Churchill's Wizards (42 page)

The first four professional British
camoufleurs
to arrive in the Middle East in WW2, led by Captain Geoffrey Barkas, disembarked at Port Said on New Year's Day 1941. Leaning over the rail of the
Andes
in the Suez Canal they surveyed their task with sinking hearts: ‘This was the Army we were supposed to know how to camouflage; these huge workshops, depots and store dumps; hutted and tented camps, antiaircraft batteries and defence works; men and vehicles by the thousands … with all the shy unobtrusiveness of a red vest on a fat man.' One answer to their problem was berthed nearby. The huge battleship HMS
Centurion
looked formidable, but was actually a dummy hulk, whose 13.5-inch guns were made of painted wood.

There is a well-known army saying, ‘Time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted', and the
camoufleurs
soon arranged a flight over the Western Desert and found, looking down, that the terrain was not wholly monotonous. Regions of sand had distinctive patterns which they began to name: the Wadi, the Polka Dot, the Figured Velvet and so on. They noticed, too, how tanks and lorries left distinctive scars and tracks across the desert. Then Barkas sent John Hutton off to the Sudan and Patrick Phillips to camouflage the defences in Palestine, reserving Egypt and Libya for Blair Hughes-Stanton and himself. On 24 January 1941 the two officers and their two drivers set off from Cairo in a Chevrolet staff car with desert tyres to try and find what Churchill liked to call ‘the Army of the Nile' somewhere along the coastal plain. Their other vehicle was a fifteen-hundredweight Fordson truck crammed with water, petrol, rations, tents, stoves, tools, canvas, rope, wire, camouflage nets, rolls of garnish, paints and kit for camouflage experiments.

The
camoufleurs
were following the same campaign westward that Alan Moorehead and the other correspondents had pursued. They had some catching up to do because General O'Connor's astonishingly
successful attacks were now moving westward into the yellow dust of Libya, having taken the town of Bardia and 40,000 more prisoners in early January. At last they caught up with the Australian infantry (who had replaced the Indian divisions) and Brigadier Horace Robertson, a gingery old tough from Melbourne who had been with the light horse on Gallipoli and in Palestine during the Great War, and who was nicknamed ‘the Ball of Fire' by the
camoufleurs
. With the permission of some gunners in a
wadi
, they continued their experiments with camouflage nets.

Things went well until their staff car was smashed up in a violent head-on collision which left their faces cut and bruised. They continued in their truck to the charming town of Derna, which had been abandoned by the Italians and looted by local Arabs in long robes. Also in Derna, relaxing in greater luxury, were the journalists: Alan Moorehead of the
Daily Express
, Alexander Clifford of the
Daily Mail
and their conducting officer, Geoffrey Keating of the King's Royal Rifles. Naked after a long bath, Moorehead was disconcerted to notice the telephone had the owner's name set in the base: ‘His Excellency Marshal Graziani'. Two days later the three journalists had the unexpected pleasure of the entire fortress of Ain Mara surrendering to them, thanks to their uniforms and British car. From that glorious height they soon fell over what Moorehead called the ‘moving precipice' of the front. There was an ambush by the Italians near Giovanni Berta in the Jebel El Akhdar; three British soldiers were killed and Clifford, Keating and the driver were wounded. The
camoufleurs
saw the point of their craft as trying to save the lives of British soldiers, and they stuck to the experimental work they had been doing all along, carefully garnishing a net to camouflage vehicles and then finding high ground to take photographs of it so they could see if the disguise would work from the air. They witnessed the surrender of Benghazi on 7 February 1941.

Fifty miles south General O'Connor had trapped the remains of the Italian Tenth Army at Beda Fomm, where the 7th Armoured Division annihilated it. The Italian General Bergonzoli (nicknamed ‘Electric Whiskers' for his startled beard) was captured, and then the campaign effectively ended. Field Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, known as the ‘Butcher' for the ferocity of his tactics in Libya and Abyssinia, was now fleeing westward towards Sirte. O'Connor's British forces could
have chased him all the way to Tripoli, driving on in cannibalised or commandeered vehicles to knock the Italians right out of Libya. But it was not to be. Churchill thought he saw the bigger strategic picture, and he was worried about the Balkans. On 12 February he ordered Wavell to halt, change course, and send his best troops across the Mediterranean to assist the beleaguered Greeks.

