Waging war by misleading the enemy, with bogus documents, decoy ships, fake buildings and ‘dazzle painting.’
Among the graves in a cemetery in Huelva, in southern Spain, is one for a Glyndwr Michael, a vagrant who died in 1943 at age 34—in London. Long after his death, his grave marker was amended to commemorate his inadvertent service during World War II. For it was the corpse of this young man that was used by the British in one of the greatest of wartime ruses: Operation Mincemeat. The cadaver was dressed in the uniform of a Royal Marines officer and given the name William Martin, taken to Spain in a submarine and left to drift ashore. A briefcase stuffed with “secret” documents was attached to a belt worn by “Major Martin.”
The body would be discovered, the British hoped, and the papers delivered to the Nazis, convincing them that Allied forces in the Mediterranean were going to invade southern Europe through Greece—and that any Allied movement toward Sicily would be a feint. The ruse worked: Hitler redeployed his forces and sent Rommel to take command of the Greek defenses. The Allied conquest of Sicily took 38 days rather than the 90 originally estimated, with many thousands of lives saved.
The story of Operation Mincemeat and the Royal Marine who came to be called “the man who never was” is related in Nicholas Rankin’s “A Genius for Deception,” a delight-filled account of “how cunning helped the British win two world wars.” As Mr. Rankin notes, Archibald Wavell—whose career began in the Boer War and ended with him a field marshal and viceroy of India—once wrote: “The beginnings of any war by the British are always marked by improvidence, improvisations, and too often, alas, impossibilities being asked of the troops.” Improvisation defined British deception operations. Camouflaging soldiers in the field, building entire fake armies and fake cities to fool airborne reconnaissance and bombers, counter-sniping with dummy heads—all originated in the British amateur spirit and gift for discovering a way forward out of the strangest materials.
At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, for instance, Solomon J. Solomon was a successful British portrait painter. He became obsessed with camouflaging soldiers, writing letters to the Times of London and harassing the British War Office. Swept off to France by a sympathetic general, he began constructing steel trees as forward observation posts. With help from members of London’s theatrical and artistic worlds, he started a British Army School of Camouflage in Hyde Park.
Another painter, the marine artist Norman Wilkinson, was an avid sailor and fisherman. Serving in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve, he learned first-hand the dangers of U-boats in the Dardanelles. A fishing expedition in 1917—accompanied by much meditation on the art of tricking trout into rising to an artificial fly—gave him the idea of a better way to camouflage ships from submarine attack: Paint them with large patches of strong color in complex patterns. Rather than hiding ships, “dazzle painting,” as it was dubbed, distorted them and made it very difficult for U-boat commanders to discern a ship’s course and speed without giving themselves away. Mr. Rankin writes: “A camouflage officer once explained to a merchant skipper who objected to the vivid painting of his vessel” that the aim of dazzle painting was not to “turn your ship into an imitation of a West African parrot” but “to give the impression that your head is where your stern is.”
In the 1930s, Sefton Delmer, who spoke German like a native, was the only English journalist welcomed into Hitler’s inner circle during his rise to power. Once the war began, he put his intimate familiarity with the Nazis and their ways of thinking to use in what was called black propaganda. He produced seemingly authentic German-language radio programs aimed at demoralizing Hitler’s troops—the broadcasts sounded like genuine Nazi propaganda and entertainment but were seeded with disinformation. Mr. Rankin quotes a typical report—”Gallant doctors battle diphtheria in German children’s camps”—as “the kind of apparently upbeat take on a disaster that was actually designed to worry a German parent.”
The tales of inspired British wartime subterfuge have been told individually—Operation Mincemeat, for instance, was described in 1953 by one of its planners, Lt. Cmdr. Ewen Montagu, in “The Man Who Never Was: World War II’s Boldest Counterintelligence Operation.” Mr. Rankin, though, seems to be the first writer to pull together the deception operations of the two great wars. With its sharp, essayistic style, “A Genius for Deception” is as much an entertainment as history—a celebration of the British amateur spirit and what it got up to in wartime.
There is much to savor, as in this anecdote (which the author admits “seems almost too good to be true”) about an incident during the Battle of Britain: During one of the nightly Luftwaffe attacks, an urgent call went out from a British camoufleur in charge of an elaborate fake airfield, complete with dummy planes, to an RAF fighter pilot.
Camoufleur: “Sir! We’re being attacked!”
Pilot: “Splendid, Sergeant. Good show.”
Camoufleur: “They’re smashing the place to bits!”
Pilot: “Yes, excellent. Carry on.”
Camoufleur: “But, sir—we need fighter cover! They’re wrecking my best decoys.”
Mr. Messenger is a senior editor of The Weekly Standard.
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Full article and photo: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703363704574502481350595564.html
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