deception

deception is only a longer word, also from the Latin, for feinting, which is as old as combat and far older than war. The ancient Chinese military strategist, Sun Tzu, laid down long ago in his book The Art of War that all war depends on it. Great commanders always use it, casting threats in one direction or several to draw their enemies' reserves away from another, in which they intend to strike. So much is this a matter of routine that when, on 10 January 1940, a German light aircraft force-landed at Malines-sur-Meuse in Belgium, carrying a staff officer who failed to burn properly the draft he had with him of the German plan to strike through the Ardennes for the Channel ports (seeFALL GELB), the British and French intelligence staffs took for granted that the papers had been planted on them, and could not possibly be true.

Deception in 1939–45 took the form of ploys run by intelligence staffs, for operational purposes. Their necessary bases lay in sound security, which would keep any deceptive plan secret, coupled with sound intelligence—both about the opposing side's situation, and about his reactions to the plan as it developed. Their object was always to make the other side act, or refrain from action, on some mistaken assumption.

Visual deception—camouflage (derived from the French verb camoufler, to make up for the stage)—was common to all the warring nations. Sven Nolan's film Sieg im Westen included shots of German soldiers traversing the Ardennes with branches in their steel helmets that became world-famous. Major factories and power stations, all over Europe, were dazzle-painted to confuse pilots making low-level air attacks; so were some warships to confuse U-boat attacks as to the range, course and length of their intended victims; by the middle of the war, the factory workers hardly noticed the dazzle-painting any more, so used to it had everybody become. Camouflage of gun positions in the field, and of ships in harbour, soon became automatic, and in the zone libre, the area of France nominally controlled by the Vichy government, army vehicles were disguised as agricultural machinery (see France, 7). Dummy aircraft—occasionally, whole dummy airfields—were erected by both sides. Close ground observation could spot these at once, and spies might be able to report accordingly; only a very good dummy airfield would stand up to repeated air photographic reconnaissance. The RAF and the Luftwaffe both cherish the anecdote of the dummy airfield that was attacked with wooden bombs.

In the UK a department of the air ministry, called Colonel Turner's, specialized in simulating dummy airfields after dark, by breaches of the blackout that was such a curse to civilians; and it quickly advanced to simulating dummy ports as well. This worked so well that a German air raid aimed at Portsmouth, a naval base in the south of England, early in 1941 and claimed by Goebbels as a success, in fact attacked nearby rural Hayling Island instead; total casualties amounted to three cows killed.

Even more sophisticated was the camouflage employed above a sprawling US aircraft plant at Burbank, California, over which a ‘suburb’ was constructed by Hollywood set makers. The entire factory was covered by netting and canvas on which was painted the continuation of local roads. Along these ‘roads’ were placed canvas houses and the area around them were ‘planted’ with trees and shrubs. Fake cars, laundry lines, and gardens were all added while air ducts provided ventilation for the workers in the factory.

During the New Georgia campaign in the Pacific war the Japanese concealed the construction of an airfield at Munda on New Georgia island by rigging cables to the top of the trees they needed to clear to make a runway. They then cut the trunks away leaving the treetops suspended in the air while they began working on the airstrip underneath. This ingenious piece of camouflage hid the airstrip from photo reconnaissance flights and the Americans only discovered it twelve days before it was completed.

The Soviets were equally ingenious in hiding Moscow's most important buildings from German air attacks at the start of the German–Soviet war. The façade of the Great Palace was concealed behind a net covered with green branches; the golden onion domes of the Kremlin were painted battleship grey and its walls were given a camouflage covering of yellow, black, cream, and orange paint; Moscow's squares were painted to give the illusion from the air of rooftops and buildings; and huge backdrops from the Bolshoi Theatre were hung on the exteriors of office buildings.

In Egypt, Jasper Maskeleyne—who before the war had been a partner in Maskeleyne and Devant, celebrated conjurors in London's West End—devised canvas screens that could be fitted over tanks or guns, to make them look like lorries. He invented an inflatable submarine, and bettered it with an inflatable battleship to confuse Axis reckonings of the Royal Navy's order of battle. Such devices had to be inflated overnight, for it would have been ruinous to the ploy if a chance air reconnaissance had photographed a half-inflated warship.

