Given the choice of having a civil servant post or an officer’s commission, Wheatley wanted to be an officer, although it meant he had to start as a Pilot Officer, a junior RAF rank. Having been a naval cadet and an army lieutenant, it was his third uniform. After his frankly undistinguished service in the First War as a gunner subaltern, he now found himself in the “strategic stratosphere”, part of a small team that formed the guiding vision over almost ten million men and women in uniform.
Wheatley had a strong sense of his own good fortune, like a ‘boy makes good’ story from Chums. “Success stories of the poor boy who becomes a millionaire are innumerable,” he wrote later, pitching his wartime memoirs, “but for a civilian to be specially commissioned in order that he should become a member of the Joint Planning Staff in the midst of a war is a different kind of success story, and one that is unique.”
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Wheatley’s new career began with a two week intake course at RAF Uxbridge, “to learn not to slap Air Marshals on the back.” There was a good deal of square-bashing, but among the other six hundred recruits was His Grace Freddy the Duke of Richmond. He was a charming man – and it would, in any case, have been unlike Wheatley to leave a duke unbefriended – and they became great comrades. There was no alcohol in the camp, but Wheatley had the foresight to bring a flask of old brandy, and after parades Wheatley and His Grace “could be seen sneaking off like two schoolboys to smoke cigarettes behind a haystack,” as Wheatley remembered it in after-dinner speech years later: “By these means we kept body and soul together and from the illicit drinking a delightful friendship sprung.”
Wheatley also had his greatcoat lined with red satin, and (against regulations, since RAF officers were not supposed to carry sticks or canes) had Wilkinson’s make him a couple of short swagger sticks, like those often carried by army officers, but covered in blue leather and hiding fifteen inch blades in case of trouble during the blackout. Years later he left one to Freddy in his will.
Deception is almost as old as war, but its founding genius in the Second World War was Lieutenant Colonel Dudley Clarke. He was a small man with quick, bright eyes, fascinated by conjuring tricks, and Wheatley noted his “uncanny habit of suddenly appearing in a room without anyone having noticed him enter it.” He was also the first British officer to set foot on the Continent again, after Dunkirk, leading a small reconaissance unit, “so he was, in a sense, the Father of Commando Raids as well as the Father of Deception” and he seems to have introduced the terms commando and “Special Air Service” to the British army. Clarke became a legendary figure to his colleagues, although his sanity was questioned after he caused a diplomatic incident in Spain, fraternising with German agents while dressed as a woman.
Clarke had masterminded a number of brilliant deceptions for General Wavell in the Middle East and was chiefly responsible for misleading the Germans about where Montgomery’s main attack would come at Alamein. In due course he built up his own deception network, known as ‘A’ Force, and in October 1941 he gave an account of his work to the Chiefs of Staff in London. They were sufficiently impressed to create a small unit at home which would liaise with ‘A’ Force, and explore the possibility of deception in Europe.
A three-man team was proposed, comprising officers from all three services. The Army nominated Lieutenant-Colonel Lumby, then teaching military intelligence at the Army Staff College, the Navy promised a man who never appeared, and the RAF declined to spare anyone for this nebulous task, so Wheatley was recruited for it instead.
Wheatley’s career in deception began gently: Colonel “Fritz” Lumby OBE turned out to be a kindly and agreeable one-legged Indian Army man who spent an hour every morning doing the Times crossword in their shared office. On Wheatley’s first day, a trews-wearing Royal Scots officer named Eddie Combe invited him to lunch at Rules in Maiden Lane, where he kept a regular table for six or eight, and these lunches were to be a major feature of Wheatley’s war. Contacts were made there between people working in “cloak-and-dagger” roles, and “sooner or later one met … everyone involved in any secret activity in the war”.
“Lunch at Rules with Eddie Combe was a good invitation,” Wheatley remembered. It would start with two or three Pimms before moving on to harder stuff; Combe liked a dash of absinthe, or “Chanel No.5” as he called it. Lunch would consist of smoked salmon or potted shrimps, then Dover sole, salmon, jugged hare, or game, with Welsh rarebit as a savoury to finish. After their wine with lunch, they would end with port or kummel.
