BEFORE THE TORCH LANDINGS THE position of the British and Commonwealth forces in North Africa had been precarious to say the least. Through 1941 and the first half of 1942, war in the desert had continued to seesaw between thrust and counter-thrust. When Auchinleck’s Crusader offensive ran out of steam in early 1942, Rommel counter-attacked. The ensuing battle of Gazala saw the British put into flight on 14 June, with the Eighth Army scrambling back towards Egypt to avoid encirclement and capture, while the previously indomitable garrison of Tobruk surrendered on 21 June. The British and Commonwealth forces continued their headlong retreat until they reached El Alamein, a choke point on the way into Egypt.
Here the coast road and railway passed through a 40-mile (64km) gap bordered by the Mediterranean to the north and the Qattara Depression to the south. This wasteland of salt marshes and soft sands was impenetrable to armoured vehicles and prevented Rommel from making the sort of spectacular, sweeping flanking move that had brought him success at Gazala. Beyond the British line at El Alamein, the desert opened up and the way to Alexandria, Cairo and the Suez Canal was clear. Unfortunately for Rommel, by the time his soldiers began trying to force themselves through El Alamein on 1 July they were absolutely shattered, having endured five weeks of constant advance and battle. Trying to seize back the initiative, Auchinleck took personal command of the Eighth Army and counter-attacked the Afrika Korps. It was to little avail.
For the remainder of July the two exhausted adversaries faced one another until both sides called a halt to their operations. For Auchinleck it was desirable for the stalemate to be as prolonged as possible. New Sherman tanks were on their way from America and reinforcement by the 51st Division was expected shortly. On the flip side, Auchinleck knew that Rommel was also waiting for reserves before recommencing his drive into the Nile Delta. If Rommel’s reserves arrived first, the British commander had scant forces available and many of his vehicles were in repair shops. The only thing he had left to hand was deceit.
Auchinleck turned to his Director of Camouflage, Major Geoffrey Barkas, and asked for every dummy gun, truck and tank they could lay their hands on to be placed behind the front line, suggesting to Rommel’s scouts and photo-reconnaissance that the troops at El Alamein were only the forward posts of a much stronger army.
By trade Barkas was a film director, producer and writer, having directed the 1928 film Q-Ships about a British merchant ship in World War I with hidden armaments used against German U-boats. As was the case with Colonel Turner’s decoy organization, professionals from the world of cinema dealt daily in the art of tricking the human eye through a lens and thus proved extremely adept at military deception.
In addition to cinema, the art of camouflage had long been the preserve of artists. Most attribute the modern concept of camouflage to the American artist Abbott H. Thayer, who made a study of defensive coloration in the animal kingdom in 1896.1 During World War I Picasso’s geometric Cubist style influenced French camoufleurs, and it was the British painter Norman Wilkinson who devised the concept of ‘dazzle ships’ in April 1917. Pointing out that there was no way of hiding a large ship on the horizon through a German periscope, Wilkinson demonstrated it was possible, by painting ships in Cubist-like angled blocks of greys and blues, to distort the view of the ship through the periscope and thus confuse or ‘dazzle’ the aimer about its direction and speed. Before long, thousands of vessels were painted in the striking manner conceptualized by the artist.
In 1940 the War Office established the Camouflage Development and Training Centre at Farnham Castle in Surrey. It was the preserve of a mixed bag of individuals including Hugh Cott, a distinguished Cambridge zoologist who applied the coloration found on animal skins to guns and tanks. From the art world there was the Surrealist artist and friend of Picasso, Roland Penrose, who wrote the Home Guard Manual of Camouflage. Penrose’s party trick was successfully to hide his lover, the acclaimed American model, photographer and war correspondent Lee Miller, in a garden, naked, camouflaged from prying eyes with body paint and netting. He reasoned that if he could hide a naked woman in a garden full of people, anything could be hidden.
Perhaps the most famous of the British camoufleurs was the popular stage magician Jasper Maskelyne. Following the publication of his memoirs in 1949, Maskelyne has long been seen as the leading light in the deception world. However, the truth about the ‘war magician’ appears somewhat less fantastic under scrutiny. Maskelyne arrived in Cairo on 10 March 1941 as part of a detachment of 12 camouflage officers sent to work with Barkas. He spent much of his time performing magic shows for entertainment purposes and later went on to work for the escape and evasion department MI9, where he helped in devising concealed escape devices for POWs.
Maskelyne’s actual involvement in military deception appears to have been a bit of a sham. Curiously enough, people appeared much more confident with the dummy vehicles when they were told they had been devised by a well-known illusionist. It also appears that Dudley Clarke encouraged Maskelyne’s boasting to some extent, because it diverted attention away from A Force and himself. Somewhat ironically, then, Maskelyne’s main contribution to deception may have been to provide a cloak behind which others could work in secret.2
Maskelyne’s more limited role is also suggested by the artist Julian Trevelyan, a fellow graduate from Farnham. An interesting character in his own right, Trevelyan was a member of the British Surrealist movement and before the war had experimented with injections of hallucinogenic synthetic Mescalin crystals, an experience which led him to exclaim: ‘I have been given the key of the universe.’ His feet firmly back on the ground, Trevelyan was sent from the United Kingdom on a fact-finding mission to the Middle East to witness the deceptions being carried out there by Barkas’s department.
