The illusionist, p.23
The Illusionist, page 23
The Axis commanders were confident they would have warning of the British assault. ‘As assembly of the attacking troops and artillery will take at least one or two days, our own troops cannot be taken by surprise provided they keep their eyes open,’ an intelligence summary concluded.
And they were doing just that. In early October, aerial reconnaissance showed an increase in the number of military transports behind the British lines, up to about 13,000. A colleague feared the number was bigger, hidden by camouflage. For two days in the middle of the month, the planes were grounded by violent sandstorms, but they were showing a build-up in the southern sector.
What was there to see? There were a lot of trucks gathered about 25 miles behind the northern end of the line, but they had been there for weeks. Well in the rear, in Wadi el Natrun, a valley outside Cairo, was what they assumed to be X Corps. Meanwhile, at the southern end, there were supply dumps building up. At the end of September, the British had begun laying a pipeline to carry water, running south-west. Three weeks later, it was barely halfway to the front. If the British were planning to use it for their attack, then their attack was some weeks off.
On 18 October an armoured brigade moved forward out of Wadi el Natrun. It was still well in the rear. On 19 October tanks, guns and trucks advanced towards the southern end of the line and set up camp, still 20 miles from the front. Behrendt’s team, using signals intelligence, identified the 10th Armoured Division. They decided it must be part of the southern sector’s XIII Corps, along with – though they weren’t quite sure about this – the 1st Armoured Division.
He knew the British were trying to play tricks on him. At the start of October, 621 Company had identified an attempt to pretend units existed using wireless signals. They hadn’t been fooled. On 15 October, the British also began setting up artillery along the southern front, but to the trained eye, they were clearly dummies: neither moving nor firing.
And the aerial reconnaissance was clear: everything was static. The units that had advanced on the 18th and 19th were still in place on the 22nd. The men attached to them were making camp.
Nothing looked imminent, but whatever was coming would come in the south. Rommel’s deputy, General Georg Stumme, had announced this to his commanders at the start of October, and he confirmed it on the 20th: there would be a feint from Montgomery in the north, and the real attack would come in the south. That day, British planes began three days of attacks on ground troops and airfields. They had done so ahead of the last full moon, too.
A week earlier, Behrendt had been sure the attack would come on 23 October. But when the 23rd came, the Luftwaffe told him the same thing it had said all week: ‘Nothing to report’. The RAF was stopping it from getting planes over parts of the British rear, but it was clear that the 10th Armoured Division hadn’t moved. It was at least two days away from being able to take part in an assault. The general report for the day was blunt: ‘Enemy situation unchanged. Quiet all day along the front.’ Had Behrendt got it wrong? Intelligence was an uncertain business. That was why his commander had advised him to be vague about dates in his final report.
And then, a little before 10 p.m. that night, the British guns opened fire.
It was an artillery barrage heavier than anything yet seen in the desert war: more than a thousand guns, firing right along the length of the front. First they aimed at the Axis artillery batteries and then they shifted their focus to the frontline positions. The noise was horrifying even to the troops firing the guns. To those on the receiving end, it felt like an endless hell. ‘I saw a notebook,’ a British reporter wrote afterwards, ‘in which a German dispatch-rider had tried to jot down his impression of this barrage. Language failed him, as it inevitably must. All he could write was silly little blabbing phrases, repeated over and over again.’
As the Axis forces huddled for cover in their positions, or fled the storm of high explosive, communications on the front line were lost. At dawn the next day, no one in Stumme’s headquarters could tell him what was happening. It wasn’t clear what the artillery barrage meant. If the British were adopting tactics from the Great War, there might be a week of shelling before any advance. He decided to drive to the front to see for himself what had happened.
Over the previous month, Rommel had visited both Mussolini and Hitler, pressing the case for more support, and then travelled to the Semmering, a mountain resort near Vienna, to rest. He was supposed to be cut off from the world, but it was hard to relax. On the afternoon of 24 October, he was summoned to the telephone. The British were shelling his lines, he was told, and Stumme had gone missing. He began to make his preparations to leave. Shortly after midnight, there was another call. It was the Fuhrer, ordering him to return to Africa.
He was there by the following evening. The situation was bad. It was not simply shelling: the British had advanced through the German minefields in force. Stumme was dead, apparently of a heart attack after his car came under fire from Australian soldiers who had got far further forward than he’d realised.
Behrendt had little time to take satisfaction in being proved right about the timing of the attack. Too much was still unclear. There were reports of British tanks in the south and the north. Which was the main blow? Wireless listeners were picking up intense traffic at the northern end of the line. A captured British soldier seemed to confirm this. On the evening of 26 October, three days after the start of the attack, Rommel ordered a panzer division to move north to meet the attack.
There was more than a week of brutal fighting ahead at El Alamein, as Montgomery’s forces tried to push their way through the line of dug-in defenders. For Behrendt, it was a chaotic, exhausting time, but there was a lingering question: how had the British managed to launch a surprise attack in a desert that didn’t offer enough cover to hide a platoon, let alone whole divisions?
