In the north, the British disguised tanks as lorries and real lorries obliterated their tracks, and tents and more dummy lorries concealed stockpiled ammunition and stores.
A mobile tank dummy as used by Jasper Maskelyne in World War II
Second Battle of El Alamein
October 1942, Field General Irwin Rommel faced the British Forces on the Alamein line. To the enemy facing him his forces seemed strong as ever. But he had made a critical error over Malta and he was losing the Battle of the Mediterranean.
Short of fuel, ammunition and food, Rommel watched the British build for an attack. Rommel expected the assault in the North and had created an enormous minefield, called “The Devil’s Garden,”… over 500,000 mines, with interlaced hard points, and antitank guns. An attacking force would be caught up in the mines while Panzer forces in reserve would destroy them. The British realized they would have to hold these forces in place for 48 hours while engineers cleared paths through the defenses.
To convince the Axis commanders that he would begin the battle on the southern sector of the front, Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery set in motion the largest deception plan of the desert war. Codenamed Operation Bertram, it was under the control of Lieutenant Colonel Charles Richardson and bore a remarkable similarity to Allenby’s plan at Megiddo. Its principal architect was a Royal Engineer officer named Jasper Maskelyne, who had been a stage magician in civilian life:
Operation Bertram was a sleight of hand, a misdirection in both place and in time. Its goal was to convince Rommel that the main attack would come in the south, and that it would come later than a diversionary attack in the North. To do this, the Allies would need to disguise their forces. One of Montgomery’s aids put it to A Force:
“You must conceal one hundred fifty thousand men with a thousand guns, and a thousand tanks, on a plane as hard and flat as a billiard table, and the Germans must not know anything about it, although they’ll be watching every movement, listening for every noise, trodding every track. You can’t do it, of course, but you bloody well got to.”
In September, they dumped waste materials (discarded packing cases etc.) under camouflage nets in the northern sector, making them appear to be ammunition or ration dumps. The Axis naturally noticed these, but as no offensive action immediately followed and the “dumps” did not change in appearance over time, they subsequently ignored them. This allowed Eighth Army to build up supplies in the forward area unnoticed by the Axis, by replacing the rubbish with ammunition, petrol or rations at night.
Guns and tanks were moved to the south to staging areas. An old trench system was packed with petrol cans. Aerial reconnaissance revealed that the new stockpile was invisible, the trenches threw the same shadows as before. The fuel necessary for the attack had been hidden in plain sight on the field of battle.
“They built a railroad in the south out of bull rushes, and they would lay track out of jerry cans every day, and move them the next day”.
The Magic Gang built obviously phony guns out of telephone poles. German reconnaissance recognized them as phony. Just before the battle the British replaced them with real guns.
“Maskelyn built dummy men, uh, from the waist up. They cast the right shadow so it made it look like they were huge tent emplacements, and camps in the south.”
A phony fuel pipeline was started from the rear areas to the south. Its construction rate was calculated to be finished no earlier than weeks after the start date for the actual battle, October 23rd.1942.
“The Germans knew that the British could not possibly move until the railroad was completed because that was their supply line, until the pipeline was completed. So they watched every day.”
Trucks and transport were moved to the North. Some of these trucks were dummies, some were not vehicles at all, but stores of fuel and ammunition disguised so that from the air they looked like trucks.
“They had all of their tanks in the south, and all of their transport vehicles in a north. Two nights before the battle was to begin, they moved the tanks back to a staging area, and replaced them with Maskelyn’s dummy tanks.”
At night, they brought the tanks up, slipping them under shields. Little by little, with tracks swept clean, forces were moved forward. In the glare of the morning sun nothing seemed to have changed. But the British were creeping imperceptibly forward. Rommel was so unaware of the subtle deception that he left the front for a much-needed rest cure in the Alps.
The Desert night of October 23rd, 1942 erupted as shells from the British 8th Army tore into German positions. Monty’s artillery walked across the Devil’s Garden, ripping gaps in the defenses. Minesweeping tanks led sappers into the minefields carrying lamps and white tape to mark lanes for the infantry.
The battle began at 9.40 p.m. on 23 October with a bombardment fired by 592 guns, 456 of them crammed into XXX Corps’ sector. Resistance was fierce and progress was slower than expected. The following day Stumme sustained a fatal heart attack and General von Thoma, commander of the Afrika Korps, took over command of the Axis army.
Reports filtering into Panzerarmee Headquarters indicated that the British were attacking all along the front. But the attack was faltering. The defenses were formidable, the minesweepers were breaking down. Infantry was clearing mines by hand…probing with bayonets into the sand.
The Germans held their reserves. Suddenly, another front opened on the sea. The British had launched an all-out amphibious landing. The thunder of naval guns and rockets…the sounds of anchor chains, the smell of fuel oil… signs of a massive attack …and off the coast an enormous smoke screen obscured the forces.
The German 90th Light Infantry’s reserve and the Luftwaffe were diverted from the front lines to the beach.
As the 90th prepared to meet the landing, German planes dropped tons of bombs into the smoke. But as the smoke cleared, the entire invasion force had disappeared. Only a few drifting barges floated harmlessly offshore. The Magic Gang had struck again…and the non- existent British landing had, in fact, gone up in smoke.
Then on October 24th a critical convoy of five ships with crucial supplies for Rommel left Naples. The British Navy wanted to sink all five. But that might give the game away. The rule was that no ship could be sunk without being sighted by aircraft and having the Germans, in turn, sight the aircraft which had discovered their position. There was no time for this, and sinking all five ships would raise suspicions. These ships were critical but so was the Ultra secret. The decision must go to Churchill. The great deception pondered…
Then, in the British code rooms in Cairo and Malta Headquarters a message from London decoded… “Sink them.” One by one the ships were tracked down and sunk, the last one within site of the coast…
The Germans could not fail to take notice… Had Ultra been lost? To misdirect, A Force sent a congratulatory message to their harbor spy in Naples. They gave him a bonus for targeting the convoy. He never spent it. He didn’t exist. But he was all too real for the Germans, who, as the British intended, had decoded the message and…believed it.
On October 25th a German tank force tried to attack through a dummy battery at Munassib. The real guns, which had lain silent through two days of battle, now opened up and devastated the attackers. 21st Panzer was held by the diversion.
When Rommel returned to the front on the evening of 25 October, he was shaken by the sheer volume of the British artillery fire and depressed by the way in which the Eighth Army’s carefully rehearsed infantry/tank tactics were remorselessly eating their way through his positions. The reports were confusing. British were attacking all along the line. But to Rommel it was clear. He recognised immediately that he was engaged in ‘a battle without hope’.
The most dangerous gains had been made in the north and threatened his supply lines. He ordered the Panzers north. The deception, Operation Bertram, had delayed their entry into the battle for two critical days.
The role played by the element of surprise in weakening their defences was recognised afterwards by Churchill, who paid tribute in the House of Commons to the ‘marvellous system of camouflage’ which had contributed to the victory.