In March 1942 Trevelyan visited Tobruk and then went to Barkas’s Camouflage Training and Development Centre at Helwan near Cairo. He was generally impressed with what he saw, except perhaps with a dummy railhead complete with dummy rolling stock and station, which he claimed that the Germans complimented by dropping a wooden bomb on. Having witnessed the hand of Barkas at work, the artist remarked: ‘It is thanks to Barkas, principally, that the formidable technique of deception has been elaborated. You cannot hide anything in the desert; all you can do is to disguise it as something else. Thus tanks become trucks overnight, and of course trucks become tanks, and the enemy is left guessing at our real strength and intentions.’3
Returning to the situation at El Alamein, Barkas followed Auchinleck’s orders to congregate his dummies behind the main lines and was overjoyed that he, for the first time, received the magic words ‘operational priority’ to assist him.4 Operation Sentinel saw the land between El Alamein and Cairo become dotted with camps, complete with smoke rising from cookhouses and incinerators. Canteens were set up with dummy vehicles parked outside while their imaginary drivers were inside enjoying an equally notional ‘brew’. To thicken the defensive positions, the craftsmen at Barkas’s school at Helwan developed a wide range of decoys, including batteries of field guns that could be stowed inside a single truck. Within three weeks of starting the build up Barkas was simulating enough activity to indicate the presence of two fresh motorized divisions in close reserve to the main line.
XX
A Force also played a part in Operation Sentinel. With Dudley Clarke on numerous and prolonged absences during 1941, A Force had been the victim of some detrimental organizational changes. In July of that year Wavell formed a new body designated GSI(d), as mentioned earlier. Under the command of Major Wintle, Royal Dragoons, GSI(d) was made responsible for spreading ‘alarm and despondency’ among the enemy with deception and tricks. Wintle was an interesting character. Before arriving in the Middle East, he had been the subject of a scandal after threatening to shoot the Director of Air Intelligence. Wintle had been asked to rejoin his regiment, but instead wanted to be seconded to the French Army. Having been an instructor in France, Wintle believed he could instill some fighting spirit in the French if he was allowed to go out there. The Director of Air Intelligence made a quip Wintle interpreted as an insinuation of cowardice, at which point he drew his pistol. Wintle was put under arrest and faced a court martial. When challenged that he had pulled a gun and said words to the effect that certain ministers and Air Force officers ought to be shot, Wintle admitted it. He then produced a list of ministers he believed ought to be shot for the way they were running the war. Reaching the seventh name on his list, Wintle was stopped and the proceedings were brought to a speedy conclusion.
Perhaps the best known of GSI(d)’s ruses was the manufacturing of defective German ammunition. Instead of propellant, inside the cartridge case Wintle’s men would write defeatist messages, allegedly penned by German factory workers. The organization also pioneered the use of sonic deception at Halfaya on 24 December 1941.5 This technique saw an Egyptian film company record the sound of tanks moving through the desert – the recordings of which were played back through amplifiers mounted on trucks.
With the initiative very much in German hands and with the British in retreat, much of GSI(d) and A Force’s time was spent with the escape and evasion organization, MI9. It was through this association that the magician Maskelyne had his name linked with Clarke’s secret organization; it also saw Wintle arrested in Marseilles while unwisely trying to set up an escape network from France.
Clarke’s return from Gibraltar after the Madrid affair was a godsend to A Force. While absent, much of A Force’s control over tactical deception had been taken away. Clarke lobbied General Auchinleck to restore A Force’s control over all tactical and strategic deception, arguing that the two were inexorably linked and required a single chief coordinating them. In March 1942 Clarke began an operation that was to prove the cornerstone of later successes. Operation Cascade was the build up of a fake order of battle making the British appear much stronger than was the case. A Force had already built up a number of notional units, including several SAS brigades, the 10th Armoured Division in the Western Desert and the 7th Division in Cyprus. Cascade aimed to add three armoured and 11 infantry divisions to the Allied order of battle.
Achieving this was not simply a case of adding a few more formations to a list; it involved real administration. Divisions would need to be assembled, transported to Egypt and quartered, and all this would take mountains of paperwork. The divisions would need a physical imprint – camps, staging and training areas, real insignia, real radio traffic and so on. All this was provided and a phantom army began to grow. What was so fabulous about Cascade is that when the Germans learned of a new formation and entered it on their appreciation of the British order of battle, that unit would remain in existence, in many cases until the end of the war.
One of the best channels for Cascade and other deceptions was the double-agent network Cheese. After misleading the Italians over Crusader, by all the rules the Cheese link should have been discredited beyond further use. Sure enough, the Italians at SIM were suspicious and allowed the channel to stagnate. However, a new SIME case officer, the novelist Captain John Simpson, persisted in sending the Italians messages from Cheese’s fictional White Russian sub-agent Lambert.
