Churchill's Wizards (21 page)

Not for another five decades would the full extent of Meinertzhagen's commitment to deception, both in private and in public, emerge.

Like Bernard Shaw, C. E. Montague understood that the morality of war was not the morality of peace, ‘so you may stainlessly carry deception to lengths which in peace would get you blackballed at a club and cut by your friends'. He felt, however, that the British, in their amateurish gentlemanly way, were still half-hearted about using the press to deceive. Montague fantasised what whole-hearted use of this weapon would be like:

Montague thought that during WW1 ‘the art of Propaganda was little more than born'. He wondered what would be the long-term effects of another war in which propaganda had really come of age, ‘and the State … used the Press, as camouflaging material, for all it was worth'. He reckoned ‘a large staff department of Press Camouflage' would be needed: ‘The most disreputable of successful journalists and “publicity experts” would naturally man the upper grades.' Argument and reason would be replaced by emotion and ‘the
practice of colouring news, of ordering reporters to take care that they see only such facts as tell in one way'. The moral downside of it was that the untruthful journalist, the ‘expert in fiction', having gained high distinction by his ‘fertility in falsehoods for consumption by an enemy', would continue to thrive after the war was won, in ‘that new lie-infested and infected world of peace'.

On 10 February 1918, Buchan's Department of Information became the Ministry of Information. The energetic Canadian Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, proprietor of the
Daily Express
, became Minister of Information, and had a seat in Lloyd George's cabinet. Max was clear about his new role:

Of course, this was done differently from official diplomacy. For the press baron, ‘The Ministry of Information represents the democratic and the popular side of the Foreign Policy', so he used journalists and writers in the work. Rudyard Kipling was often asked for personal advice by Beaverbrook, although he was never officially employed in a propaganda capacity as he was felt to be too fierce and vengeful a ‘Hun-hater' for public consumption. Buchan rose to Director of Intelligence. Of supplying information to neutrals, he minuted:

Beaverbrook's biggest coup was landing Lord Northcliffe as the Director of Propaganda in Enemy Countries, reporting directly to the Prime Minister and the War Cabinet. Northcliffe's organisation came to be known as ‘Crewe House' after the Marquess of Crewe placed his splendid residence of that name in Curzon Street, London, at their disposal.

The man who organised, recruited and ran Crewe House was Sir Campbell Stuart. In February 1918 he was charged with putting together a team to produce and distribute propaganda to the Central
Powers. His managing committee included the editor of the
Daily
Chronicle
, the foreign editor of
The Times
, the managing director of Reuters news agency and the celebrated novelist H. G. Wells. What was even more impressive in Whitehall terms were the links Crewe House made with other government departments to ensure smooth delivery. These included a healthy line of credit with the Treasury; full co-operation from HM Stationery Office who printed millions of leaflets in myriad foreign languages; ample use of the Ministry of Information wireless service; and full-time dedicated go-betweens to the War Office and the Air Ministry, the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office, the director of Naval Intelligence, and the director of Military Intelligence.

Collaboration with the secret world was necessary for distributing the millions of cartoons, leaflets and pamphlets that Crewe House produced. At first RFC planes were used, but they did not have a satisfactory means of scattering the sheets, and after two leaflet-disseminating planes were shot down and their pilots given long terms in prison for spreading seditious messages, the War Office changed tack. Military Intelligence (MI7) had regularly been using large hydrogen balloons to get agents and crates of carrier pigeons into enemy territory at night, and now they used thousands of smaller balloons to deliver paper eastwards on the wind. Some 2,000 hydrogen balloons of specially ‘doped' paper, about twenty feet in circumference, were produced every week. Each could carry up to 1,000 leaflets, which ones depending on that night's wind direction:

Late in the war, many British propaganda leaflets went by internal post all over Austria, Bavaria and Germany, thus avoiding the strict censorship of foreign mail. This happened in two ways. First, they were smuggled in bulk via the book trade, which was not closely supervised, especially if the volumes had the covers of German
classics. Second, they were carried over the border from neutral Holland by
Gastarbeiter
and sent via the normal post inside enemy territory to neutrals, potential sympathisers, the intelligentsia and the newspapers, using counterfeit postage stamps engraved and printed by Waterlow of Watford for one of the British secret services.

