A Genius for Deception

A Genius for Deception

Review by Dennis Showalter

Freelancer Rankin presents a well-researched and entertaining account of Britain’s use of deception, bluff and espionage as force multipliers in two world wars. The book’s central figure is the man once called “the arch-mountebank.” Winston Churchill had a penchant for the unconventional in war as well as in politics. From 1914 to 1946 he was at the center of a broad spectrum of stunts designed to mislead and confound the enemy. In the Great War they ranged from government-sponsored journalistic propaganda—compare the wartime dispatches of Philip Gibbs with his postwar corrective Now It Can Be Told—through strategic deception operations as a preliminary to the Dardanelles campaign, to underwriting the desert guerrilla operations of T. E. Lawrence.

In World War II Churchill was godfather of the commandos, of the Special Operations Executive, with its mission to “set Europe ablaze”—and of the comprehensive plans for popular resistance in case of invasion, plans based on the premise that “you can always take one with you.” The massive deception plans enveloping D-Day, the furnishing of doubles for prominent public figures, the widespread use of “doubled” German agents in intelligence operations—all bore Churchill’s fingerprints.

Winston was by no means the only player in the modern version of Kipling’s “Great Game.” Rankin introduces a fascinating collection of amateurs, inventors and eccentrics whose hare-brained schemes became reality in the hands of the operators. The development of naval and military camouflage to a fine art during World War I depended on a completely unpredictable synergy between artists and warriors that eventually fundamentally transformed the concept from concealment to deception. That principle carried over to World War II, where the British Isles were defended in good part by a combination of “ridiculously serious camouflage and seriously ridiculous deception” that consistently bewildered Germans handicapped by a limited sense of the ridiculous. Radio broadcasts, straightforward programs broadcasting news and music and “black” counterparts became hits in Nazi Germany. Soldatensender was so effective it was often mistaken for a genuine German station.

Rankin tells his real-life ripping yarns at a fast pace and with a light touch that never obscures the fundamental seriousness of the events. He makes a bit much of what he describes as a cultural penchant for concealment: “the British do not say what they mean, or mean what they say.” It is no less true that 20th-century Britain was the weaker power in two symmetrical world wars. With both sides using essentially the same methods and approaches, Britain needed every edge possible or conceivable.

Nor did all of the schemes work as well as Rankin asserts. Churchill’s penchant for colorful operational shortcuts leading nowhere regularly drove his military advisors to desperation. Commando and sabotage operations, for example, absorbed scarce human and material resources for seriously limited results. These observations, however, diminish neither the reader appeal of A Genius for Deception, nor its affirmation of the work of what Britain’s “unknown warriors” achieved through high imagination and low cunning.

Hardcover: 480 pages

Publisher: Oxford University Press ( November 05, 2009 )

Item #: 17-3126

ISBN: 9780195387049

Product Dimensions: 6.125 x 9.25 x 1.2 inches

Product Weight: 26.0 ounces