Churchill's Wizards (59 page)

I learned a great deal about RSS and other matters from
The Secret Wireles
s
War: the story of MI6 Communications 1939–1945
(2006) by Geoffrey Pidgeon. John Masterman's
The Double-Cross System 1939–1945
was originally published by Yale in 1972, but the 1995 Pimlico edition has a useful introduction by Nigel West. MI5's WW2 successes feature in the official history
The Security Servic
e
1908–1945
by John Curry (1999) and
Camp 020: MI5 and the Nazi spies
(2000) edited and introduced by Oliver Hoare. Dusko Popov is the subject of
Codenam
e
Tricycle
(2004) by Russell Miller. Professor R. V. Jones's
Most Secret War: Britis
h
Scientific Intelligence 1939–1945
(1978, called
The Wizard War
in USA) was rightly described by A. J. P. Taylor as ‘the most fascinating book on the Second World War that I have ever read.' His
Reflections on Intelligence
(1989) is also most worthwhile.

An excellent, well-illustrated study of the WW2 return of the
camoufleurs
is
Camouflage and Art: design for deception in World War
2 (2007) by Henrietta Goodden of the Royal College of Art. The painter Julian Trevelyan's
Indigo Days
was published in 1957, and details about Roland Penrose came from
Visitin
g
Picasso: the notebooks and letters of Roland Penrose
(2006) by Elizabeth Cowling. The film-maker Geoffrey Barkas's
The Camouflage Story (From Aintre
e
to Alamein)
was published in 1952. A classic study of the visual arms race is
T
o
Fool a Glass Eye: camouflage versus photoreconnaissance in World War II
(1998) by Colonel Roy M. Stanley II, USAF (retd). See also
Eyes of the RAF: a history o
f
photo-reconnaissance
(1996) by Roy Conyers Nesbit. W. Heath Robinson's WW2 cartoons were collected in
Heath Robinson at War
(1942),
The Penguin W. Heat
h
Robinson (1966), Inventions (1973), The Best of Heath Robinson
(1982) and
Heath Robinson's Helpful Solutions
(2007), which is Simon Heneage's catalogue of the London Cartoon Museum show curated by Anita O'Brien.

The Wavell quote comes from the introduction to Dudley Clarke's
Seve
n
Assignments
. There is a clear account of the Norwegian campaign by Major
General J. L. Moulton in the 1966 Purnell partwork
History of the Second Worl
d
War
. Ray Mears's
The Real Heroes of Telemark
(2003) honours the endurance of the Norwegian resistance.

The Guy Liddell diaries (vol. 1: 1939–42; vol. 2: 1942–45) edited by Nigel West, were published by Routledge in 2005. John Colville's diary of his time as Churchill's private secretary,
The Fringes of Power
, was published in 1985. The ‘battleship built on land' was General Sir Alan Brooke's description after a visit to the Maginot Line in December 1939. The observations in Marc Bloch's
Strang
e
Defeat: a statement of evidence written in 1940
(1949) are confirmed by the May 1940 diary in
The Rommel Papers
(1953) edited by B. H. Liddell Hart.

Dudley Clarke's experiences are narrated in
Seven Assignments
. Airey Neave's
They Have Their Exits
(1953) is one of the very best WW2 memoirs, edged with the irony of his visits to imprisoned Nazis at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal. (Neave was murdered by the IRA on 30 March 1979, at Westminster.) Dudley Clarke's mission to Ireland features in Robert Fisk's
In Time of War: Ireland
,
Ulster and the price of neutrality 1939–1945
(1983). David Mure's
Master o
f
Deception
(1980) followed
Practise to Deceive
(1977). Danchev's comments on Dill are from his entry in ODNB.

The most recent books on Dunkirk include Hugh Sebag-Montefiore's excellent
Dunkirk: fight to the last man
(2006), Sean Longden's
Dunkirk: the men they lef
t
behind
(2008) and General Julian Thompson's
Dunkirk: retreat to victory
(2008). J. B. Priestley's twenty BBC talks, Postscripts, were published at the end of 1940.