The
camoufleurs
now headed 900 miles back to Cairo along with the 7th Armoured Division. Though they had captured no flags, Barkas and Hughes-Stanton had acquired practical knowledge about how concealment worked best in the field from all branches of a fighting army. Barkas also remembered his own experience as an ordinary soldier in WW1, and how vulnerable he had felt moving up to the trenches knowing the enemy was watching. Even in an ‘uncooperative' environment like the desert, he thought it should be possible ‘to blur the picture and confuse the judgment of the most alert enemy'. Slowly, a doctrine of the trade was emerging. Barkas wrote:

Alan Moorehead thought the war correspondents did well in the desert because the issues were simpler. ‘There were no distractions, no cities, no railroads, shops, cinemas, markets, farms, children or women … We never saw money or crowds or animals or hills and valleys. We saw the arching sky and the flat desert stretching away on every side.' The small incident achieved a significance here that it would not elsewhere because they saw it clearly and in isolation. For the
camoufleurs
too, the uncluttered empty desert behind the coastal strip was a bare stage where everything could be seen, which also made it ‘an ideal place for … the cunning substitution of real for false and vice versa'. This was true, of course, for both sides.

When the actorish German Colonel General Erwin Rommel arrived in Libya to rescue the Italians from total collapse, the first thing he did on 12 February 1941 was march his German troops three times round the same palace at Tripoli so his limited forces could make a bigger show for the
Propaganda
Kompanie
newsreel cameras. Then the man later admiringly nicknamed ‘the Desert Fox' by the British got Italian
workmen to start building and fitting 200 dummy tanks on the chassis of old cars to augment his Panzers. Rommel was an aficionado of feints and deception, and knew display and presentation mattered in this theatre where men could make mirages. Basil Liddell Hart, editor of
The Rommel Papers
, compares him to Lawrence of Arabia in his thinking about unorthodox warfare. Rommel was also acutely visual: he liked to sketch out his battle plans with coloured crayons and used to fly up in a plane to survey the terrain ahead and to take photographs.

Barkas was sure that German visual intelligence was as highly organised and scientifically equipped as the British, employing Luftwaffe aerial reconnaissance, photographic interpretation and all the usual means of observation. Training at Farnham, the British
camoufleurs
had looked at infrared photos taken from above Stonehenge that still showed evidence of stones being moved thousands of years ago. They knew the lessons of WW1: armies left distinctive messes wherever they went. The patterns of their organisation and behaviour scrawled signatures on the ground which photoreconnaissance interpreters read like spoor. Barkas knew that few of these signs could be concealed, but some could be disguised if only units would alter their behaviour. What appealed to him now was ‘an aggressive, ambushing use of camouflage as part of the plan of battle'. On the long drive back along the coast, he began to think about using camouflage not just as a passive technique of hiding but as an active performance of misleading display:

Barkas saw his camouflage unit as just that ‘travelling circus', a sort of ‘5% army' ready to construct whatever impression the Commander might wish to present. Engineers realistically simulating the kind of mess that real armies make would be doing ‘film production on the grand scale'. In a place of sharp light that threw long shadows, what would work best were 3-D dummies and decoys.

Geoffrey Barkas began with a half-share in a trestle table in the
despatch rider's room, a space even smaller than Dudley Clarke's tiny bathroom. But from small beginnings, camouflage and deception were soon achieving great things in the Middle East, and Clarke's and Barkas's people made a team.

