Churchill's Wizards (48 page)

The placing of 722 ‘Sunshields' or dummy truck covers were vital to one of the subsidiary operations,
MARTELLO
, which was to mask the move of real tanks towards the front. First, hundreds of real lorries were parked in the area often enough to get enemy reconnaissance used to their presence. Then the lorries were driven off at night and replaced by dummy Sunshields. Each Sunshield was numbered and earmarked for an individual tank to drive up to and hide inside the next night before dawn. The tanks had come from a rear area code-named
MURRAYFIELD
, and when they left, they too were replaced by dummy tanks.

This was all part of concealing the real attack in the north, but Ayrton and Robb also had to coordinate the ‘distraction' display in the south, supplied with material and devices by Barkas and his deputy and successor as head of camouflage, Major R. J. Southron. The camouflage centre at Helwan went into overdrive to supply 400 dummy Grant tanks, 100 dummy guns and over 2,000 dummy lorries. A
camoufleur
called John Baker designed a prototype truck that could be assembled from
gerida
palm hurdles, stitched into hessian and painted by teams from East Africa, Mauritius and Seychelles, helped on in the final days by the first British Camouflage Company from Palestine.

Operation
DIAMOND
was another subsidiary deception that started weeks before the battle. It involved the continuation of the genuine water pipeline, buried in a trench which ran from El Imayid into the
MARTELLO
assembly area, with a twenty-mile dummy pipeline made of beaten and shaped empty petrol tins, heading south and luring enemy eyes towards the dummy dumps code-named
BRIAN
where 700 tarpaulins had been draped over miscellaneous objects so they looked like 9,000 tons of ammunition, food, oil and ordnance.

From 15 October, three field regiments of dummy artillery were located at a site in the south code-named
MUNASSIB
. They had some signs of life and the camouflage was deliberately not quite good enough to hide their fakeness from the enemy, who therefore discounted them. But after the Battle of El Alamein began, the dummies were switched at night for real guns. Their crews lay hidden
until a tank attack in their sector allowed them to start a surprise shelling.

Overall then, a German or Italian intelligence officer surveying the terrain south from El Alamein and considering his
shufti
-wallah
or
Fliegerführer
reports on the morning of 22 October 1942 would have seen not much change. The big British tanks were still at the back, so there was surely two days' grace before they could get into position. Large dumps, a completed pipeline, and radio traffic analysis indicated more activity in the south. Something would be coming there, maybe, but not yet.

In the first stage of the Second Battle of Alamein, ‘A' Force's deception plan
BERTRAM
gained for the British what General Alexander called ‘that battle-winning factor': surprise. The attack began with an artillery barrage by nearly 900 guns which blasted two corridors through the enemy minefields and defences for British infantry and tanks to advance. The second and third stages went on for twelve long days, and the battle was won by grim and chaotic fighting.

Overwhelming force carried the day by 4 November. Rommel had 530 tanks, but 300 of these were Italian, whereas Montgomery had 1,200 tanks, 470 of them heavy Shermans and Grants from the USA. Above all, Rommel did not have enough fuel. Through Enigma decrypts the British knew exactly how much petrol he had and which tankers were coming to supply him, and they made sure to sink these individual ships. In September 1942, 33 per cent of Axis military cargo and fuel was sunk before it reached Libya, but in October the figure reached 44 per cent, and, in
The Hinge of Fate
, Churchill claimed the Germans lost 66 per cent of their petrol. In a disorderly rout, the defeated Germans and Italians fled west from Egypt along the coast road.