As the Twenty Committee had found in London, the best way of establishing an agent’s standing was to have them demand money from their controllers. The fact that none was forthcoming in this case did not bode well. Unfortunately for Lambert, Rommel had other means of getting information out of Cairo and Lambert’s services were simply not in demand. The prime source of information for Axis forces was in fact the US embassy in Cairo. American military attaché Colonel Frank Bonner Fellers was charged by Washington with providing reports on the actions and plans of the British in the Middle East. To that end Fellers was a frequent visitor to British GHQ and to frontline units. Fellers’ reports were transmitted in the so-called ‘Black Code’ used by American missions abroad. Unknown to the Americans, this code had been fatally compromised by the Italian SIM. Before America’s entry to the war, a SIM agent had picked the lock on the safe in the office of the US military attaché in Rome. The agent photographed the ‘Black Code’ and put everything back in order without anyone noticing. The Italians then passed the code on to the Abwehr. From that point on, most of what Fellers told Washington ended up on Rommel’s desk.6
Another important source of information for Rommel was his wireless intelligence service commanded by Captain Alfred Seebohm of the 621st Signals Battalion. In the broad expanse of desert warfare, radio communications were the only practical way for a modern army to communicate. Unfortunately for the British Eighth Army and the Desert Air Force, in the chaos of the fighting with Rommel, their radio security had become somewhat lax. Unknown to the average Tommies, as they chattered away to their command posts and colleagues, Seebohm was listening in, and the German had an uncanny knack of deducing British intentions from the origin and intensity of the chatter he intercepted.
These secret sources had given Rommel the edge in the desert battles and played no small part in his success. Unfortunately for the German field marshal, this success was not to last. Acting on Bletchley Park’s Ultra intercepts, on 10 July the British launched a surprise attack on two Italian infantry divisions at Tel-el-Eisa. Caught up in the attack was part of the 621st Signals Battalion including Seebohm. Rather than flee, Seebohm set up a defensive perimeter around his vehicles and prepared to fight it out. In the ensuing combat about one hundred members of the 621st were captured, along with a large cache of important documents. Seebohm was mortally wounded in the attack and later died in a hospital in Alexandria.
The loss of Seebohm was a catastrophe for Rommel, who was furious to learn he had been so near the front line.7 Not only had he lost the officer, but the captured papers would reveal the extent to which Seebohm had been aware of British call signs, map reference codes and radio codes. It also confirmed suspicions about the ‘Black Code’ having been broken. The British informed Fellers of the breach, but asked the American to keep using the code as a channel for deception traffic.
Thus, at the time Rommel was on the verge of breaking through the last British defences at El Alamein, his most important secret sources dried up. Coupled with the collapse of these sources, the British were able to demonstrate mastery of the skies over Egypt, making German aerial reconnaissance dangerous and sporadic. With the lights switched out, and desperate for news of British intentions, the Germans had no choice but to rely on their agents on the ground.
Unfortunately for Rommel these agents were a mixed bag of no-hopers and unfortunates. The key agent network in Cairo was known as the Kondor mission. All sorts of legends have grown up about Kondor, but the truth is that as a source of intelligence the mission was a disaster. Kondor consisted of two German spies smuggled into Egypt by the Hungarian adventurer, Count Laszlo Almasy. Famous as a pioneer of desert travel, Almasy was recruited by Major Nikolaus Ritter (alias Dr Rantzau) for his knowledge of the Middle East to help infiltrate spies into Egypt. As with almost everything else Ritter was involved in, the result was a dismal failure.
The first mission was to pluck the Egyptian chief of staff, General Aziz Ali Masri Pasha, from behind British lines and take him to a conference in Berlin to discuss an anti-British uprising. Ritter provided Almasy with two Heinkel He111s and a crew, but the link up never materialized and Ritter had his arm broken in a plane crash and went back to Europe. Masri fared no better. When he tried to flee, the RAF forced his plane to land at Almaza airport and he was taken into custody. This attempted flight was reported in the New York Times, which correctly speculated that Masri was trying to cross over to the Germans in Libya to offer them his expertise in desert warfare.8
Almasy’s next mission fared little better. Operating under the codename Salam (a part anagram of his surname), Almasy recruited a spy ring in Paris known as the Pyramid Organization. The network comprised of two men, Mohsen Fadl, the head of the Egyptian tourist office in Paris, and Elie Haggar, a student in the French capital and the son of the head of the Egyptian Police Force. Both were infiltrated into Egypt via Istanbul in October 1941 and told to report on political matters. Unfortunately neither was provided with any means of communicating with the outside world and both were eventually caught in 1943 after very little gain.
With no news from the Pyramid Organization, Almasy came up with the Kondor scheme. This time the explorer would drive two German agents from Tripoli through the southern desert into Egypt. Despite much celebrity, the mission was another in a long line of German secret service disasters.