Production of propaganda was split into three enemy areas: Austro-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Germany. Northcliffe was persuaded by H. Wickham Steed, the foreign editor of
The Times
, that the dual monarchy of Austria and Hungary was the weakest link in the chain of the Central Powers, and therefore the first place to start hammering. This was because the sprawling Habsburg Empire contained many peoples and nationalities who were potentially pro-Ally. ‘There are thus in Austria-Hungary, as a whole, some 31,000,000 anti-Germans, and some 21,000,000 pro-Germans', wrote Northcliffe. ‘The pro-German minority rules the anti-German majority.'

On 24 February 1918, Northcliffe asked Lord Balfour, the Foreign Secretary, for a clarification of inter-Allied political attitudes towards the Habsburg Emperor's dynasty and the ethnic minorities he ruled. Clearly, policy had to precede propaganda: he needed a clear line to follow. Balfour agreed four days later that ‘a propaganda which aids the struggle of the nationalities, now subject to Austrian Germans or to Magyar Hungarians, towards freedom and self-determination, must be right'. It was the continuation of the divide-and-rule strategy formerly directed against the Ottoman Empire.

So, in early April 1918, H. Wickham Steed and another member of Campbell Stuart's team, the academic Dr R. W. Seton-Watson, were in Italy, attending the three-day Congress of Oppressed Habsburg Nationalities in Rome where Italians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes and Rumanians found common cause in ‘the right of peoples to decide their own fate'. Six months before, the Italian front at Caporetto had buckled under a surprise attack by the Austrians. A hundred thousand Italians had been taken prisoner and 700 guns lost in the retreat. Now the tide was turning. Steed and Seton-Watson set up a polyglot printing press at Reggio Emilia. It published a weekly news journal and patriotic and religious leaflets in six languages which were fired across the trenches by mortar, rocket and rifle-grenade, dropped by aeroplane, and even thrown by contact patrols of ardent deserters who volunteered for the task. Troops of doubtful loyalty
were assailed across no-man's-land by loudspeaker propaganda and gramophone records playing Czecho-Slovak and southern Slav songs. Deserters began coming across, carrying the leaflets, singly or in groups. Some Czech troops mutinied. The Austro-Hungarian military authorities were further alarmed when the Italian fightback started from June.

From May to July 1918 the director of propaganda literature against the Germans was H. G. Wells, the imaginative and largely self-educated author of many successful books, including
The History of
Mr Polly
and the WW1 novel
Mr Britling Sees it Through
in which a grieving father seems to find God. When he joined Crewe House, Wells agreed that policy had to be clarified before any positive propaganda could begin, and he urged ‘a clear and full statement of the war aims of the Allies'. Typically, he wanted an ideal vision of the future, something people could believe in after the war. ‘The thought of the world crystallises now about a phrase “The League of Free Nations”.' He wanted to hold out a beacon of hope, the dream of perpetual international peace. Wells believed in this ideal but thought the British government was cynical about it. ‘We were in fact decoys. Just as T. E. Lawrence of the “Seven Pillars” was used all unawares as a decoy for the Arabs.'

Though they came from his department, Wells did not personally write the texts of the British-produced German-language propaganda leaflets that showered down on Germany in such quantities (over ten million in the last three months of the war). These aimed to inspire fear rather than hope, and they were demoralising because they were true: reminders of shortages and social problems, maps and diagrams of lost ground and military defeats against inexorable Allied success, graphic depictions of growing American strength, name lists of dead and captured German U-boat commanders, pictures of happy smiling Germans who had given up and were not being tortured, the surrender of Bulgaria in September.

Losers are more susceptible to propaganda than winners, because more fearful and anxious. Nor was it only leaflets working on their minds. Many German newspapers translated interesting pieces from the neutral press – Dutch, Scandinavian and Swiss – and such papers were skilfully bombarded with ‘camouflaged articles' from Crewe House that, without banging a drum, showed the social, economic,
commercial and scientific conditions in Allied countries in a glowing light. German readers could make their own comparisons with drabness and depression at home. So the gnawing discontents and sapping of the will continued.