Historians today tend towards the view that the real pivot of the war against Hitler was not Alamein, where casualties were relatively light, but Stalingrad, where, between August 1942 and January 1943, the Russians lost half a million men, and killed or captured 250,000 Germans. Nevertheless, ‘The Battle of Egypt', as Churchill told the House of Commons on 11 November 1942, ‘must be regarded as an historic British victory.' Churchill ordered Sunday church bells to ring out across the nation. He added ‘a word about surprise and strategy':

Not an iota of this camouflage and deception could be described in the official 1943 Ministry of Information book
The Battle of Egypt
, nor could it be shown in
Desert Victory
, the film about El Alamein directed by Roy Boulting from footage shot by British Army and RAF Film Units. But then, like all films,
Desert Victory
was fake too. The grim handsome faces illuminated by the gun flashes of the opening artillery barrage were filmed at Pinewood Studios. Cameraman Peter Hopkinson told film historian Kevin Brownlow that the famous shot of the advance of the Australians through smoke was in fact staged behind the Ninth Divisional cookhouse in the Egyptian desert. British soldiers put on German uniforms to play corpses lying beside captured Panzer tanks. But in his 11 November speech Churchill confessed: ‘I must say, quite frankly, that I hold it perfectly justifiable to deceive the enemy even if at the same time your own people are for a while misled.'

Within days of the end of 2nd Alamein, an even bigger surprise hit the Axis: operation
TORCH
, the Allied landings in the Vichy-French-held colonies of North Africa. Apprised of
TORCH
in September 1942 by Strangeways, Clarke had flown to the USA and the UK in October to coordinate what the Americans and LCS were doing to divert enemy attention. This time there were eight different, overlapping deception plans. LCS and ‘A' Force spread false information that the Allied objectives were in places as far apart as Dakar in West Africa and Malta, east of Sicily. When
TORCH
began, therefore, half a dozen German and Italian Atlantic submarines were lurking south of Dakar, with another forty between Gibraltar, the Azores and Cape Verdes, rather than directly off Casablanca, where they could have wreaked havoc on the American invaders. Nor did the German Focke-Wulf reconnaissance aircraft find the US convoys. Hundreds of Axis bombers and fighters were too far to the east, on Sicily or in Southern
Italy, waiting to bomb the armada on its way, as they believed, to relieve Malta. As a result, the three American convoys were not attacked from the air.

MI5's ‘B' Division, who ran the double agents, were beginning to liaise closely with the deceivers. From London,
GARBO
reported the unfortunate long illness and death of his invented agent two, William Maximilian Gerbers, who was supposedly based near Liverpool, a carefully arranged alibi for the lack of any reports from Gerbers of the torch convoys gathering on Liverpool's River Mersey. The death notice was in the
Liverpool Daily Post
on 24 November.

In October 1942, John Bevan hosted a deception conference in London to which representatives came from Washington DC, Peter Fleming travelled from India and the by now legendary Dudley Clarke from Cairo. ‘We had all heard so much about Dudley Clarke that we were most intrigued to see the “great deceiver” in the flesh,' wrote Dennis Wheatley. ‘He proved to be a small, neat, fair-haired man, with merry blue eyes and a quiet chuckle which used to make his shoulders shake slightly.' From 8 October to 1 November 1942, Clarke also touched base in London with the CIGS Alan Brooke, General Ismay, the Admiralty, MI5, MI9, SOE, the whole secret kingdom. On Wednesday, 14 October, Churchill received Bevan, Clarke and Fleming in his private rooms.

On 8 November 1942, Allied forces under American command began making three separate landings in Morocco and Algeria. US General George S. Patton Jr led the Western Task Force in 100 ships directly across the Atlantic from the USA to land near Casablanca. Centre and Eastern Task Forces, comprising British and US troops who had sailed from the UK and assembled at Gibraltar, landed at Oran and Algiers. A huge Allied propaganda blitz accompanied the landings: a repeated radio broadcast by President Roosevelt, speaking French, and 22 million printed leaflets of his speech dropped by plane. ‘
Mes amis
,' it began, and Roosevelt spoke of his friendship for France:

The giant radio transmitter Aspidistra, used for the first time,
blasted Roosevelt's speech from the South Downs to the Atlas Mountains so effectively that Moroccans thought it was coming from Rabat. A message from General Eisenhower to the armed forces and people of North Africa was also broadcast and printed in leaflets and the Free French leaders General Henri-Honoré Giraud and General de Gaulle broadcast a request to French commanders, soldiers, sailors, airmen, officials and colonists to rise in the war of liberation: ‘Help our Allies. Join them without reserve. The France which fights calls upon you. Despise the cries of traitors who would make you believe our Allies want to seize our Empire. Forward! The great moment has come!'

