
A Genius for Deception

Sefton Delmer
Nicholas Rankin • A Genius for Deception
The subsequent assault on Messines or Mesen Ridge was perhaps the greatest British success so far in the stalemated, deadlocked war. At 3.10 am on 7 June 1917, nineteen of the twenty-one mines buried by the tunnellers under the German lines went off in a rolling sequence that lasted an appalling twenty-eight seconds.
Nicholas Rankin • A Genius for Deception
Tunnellers
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.
Nicholas Rankin • A Genius for Deception
Clarke picture
Dudley Clarke
Nicholas Rankin • A Genius for Deception
Desert Victory:
Nicholas Rankin • A Genius for Deception
Sunday Times journalist James Lansdale Hodson for the 1943 propaganda documentary filmRankin, Nicholas. A Genius for Deception: How Cunning Helped the British Win Two World Wars (p. 312). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
In this testing environment, Major General Archibald Wavell, the soldier who lost an eye near Ypres and walked through the Jaffa Gate into Jerusalem with Lawrence in 1917, had been reviving Lawrence’s guerrilla tactics, using cunning, deception, mobility and tiny ‘mosquito columns’ against elephantine Italian forces. Wavell had been appointed
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Wavell
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
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Clarke Biography
In his introduction to Dudley Clarke’s first book, Seven Assignments, Wavell wrote:
Nicholas Rankin • A Genius for Deception
When WW2 got under way, and Wavell became commander-in-chief, Middle East, he encouraged the development of special forces and secret fraud by picking Orde Wingate for guerrilla war in Ethiopia and Dudley Clarke for strategic deception.