Combe, who had won a double MC in the First War, was a fat man of about fifty, but on returning to the War Office he would make a point of running up three flights of stairs. Wheatley, in contrast, had to lie on a bed for an hour, having arranged with a friend to wake him if he was needed.
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Wheatley and Lumby were marginal figures, isolated in their office up on the third floor without a clear role. Wheatley’s most idiosyncratic plan during the time he worked with Lumby was a paper called ‘Deception on the Highest Plane’ in which he proposed to spread rumours of a new Christ-like figure emerging in Germany as an alternative to Hitler; its Messianic aspects may have owed something to John Buchan’s Greenmantle. Nothing came of it.
Lumby disliked deception work, and he was pleased to get a transfer to a senior staff post in Africa. There was a change of gear when his successor Lieutenant Colonel Johnny Bevan arrived, becoming head of the reorganised “London Controlling Section”, as the team was now called. A modest, unassuming man with a Military Cross, Bevan was good at rescuing situations. A contemporary at Eton recalled “when things were looking pretty bad for his side at cricket, he would shuffle in, about sixth wicket down, knock up a hundred and shuffle out again looking rather ashamed of himself.”
Bevan lobbied the Chiefs of Staff to give deception a more definite role, and he moved himself and Wheatley – still a two-man team – down to the basement of the war rooms, where they would be better integrated with the JPS machinery and be taken more seriously. Deception was a difficult field to work in, and many senior figures were initially unconvinced of its worth, particularly since it required not just rumours and false messages but thousands of real troops moved around the globe and massed in places that would – unknown to almost everyone involved – never lead to action.
The first major job for Bevan and Wheatley was to provide deception for Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa in November 1942. Bevan masterminded a complex series of feints to tie up as many German troops as possible in Western Europe, including Solo I (a notional invasion of Norway) and Overthrow (a fictitious plan to establish a foothold in the Pas de Calais).
Torch was a great success. After the telegrams came in, the team treated themselves to a lunch at the Berkeley, and Wheatley bought himself a couple of top hats. Returning to the basement, Wheatley found a duplicated memo in his in-tray, from Churchill to the Chiefs of Staff: “The news of our early successes in North Africa is most gratifying. But it is over a week since I have heard anything of our plans for going into Norway. Pray let me hear most of these as a matter of urgency.”
It was a joke, at least of sorts, to discourage complacency. Wheatley didn’t have personal contact with Churchill, although Bevan did, but he was a great admirer. One morning he “souvenired” (his word) an ashtray that Churchill had used at a midnight meeting of the War Cabinet.
As time went by the LCS took on more members, several of them to become enduring friends of Wheatley. Along with Johnny Bevan, these included Major Neil Gordon Clark, Colonel Sir Ronald Wingate, Commander James Arbuthnott, and in particular Major Derrick Morley, who smoothed Wheatley’s entry into clubland after the war.
Other friends included General “Pug” Ismay, Churchill’s Chief of Staff; Air Chief Marshal Sir William Elliott; Major Eric Goudie, (“gayest of all my friends”) and the legendary Dudley Clarke himself, who became another enduring friend: almost any post-war career would be an anti-climax, and in later years he worked quietly at Conservative Central Office. Wheatley left him a pair of Chinese Immortals in his will. “We formed a happy band of brothers,” Wheatley said later, and these were among the best years of his life, with full outlets for his own gaiety and bonhomie.
At Christmas 1942, for example, he gave William Elliott some Chateau Petrus Pomerol 1921, and Elliott gave him some Floris scent in return. “Spirits are a very poor return for wine,” he wrote, “but I am hoping that you may like them in this rather sybaritic form. If not I can only pray that your wife does. Secretly however I would like to feel that you share the shocking weakness which I have for scent. But for Rosemary you would find me redolent of Caron and Chanel.” As a postscript, he added about the wine “I wish Goering and Laval knew that I had these bottles of the famous year.”