Maskeleyne did his work under the superintendence of Brigadier Dudley Clarke, whom Wavell had spotted in Palestine in 1936 as an officer likely to take sound charge of deception. Clarke, a regular gunner much involved with the earliest commandos, ran deception in the Mediterranean from December 1940 till the end of the war. His tiny, highly secret unit, codenamed A Force, exercised a far-reaching impact, mainly through Clarke's leading idea: that the enemy should be encouraged to believe that the Allied forces were a great deal stronger than in fact they were. For cover A Force provided training in escape (see MI9) and for its deception work it had a number of bodies known as Thirty Committees which ran double agents (see also XX-committee).

By turning round some double agents, and setting up some simulated wireless traffic, Clarke gradually succeeded in persuading his German and Italian opponents that the British and Commonwealth forces actively engaged in the Western Desert campaigns were about half as large again as in fact they were; and moreover that imaginary forces lay to the east of the desert Eighth Army, in the Levant and in Mesopotamia, posing a substantial threat to the Axis hold on the Balkans if Turkey entered the war on the Allies' side. By the end of 1942 Ninth and Tenth Armies on which this deception was based were almost wholly notional—their real strength hardly amounted to a single fighting division—but they impressed the enemy high command as real.

Another successful form of deception carried out by the British in the western desert involved the planting of deliberately bogus documents. The Germans discovered maps in abandoned British vehicles which had been left there on purpose to mislead them: most famously in late August 1942, when a scout car, with a dead officer inside, was abandoned in a minefield in front of the German 90th Light Division. Found in the wreck was a map (called a going map) of the surrounding sand dunes, showing soft areas as hard and hard areas as soft. A few days later the Africa Korps tried to probe round Montgomery's left at Alam Halfa, using the going map; and got badly entangled in soft sand, in easy range of the 4th Armoured Brigade's anti-tank guns.

Clarke's masterpiece came in the autumn of 1942, when dummy pipelines across the desert, among other measures, succeeded in deceiving Rommel into the belief that Montgomery's Eighth Army would not attack him till November, and would then go for his right flank; so that he was on leave in Germany when the second battle of El Alamein began on 23 October with an onslaught on his left.

J. F. C. Holland who, among his other achievements, was largely responsible for the formation of MI9, SOE, and the Independent Companies which preceded the commandos, had already, early in the war, sent E. S. Coombe from his irregular warfare branch of the War Office (MIR) to found the Inter-Services Security Board, which issued codenames for all operations of war and thus became, as Holland had intended, a suitable point from which deception could be organized centrally. Admiral J. H. Godfrey, the director of Naval intelligence, was also much interested in the subject and installed Ewen Montagu in a section of his Naval Intelligence Division called 17M from which Montagu could look after deception securely.

Clarke's successes in the Near East were such that in 1941 Churchill was persuaded to set up the London Controlling Section, the smallest but not the least important of the British wartime secret services, which, under Colonel J. H. Bevan, ran deceptive affairs from the cellars of Great George Street, beside the underground cabinet war rooms. It worked under the direct supervision of the Chiefs of Staff, in daily consultation with their joint planning staff. American officers were brought in to work with the section's small staff as necessary; so was Montagu's small team of experts; and when COSSAC was formed in March 1943 it contained a deception Section, Ops(B), which also worked closely with it.

By an extraordinary, probably unique chance, the Allies were able, through the skills of their decipher staffs (see ULTRA, 1), to assess quite accurately how far the other side had been deceived: which plots had been seen through and which were working properly (see MINCEMEAT, for example). Hence the success of FORTITUDE in 1944, which, with its associated ploys, was co-ordinated by an enlarged Ops(B) now part of COSSAC's successor SHAEF. Commanded by an ex-A Force officer, Colonel H. N. Wild, Ops(B) supervised all deception operations within SHAEF's area of command.

