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Part Ten
"Hitler intended the Afrika Korps to be a stone wall: Rommel made it an avalanche, moving under laws of its own." Ronald Lewin
Throughout this series, I have questioned David Fisher's depiction of Jasper Maskelyne's wartime career. In response to Fisher's version, my articles have often contained critical adjectives such as 'exaggerated', 'legendary', 'mythical', 'inaccurate' and 'incomplete'. Given the fictionalisation and distortion of the Maskelyne legend, it is quite hard to extract cleanly those elements of Maskelyne's career that actually did occur. An additional question can be posed: leaving aside the authenticity of Maskleyne's specific contributions, how reliable is Fisher's presentation of World War Two history ? On preliminary reading, Fisher provides a detailed and plausible historical backdrop to the Maskelyne tale. His account of the desert war, presumably bolstered by inside information contained within Jasper Maskelyne's 'diaries', makes exciting reading. This, after all, was an astonishing campaign, even though it was, in reality , a side-show compared to the 'total war' fought by the Germans inside the Soviet Union. Fisher has skilfully woven together facts, figures, quotes, and eyewitness commentary drawn from different sources. He does not cite where his 'information' comes from ; presumably, it is a clever amalgam of previously published accounts. However, when exposed to the more exacting standards of professional research, deficiencies in Fisher's general account begin to surface. Fisher from the outset perhaps fails to understand the initial context of the war in Africa. Let me give two examples: Firstly, when discussing the earlier campaign — Mussolini's invasion of Egypt in 1940 — Fisher boldly claims:"If the Italian offensive succeeded, England would lose its primary sources of gasoline." This appears to be an anachronistic error. Fisher is confusing our present-day reliance on Arab oil with the different circumstances of the 1940s. Historian Alan Levine states: "In those days the developed world was not yet dependent on Middle East oil. Britain's own supply during World War II came not around the Cape but from the Americas." This revelation would probably surprise many students of the Second World War. Fisher's misunderstanding about this point might therefore be forgivable. Secondly, and less excusable, Fisher introduces the misleading notion that Hitler in advance secretly developed the Afrika Korps into a specially trained élite desert army whose mission would be to conquer North Africa. "Unknown to the Italians since 1936 the Nazis had been training officers for an élite desert army inside two huge hothouses in the district of Schleswig-Holstein in the north and Bavaria in the south. The soldiers lived inside these buildings under desert conditions for weeks at a time. They ate desert rations, drilled in breath-sucking heat, slept in bone-chilling cold and trained on a sand-covered floor. By 1940, the spine of the Afrika Korps had been hardened." I have not been able to validate this reference. Military historians, on the contrary, emphasise how unfamiliar Rommel and his men were with desert warfare when they first arrived in Africa. Lewin, an authority on the Afrika Korps states that "The Afrika Korps was a child of chance. At no point before 1939 did Hitler contemplate fighting a 'colonial' war...." "...by 1940 the Wehrmacht possessed not a single unit specifically trained for an African campaign. No attention had been given to research and development of appropriate equipment. No war games or even more modest exercises had examined the tactical problems. The orientation, the training and the armament of the force that finally disembarked at Tripoli were entirely those of a formation designed for European conditions." Fisher seems to have relied on a combat myth, rather than a solid source. Lewin dismisses this myth :"There was a popular British notion in 1941 that the Afrika Korps had been carefully trained and acclimatised as part of Hitler's grandiose plan for world conquest. Indeed, Rommel's swift and unexpected success seemed to imply a special aptitude on the part of his troops. But this was moonshine. It was not until much later that an area at Grafenwoehr in Bavaria was devoted to the occasional hot-weather training of reinforcements for Africa. All that was done in the early days by way of preparing the troops was to warn them about hygiene and provide lectures by travellers, and other 'experts', on geography and similar rewarding subjects. When they moved forward to the front from Tripoli after disembarkation, wearing their unfamiliar olive-green pith helmets, they were advancing to all intents and purposes into Terra Incognita." Furthermore, there is strong evidence to support the case that Hitler originally sent Rommel to Africa not to conquer the Nile Delta and not to invade the Middle East, but to make up for the appalling errors of Mussolini's earlier abortive campaign, and to protect and consolidate the Nazis' southern flank, keeping the British fully occupied. Seen from this perspective, Rommel's campaign was highly successful. Of course, discussion of Rommel's original mission — whether defensive or expansionist— rapidly becomes pointless, because from Rommel's tactical standpoint attack was the best form of defence. The desert campaigns were unavoidably opportunistic. Plans were rapidly modified, extended and even abandoned, according to the surprising and unpredictable results of the battlefield. After his resounding initial success , Rommel began to consider pressing ahead as far as possible , and even taking Egypt. The problem for Rommel was that Hitler