Churchill's Wizards (60 page)

Brigadier Dudley Clarke's Seven Assignments leaves off just where the
‘A' Forc
e
Narrative War Diary
(CAB 154/1 in the National Archives) begins. Clarke's meeting with ‘Wild Bill' Donovan is recorded on page 34 of
Establishing th
e
Anglo-American Alliance: the Second World War diaries of Brigadier Vivia
n
Dykes
(1990), edited by Alex Danchev.

Barkas's road trip is in
The Camouflage Story. With Rommel in the desert
(1951) by Heinz Werner Schmidt and
Rommel's War in Africa
(1981) by Wolf Heckmann are authentically detailed.

On the SAS,
The Phantom Major: the story of David Stirling and the S.A.S. Regiment
(1958) by Virginia Cowles is excellently researched, and Tim Jones has kept up to the mark with two fine books on Stirling's legacy:
SAS: the first secret wars
(2005) and
SAS Zero Hour: the secret origins of the Special Air Service (2006). Ghost Force
:
the secret history of the SAS
(1998) by Ken Connor, who was twenty-three years in the regiment, knows what it is talking about.
The Originals in their Own Words: th
e
secret history of the birth of the SAS
by Gordon Stevens was published in 2006.

Sir Michael Howard's
Strategic Deception in the Second World
(1990), vol.5 of the official history of British Intelligence in WW2, singles out Dudley Clarke's achievements in ‘notional' forces, as does Thaddeus Holt's comprehensive
Th
e
Deceivers: Allied military deception in the Second World War
(2004).

I Spied Spies
by Major A. W. Sansom, MBE was published in 1965. Jasper Maskelyne's ghosted
Magic: top secret
(1949) is fantastical; David Fisher's
The Wa
r
Magician
(1983) is fictional: ‘The events depicted in this book are true. Everything Jasper Maskelyne is credited with doing he actually accomplished', says its disclaimer, but see the website run by Richard Stokes, www.maskelynemagic.com, for a more realistic view. Earlier magicians also laid claim to camouflage inventions: see chapter 7 of Horace Goldin's
It's Fun to be Fooled
for a WW1 example.

The Australian Chester Wilmot's book
Tobruk 1941: capture, siege, relief
describes cheerfulness in adversity. Steven Sykes's
Deceivers Ever: the memoirs o
f
a camouflage officer
was published in 1990. For more on WW2 Mesopotamia, see
Five Ventures
(1954) by Christopher Buckley,
Iraq and Syria 1941
(1974) by Geoffrey Warner and
Iraq 1941
(2005) by Robert Lyman. George Steer lent me a copy of
The Road Uphill: episodes in a long life
(1997) by his stepfather Kenyon Jones, together with an undated typed account of ‘cheese' that KJ sent to Dudley Clarke some time after the war.

If Spain was the Axis neutral, Portugal was the Allied neutral. See
Sympathy for
the Devil: neutral Europe and Nazi Germany in WW2
(2001) by Christian Leitz.
On the failure of Washington DC to fit many pieces of the Japanese jigsaw together see the opening chapter of
The Secret War against Hitler
(1989) by William Casey of the CIA.

Juan Pujol wrote his autobiography GARBO with Nigel West in 1985. The Far Eastern haversack ruse features in the biography of Peter Fleming by Duff Hart-Davis, in
Wavell: supreme commander
(1969) by John Connell, completed and edited by Michael Roberts, as well as in
The Deceivers
by Thaddeus Holt.

The Cabinet War Rooms are part of the Imperial War Museum, open to the public, and the Churchill Museum now occupies the rooms where the Deception Planners once sat.

The letters and photographs dealing with the consequences of Clarke's arrest in Madrid are in the Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge (CHAR 20/25/42–52). Clothes, as Virginia Woolf observed in
Orlando
, do more than keep us warm: ‘They change our view of the world and the world's view of us.' See
Dressing Up:
transvestism and drag – the history of an obsession
(1979) by Peter Ackroyd and
Crossing the Stage: controversies on cross-dressing
(1993) edited by Lesley Ferris.

I am grateful to Dr Paul Adamthwaite of Ontario for supplying me with David Syrett's account ‘The Battle for Convoy HG-75, 22–29 Oct 1941' which appeared in
The Northern Mariner
, vol. 9, no 1.