Fifteen-years'-worth of Churchill's speeches are collected in ten volumes edited by his son Randolph. The Dunkirk speech is on page 215 of
Into Battle
(1941). Dudley Clarke was paid 25 guineas for his fifteen-minute talk, which was printed in
The Listener
. The producer was the future historian Ronald Lewin.
The Gree
n
Beret: the story of the Commandos 1940–1945
(1949) by Hilary St George Saunders credits Dudley Clarke in chapter 2. Ernest Chappell's account of the first raid is in
Commandos: the inside story of Britain's most elite fighting force
(2000) by John Parker.

The classic account of WW2 British internment is ‘Enemy Alien' by the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Dr Max F. Perutz, OM, CH originally published in
Th
e
New Yorker
in 1985, and reprinted in
Is Science Necessary? Essays on Science an
d
Scientists
(1989). For more on the ‘Fifth Column' see
Blackshirt: Sir Oswal
d
Mosley and British Fascism
(2006) by Stephen Dorril.

You get a disturbing sense of what invasion meant in
Occupation: the ordeal o
f
France 1940–1944
(1997) by the late Ian Ousby. William L. Shirer's account of Compiègne (and his global scoop for CBS) is in chapter 16 of
The Nightmar
e
Years 1930–1940
, vol. 2 of 20th Century Journey, published in 1984. Keitel's speech is from page 1012 of volume 3 of
The Second Great War
. Priestley's comment came from the last
Postscript
, Sunday, 20 October 1940.

George Orwell's ‘Patriots and Revolutionaries' first appeared in Victor Gollancz's
Betrayal of the Left
(1941), an indictment of the Communist Party, and was also the final piece in the last non-fiction book published by Gollancz in 1981:
The Left Book Club Anthology
, edited by Paul Laity. Tom Wintringham's version of the Battle of the Jarama in
English Captain
(1939) should be compared with that of Jason Gurney in
Crusade in Spain
(1974).
Picture Post 1938–50
, edited and introduced by Tom Hopkinson, was published in 1970.
Home Guar
d
Socialism: a vision of a People's Army
(2006) by Stephen Cullen gets it all in fifty pages. The Maxwell memo is on pp. 57–8 of the most revealing vol. 4, ‘Security and Counter-Intelligence', of
British Intelligence in the Second World War
(1990), written by Professor Sir Harry Hinsley with Anthony Simkins, formerly Deputy Director of MI5, with unrestricted access to the records. The photograph of Lee Miller as a camouflaged nude is on pp. 182–3 of
DPM: Disruptive Patter
n
Material
and I am grateful to its editor Hardy Blechman for the loan of a copy of Penrose's
Home Guard Manual of Camouflage
.

Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo's fictional film
It Happened Here
(1966) and David Lampe's first class investigation of the Auxiliary Units,
The Last Ditch
(1968), prompted other speculations about German invasion. Norman Longmate wrote the book of the BBC1 television film
If Britain Had Fallen
in 1972, and
Th
e
Real Dad's Army: the story of the Home Guard
in 1974, the same year that Duff Hart-Davis published
Peter Fleming: a biography
. Len Deighton's brilliant vision of a Nazi-occupied UK,
SS-GB
, appeared in 1978, paving the way for other novels: Gordon Stevens
And All The King's Men
(1990), Robert Harris
Fatherland
(1992) and Owen Sheers
Resistance
(2007).

The Home Guard: a military and political history
by S. P. Mackenzie came out in 1995, and further details about the British Resistance can be found in the more excitable
With Britain in Mortal Danger: Britain's most secret army in WWII
(2000) edited by John Warwicker. I am grateful to his daughter Julia Korner, encountered at the Special Forces Club, for a copy of Andrew Croft's autobiography
A Talent for Adventure
(1991). The BFI guide to the film
Went th
e
Day Well?
was written by Penelope Houston in 1992. Michael Korda's memoir
Charmed Lives: the fabulous world of the Korda brothers
was published in 1980.

When
The Big Lie
by John Baker White, first published in 1955, was issued by Pan in 1958, its cover was subtitled
The Art of ‘Political Warfare
' with the strapline ‘How the Allies Fooled the Nazi High Command'. Dennis Wheatley's War Papers were published as
Stranger than Fiction
in 1959.