Chapter 33
Six weeks before his guns opened fire, and a week after the Battle of Alam Halfa, Montgomery had summoned Clarke to his headquarters again. This time, he gave him lunch. Clarke had met Montgomery before the war, on a course for Staff College candidates. The future commander had taught infantry tactics, something of which Clarke had little experience. ‘Under Monty’s teaching the whole thing suddenly became plain and simple to me,’ he recalled. He was less of a fan of the brusque way that the general treated his senior staff, and privately resolved that he would try to deal with the Auk’s replacement, General Alexander, where possible.
But if Montgomery’s officers found him difficult, he had a knack with the rank and file. He recognised that he wasn’t leading professional soldiers. His army was made up of civilians who had put on uniforms when their country had called. They needed to understand that there was a plan and that they had a part in it. And they needed to believe that they had a general every bit as special as the one the Germans had.
His tour of his new command veered well over into self-promotion. Here was a new broom, sweeping out the failed generals of the past. He admitted that it appealed to his vanity. But his troops wanted to have faith in the man who was ordering them to charge the enemy guns, and liked it that he loudly expressed his faith in them.
That September, a desert army that had come to look ragged over months of retreats began to take pride in itself once again. Shirts were tucked back into shorts. The new general demanded daily exercise, to prepare his men for what was coming. ‘Ordinary fitness is not enough,’ he told his commanders. ‘They must be made tough and hard.’ He wanted no one under any illusions about the battle ahead. ‘It will be a killing match; the German is a good soldier and the only way to beat him is to kill him.’
Although Montgomery talked a great deal about morale and self-belief, the force he was building was going to have other things that mattered just as much: equipment, in the form of new Sherman tanks from America; and training, with the troops rehearsing their roles in the coming fight. The armies of Britain and her allies had been in poor shape in 1939. For three years they had been losing. Now, at last, they were in a condition to start winning.
Montgomery knew he had no alternative but to make a frontal assault. He had vivid first-hand experience of the difficulties of attacking a strong defensive line. He’d been shot in the chest in 1914 while leading a platoon. He had been horrified by the waste of life in that war, and was determined not to repeat the same mistakes. His solution came in several parts: to ensure that his attack came with overwhelming force; to ensure that every unit understood and had practised its precise role; and to do what he could to take the enemy by surprise.
Which was why he wanted to see Clarke. It was a three-hour journey from Cairo to the spot where Montgomery had located himself, on the Mediterranean coast, and Clarke, never an early riser, arrived at noon. He was met by Lieutenant Colonel Charles Richardson of the planning staff. Richardson had drawn up details of the proposed attack, based on Montgomery’s instructions, but he was worried that it involved sending the Eighth Army to exactly the place the enemy would expect them, at precisely the time when an assault was likeliest. He was conscious of his youth, having just turned thirty-four, and the responsibility of so many lives weighed on his shoulders.
Richardson liked Clarke, and was a little in awe of him. He didn’t know the details of how he did what he did, and the senior man showed no inclination to tell him. Richardson explained his view, that the plan was ‘horribly obvious’, and they talked through some of the issues, and then Clarke took the opportunity to go for a swim in the sea. Swimming trunks weren’t Army issue, so officers at headquarters swam naked, something that Churchill had joined them for when he visited, to widespread delight.
Then it was down to business, over lunch with the general. Montgomery set out his plan. He wanted to launch simultaneous attacks at the northern and southern ends of the front. The southern attack, by XIII Corps, would be a feint, designed to hold enemy forces there while at the northern end XXX Corps would break through the line, and X Corps would then follow up and draw Rommel’s tanks into a fight. He was going to attack at night, to give his men the greatest chance of clearing the minefields and getting past the guns that covered the front. They would need a full moon to see what they were doing, and the next one was too soon, only a couple of weeks away, so they would go for the one after that, on 23 October.
‘Every endeavour will be made to deceive the enemy as to our intentions to attack at all and, if this fails, as to the direction of our main attack,’ the first draft of Montgomery’s plan, published that day, read. The commander had a few ideas about that, but he wanted to know what A Force could offer.
Clarke set out the problems. Axis intelligence forces could hardly have missed the build-up of the Eighth Army. After the Battle of Alam Halfa, they’d be expecting an Allied offensive. If that weren’t enough, they would have noted the arrival of a new commander and the visit by Churchill. They weren’t going to buy the idea that the British would stay on the defensive for long.
Alam Halfa offered other lessons, too. It had been a night attack during the full moon. The Axis would hardly be surprised if Montgomery tried the same thing. And RAF reconnaissance planes had spotted Rommel’s vehicles assembling before the attack. In the flat, featureless desert, it would be difficult to hide the men and vehicles moving up to the marshalling points.
Put like that, Richardson was right. Montgomery was planning to attack in the obvious place at an obvious time. Even his choice of the northern flank reflected his perfectly sensible desire to control the best road through the desert.
Montgomery was under no illusion at all that the battle wouldn’t involve hard fighting. Indeed, that was his goal. His view was that one of Auchinleck’s mistakes the previous year had been to allow Rommel to pull his forces back across Cyrenaica. This time, he wanted to keep the Axis army in place and destroy it. That was how wars were won.