The Kondor agents were Max, 29-year-old Heinrich Sandstede, an English-speaking former employee of the Texas Oil Company, and the lead agent, Moritz, 28-year-old Johannes Eppler, who also went by the name Hussein Gaafar. Eppler had been born to German parents, but was raised in Cairo by his stepfather, an Egyptian judge. As such he was credited with enough local knowledge to make the mission a success. Instead it was doomed to failure from the start because as early as December 1941 Bletchley Park began picking up signals relating to it. The British code-breakers listened in as the team was assembled, as it received six Ford V8 lorries, and as it set out from Jalu Oasis 250 miles (402 km) south of Benghazi on 12 May. Moritz and Max were dropped off seven miles (11km) from Asyut and then made their way to Cairo by train. Arriving in the Egyptian capital, the two agents painted the town red with £3, 600 of forged British banknotes they had been given to buy information. The pair never got their radio set working and, despite many claims that the two agents were Rommel’s top spies in Egypt, no messages were sent. After several attempts to set up their operations in brothels, the pair were put up in a houseboat on the Nile by the famous Egyptian belly dancer Hekmet Fahmey. The star of the Kit Kat Club at Cairo’s Continental hotel, Fahmey had links to the nationalists Gamal Abdul Nasser and Anwar el-Sadat, both future presidents of Egypt and then members of the anti-British Free Officers’ Movement. In a bid to procure more funds and establish contact with Rommel’s HQ, Fahmey introduced the pair to Sadat. Their presence in Cairo was also advertised to Victor Hauer, an Austrian employed by the Swedish embassy to look after the concerns of interned Germans. Hauer was told to look after the German agents, but instead he was taken into custody on 21 July and spilled the beans to his interrogators. Eppler and Sandstede were arrested along with Fahmey and some of the Egyptian officers – Sadat included. The failure of Kondor left the Germans with just one last source: Lambert.
Lambert’s script writer, Captain Robertson, had given the notional agent an address in the Rue Galal in Cairo. From there he sent a stream of news about the fictional order of battle build up that A Force was creating in Operation Cascade. Lambert was also used in trying to divert Axis resources away from Malta, which was then in a state of blockade, and to deter reserves being sent to Rommel. From a fictional sub-agent, Lambert began sending reports that the British were planning an attack from Cyprus against the Greek islands. As the script unfolded, this notional attack became focused against Crete. To support Lambert’s messages, dummy landing craft were constructed in Cyprus and dummy gliders were built in Egypt to hint at airborne support for this bogus operation.
When Lambert reported that the invasion force might have already left Cyprus, a detachment of the Italian Navy blockading Malta was sent to intercept it. While the Italian ships were away a British convoy managed to reach Malta with much-needed supplies. Although his warnings had not materialized, this was enough to build Lambert up in the eyes of his controllers.
The fictional White Russian was handed over by the Italian SIM to the German Abwehr. Whatever suspicions the Italians had harboured did not seem to be shared by his new German bosses, whose opinions of Lambert were being read by Bletchley Park. On 4 July ISOS decrypts revealed that Lambert was thought of as a credible source by the Abwehr and by 12 July Bletchley Park could report that Lambert was considered ‘trustworthy’. After the failure of the Kondor mission to report in and the loss of Seebohm, the Abwehr instructed Lambert to step up his transmissions from twice a week to daily. His eagerly awaited reports were then sent by the Abwehr direct to Panzer Army HQ where they were dissected by Rommel’s staff. This was an incredible success for the British.9
With Lambert’s new lease of life confirmed, SIME decided to add another fictional character to the Cheese network by giving Lambert a notional girlfriend, a Greek girl they codenamed Misanthrope. This fictional woman was portrayed as young, brave and intelligent with a hatred of the British. She showed no scruples in befriending officers for the purpose of extracting secrets from them. Lambert revealed to his eager Abwehr controllers that he was teaching the girl to use his radio set in case he fell ill. Again the British showed a deep understanding of the cunning necessary in secret service work. Every radio operator sounds different over the air when typing out Morse code. To ensure Misanthrope was distinguishable from Lambert, the British recruited an ATS officer (Auxiliary Territorial Service, the British Army’s female support service) as a substitute radio operator.
Suddenly the Germans were keen to send money to Lambert and worryingly they asked him to have a face-to-face meeting with one of their agents in order to be paid. Lambert replied that this was impossible, but he would send his girlfriend instead. To this end SIME recruited and schooled a Greek girl to play the role of Misanthrope. The girl was known as the BGM (Blond Gun Moll) as it was rumoured she had shot someone in the past, and it was SIME’s knowledge of this act that allowed them to blackmail her into complying with their requirements. In fact the ‘gun’ part of her nickname was inaccurate, as she had actually pushed the poor fellow off a building rather than shot him.10
Despite her schooling and background the BGM was reluctant actually to meet with an Abwehr agent face-to-face, so a system was worked out whereby the Axis courier would leave the money inside some milk bottles in a cupboard outside the house in the Rue Galal. They remained empty as a succession of couriers failed to materialize. This should not be read as a lack of interest in Lambert; on the contrary, the bogus Russian remained, along with Garbo, one of Germany’s most trusted spies until the end of the war.