Peter Haining's
Where The Eagle Landed: the mystery of the German invasio
n
of Britain
, 1940 (dedicated to Dennis Wheatley) is less reliable than James Hayward's excellent
The Bodies on the Beach: Sealion, Shingle Street and th
e
Burning Sea myth of
1940 (2001).

The Ironside Diaries 137–40
were published in 1962. The Göring boast comes from
Trenchard
(1962) by Andrew Boyle. There is a huge literature on the 1940 air war: Len Deighton's
Fighter: the true story of the Battle of Britain
(1977) and
Battle of Britain
(1980) stand out as clear and vivid.

London bombing details come from
The Night Blitz 1940–41
(1996) by John Ray and the 1942 HMSO publication
Front Line 1940–41: the official story of th
e
Civil Defence of Britain
.

Propaganda in War 1939–1945: organisations, policies and publics in Britain an
d
Germany
by Michael Balfour, published in 1979, is the classic account.

Sefton Delmer features prominently in
The Secret History of PWE: the Politica
l
Warfare Executive 1939–1945
written by David Garnett (who edited the letters of T. E. Lawrence) in 1945–6 but which was first published in 2002.

Val Gielgud's memoirs are called
Years of the Locust
(1947).
Stephen Potter a
t
the BBC: ‘Features' in war and peace
(2004) by his son Julian Potter throws interesting light on the BBC in wartime.
Lord Haw Haw: the English voice of Naz
i
Germany
(2003) by Peter Martland,
Germany Calling: a biography of William
Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw
(2003) by Mary Kenny, and
Haw-Haw: the tragedy of
William and Margaret Joyce
(2005) by Nigel Farndale should sate curiosity about ‘Sinister Sam'.
ITMA 1939–1948
by Francis Worsley was published in 1948, and Ted Kavanagh's biography of Tommy Handley the following year.

Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre on the Air had been broadcasting classics of English Literature for CBS like
Dracula
and
Treasure Island
before they came to H. G. Wells.
Broadcasts from the Blitz: how Edward R. Murrow helped lea
d
America into war
by Philip Seib was published in 2006. Kevin Jackson's superb biography
Humphrey Jennings
was published in 2004.

Some of the ‘V' campaign material comes from the
BBC Handbook 1942
, volume III of Asa Briggs's great history of broadcasting,
The War of Word
s
1939–1945
, and Sir John Lawrence's contribution to
Sage Eye: the aestheti
c
passion of Jonathan Griffin
(1992) edited by Anthony Rudolf. There is a photograph of the BBC ‘V' signal and the African drum used to record it in James Blades' autobiography
Drum Roll
(1977). Anthony Rhodes's
Propaganda: the ar
t
of persuasion in WW2
(1987) shows visual uses of the ‘V'.

Sir Hugh Greene's lectures, speeches and broadcasts are collected in
The Thir
d
Floor Front
(1969). For ‘black' radio see Delmer's
Bla
ck Boomerang
, Garnett's
Secret History of PWE,
as well as
The Black Game: British subversive operations
against the Germans during the Second World War
(1982) by Ellic Howe, and
Black
Propaganda in the Second World War
(2005) by Stanley Newcourt-Nowodworski.

In 1998 and 2002, the late David Syrett edited two volumes of papers for the Navy Records Society about signals intelligence in the Atlantic battle against the U-boats.

General Sir Archibald Wavell's address to Australian troops in February 1940 in which he described Middle East Command is in
Generally Speaking
(1946). For more on Bagnold see
Long Range Desert Group
(1945) by W. B. Kennedy Shaw and ‘Bagnold's Bluff' by Trevor J. Constable in
The Journal for Historical Review
vol. 8, no. 2 (March/April 1999), also
Bearded Brigands: the diaries of trooper
Frank Jopling
(2002) edited by Brendan O'Carroll and
Desert Raiders: Axis an
d
Allied Special Forces 1940–43
by Andrea Molinari (2007). Alexander Clifford's
Three Against Rommel
was first published in 1943. The Dimbleby quote is from
The Frontiers are Green
(1943). The first book in Alan Moorehead's African trilogy is
Mediterranean Front: the year of Wavell, 1940–41
, and his moving memoir
A Late Education: episodes in a life
(1970) is structured around his friendship with Alexander Clifford.