FORTITUDE, to which the double agents of the XX-Committee made a notable contribution, succeeded in persuading both Hitler and the German general staff that the Normandy landings in June 1944 (see OVERLORD) were a feint: that the real attack was going to be delivered in July on the beaches south of Boulogne by General Patton's notional First United States Army Group (FUSAG) stationed in Kent and Essex. FUSAG's real strength was confined to a few mobile wireless units broadcasting messages to simulate many divisions' activity, supported by dummy invasion craft which supplemented the real ones in east coast ports. Clarke's doctrine of inflating the opponent's estimate of one's order of battle was thus vindicated: FORTITUDE convinced so many great personages at the German High Command (OKW), Hitler included, that hardly a soldier in the Wehrmacht was moved from the right bank of the Seine to the left in June 1944. By 1 July Montgomery had too firm a foothold ashore to be dislodged; and Patton, now leading the newly formed Third US Army, could be fed into real battle on the far right flank of the Allied landing (see Normandy campaign).

Deception, as employed by the British and Americans, was that rare device, a merciful instrument of war: it saved scores of thousands of lives, on both sides, by a real economy of force. But it was also extensively used by the Red Army which had no scruples when it came to preserving lives. Soviet staff manuals laid stress on the importance of deception, and divided it into strategic, operational, and tactical levels. The Soviet military encyclopedia defined deception (maskirovka) in 1978: ‘The means of securing combat operations and the daily activities of forces; a complexity of measures, directed to mislead the enemy regarding the presence and disposition of forces, various military objectives, their condition, combat readiness and operations, and also the plans of the command…maskirovka contributes to the achievement of surprise for the actions of forces, the preservation of combat readiness and the increased survivability of objectives.’

The Germans were capable of mounting extended deceptions themselves—the whole Nazi regime was founded on bluff. They achieved surprise, to a remarkable degree, at the opening of their invasion of the USSR on 22 June 1941 (see BARBAROSSA). Cover for this operation had been that the main threat was still against the UK; and it succeeded wonderfully. Stalin ignored British warnings (and indeed warnings from his own spy, Sorge) that it was impending. BARBAROSSA delivered a salutary shock to the Soviet general staff, which thereafter was always looking out for opportunities of springing surprises itself. Like Napoleon, Hitler bit off more than he could chew when he invaded Russia. The vast spaces of that front, none of which could instantly be crossed, made it possible to divert his reserves into the wrong places. The Soviet authorities followed Dudley Clarke in misleading the Germans about their order of battle, largely by the use of dummy wireless traffic supported by camouflage devices to mislead the Luftwaffe's air reconnaissance. Moreover they made a rule of making all their main troop movements by night, much harder for an enemy to perceive at that time.

The extremely secretive nature of communist society was also a help to them; villagers who had spotted dummy constructions in their immediate neighbourhood were not going to gossip about them. Besides, Stalin enforced the strictest secrecy where high-level planning was concerned. One major operation was prepared in detail by its commander, aided by only two staff officers; and as little as possible was ever put down on paper. This minimized opportunities for spies, maddening though it has proved for historians. The Soviet experience in fact can be held to illustrate the point that security can be even more important than sound intelligence in working a deception plan.

The first major deception the Soviets sprang on the Germans was in the winter of 1941, when they conjured up three hitherto unsuspected armies to drive the leading Wehrmacht forces back from the outskirts of Moscow. In the first half of 1942 they produced very much more substantial tank forces than the Germans had expected; some of their tank armies, known already to German intelligence, were wrongly believed only to be of brigade strength. That autumn, though the Germans realized the Soviets were bound to counter-attack somewhere in an attempt to relieve Stalingrad, they succeeded in bringing off an attack in a wholly unexpected quarter. Again, in the summer of 1944 the Germans took for granted that the Red Army would advance into the Balkans; it struck westward instead, flummoxing them once more and costing them 350,000 men. Moreover the Soviets succeeded, in the summer of 1945, in convincing the Japanese that they were still far from ready to engage in major operations in the Far East: a grand stroke of politico-military deception.

M. R. D. Foot

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