This force was preparing and training for a massive assault on the Messines-Wijtschate Ridge overlooking the Ypres Salient from the south. Sappers and gunners paved the way for the infantry: British, Australian and Canadian tunnellers were secretly digging through the clay to place twenty-one giant mines under the German positions, listening throug

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

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,

Lieutenant Colonel Dudley Clarke, RA, the man who was to become the éminence grise of WW2 strategic deception, seemed a conventional enough colonel, with his left-parted hair brushed back from the widow’s peak, and his courteous manner. He liked to appear in rooms, or disappear from them, silently, and his pale oval face, with quick glances from un

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

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.

Meanwhile, 25,000 men were landed secretly, by night, at Anzac Cove, and then packed into concealed trenches. Australian tunnellers, many of them ex-goldminers, dug new saps towards the Turkish lines for a lightning surprise attack at Lone Pine on 6th August. Hopes were high for a coordinated breakthrough.

Wavell had a gift for picking good people. One was Major Ralph Bagnold, an officer in the Royal Signals, one of a select band who knew and respected the great desert that lay behind the cultivated coasts of North Africa. Bagnold had been exploring the Sahara since 1926. He had improved the sun compass for desert navigation, discovered the best way