Cross-dressing ALLIES HERO who tricked THE NAZIS … with cons so ingenious they even fooled his own side
The Illusionist: The True Story Of The Man Who Fooled Hitler Rob Hutton W&N €36.50
During the 1941 battle for the Libyan city of Tobruk, British operatives lay in wait near a water-distilling plant that was being targeted by Italian pilots. As soon as a bomb dropped near enough to the building, the operatives rushed onto the roof and painted a huge patch of tar on it. From the air, they knew, this would look exactly like a gaping hole. The plan worked: ‘The bombers, sure they had done their job, left [the plant] alone.’
The team were under the command of Dudley Clarke, a ‘respectable scoundrel’ who relished using the skills he had learnt from his uncle Sidney, an amateur magician, in order to deceive and bamboozle the enemy on the North African battlefield.
If he could trick them into thinking that the British had troops and equipment where they didn’t – or vice versa – he could mess with their plans. ‘All around him was chaos,’ writes Rob Hutton in his superbly entertaining biography, ‘and he was having the time of his life.’
‘What is seen,’ wrote Clarke, ‘is usually believed… One might want to pretend that a number of submarines existed. Instead of building the submarines, one could get exactly the same result by drawing attention to some sort of shed or slipway.’ On one occasion he suggested the existence of some tanks simply by marking an area as prohibited. In another episode, he sent the brigadier in charge of Cyprus the insignia of a major-general to pin onto his shoulders.
The promotion wasn’t real – it was done simply to con the Germans and Italians. If there was a major-general on the island, went the theory, it must follow that there was a whole division of troops there.
In all his deceit, Clarke never forgot the importance of sending out lots of little clues, allowing the enemy to draw their own conclusions.
‘By making [them] work for the story,’ writes Hutton, ‘he hoped to make them sell it to themselves. Anyone smart enough to notice a distinctive helmet in the background of a photograph would surely be so pleased with themselves that they’d be keen to believe the tale that it supported.’
To quote the modern magician Teller (the one in Penn and Teller who never speaks on stage), ‘there is no story as powerful as the one the audience tells itself ’.
Or to quote one of Clarke’s own colleagues, ‘Never give the Boche [Germans] the thing on a plate’.
Clarke also knew that sleightof-hand rarely, contrary to myth, depends on speed. ‘In fact, quick movements draw attention. It is the slowness of the hand that deceives the eye, by reassuring the audience that there’s nothing suspicious going on.’ This was why he let troops build up slowly in the south of an area, ‘to put the Germans at their ease’ and hide the fact that the real attack was coming in the north.
Sometimes the deceptions were too successful. One of Clarke’s team painted ‘shadow houses’ in Beirut, patterns on the ground that from the air gave the impression of a built-up area. They were so convincing that they prevented the RAF’s own
pilots from finding the runway, so had to be abandoned.
The book contains a wonderful supporting cast, from Lieutenant General Philip Neame, winner of both an Olympic gold medal and a Victoria Cross, to Eric Tittering ton, private chemist to the king of Egypt, who was charged with preventing poisonings and so went by the nickname ‘Titters the Taster’. There’s also a womanising double agent who invented a fake contact called ‘Nicosoff’, possibly because it sounded like ‘knickers off ’.
Not that Clarke didn’t bring his own quirks. At one point he was arrested in the street in Madrid, dressed in a ‘knee-length floral dress, high heels, stockings, a necklace, gloves to the elbow and a tight turban to cover his military haircut. He had accessorised with a small handbag’.
You may have seen Clarke played, in a fetching Chanel dress, by Dominic West in the 2022 BBC series SAS: Rogue
Heroes. There was some debate among British commanders as to whether the officer might be a ‘homosexualist’, but eventually it was decided that everyone needs a hobby, and Clarke was allowed to continue his crucial work.
Fans of wordplay will be happy to see it taking its usual place in the world of deception. The team running a group of double agents was called the Twenty Committee, because their aim was to double cross, and ‘XX’ is 20 in Latin. Meanwhile the Royal Navy confused enemy intelligence by giving its shore bases the names of ships, which is why HMS Armadillo was a country house in the west of Scotland.
Clarke’s legacy was long-lasting. The false signals surrounding the D-Day invasion of France in 1944 were the work of those who’d trained under him.
So successful was his trickery that one German general was heard after the war expressing his bafflement that the Allies had never deployed the 5th Airborne Division, still unaware that it had never actually existed.
You can see precisely why Winston Churchill valued Clarke so much, saying that ‘in wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies’.
‘He was arrested in Madrid, wearing a floral dress, high heels and stockings’