XX
Having ordered his deceivers to commence work at the beginning of July, Auchinleck did not remain long enough in theatre to witness their eventual success. While en route to Moscow on 5 August 1942, Churchill visited Auchinleck at his desert HQ. Churchill was unhappy that ‘the Auk’ had taken direct control of the Eighth Army and believed that should have been left to a subordinate while he concentrated on commanding the whole theatre. The British Prime Minister wanted a new commander for the Eighth Army and, against the advice of Auchinleck and General Sir Alan Brooke, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, he appointed Lieutenant General William ‘Strafer’ Gott.
An aggressive desert veteran popular with his troops, Gott never took up this post, as the unarmed transport aircraft he was travelling in was shot down on 7 August. Although the aircraft crash-landed and the pilot escaped, Gott did not escape the wreck. Somewhat ironically considering Gott’s nickname, after a forced landing the transport was strafed on the ground by the German fighter and caught fire. The following day the Eighth Army command was offered to Lieutenant General Bernard Montgomery (Monty), the preferred choice of Brooke, but then still a relative unknown to many. On 8 August Churchill also replaced General Auchinleck as Commander-in-Chief Middle East with General Harold Alexander. Churchill was pained to replace Auchinleck and told Alexander that sacking his predecessor was ‘like killing a magnificent stag’.11 However, with the succession of reverses and Rommel’s growing reputation as an unbeatable military wizard, such a cull was necessary.
Alexander’s first appreciation of the military situation in the Western Desert was precise. If the Alamein position was lost, then the whole Nile Delta was indefensible. A German advance beyond that point would precipitate a huge withdrawal. This view was shared by Montgomery, who pinned his colours to the defence of El Alamein. This would be his Thermopylae and the word ‘withdraw’ was henceforth expunged from Eighth Army vocabulary.
Greatly assisted by Bletchley Park’s decrypts of Rommel’s situation, Montgomery was able to resist the final Axis attempt to break through the Alamein line and drive into the Delta. The battle opened on the night of 30 August with a determined German effort to hook round the British from the south and to occupy the ridge of Alam el Halfa, which gave the battle its name. Warned by Bletchley Park, the Desert Air Force was able to hit Rommel’s tank and vehicle concentrations as they were bunched up passing through the dense British minefields. This same air force also bombed and strafed Rommel’s supply lines to the point where, on 4 September, he had to give up his advance.
General Alexander put part of the success at Alam el Halfa down to a ruse, which in essence was a variation of Meinzerhagen’s haversack ploy described in Chapter 8. It concerned the planting of a bogus ‘going’ map in a damaged armoured car that was left behind to be captured by the Germans. A ‘going’ map was a specially coloured map produced by the Survey Branch showing what parts of the desert were possible for vehicles and which areas were impassable. The map was specially drawn up to show that a wide flanking move around the Alam el Halfa position would be hard ‘going’, while an advance against the south of the position would be relatively easy ‘going’.
The map was ‘aged’ with folds, creases, tea and oil stains and given to an 11th Hussar armoured car reconnaissance. The patrol drove within sight of the Germans and attracted some fire, at which point the crew of the armoured car faked a breakdown. The crew bailed out, ran away to the safety of another vehicle in the patrol and sped off, leaving the map and several other documents behind.12
According to Alexander, the Germans found the map and altered their plans from making an outflanking manoeuvre to a direct assault on the ridge, which was repelled. Although many believe the Germans did not make the flanking move because of a lack of fuel, Alexander claimed that confirmation of the role of the map was given by General von Thoma, who was subsequently captured by the Allies.13 It has been pointed out that von Thoma was not in the theatre at the time of Alam el Halfa and only arrived later. Although it is not beyond the realms of belief that the captive general learned of the German planning after his arrival, his absence during the battle has left the door open for sceptics.14
XX
After his failure to break through the Alamein line Rommel was forced onto the defensive. With an impatient Prime Minister anxiously watching proceedings, the British made their preparations for a counter-attack scheduled for 23 October. To cover this attack, two cover plans were developed, Operations Treatment and Bertram.
Shortly after Montgomery took command of the Eighth Army on 13 August he held his first meeting with Colonel Dudley Clarke and was given an appraisal of his command’s activities, which centred on maintaining a notional threat against Crete. Montgomery did not disapprove of Dudley Clarke’s tactics; in fact he endorsed them. When planning the counter-offensive, in addition to the notional threat against Crete, Montgomery wanted A Force to use its intelligence channels to make the Germans believe the start date, or D-Day, for the forthcoming Allied desert counter-offensive would be 6 November, two weeks later than actually planned. This A Force ruse was codenamed Treatment.