A German trench newspaper appeared,
Heer und Heimat
, witha picture of the Kaiser between two oak-leaf clusters, and a subtitle
Der
Ruf zur Einigkeit
, ‘The Cry for Unity', which featured a front page cartoon showing the German political parties at home fighting each other rather than the enemy. This paper looked and seemed thoroughly German, but it too was produced by Crewe House. General von Hutier was perhaps right to warn his troops against British ‘ruses, trickery and other underhand methods.'

The German awareness of British methods – triumphantly boasted about afterwards by people like Sir Campbell Stuart – had far-reaching consequences. Both Ludendorff in his memoirs and Adolf Hitler in
Mein Kampf
believed that the British propaganda campaign had corroded the German will to resist; that the German armed forces were never really defeated at the front, but only stabbed in the back; and that devious foreigners were responsible, not decent Germans. Self-pity and self-deception would be stirred into the toxic resentments of the nascent German National Socialist Workers' Party.

As the war dragged on towards the end, Solomon J. Solomon brooded in London. In February 1918 he bought a radiographer, a kind of magic lantern that projected a flat picture on to a screen, for use with his camouflage students. Its combination of mirrors and powerful electric lights enabled Solomon to study enlarged and illuminated aerial reconnaissance photographs in considerable detail. He became obsessed with three of them in particular, taken in autumn 1917, because his painter's eye had spotted curious anomalies. Some of the shadows seemed to be wrong in relation to the sun. As he pored over the pictures Solomon began to suspect that this was a landscape deliberately designed to fool the camera. New tricks were being used to see through camouflage as it became more sophisticated; colour-blind spotters, for example, sent up in aeroplanes, had been successful in picking out artificial greens from natural ones. But Solomon became convinced that German camouflage was still pulling the wool over Allied eyes.

Solomon eventually laid out his ideas in
Strategic Camouflage
(1920), a book whose conspiratorial tone is set from the opening epigraph:

Germany was a technically advanced country. Of the first hundred Nobel Prizes for Science, Germany won thirty-three to Britain's eighteen, and Germans set the technological pace of twentieth-century warfare. Solomon insisted that the Germans had surpassed the Allies
in their camouflage of men and equipment.

‘Camouflage and the interpretation of aerial photography were war babies, and are still in their infancy,' he wrote in
Strategic Camouflage
, convinced that no official reader of photographs was as well equipped as a painter to do the job (early photographic interpreters included a diplomat and a stockbroker). Like Abbott Thayer, Solomon overrated the artist's expertise. He was unimpressed by the carefully illustrated official manual,
Notes on the Interpretation of Aeroplane Photographs
, and remained convinced that the British had often been ‘fooled by the devices of the enemy'.

He argued that the Germans had managed to construct, in back areas five to nine miles behind their lines, low hangars the size of whole fields to conceal thousands of men by day. These barely sloping structures blended with the hedges and roads of Flanders and hoodwinked both aircraft spotters and photographic interpreters that all they were seeing was a patchwork of cultivated fields. Solomon thought the Germans understood exactly what would show up in the Allied aerial photographs. ‘Keep everything low' was one of the camouflage instructions found on a German prisoner. Bridges, for example, stuck out as clear targets for bombs or artillery. But a dark-painted bridge, dropped three or four inches below the surface of the river it spanned, was still navigable and far less conspicuous. Solomon thought German
camoufleurs
had managed to cover roads over completely with wire and canvas, so that a hasty spotter would see only a route empty of traffic. This was the equivalent of a conjuror's false bottom, Solomon reckoned. Enemy transport could continue to flow underneath painted buckram and mosquito-netting.

Solomon claimed to spot errors in German ‘skiagraphy' or painting of shadows. When a house cast no shadow on the ground, he was convinced that the Germans had erected an imitation field alongside it, coming up to its eaves. He pointed out houses that were too small, tree shadows that did not move with the sun, pipes pretending to be paths.
Strategic Camouflage
becomes dizzying as Solomon asks us to scrutinise muddy blow-ups of black-and-white photographs as well as his own impressionistic colour paintings of the wobbly shapes, odd shadows and dim contrasts in certain photographs.