For a full account of Borges's anti-fascist credentials see
Borges: a reader
(1981) edited by Emir Rodriguez Monegal and Alastair Reid, and
Borges: a life
(2004) by Edwin Williamson.
MI9: escape and evasion 1939–1945
(1979) by M. R. D. Foot and J. M. Langley is the classic account of wartime escaping. Clayton Hutton's story of escape aids,
Official Secret
, was published in America in 1961. Its last three dozen pages are about his fights with British Air Ministry bureaucrats in the 1950s trying to block its publication on grounds of ‘security'.

For SOE kit see the PRO's
Secret Agent's Handbook of Special Devices
(2000) and
SOE Syllabus: lessons in ungentlemanly warfare
(2001) as well as
SOE: th
e
scientific secrets
(2003) by Fredric Boyce and Douglas Everett.

Tomás Harris's summary of the Garbo case was published in
GARBO:
the sp
y
who saved D-Day
(PRO, 2000) edited by Mark Seaman.

Dr Hugh B. Cott began a long association with Africa at the Camouflage School, Helwan, Egypt. Later work on the ecology of the Nile crocodile took him thousands of miles through the continent. The second of the 109 marvellous pen drawings in
Uganda in Black and White
(1959) is a Jackson's Chamaeleon whose ‘expressionless face' and ‘hesitant gait' give it the look of ‘a robot'. The undress of soldiers in the Middle East is captured by Cecil Beaton, who arrived in March 1942 on photographic commission from the Ministry of Information, and some of whose photographs can be seen in
Near East
(Batsford, 1943).

Rick Atkinson's
An Army at Dawn: the war in North Africa, 1942–1943
(2003)
covers
TORCH.
Carlo D'Este has written two superb biographies of the key American generals:
A Genius for War
(1995) about George S. Patton, and
Eisenhower: a soldier's life
(2002).

For how Sir Arthur Harris distorted the Casablanca Directive about the bombing of Germany see pp. 201–2 of
The Bomber War
(2001) by Robin Neillands. Macmillan's Greek/Roman analogy is cited in volume 1 of Alastair Horne's official biography,
Macmillan, 1894–1956
; ‘Supermac' was still using it as the wise old UK PM when he courted the young US President John F. Kennedy in the early 1960s. Stories of 30 Assault Unit RN/RM Commando are told disjointedly in
Attain by
Surprise: capturing top secret Intelligence in WWII
(2003), edited by David Nutting, and the splendid
Arctic Snow to Dust of Germany
(1991) by Patrick Dalzel-Job, which has photographs of the young and handsome Charles Wheeler.

The detail about Patrick Leigh-Fermor comes from his afterword to the 2001 Folio Society edition of the classic
Ill Met By Moonlight
by W. Stanley Moss, telling how two SOE officers kidnapped General Kreipe on Crete in 1943.

‘Deception history is more complicated than we are more normally inclined to believe': Klaus-Jürgen Müller in ‘A German Perspective on Allied Deception Operations in the Second World War', in
Strategic and Operational Deception i
n
the Second World War
(1987), edited by Michael I. Handel, warns of the dangers of exaggerating the success of
MINCEMEAT.

The Unknown Courier
by Ian Colvin (with a note on the Axis situation in the Mediterranean in spring 1943 by Field Marshal Kesselring) was published by William Kimber in 1953, after Ewen Montagu's
The Man Who Never Was
(which had an introduction by General the Rt Hon. Lord Ismay, Secretary General of NATO, formerly Churchill's Chief of Staff, ‘Pug'.) A combined edition of
Operation Heartbreak and The Man Who Never Was
, with an introduction by Duff Cooper's son, John Julius Norwich, was published by Spellmount in 2003.

Borges y yo
appeared in
El Hacedor
in 1960 and
Dreamtigers
in 1964. Borges reviewed Victor Fleming's 1941 film of
Jekyll & Hyde
in the magazine
Sur
, saying that two completely different actors would have been preferable to the solo Spencer Tracy overacting. Borges had written the story of another failed impersonation in ‘The Implausible Impostor Tom Castro' in 1933. Dennis Wheatley writes about ‘the False Montgomery' in chapter 17 of
The Deception Planners: m
y
secret war
(1980). The drunkenness story is on page 140 of Jock Haswell's
Th
e
Intelligence and Deception of the D-Day Landings
(1979). He says the Germans paid no attention to copperhead at all, but a kindlier version of James's treatment and achievement is on page 562 of
The Deceivers
by Thaddeus Holt.