At the time, Dudley Clarke was heavily involved with the planning for Operation Torch. In October he was called to attend a meeting with the London Controlling Section, which was set up to ensure Anglo-American cooperation in deception once the US forces began operating in North Africa. As he would be away from Egypt at the crucial time, Clarke handed over management of Treatment to his deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Noël Wild.
Having been acquainted with him for some time before the war, in April 1942 Clarke had poached Wild from his job as a staff officer at GHQ Cairo. The circumstances of his recruitment were somewhat irregular. One evening Major Wild went to a Cairo hotel to cash a cheque and was ambushed by the A Force chief, who bought him drinks to celebrate Wild’s promotion to lieutenant colonel as Clarke’s deputy. When Wild enquired what the promotion entailed, and what exactly Clarke did, he was met with evasive replies. The only certainty was that Clarke wanted someone he knew and trusted in the post.15
After a night’s sleep Wild accepted the position and was indoctrinated into the weird and wonderful world of A Force. By the time of Treatment, Wild was well enough versed in its techniques to use the A Force channels to hint that there were no plans to commit to a major offensive against Rommel. As long as German forces continued to advance into the Caucasus through the Soviet Union, the British were said to be apprehensive about their rear. Instead, Montgomery’s sole purpose was to use the lull in the fighting to train and test his troops for future operations. According to information sent out by the Cheese network, if there was going to be any major British attack it would be against Crete. This information was taken so seriously that Hitler ordered the island’s garrison to be strengthened on 23 September. He reiterated this order on 21 October, just two days before the British offensive was due to open.
To divert attention away from the last week of October, a conference was scheduled in Tehran. In attendance would be the British Commanders-in-Chief Middle East, PAIFORCE (Persia and Iraq) and India. This conference was scheduled for 26 October, three days after D-Day. In Egypt the last week of October was left open for officers to take leave and many had hotel rooms booked in their names.16
The tactical counterpart to Treatment was codenamed Bertram and was given to Lieutenant Colonel Charles Richardson to devise and implement.17 An engineer by training, Richardson had only recently joined the planning staff of Eighth Army HQ after having spent a year with SOE in Cairo. Privately he was dismissive of the dummy tanks Auchinleck had used in Sentinel as a ‘pathetic last resort’. Richardson was sceptical about the chances of fooling the Germans, in particular the Luftwaffe and its photo-reconnaissance interpreters.
Richardson was summoned by Montgomery’s chief of staff, Freddie de Guingand, and received the outline of the British plan, which was a direct assault along the coastal road, on the right of the British position. He was then told to go away and come up with a suitable cover plan that would conceal the intention of the offensive for as long as possible, and when that was no longer possible, to mislead the enemy over the date and sector in which the attack was to be made.
For this purpose Montgomery wanted a plan that advertised false moves in the south, while concealing his real moves in the north of the sector. Pondering the situation from Rommel’s point of view, Richardson thought that the German field marshal might ‘buy’ the suggestion of a British attack from the south, as it was the sort of tactic he might resort to himself. The other thing Richardson had to consider was how to persuade Rommel the attack was not going to be delivered on 23 October, as was the case. The preparations for the battle were so vast that Richardson supposed they could only stall the enemy’s thinking by about ten days. The way he proposed to do this was ingenious. His idea was to construct a dummy pipeline bringing water to the southern flank. German reconnaissance would no doubt spot this pipeline and, by gauging the speed with which it was being constructed, they would be able to project the date on which the British would be ready to begin their operations. This date would be set at ten days after D-Day. Richardson took the plans to de Guingand, who approved them, and passed them on to Monty for his final endorsement.
With official approval granted, Richardson needed someone actually to implement the plans. Richardson was aware of A Force’s existence, probably through de Guingand, who had until recently been the Director of Military Intelligence in GHQ Cairo. However, Richardson was reluctant to use A Force because he believed Clarke’s work was so ‘stratospheric and secret’ it was best to keep well out of it.18 Instead Richardson used GHQ’s Camouflage Department under Barkas.
On 17 September Barkas and his deputy, Major Tony Ayrton, were invited to de Guingand’s caravan and warned that what they were about to hear was top secret. The Chief Engineer of the Eighth Army was about to make a number of bulldozed tracks running from an assembly area codenamed Martello towards the front line, running parallel with the coast road and railway. Shortly afterwards large concentrations of vehicles and tanks would begin concentrating at Martello along with vast quantities of stores and munitions. Beyond Martello, but about five miles behind the front line, a great number of field guns would be marshalled at an area codenamed Cannibal 1. These would then be moved closer to the front line to deliver an opening barrage from positions directly behind the front line codenamed Cannibal 2. De Guingand wanted to know if the Camouflage Department was able to assist with the following objectives: 19
1. To conceal the preparations in the north.
2. To suggest that an attack was to be mounted in the south.
3. When the preparations in the north could not be concealed, to minimize their scale.
4. To make the rate of build up appear slower than it actually was, so that the enemy would believe there were still two or three days before the attack commenced.