Solomon also made coloured drawings, sketches and models to prove his point. In March 1918, he began pestering his superiors in the
Royal Engineers, men at the Air Ministry, the General Staff, the Prime Minister's office, and fellows at the Athenaeum Club like Sir Martin Conway, who said, ‘This is the most important find since the beginning of the war,' and went off to tell General Hugh Trenchard, chief of the RFC and future father of the RAF. In a hurried survey under poor light, ‘Boom' Trenchard peered at Solomon's evidence and saw only fields. But the matter should be looked into, he said, and fresh photographs procured. ‘Are you prepared to go to France?' Trenchard asked Solomon.

But it seemed to be nobody's business to send him. Solomon became depressed. Back home, he stared again at the photos taken of St Pierre Capelle: the worked fields now looked astonishingly like undulating hangars, the haystacks were fake, the tree shadows all wrong. The whole area seemed to him to show a vast hidden camp for reserves, barely eight kilometres east of Nieuport, on the only rising ground in a marshy district north of Ypres.

When Trenchard sent his aide, Major John Moore-Brabazon – Britain's first-ever certified pilot, the inventor of the aerial camera and Churchill's future minister of aircraft production in WW2 – to see Solomon's evidence in his studio, the painter failed to persuade this sceptical aviator. Solomon managed to get to see the new CIGS, Sir Henry Wilson, who did not say much, but according to Solomon, ‘seemed to think there was something in it'.

Hesketh Prichard, the king of the snipers, was called by people on his own side ‘The Professional Assassin'. It was said in an admiring way, but he paid a high psychological price for the title. Although it was his job to kill Germans, the hours his grey eyes spent studying the enemy through a Ross glass were also extended exercises in empathy. Another man, seen with his unshaven face and scruffy cap magnified twenty times, cannot long remain the bestial baby-eating ‘Hun' of propaganda. Prichard observed the enemy's all-too-human habits and bodily needs, trying to survive in the squalor of the trenches on the other side of the barbed wire, and saw
mon semblable, mon frère
. His sensitivity was what made him such a good hunter and sportsman. It is true that after he heard on 3 October 1915 that his great friend Alfred Gathorne-Hardy had been killed with many of his men at Loos, ten yards from the German wire, he wrote: ‘If it is any satisfaction, I shot a German
between the eyes at 5 o'clock today'; and that after Nurse Cavell was executed later that month he said: ‘It makes me so glad when I shoot a German, and especially an officer.' But for the most part, Prichard was not motivated by revenge. He knew the Germans were both brave, and human. His work was plainly necessary, but it began to trouble him more and more that it was murderous.

The writer H. M. Tomlinson in his 1930 memoir
All Our Yesterdays
remembered how Prichard went sick for some weeks after putting a bullet through the head of a particular German sniper who had been a deadly nuisance. This same incident is written up in Prichard's own
Sniping in France
as a short story, ‘Wilibald the Hun', rather than as reportage. Perhaps psychically troubling material needed to be disguised as fiction. Hesketh Prichard began getting splitting head-aches from the eye strain of spotting and shooting all day. Then he developed what was called ‘trench fever' from the drains leaking excrement. But he battled on with his work, inventing new devices, developing the courses and tactics of camouflage and deception, saving thousands of lives by helping to take a few others. But the King of the Snipers was slowly sickening and wasting away from his mysterious illness: he endured fourteen operations before dying in June 1922, aged 44.

H. M. Tomlinson wrote an obituary appreciation of Hesketh Prichard for the Liberal paper
Nation and Athenaeum
. He saw the man who first guided him at the front as ‘a gentleman': a privileged person from a leisured caste whose code was honour and service. The war degraded what was noble in Hesketh's philosophy, and its delicate notions were ruined by ‘the senseless waste of our own men'. Tomlinson said he was shocked by this ‘drainage of good life', but also by

The first day of spring, 21 March 1918, saw the opening phase of a massive German offensive designed to break out of the trenches and to drive the British back to the French coast. After the Russian Revolution of October 1917, the Bolsheviks had reneged on Russia's
alliance with Britain and France and sought a separate peace with Germany at Brest-Litovsk. With the Russians out of the picture and the Americans not yet arrived in Europe, this seemed to the Germans the right time to strike a decisive blow, so they quietly moved a million more men and 3,000 guns to the western front.

