Brigadier Dudley Wrangel Clarke
We’ve written earlier of the close relationship between Deception and warfare, and current affairs continue to make deception the sharp edge of politics and the rough cut of history.
We look for guidance to our great magician-sages of the past, in this case to the unsung British Army hero Dudley Clarke. Then Col. Clarke was the British officer in charge of deception operations, mainly owing to his lifelong exposure to magic: his uncle, S. W. Clarke, was the foremost magic historian of his day; like many reading this blog, Dudley had been practicing trick moves since age 12.
It was he who designed Operation Bertram, the massive deception that allowed the Allies to beat Nazi Uebermensch Gen. Erwin Rommel in the North African desert.
| A tank only a Nazi would fear |
By building dummy tanks and aircraft out of palm branches and masking trucks with tank-like umbrellas, Clarke and his men convinced the Germans that the British had delivered one entire extra division onto the battlefield. By parking real trucks near the front line and tanks in the rear, then switching and camouflaging them the night before the attack, the British convinced the Nazis it would take two full days to be at fighting strength.
| Col. Clarke's strategy program. |
Even when the Nazi surveillance discovered fake airplanes, Clarke - using a magician’s classic “out” - turned that potential disaster into a stunning climax:
Major Oliver Thynne had joined Clarke’s “A” Force deception team in Cairo in the spring of 1942. Soon afterwards he discovered from Intelligence that the German aerial observers had learned to distinguish the dummy British aircraft from the real ones because the flimsy dummies were supported by struts under their wings.
When Major Thynne reported this to his boss, Colonel Clarke, the “master of deception,” fired back, “Well, what have you done about it?”
To which the novice deceptionist fumbled, “Done about it, Dudley? What could I do about it?”
When I posed this problem as a snap test question to my classes of American and foreign Special Operations officer-students in the period 2003-2005, less than one in ten could anticipate Clarke’s solution, which was:
“Tell them to put struts under the wings of all the real ones, of course!”By putting dummy struts on the real planes while grounded, enemy pilots would avoid them as targets for strafing and bombing.— Whaley, Barton, Turnabout and Deception: Crafting the Double-Cross and the Theory of Outs, Naval Institute Press.
