British Government and Clandestine Radio Propaganda Operations against Germany during the Munich Crisis and after' by Nicholas Pronay and Philip M. Taylor, in
Journal of Contemporary History
, vol. 19, no. 3, (July 1984), and the interesting and opinionated
Truth Betrayed: radi
o
politics between the wars
(1987) by the late W. J. West.

I have relied on Christopher Andrew's
Secret Service
and the biography of Claude Dansey,
Colonel Z: the life and times of a master of spies
(1984) by Anthony Read and David Fisher, for information about SIS.
The Partisan Leader'
s
Handbook
is Appendix 2 in
SOE in the Low Countries
(2001) by Professor M. R. D. Foot whose
SOE: the Special Operations Executive 1940–1946
is the classic outline history. Details about Section D, Electra House and MI (R) are also in
Th
e
Secret History of SOE
(2000) by William Mackenzie and
Special Operation
s
Executive: a new instrument of war
(2006), edited by Mark Seaman.

On GC&CS, see
Thirty Secret Years: A. G. Denniston's work in signal
s
intelligence 1914–1944
(2007) by Robin Denniston. There are many books about Bletchley Park: I consulted
Battle of Wits: the complete story of code-breaking i
n
World War II
(2000) by Stephen Budiansky,
Action This Day
(2001) edited by Michael Smith and Ralph Erskine, and
Station X: the code breakers of Bletchle
y
Park
(2003) by Michael Smith.
The Essential Turing
, edited by B. Jack Copeland, was published by Oxford in 2004. For the repercussions of the Venlo incident see Nigel West's preface to
Invasion 1940: the Nazi invasion plan for Britain by S
S
General Walter Schellenberg
(2000) introduced by John Erickson. This bizarre volume, which includes the names of those to be arrested, also gives the title to Tom Paulin's interesting cut-up/collage of 1918–1940,
The Invasion Handbook
(2002). See also
Militärgeographische Angaben über England, 1940
, published by the Bodleian Library in 2007 as
German In
vasion Plans for the British Isles 1940
.