Although sobered when told he had about a month to achieve all this, Barkas was inwardly jubilant that at last Camouflage was about to make a ‘campaign swaying’ contribution.20
Barkas and Ayrton left the caravan to formulate their plan and took a stroll along the beach where their voices were drowned out from prying ears by the waves breaking on the shore. Two hours later, having typed up an appreciation and report on the subject, they went back to de Guingand, offering to suggest that two armoured brigade groups were concentrating to the south. When Montgomery’s reply was delivered a few days later, Barkas was told to make provision for an entire phantom armoured corps in the south.
This entailed making 400 dummy Grant tanks and at least 1,750 transport vehicles and guns. Barkas was given ample resources, including three complete pioneer companies, a transport company and a POW unit. While he masterminded production of the material and devices, Barkas charged Ayrton and his colleague, the former Punch illustrator Brian Robb, with the actual deception work on the battlefield.
The deception scheme was composed of a number of separate plans, their component parts coming together to form a veritable symphony of deceit. The first problem was the approach tracks that were bulldozed from Martello to the front line. Although there was absolutely no hope of hiding their existence from the Luftwaffe, their purpose could be concealed. Ayrton went up in an aircraft to enact the role of a German reconnaissance pilot taking photographs. Ayrton’s solution to the problem of the tracks was ingenious. He called in at the Chief Engineer’s with annotated aerial photographs and suggested that rather than starting at Martello and driving directly to the front, the bulldozers should complete only patches of the track and join them together only much closer to D-Day.
More solutions were found to disguise the stores. Over 3,000 tons of stores had to be hidden at El Alamein train station, about five miles behind the front line. This included 600 tons of supplies, 2,000 tons of petrol, oil and lubricants and 420 tons of engineer stores.21 A similar amount required concealment at a second station about 15 miles to the east. In the forward area the most pressing problem was finding suitable storage for the cans of petrol. Ayrton and Robb found that there were about a hundred sections of slit-trenches in the area, all of which were lined with masonry. Supposing that these trenches were already well known to Germans from reconnaissance photographs, it was decided to line the trenches with a single course of petrol cans on each side. This slight reduction in the width of the trenches did not appear to change the shadows cast by the trenches, so 2,000 tons of fuel was successfully stored overnight. Confirmation of their success came when British air observers were sent out to locate the new fuel dumps and failed.
The food supplies arrived at the dumping ground in trucks by night. The trucks were met by guides and led to pre-arranged unloading sites in the open, featureless piece of terrain. As they were unloaded, the stores were stacked in such a way that they resembled three-ton trucks covered by camouflage netting. Further stores were stacked under the apron of the net, with the remaining boxes stacked and hidden under soldiers’ tents. To complete the illusion of a park of thin-skinned vehicles, a small unit of soldiers was moved into the area to animate it and real trucks were diverted to drive through it to create tracks and demonstrate the sort of activities associated with a vehicle park. Similar arrangements were made for the concealment of ammunition and other military stores close to the rail stations at El Alamein and also further back.
The British offensive was to be opened by an enormous barrage of around 400 25-pounder field guns. These guns had to be hidden at their assembly point and then again at their barrage positions. It was not simply a case of hiding the guns, but also their limbers and the distinctively shaped quad tractors used to transport them. It was found that by backing the limber up to the gun and rigging a canvas dummy vehicle over the top with the limber and gun’s wheels protruding, the effect was to produce a convincing three-ton truck. In turn the quads had a rectangular tent put over the back of them to make them also appear as trucks. Each gun crew was then trained in making the transformation from assembly area (Cannibal 1) to the barrage point (Cannibal 2) – the codename Cannibal deriving from the way the dummy ‘swallowed’ the thing it was protecting. When the time came to move the guns into position, the transition occurred at night and the gun crews had their tents and covers in place before the sun came up.
As for the Martello staging area, the problem was collecting hundreds of armoured vehicles in an area just 12 x 8 miles (19 x 13km). Since there was no way of hiding such an assembly, it was decided to fill up the Martello area with as many thin-skinned vehicles and dummies as quickly as possible. The Germans would no doubt notice this concentration area, but because nothing appeared to be happening there, they would come to ignore it.
Meanwhile, each tank that was destined to arrive at Martello was assigned a special point where it would be concealed. Each tank was provided with a ‘sunshield’, an invention that Barkas attributed to Wavell, who had earlier shown him a sketch of a tank with a canopy over it. The idea was that each tank would have a quickly detachable cover to make it look like a truck. In all, 772 ‘sunshields’ were issued before El Alamein. The tank crews were trained how to use them and then taken up to Martello and shown their hiding place in advance. On the night of 20–21 October Xth Armoured Corps began moving from its staging area to Martello. On arrival the crews had their ‘sunshields’ rigged before first light. Back at the staging area, the track marks were obliterated, the empty fuel cans were collected and a dummy tank was erected where the real tank had previously stood. From the point of view of German photo-reconnaissance, nothing had changed since the previous day, except the arrival of more trucks in an already busy assembly area behind the British lines.