In the event, the American torch landings were unrehearsed, shambolic, and followed by up to three days of bloody fighting. But they could have gone a great deal worse had it not been for British deception work on three continents.

In January 1943, Churchill and Roosevelt met in plenary conference at Casablanca in Morocco. In comfortable villas at Anfa, surrounded by flowers, fruit and sunshine, the British Prime Minister and the US President gathered with their Anglo-American Chiefs of Staff to decide how they could at last bring the war to a successful conclusion. Led by the CIGS, Sir Alan Brooke, the British delegation knew exactly what they wanted and finally got the Americans to agree to it: first clear the Axis out of North Africa, and then jump to Sicily and mainland Italy in order to knock the Italians out of the war. Meanwhile, U-boats were to be sunk, Germany's industrial heartland bombed, and plans made for a subsequent invasion of north-west Europe to ensure Germany's final defeat. At the press conference, Roosevelt surprisingly declared that only ‘unconditional surrender' was acceptable.

With regard to North Africa, the Anglo-American summit agreed that the British Eighth Army would come under US General Dwight D. ‘Ike' Eisenhower's supreme command as soon as it crossed the Tunisian border from Libya, and that the British General Alexander would be deputy to Eisenhower, with operational command over all Allied forces in Tunisia, including the British First Army, the American II Corps and the Free French. General Alexander's combined forces would be known as 18th Army Group.

Campaigning with allies is rarely easy. Churchill said, ‘There is one
thing, however, which you must never do, and that is mislead your Allies. You must never make a promise which you do not fulfil. I hope we shall show that we have lived up to that standard.' But the British and the Americans – two people separated by a common language, as the cliché goes – were actually foreigners to each other, no more natural partners than Germans and Italians. The British referred to the Americans as ‘our Italians' and many Americans, of all ranks, loathed ‘Limeys' as patronising snobs and ancient enemies. Others, however, saw the relationship with America more positively. When the future Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was sent out to the new Anglo-American Allied Force Headquarters (AFHQ) in Algiers as Churchill's personal political emissary, he told the future Labour minister Richard Crossman, who was running Psychological Warfare, that the British were now Greeks to the Americans' Romans: ‘We must run AFHQ as the Greek slaves ran the operations of Emperor Claudius.'

The British Eighth Army advancing west met the British First Army and the American II Corps advancing east, and General Harold Alexander joined them all together. He had a small tactical team from ‘A' Force at his headquarters and managed to surprise the enemy totally by a German-style blitzkrieg attack which drove a narrow offensive blow straight through their lines to capture Tunis. German soldiers were caught sitting astonished at café tables, aperitifs undrunk, while others came out of the hairdresser's, mouths agape in shaving foam, or still draped in the barber's sheet, with their hair only half cut. David Strangeways was at the point of the spearhead, leading a small tri-service advance team of intelligence officers and men from 30 AU Commando – called ‘S' Force – into Tunis and Bizerta to seize vital Axis intelligence material before it was destroyed; he won the DSO. The journalists Alexander Clifford, Alan Moorehead and Geoffrey Keating got into Tunis on 7 May just behind the first troops of the 11th Hussars and the Derbyshire Yeomanry and found a kind of madness: in one street people were throwing flowers, in the next grenades; here there was sniping, there cheering as hundreds of British captives were freed. Alexander kept up the pressure on the peninsula east of Tunis, the last area to hold out; suddenly it cracked, and thousands and thousands of German and Italian soldiers were throwing down their arms and surrendering. There were no
aeroplanes for the generals; no boats for the soldiers; no Dunkirk for the Axis in Africa. At 19.52 hours on 12 May 1943 it was over. The next day, General Alexander sent his famous signal to Winston Churchill: ‘Sir, it is my duty to report that the Tunisian campaign is over. All enemy resistance has ceased. We are masters of the North African shores.'