As for the Floris, “Joan will, I know, love it,” wrote Wheatley; “that is if I can bring myself to spare her a single drop. But that is doubtful as I too am a devotee of joyous smells. Alas! This decadent age and my wife forbid me to move abroad with scent upon my person; but I make up for that as well as I can in the seclusion of the bathroom …”
Following Coombe’s example, Wheatley began hosting his own lunches, and his behaviour with his seniors (or “bigger boys”, as he thought of them, as if fixated on his schooldays) was an unusual mixture of formal and informal. To begin with, Wheatley stuck to the behaviour expected from junior officers during the First War, and on being shown into the room of a General or Admiral he would stand rigidly at attention until he was addressed. They might smile and invite him to sit down, or offer him a cigarette. When business was concluded, Wheatley might then say “I wonder, Sir, if you happen to have a day free to lunch with me?”
This was slightly unusual but they generally accepted; many of them in any case knew of Wheatley as a writer. Wheatley would lunch them at the Hungaria and he was a good host, with exceptional wine from his own cellars. As well as colleagues and the occasional writer he lunched a host of others including J.C. Masterman (Bill Younger’s old tutor, the MI5 man who later wrote The Double Cross System), Peter Fleming, Brigadier Colin Gubbins, who scotched Germany’s atomic bomb plans with a raid on its deuterium or ‘heavy water’ plant, Ian Fleming, John Slessor, Max Knight and a legion of others, often in groups of four or six; over a hundred and sixty guest lists survive in his papers.
Wheatley’s lunches were a great success; “I spent my war Eating for Victory,” he said later. He would move from lunch invitations to dinner, and by this means he built up a good network of contacts. The work of the LCS involved endless liaising with other officers, and Wheatley’s capable networking undoubtedly smoothed Bevan’s way with senior colleagues and generally oiled the wheels.
All Wheatley’s life he was noted for his jolly demeanour, and he was never happier than during the War. Not only was he happy with his friends, but he was happy with his enemies. Conflict with the unambiguous evils of Nazi Germany fitted perfectly with his tendency to see things in invigoratingly black and white terms, instead of letting any depressing grey areas creep in. As Bertrand Russell once put it, “Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation or creed.”
In Spring 1943 the JPS moved to larger room in the fortress-basement. Feeling the new room was bleak, Wheatley took the opportunity to decorate it with his some of his best furniture, which also protected the furniture itself – then costing money to store – from bombing. He brought in a dining table, a set of Chippendale chairs, a bronze figure of a dancing faun for the table, and some oriental rugs. Seeing all this for the first time, General Ismay looked at Wheatley and said, “Dennis, where are the girls?”
It was a move that almost never happened. Allocating rooms was the responsibility of a pompous Lieutenant-Colonel named Denis Capel-Dunn, “the Papal Bun”, and he denied the JPS request for more space. When Wheatley complained, he told Wheatley that his decision was final, and that for a junior officer to argue with him was “an impertinence”. Wheatley outwitted him by appealing to a more senior figure that he was on lunching terms with, and the JPS gots its extra space. Wheatley then magnanimously invited Capel-Dunn to lunch, becoming friends with the man later immortalised as the model for the odious Widmerpool, in Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time.
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By summer 1943 the Allies were ready to invade Sicily, beginning the Italian Campaign, so it was Bevan’s job to convince the Axis that an invasion of France was imminent instead. To this end he had banknotes printed with the inscription ‘British Army of Occupation in Northern France.’ Wheatley and other colleagues would carry these, and when they paid the bill in a restaurant or bought something in a shop they would accidentally hand one over, snatching it back when the recipent had seen it.
Wheatley had less to do with Operation Mincemeat (‘The Man Who Never Was’) than he let people believe in the Fifties – it was largely engineered by Ewen Montagu – but he was involved in ‘Monty’s Double’ (Operation Copperhead), in which a peacetime actor and lieutenant in the Pay Corps named M.E.Clifton James, who bore a remarkable resemblance to Montgomery, visited the Mediterranean days before the invasion of Normandy; if Monty was in the Mediterranean, then it seemed obvious no cross-Channel invasion was imminent. At the last moment someone realised “Monty” might be airsick, ruining the illusion, and Wheatley took him up in a plane to check he could fly.