The main focus of the build up in the south, where Montgomery wanted Rommel to think the attack was coming from, began on 26 September with the start of the dummy water pipeline codenamed Diamond. A five-milelong section of trench was dug and a ‘pipeline’ laid parallel to it. The actual ‘pipeline’ was constructed from crushed, empty petrol cans laid along the ground in a line. Overnight the trench would be filled in and the ‘pipeline’ gathered up to be reused in the next section of trench. Dummy pump houses were built at three points along the line, complete with overhead tanks and can filling stations. To add further credence to the illusion, these areas were populated by dummy vehicles and mannequins of soldiers.
To the east of Diamond, an area codenamed Brian (after Brian Robb) was set aside for the build up of dummy stores. Despite a sandstorm and the unexpected arrival of a horde of British tanks on field manoeuvres, two days before D-Day Barkas’s men had created what appeared to be a huge stockpile of stores.
With the real artillery hidden to the north dummy batteries were set up at the eastern end of what was codenamed the Munassib Depression. This area was chosen for the site of a series of dummy gun batteries, which were set up on 15 October. They were camouflaged exactly the same way a genuine battery would be hidden, but after a few days the camouflage was allowed to lapse so that the Germans would realize the guns were dummies. Shortly after D-Day, the dummy field guns in Munassib were replaced with the genuine items, much to the surprise of a column of German armour which decided to probe against what it thought was a harmless decoy position.
Last, but by no means least, at the opening of the battle a non-existent amphibious landing was staged behind German lines between El Daba and Sidi Abd el Rahman. This operation saw the use of sonic deception – where battle sounds were played over loudspeakers mounted on fast motor torpedo boats operating just off shore. This technique was still in its early stages, but had been pioneered by GSI(d) almost a year earlier. Barkas was not overly impressed with sonic deception, complaining that the recordings of gunfire sounded like dustbins being struck. However, better amplification was being developed by movie companies in the United States and so the ruse would be used again later in the war.
XX
The night of 23 October was clear and brightly illuminated by a full moon. At 9.40pm, the calm was ruptured by the detonation of hundreds of British field guns. For 15 minutes, just short of a thousand British guns pounded the German batteries in front of them. There was a five-minute pause before the barrage recommenced at 10pm, this time targeting German forward positions. Behind the barrage Allied infantry began advancing through the Axis minefields.
At the opening of the battle Rommel was not in Egypt. He had been in poor health since August and had returned to Germany in September on leave. On 3 October he was presented with his field marshal’s baton in Berlin and declared that he was at the gateway to Egypt and had no intention of being flung back.
His understudy was General Georg Stumme. On the night of 23 October Stumme and his chief signals officer went forward on a reconnaissance towards the British lines. It was an ill-chosen adventure moments before the opening of the British attack. In the opening barrage the signals officer was killed by machine-gun fire and Stumme suffered a heart attack. He was unused to the climate in North Africa and had been overworking: the shock of the barrage and the close proximity of the signals officer’s death finished him off. It was some time before he was missed and the body recovered. Meanwhile in Berlin it was a full 24 hours before the seriousness of the situation was realized and Hitler ordered Rommel to return and resume command.
With the charismatic field marshal missing for the first 48 hours of the battle and overwhelming Allied superiority, the end result of El Alamein was never really in doubt. The Axis troops fought hard but were gradually worn down in a battle of attrition. When a renewed offensive began on 2 November Rommel realized the game was up. Despite being told to stand and fight by Hitler, by 4 November the Afrika Korps began to retreat to the west. Four days later the Torch landings began.
The victory at El Alamein is often described as the turning point of the war against the Nazis, or, as Churchill put it, ‘the end of the beginning’. Along with the surrender of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad on 31 January 1943, El Alamein marked a point in the war when the balance swayed in favour of the Allies, and one on which all future successes were built.
Although one might speculate that the German defeat was down to a lack of air superiority, a lack of operational intelligence, the inferiority of their numbers and the disruption of their supplies, the success of Treatment and Bertram cannot be overlooked. Barkas modestly and rightly noted that none of his colleagues was ‘so foolish’ as to think that El Alamein had been won ‘by conjuring tricks, with stick, string and canvas’ and attributed the success to the bravery of the fighting men. However, in a speech in the House of Commons on 11 November Churchill acknowledged the importance of ‘surprise and strategy’ in the battle:
By a marvellous system of camouflage, complete tactical surprise was achieved in the desert. The enemy suspected – indeed, knew – that an attack was impending, but when and where and how it was coming was hidden from him. The Xth Corps, which he had seen from the air exercising fifty miles in the rear, moved silently away in the night, but leaving an exact simulacrum of its tanks where it had been, and proceeded to its points of attack. The enemy suspected that the attack was impending, but did not know how, when or where, and above all he had no idea of the scale upon which he was to be assaulted.
For the first time on a large scale, the planning of a cover for an operation involving camouflage, decoys, bogus signals traffic and double agents, had been successfully achieved. With varying degrees of success, this same recipe would now be applied to every major Allied operation in the build up to the Normandy invasion in 1944.