Robert Hutton on Dudley Clark and the great WWII weapon of Deception

“The Illusionist: The True Story of the Man Who Fooled Hitler” by Robert Hutton (Pegasus Books)

A great magician is a polished illusionist, who practices and plans so that nothing is left to chance.

During WWII, the British military had an extraordinary and unique officer. Dudley Clarke reveled in creating an illusion that fooled the enemy leaders into making not just any choice but the wrong one Clarke wanted them to make. He developed a new kind of warfare, a new weapon: deception. Clarke would prove to be the master of it, brilliant and effective. The components of his new weapon: rumor, stagecraft, a sense of fun, all aimed first at Erwin Rommel, Hitler’s greatest general, and later against Adolph Hitler himself.

Clarke was originally a recruiter and trainer of another new style of fighting a war: the commando! He looked for men who were intelligent, self-reliant, and independent, who had the additional quality of “dash”. One of the first was movie star David Niven. Clarke’s concept was small independent units carrying out constant small attacks that did damage far beyond their unit size.

However, his unique talents were requested personally by the commander-in-chief of forces in the Middle East. Clarke headed to one of his favorite cities, Cairo, Egypt. The war in East Africa was Mussolini’s major thrust; he was hoping to capture the Suez Canal to sever the British shortest links to her allies, help the Italians control the Mediterranean Sea, and open the way to the rich oil fields of the Middle East. It would last three years before the Axis armies were finally beaten in North Africa. Clarke’s expertise would convince Rommel that the British had a much larger force of tanks and men available, from Greece to Crete to Egypt. How he managed to do so is part of the brilliant aspect of military deception. Clark developed connections with those known to be foreign agents, journalists, and government officials who leaked information to the enemy.

Then he created the plan: a situation that he wanted the enemy to imagine was the logical result of the subtle clues Clarke would feed to those he trusted (and those he knew would betray him). Next he put these small deceptions into play, by changing the patches on British uniforms to suggest that a new larger unit was arriving, which he could also hint by sending rumors that transportation needs would increase due to new troop movements. Get the idea? He scattered these tidbits of information where he knew they would get back to General Rommel (and later, Hitler himself). They would reinforce what they expected the Allies to do, or the fear of what the Allies would do, and react accordingly. So massive troop movement would occur to block Allied troops that didn’t exist. Sometimes they created dummy tanks and trucks to fool recon flights.

Take a peek into the creative mind of one of the heroes of WWII who nobody remembers.