The Allies knew a big attack was coming soon but they had no exact idea of its scale and location. In
The Secret Corps
, Ferdinand Tuohy says that the German General Erich von Ludendorff had ordered every department and branch not to convey any information whatsoever to the enemy, and that Ludendorff appointed special security officers to police the concealment:

Major movements of men and stores were done at night or cloaked in camouflage. The Germans had created a phantom army in front of the French sector, using signals deception and dummy wireless traffic. Field Marshal Haig's intelligence at GHQ was poor because Brigadier John Charteris told him only what he wanted to hear.

Die Kaiserschlacht
, the Kaiser's Battle, began with the greatest artillery barrage of the war: 3.2 million shells in one day. The damp weather helped camouflage the Germans: their
feldgrau
uniforms were ghostly as they advanced over the misty fields. The bloodiest day of the war yielded 80,000 casualties on both sides.

The second phase of the German attack, code-named ‘Georgette', was launched near Armentières on 9 April 1918. Four German divisions under General von Arnim struck at a weak point where the dispirited 2nd Portuguese division held the line. German soldiers flooded through the gap and Armentières, Ploegsteert and Messines were all abandoned by the Allies on 10 April. What had taken four horrendous months to gain at Passchendaele was lost in a few days. The British front was crumbling on Thursday, 11 April 1918 when Haig issued an order to hold ‘to the last man'. The Germans seized a wilderness of mud, what Churchill called ‘the Dead Sea fruits' of the Battle of the Somme, before they stopped, exhausted.

There were major repercussions after the offensive. First, the Allies agreed to a unified military command under the French General Ferdinand Foch, just as, in WW2, all would agree to work under the American General Eisenhower. Second, gloomy news of the big German attack with British retreats and heavy casualties caused inevitable political fallout at home. Who would carry the can for the losses and setbacks? Lloyd George shook up his government. Lord Milner replaced Lord Derby as Secretary of State for War on 18 April and his place in the War Cabinet was taken by Austen Chamberlain. The reverberations reached as far away as Palestine, where Allenby was stripped of troops he was going to use in his final push against the Turks.

Amid the recrimination and blame, Solomon J. Solomon suddenly did not seem quite such a mad obsessive in London clubland and society. The Germans had made a surprise attack
en masse
; perhaps they
had
been camouflaged in the way that Solomon suggested. The painter now cranked up his campaign. He drafted a letter to the Prime Minister and took it round for his neighbour, Sir Edward Carson, to check. Carson wrote a forceful letter to Lord Milner pointing out the importance of Solomon's discovery that German camouflage was helping to hide troops in the landscape.

A week or so later, Solomon presented his case to Lloyd George and the Secretary of State for War while lunching at Sir Alfred Mond's house. ‘There is no doubt about it,' affirmed the Prime Minister. Solomon says, ‘He saw at once that the March surprise had been effected in some such way by the Germans.' Lloyd George then passed Solomon on to General J. C. Smuts and Lord Rothermere, President of the Air Council. Solomon also tried to see Major General George Macdonogh, the director of Military Intelligence, to find out if any information on camouflage had been gleaned from enemy prisoners.

In May 1918, the famous American portrait painter John Singer Sargent, RA was back in London, about to be commissioned as a war artist. Solomon saw a chance to warn the American Army. According to Solomon,

In early July, Solomon heard from Professor Mantoux that General Foch was interested in his discoveries and wanted to see him at French GHQ at Versailles. Solomon underwent a blizzard of red tape, officials and bumf before starting a muddled, hopeless journey to France. Three trains, a hotel for the night and a car finally got Solomon to the British Mission at Château Breau. General Weygand arranged for Solomon to drive on to Chalons to meet the chief French expert reader of photographs, Captain De Bissy.