‘If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars,' wrote the poet Arthur Hugh Clough, and Clarke was swift to play upon the enemy's fear of parachutists, which he read about in a captured Italian officer's diary. In January 1941 Clarke started operation
ABEAM
, whose aim was to persuade the Italians that the British had parachutists in the Middle East ready to drop behind their lines. They had no such thing, but Wavell, one of the first British soldiers to appreciate airborne tactics, having watched 1,200 paratroops jump during the Soviet manoeuvres of 1936, encouraged Clarke's new ploy.

Two years before any real British paratroopers appeared in the Middle East, Clarke coined the name of a wholly imaginary unit, the Special Air Service Brigade (SAS), and invented their story. The 1st battalion of the Special Air Service Brigade were parachutists, and the 2nd and 3rd battalions deployed in gliders. They were supposedly training south of Amman in Jordan at Bayir Wells camp (a real place Dudley Clarke knew from his time in the Trans-Jordan Frontier Force), guarded by Glubb's (real) Arab Legion. Clarke's ‘1 SAS' comprised 500 (non-existent) paratroopers in ten platoons (A–K), armed with carbines and grenades. The Italians were led to believe that these men would drop with special containers packed with Bren guns, mortars, explosives, mines, and small-arms ammunition, just like German
Fallschirmtruppen
.

On 2 February 1941,
Parade
picture magazine in Cairo carried a photograph of a parachute-swaddled Abyssinian grinning in front of a large Bristol Bombay transport aircraft. (He was, in fact, just an Egyptian laundryman, dressed up.) Two days later, RAF HQ issued secret instructions to RAF units across the whole of the Middle East to report the stories that Clarke was spreading about the presence of British parachutists and gliders. More documents were planted and further sibs spread in Egypt and Palestine. In early April, Clarke carefully briefed two yeomanry gunners and set them loose in Alexandria, Cairo and Port Said wearing uniforms and badges of 1 SAS, which drew curious questions from other British servicemen. The gunners pretended to be toughly tight-lipped but dropped little hints
that they were off to Crete, or raiding enemy lines of communication in Libya. Such information, trickling back through Axis intelligence, was unnerving for the enemy.

In April 1941, Clarke at last got his War Establishment (ME/1941/10/1) and his unit for the first time got its name, institutional recognition and its own offices. Clarke moved north from his bathroom at ‘Grey Pillars' to a block of flats which now became the Advanced HQ of ‘A' Force.

The name ‘A' Force was deliberately vague. It could stand for anything, but Clarke pretended that it stood for ‘Airborne', since he was currently fabricating non-existent British airborne forces in the Middle East. By the end of April, realistic dummy ‘gliders' (the fictional ‘K detachment, SAS') had appeared at Helwan air base near Cairo and were attracting attention locally. Fifty-seven sappers under Lieutenant Robertson, one of Clarke's ten officers, skilfully engineered the fakes. In early May, Robertson's sappers were converting these dummy gliders into the dummy bombers of the ‘Desert Air Force' at Fuka near Mersa Matruh. In June, for the benefit of any spies and the captured Italians in the nearby PoW cages, Clarke arranged for the RAF to fly from Heliopolis and drop dummies by parachute over Helwan. They were then collected, repacked and driven back to base for another go. Some genuine parachutes were also diverted to Jock Lewes of B Battalion, No. 8 Commando, to practise with at Fuka.

What began as part of a deception scheme had major (and quite unexpected) consequences in the real world. Among Jock Lewes's men at Fuka was one mad-keen commando who injured himself on a parachute jump. This was David Stirling, 6' 5” tall, whose father was a general and whose mother was a Lovat of the Lovat Scouts tradition. Recovering in hospital, David Stirling re-thought the commando concept. He decided it had grown unwieldy, and instead devised a scheme to reduce the commandos to smaller, mobile four-man teams. Stirling was only a lieutenant and he had to sell this idea to the top brass at Middle East HQ; he later described the bureaucracy he had to get through as ‘layer upon layer of fossilised shit', but he persevered. His idea eventually gave birth to Britain's most famous raiding regiment, whose badge is a winged dagger above the motto ‘Who Dares Wins'. In 1985, Colonel David Stirling told the TV producer Gordon Stevens that