One day, Wavell was en route to visit a military post when his car was flagged down by a British officer from his Intelligence staff. A ‘dark, fiery and eager’ captain called Orde Wingate, having ambushed the commander on the highway, abruptly laid out his plan for dealing with the armed Arab gangs: armed Jewish gangs or Special Night Squads,

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

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

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

Montague also writes about the deception plan that accompanied the expanded British Fifth Army’s attack on Pilckem Ridge, north-east of Ypres, on 31 July 1917, which turned into the notorious Battle of Passchendaele by the time it petered out exhausted in November. Under the overall command of Field Marshal Douglas Haig, the initial push tried to

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.

Dudley Clarke

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.

Sefton Delmer,