never gave sufficient support for a decisive push through Egypt into the Middle East. Hitler was preparing for the greater prize elsewhere, namely, attacking and destroying the Soviet Union. Kicking its dilapidated door in... It is true that the Germans , in June 1941, developed a grand, or rather grandiose, draft plan — Plan Orient — an ambitious strategic pincer movement which would have confirmed Britain's worst nightmares. The British would be driven from Egypt ; the Panzer army would continue its conquest across Syria and northwards into Persia, eventually joining up with the victorious German troops already in Russia who would have moved southwards down through the Caucasus, capturing the vital Soviet oilfields. Plan Orient , it should be emphasised, was based on wish-fulfilment rather than logistical and operational reality. The pathways were obstacle-ridden, the distances were too vast and the deadlines were impossible to meet. ___________________________________________________________________________ In November 1941, the British launched Operation Crusader against Rommel. 'Sunshields' , the lightweight contraptions designed to camouflage tanks as trucks (see Article Five) were used in abundance to conceal the initial advance of the British tanks. According to Fisher, Maskelyne joined a decoy unit which transported dummy cardboard tanks and fake guns to selected areas of the desert. Fisher, expanding on information already recorded in "Magic-Top Secret", provides interesting details about some of Maskelyne's methods for creating fake armies, probably inspired by his familiarity and expertise in contructing and handling stage props : 'Soldiers' were built from "cardboard, canvas and tubing...Seen at close range, Maskelyne's soldiers wouldn't fool anyone. They looked like bundles of costumed cloth and cardboard twisted into natural positions. But when... observed from thousands of feet in the air, they came alive...forward platoons became phantom companies..." 'Tanks' were built from five separate segments , each one made of painted sailcloth stretched over a specially designed metal frame. These parts could be quickly snapped together and assembled. The dummy tank could then be carried into position by two men. In contrast, the previous wooden tanks used by Wavell in late 1940 were cumbersome, bulky, and hard to transport. 'Artillery pieces' were also constructed from "canvas, cardboard, rods, hinges and painted sailcloth, and could be folded flat for easy transport." To add to their realism, Maskelyne concocted various mixtures of gunpowder, aluminium powder and iron filings . "The first provided the smoke, the second the flash, the third the red flame." At the start of Crusader, Fisher states that Maskelyne and his Gang gained permission to join the 24th Armoured Brigade, "a Royal Engineer decoy unit... equipped with thirty-five Magic valley folding tanks (ten self-propelled), twenty-four dummy field guns and sufficient dummy ammunition, and twelve Bedford trucks." Although it is hard to confirm Maskelyne's specific role, major decoy operations certainly did take place on the eve of Crusader. Barkas' account in "The Camouflage Story" (1952 ) gives important details of one such plan. The aim was to create fake forward installations in two oases, Siwa and Giarabub, to the south, while preparing a genuine offensive in the north. Phoney food and ammunition dumps were set up. Large camps, with latrines, campfires, cookhouses and defensive slit trenches were conjured up. The surrounding desert was covered with appropriate wheel tracks. "Starved as they were for transport, labour and materials. the Siwa and Giarabub schemes could never have produced much effect, but they were worth while, for they provided invaluable experience, and furnished us with much ammunition in our struggle to get men, wheels, and materials...The enemy may have noticed what was done. It is true that German Intelligence Summaries , captured later, showed that he had overestimated the real strength of the garrisons in the oases by an appreciable amount...But I doubt whether camouflage could claim much of the credit. " Historian Cruikshank gives a similar assessment. The diversionary operation lacked sufficient quantities of faked material and was poorly synchronised with the actual assault. "The verdict was that a deception could not succeed unless it was planned with the same degree of thoroughness as a genuine operation." The uncoordinated deception plan for Crusader would serve as a useful forerunner to the sophisticated deception plan at El Alamein implemented the following year (which we will critically dissect in a forthcoming article). According to Fisher, Maskelyne, while in the same decoy unit, experimented with sonic deception: "he bolted four loudspeakers to his Bedford and connected them to a wind-up gramophone sitting on the front seat. A recording of tanks at full attack was to be blasted through the speakers, thus giving the puny force the growl of a tank brigade." This ruse sounds extraordinary , but is possible. An authoritative independent source (M. Howard, Strategic Deception) confirms that sonic deception was employed: "During the course of Operation Crusader there was a tactical need to give the impression of large number of tanks massing to assault the defences of the German garrison at Halfaya, on the Egyptian frontier. To achieve this, A-Force arranged for an Egyptian film company to record the sound of tank movements and then broadcast the results over amplifiers normally used by a political warfare unit. Thereafter, special apparatus was manufactured to record and broadcast every kind of useful sound, and was installed in an armoured car appropriately named'Sonia'."
