A Genius for Deception

Soon after Wavell arrived in Palestine, the District Commissioner for Galilee was murdered by ‘Arab terrorists’ in Nazareth. Wavell cracked down hard on the Arab Higher Committee, and several Arab leaders were deported to the Seychelles. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haji Amin el Husseini, chief of the extremists as well as the leader of the religi

Desert Victory:

From 1915 onwards, the British employed the new technique of wireless direction finding (DF) to locate German transmitters and to intercept their radio transmissions. The principal site for this was Hunstanton Coast Guard Station on the Wash in Norfolk, which could ‘tap the air’ in Flanders and northern France as well as the North Sea, and sent non

Sefton Delmer,

Clarke could charm senior officers brilliantly, but he also got things done. His intelligence was allied to an ingenious imagination and a photographic memory. He did his best work at night, and in public places always sat with his back to a wall. You would not notice him in a crowd and he was never famous, yet Field Marshal Harold Alexander believ

Charles Bosman’s classic short story The Rooinek opens with two ragged Boers lying in hiding, shooting with smokeless Mausers at smart British officers riding out openly on horseback. The last British regiment ever raised by a Highland clan chief, the Lovat Scouts, were formed in response to such guerrilla marksmen in South Africa. The original dra

In his introduction to Dudley Clarke’s first book, Seven Assignments, Wavell wrote:

20 Lt Col Dudley Clarke, head of ‘A Force’ in Cairo and Britain’s top deceiver, was arrested in drag in Madrid in October 1941, while disseminating false information to reach German agents in Spain.

When I commanded in Palestine in 1937–8, I had on my staff two officers in whom I recognised an original, unorthodox outlook on soldiering . . . One was Orde Wingate, the second was Dudley Clarke.