The most important deception of the war was the protection of Neptune (the D-Day Normandy landings) by Operation Bodyguard. Bevan and the LCS created false operations including Fortitude North, leading the Germans to expect an invasion of Norway, and Fortitude South, for which an entire fictitious army of invasion was built up in Kent. This was so successful that even as the Normandy landings were happening, the Germans believed they were only a feint and continued to keep the bulk of their armoured divisions uselessly in the Pas de Calais, where they expected the real attack. This ensured the success of D-Day.
Allied deception was one of the great triumphs of the War: by the strategic legerdemain of arriving in large numbers where they were not expected, the Allies saved thousands of lives on both sides, avoiding the attritional horror of a grinding, head-on struggle with a fully prepared enemy. Even Churchill, for the most part excessively sanguine, suffered from nightmares about the possible loss of life in invading Europe. Worse still, there was the almost unthinkable possibility that the landing might have failed altogether and been pushed back into the sea. This would have been the ruin of three years planning, the exposure of technological ‘secret weapons’ like the Mulberry harbours and DD amphibious tanks, which could never again have the same surprise value, and the loss of an army.
Instead the Chiefs of Staff came to record that Bevan and the LCS had an unbroken record of success that was “unique,” and in particular that it had made a “decisive” difference to the retaking of Europe. Johnny Bevan was made a Companion of the Bath, as was Dudley Clarke. Wheatley didn’t feel this was enough: he thought Bevan should have had a Grand Cross of the Bath and the rest of the team, including himself, “CBs or, at least, CBEs.” In the event he had to be content with an American Bronze Star, a medal one grade above a Purple Heart1.
Bevan modestly dissuaded Wheatley from writing about the team (“No one will want to read all this nonsense about the sort of people we are”) but he wrote and told him that without Wheatley’s “enthusiasm” he would have been tempted to pack the job in. They remained friends, and after the war Bevan looked after Wheatley’s investments as his stockbroker. When he came to make his will, Wheatley wanted Bevan to have the bronze faun that had been on their table in the War Rooms basement.
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Wheatley’s last real assignment came in June 1944, with the D-Day Landings. Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Peck thought the Americans would soon believe they had won the War single-handed, and he wanted war correspondents and known writers with ‘names’ to cover the British assault and write pieces pitched at the American press.
General Ismay declined to let Wheatley go, not because he was too useful – his work had effectively come to an end – but because he knew too much to be captured if his plane was brought down over Europe. Peck then said that even if he had flown over the beaches he wouldn’t have seen much more than clouds of smoke, and instead sent him to down to Harwell to cover the launch of the British 6th Airborne Division under Major-General Gale, whose parachute and glider troops spearheaded the assault by capturing bridges. Wheatley turned in a suitably upbeat piece about “the great crusade which was to bring light back to Europe”, befriending Gale in the process.
The piece, entitled ‘The Opening of the Battle of the Century’ seems never to have been used; perhaps Wheatley’s account of taking down a “a very special bottle of wine” (a Rupertsberg Hoheburg Gewurztraminer Feinste Edelbeer-Auslese 1920, “the greatest Hock I have ever drunk”) was not what the American public needed.
Wheatley had ascended in rank as his war went on, from the keenly saluting middle-aged Pilot Officer (a rank more suited to someone in their twenties) through Flying Officer, Flight Lieutenant, Squadron Leader and finally, in July 1944, acting Wing Commander. But by now there was nothing for him to do, and he spent his time collecting together thematic groups of stamps – Queen Victoria heads from around the Empire, Rajahs, gods and goddesses and so on – some of which he later put under glass on tabletops.
Wheatley’s fiction career had come to a halt in March 1942, with the publication of the Gregory Sallust book V For Vengeance, and he wanted to get back to it. Britain, in a famous formulation, would proceed to win the war and lose the peace, and there was going to be more for Wheatley to worry about in the coming years. But for now, it was time to get out of uniform.
1 The citation was simply for “meritorious service to the US army while serving as London Controlling Section representative on the Inter-Service Security Board from August 1943 to August 1944.”