Geoffrey
Pyke features in Pyke: the unknown genius
(1959) by David Lampe, the
‘Science in War' section of Max Perutz's
Is Science Necessary?
(1989) and Paul Collins's ‘The Ozzard of Whizz' in
Fortean Times
197, June 2005. The ice-shooting incident is recorded in Alanbrooke's
War Diaries 1939–1945
for 19 August 1943. Rommel's report is quoted on page 453 of
The Rommel Papers
(1953).

Bodyguard of Lies
is also the title of the 1975 book on WW2 deception by Anthony Cave Brown which although pioneering is not always accurate. The modified COSSAC plan is described in Chapter 13 of
Operation Victory
(1947) by Major-General Sir Francis de Guingand. A clear and concise outline of the planning and execution is in
D-Day
(2004) by Martin Gilbert.

Part of the Soviet Russian help to
BODYGUARD
was a feint towards northern Norway, and a purported amphibious assault from the Black Sea on Rumania. The classified official history,
Fortitude: the D-day deception campaign
was written by Roger Hesketh in 1945–8, but not published until 2000.

Allied Photo Reconnaissance of World War II
(1998) edited by Chris Staerck shows aerial reconnaissance pictures of the Normandy beaches before and after D-Day. A picture of René Duchez with an account of his activities is on page 94 of
D-Day: June 6, 1944 – the Normandy Landings
(1992) by Richard Collier.

PLUTO: Pipe-Line Under the Ocean
(2nd edition, 2004) by Adrian Searle tells the definitive story. More engineering ingenuity is displayed in
Churchill's Secre
t
Weapons: the story of Hobart's Funnies
(1998) by Patrick Delaforce and in Gerald Pawle's
The Secret War 1939–1945
(1956) about the ‘Wheezers and Dodgers' of DMWD, the Admiralty's Department of Miscellaneous Weapon Development.

Sonic and wireless deceptions around D-Day feature in chapters 6 and 7 of
Trojan Horses: deception operations in the Second World War
(1989) by Martin Young and Robbie Stamp.
King's Counsellor
(2006), the wartime diaries of Sir Alan Lascelles, edited by Duff Hart-Davis, record a visit by ‘two MI men' on Friday, 3 March 1944 to explain how the King's visits could help ‘to bamboozle the German Intelligence'.

For a critical, pro-Crossman view of
Nachrichten für die Truppen
and Delmer's work see
Sykewar: psychological warfare against Germany, D-Day to VE-Day
(1949) by Daniel Lerner.

TAXABLE AND GLIMMER
feature in ‘Deception, technology and the D-Day invasion' by R. W. Burns in
Engineering Science and Education Journal
, vol. 4, issue 2, April 1995.
The Far Shore
(1960) by Rear Admiral Edward Ellsberg, USN gives a clear account of what went wrong. Robert Capa was not the only one to lose his images: most US motion-picture footage of the landings was lost when the ship holding it was sunk. Ernie Pyle's syndicated dispatches appeared six times a week across the USA and were collected in three books:
Here is Your War: th
e
story of G.I. Joe
(1943),
Brave Men
(1944; the quote here is from chapter 26) and the posthumous
Last Chapter
(1945). The Smuts story comes from chapter 31 of
The War and Colonel Warden
(1963) by Gerald Pawle, based on the recollections of Commander C. R. Thompson.

GARBO
's message, as received by teleprinter at Hitler's HQ on 9 June 1944, is reproduced (and translated) at the start of Roger Hesketh's
Fortitude: the D-Da
y
deception campaign
.

Chapter 337 in vol. 8 of
The Second Great War
is an illustrated account of the German ‘reprisal weapons' in action. Many words have been written about the bombing of Germany, for which 45,000 Allied airmen gave their lives. For a literary response see
On the Natural History of Destruction
(2003) by W. G. Sebald, for a moral inquiry see
Among the Dead Cities
(2006) by A. C. Grayling, and for case studies of two individual cities see
Inferno: the destruction o
f
Hamburg 1943
by Keith Lowe and
Dresden: Tuesday 13 February 1945
by Frederick Taylor.

To the Victor the Spoils: D-Day to VE-Day – the reality behind the heroism
(2004) by Sean Longden is a superbly researched account of what soldiering with 21st Army Group into Germany was really like: grim, grimy, and grinning. Richard Dimbleby's account of Belsen was partially printed in
War Report: D-Da
y
to VE-Day
(1946) and more fully in the 1975 biography of him by his son, Jonathan Dimbleby.