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JASPER MASKELYNE'S INVOLVEMENT IN NAVAL CAMOUFLAGE According to Fisher, Maskelyne and his Magic Gang were also given orders to construct dummy submarines. They scavenged the outskirts of Cairo and came across abandoned, rusting railway carriages. The Gang hammered out a passable replica of a British submarine and allegedly tested it out in January 1942. Attentive to detail, they even created a false wake by attaching floating drums which seeped whitewash. | ||||||||||||||||||
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A classic story , uncritically recycled by others, which appears in both "Magic-Top Secret" and "The War Magician" is that of the mystery unidentified submarine — actually one of Maskelyne's prototype fakes — being almost hunted down and attacked by other British forces who were not 'in the know'. Perhaps this is based on a true incident. More likely it is yet another combat myth. The dummy submarines were first moored at Beirut harbour and eventually transferred to other ports. The plan behind this scam was that German reconnaissance planes would note the decoys still in their pens, but be unaware that the real submarines had secretly slipped away on patrol. Impressed with this first foray into naval deception, Maskelyne was given a further unusual task : to recreate a battleship! According to the account in "The War Magician", his men tried their best with the limited material at their disposal, but the end product, the faked battleship (actually an abandoned cruiser) did not look right. Perhaps there was a way of taking advantage of these deficiencies ? After all, if this really were a real battleship, the navy would be making strenuous efforts to camouflage it. So they altered the original plan: "Seems we've been trying to convince the Germans that our cruiser is actually a battle ship, when in fact we should be trying desperately to convince them that's precisely what it's not!" "Magicians often use a stage technique known as the sucker effect, or sucker bait. The object is to allow the audience to reach its own conclusion from evidence it detects by observation. Let your audience believe they've caught you in an error and you've got them right where you want them." ..." We've got to let the Germans reach their own conclusions. If we take obvious pains to camouflage our boat, but do a bad job of it, their intelligence people will be quite happy to discover a real battleship beneath all our canvas and papier-mâché..." According to Fisher, Maskelyne finished the dummy battleship in February, 1942, and named it H.M.S. Houdin in honour of the great French magician Robert-Houdin. Whether these are the authentic words of Maskelyne, or reconstructed creation of Fisher, I do not know. Without access to the missing 'diaries' or rather wartime scrapbooks, it is not possible for me to judge. The material about the dummy submarines and the faked battleship is also included in the earlier "Magic-Top Secret". Fisher's account is very similar with some additional details. I should also add that the British had already experimented with fake battleships in 1940, changing three merchant steamers into three faked destroyers. According to Cruikshank, none of the southern coastal authorities in England wanted them and the three flimsy fakes proved an embarrassment.
LOST IN DESERT? "the whole episode of being lost in the desert is not true." Alistair Maskelyne I must admit that when I first read "The War Magician", I found the 'lost in the desert' episode (May 1942) extremely plausible and I had assumed it was completely authentic. Fisher's account contains so much detail on this misadventure. At first glance, the desert episode, although dramatic, does nothing to enhance Jasper Maskelyne's reputation. He comes across as negligent and ignorant of basic safety precautions. But this very carelessness, this human fallibility, adds to the 'authenticity '. And there are examples of similar desert escapades in both the German and British accounts of the war. In a violent sandstorm , soldiers could get lost merely crawling from their tents to the latrine. Even in clear weather and armed with a compass, drivers frequently found themselves off-course. However, a comparison of the same episode in both "Magic-Top Secret" and "The War Magician" immediately reveals numerous discrepancies :
Alistair Maskelyne wrote in his first letter that "the whole episode of being lost in the desert is not true." And this direct comparison of the two accounts seems to provide ample reasons for doubting that the incident ever took place. In a follow-up letter, I tried to clarify why Alistair thought this episode was fictitious. Had his father confirmed this personally? Did Jasper actually admit it was made up to suit the purposes of the ghost-writer? Was it never mentioned in his wartime letters ? Alistair, in his second letter, replied: "Your question about the lost in the desert episode: this was one of several anecdotes in Magic Top Secret about which I questioned my father, since we had never been previously told of it. The reply was , again , very similar to his response to the fictitious 'walnut table episode' in 'White Magic'; 'the writer thought it would make the story more interesting' ".
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