But he didn’t want to be a Great War general thoughtlessly throwing men into the meat-grinder. What did his soldiers have going for them?
Clarke pondered the question. It might be plausible to the enemy that the British were worried about events on the Russian front and a German attack through the Caucasus. He could put over a story arguing that the British were holding off until winter had set in. The longer the enemy waited for the attack to come, the more they might begin to doubt it ever would.
A Force had already had success over the summer suggesting that the Allies wanted to retake Crete. A large German force was standing by there to repel them. Carrying that story on would provide some cover for troop build-ups in Egypt, and have the added advantage of pinning the defenders in place.
There were things he could do about timing, too. A good sign that no attack was imminent would be the absence of generals from their headquarters. He would organise a conference in Iran for 26 October, with Alexander invited.
As for the question of which end of the line would see the real attack, Clarke suggested two magician’s tools: concealment and misdirection. They would hide the troops in the north, and draw attention to those in the south.
With lunch over, Clarke talked through details with de Guingand, and then headed back to Cairo. He had things to be getting on with.
The following evening, Nicosoff sent a message to Athens: ‘Believe English are worried about Caucasus and transferring troops from Africa. Some are already passing through Cairo.’
Clarke would not be able to run the operation himself. He had just been ordered to America, to induct the new allies into the ways of deception, and was departing that weekend. So the running of the plan would fall to his deputy, Noel Wild, in liaison with Richardson. But much of the work was going to involve what A Force referred to as a ‘physical implementation’. This would fall to Barkas and his camoufleurs.
It was an exciting moment for Barkas. Three days after Clarke visited Montgomery, Barkas and one of his deputies, Tony Ayrton, made their way to Eighth Army Headquarters, and reported to de Guingand. The brigadier, with Richardson, took them through the plan for Operation Lightfoot, the codename given to the coming attack, and then asked what they could do to help. It was a daunting task. If the deception plan failed, Richardson pointed out, it would do more damage than no plan at all. Barkas tried his best to sound confident.
But de Guingand was asking for a lot. Barkas had a few hundred men at his disposal, and they had to hide tens of thousands, and all evidence of their passing, in terrain that was entirely free of buildings and vegetation, under the eyes of regular reconnaissance flights.
Years later, de Guingand would recall how he’d described the problem: ‘You must conceal 150,000 men with a thousand guns and a thousand tanks on a plain as flat and as hard as a billiard table, and the Germans must not know anything about it, although they will be watching every movement, listening for every noise, charting every track.’
Barkas and Ayrton borrowed a typewriter and set to work. Two hours later, they presented the outline of a plan. De Guingand thanked them, and Ayrton set off to scout the ground where their illusion would be performed, while Barkas went back to Cairo to begin assembling his props.
Operation Bertram, as this exercise was codenamed, didn’t look simple to anyone, but possibly no one involved grasped its full complexity. Clarke was on the other side of the Atlantic as Barkas worked out how to conceal men and equipment. Barkas was unaware of how Clarke was using Cheese and other channels to whisper misleading hints into the ears of the audience. And Clarke wasn’t aware of how effectively Bletchley Park was able to check that the enemy really was fooled.
The illusion that the deceivers were going to pull off would be the largest performed to that date. But it would be based on a very small, very old one, perhaps the oldest one of all. You’ve seen it. It involves three shells and a ball.
Chapter 34
There are dozens of variations of the cups and balls routine, involving different numbers of cups and different sorts of balls in different combinations, appearing, disappearing, moving between the cups and in and out of them. ‘There is no better test of a conjurer’s skill,’ Clarke’s uncle Sidney had written a few years before. Looking at the earliest recorded tricks, he quoted an account by an ancient Greek writer, Alciphron: ‘A man came forward and placed on a three-legged table three small dishes, under which he concealed some little white, round pebbles. These he placed one by one under the dishes, and then, I do not know how, made them all appear together under one.’
These days, we would call what Barkas and A Force were planning a ‘shell game’. Genuine magicians don’t tend to bother with it. You’ll see it instead wherever tourists gather, and conmen want to fleece them. There are three walnut shells, or matchboxes, or bottle-tops on a crate. The ball goes under one, and you’re asked to bet where it is. But however closely you watch the shells go round, the ball won’t be under the one you pick. It’s concealed between the conman’s fingers, waiting to be placed where he wants it.
Bertram would follow the same principle, but instead of a ball, there would be X Corps, with its hundreds of tanks and guns, and tens of thousands of men.
First, they needed props: four hundred dummy tanks, a hundred dummy guns and close to 2,000 dummy vehicles. A Force’s dummy tank units were already deployed, and there was nothing close to these quantities in storage. They would need to be built, and fast. Barkas’ team quickly realised that the usual workshops wouldn’t be able to produce close to what was needed. The camoufleurs would have to improvise.
One of Barkas’ men noticed that the beds and packing cases the Egyptians made from palm trees contained standard shapes that could be repurposed. The army began placing orders for unbelievable numbers of bed parts, much to the delight and amusement of the locals, and a production line of soldiers was tasked with assembling them into the required shapes, covering them with hessian and painting them.
