Early in May 1941, a British convoy steamed through the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea at Gibraltar, continued for more than two thousand miles eastward while dodging lurking German U-boats and warding off German bomber attacks, and churned into the huge British naval base at Alexandria, Egypt. Rapidly offloaded were 238 new tanks to reinforce General Archibald Percival Wavell’s Middle East Command.
These tanks had arrived with a terse message from Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who exclaimed in biblical terms:
“Behold, now is the day of salvation.” Translation: launch a massive attack westward against the vaunted Afrika Korps of General Erwin Rommel, whose force was fifty miles inside Egypt preparing an offensive to capture Cairo, the location of Wavell’s headquarters.
Now Wavell rushed to inspect the new shipment of tanks. He was shocked to see that they were painted with forest-green camouflage, because they had originally been assigned to Greece. In the North African desert, these green tanks would stick out like the proverbial sore thumb, providing ideal targets for German gunners.
Wavell was a burly, one-eyed man who, during the early months of the war when Great Britain was a lion at bay, virtually ruled a vast empire in Arabia with an agile brain and a few battalions of infantry. All of his adult life, he had been a student of the art of modern war, particularly as it related to deception.
In a memorandum to the British chiefs of staff in the dark days of late 1940 during which the mighty German Luftwaffe was pounding Great Britain in an effort to destroy the Royal Air Force as a prelude to invasion, Wavell had written: “Practically all the ruses and stratagems of war are variations or developments of a few simple tricks that have been practiced by man on man since man was hunted by man.
“The elementary principle of all deception,” he continued, “is to attract the enemy’s attention to what you wish him to see and to distract his attention from what you do not wish him to see. It is by these methods that the skillful conjuror obtains his results.”
Now, after inspecting the green-colored—and, therefore, useless—tanks, General Wavell hurried back to Cairo, bent on putting his deception and camouflage principles to work. He had an officer immediately contact a small group of prewar magicians, artists, professors, and craftsmen who had only recently arrived in the Middle East. Not knowing where to assign the Britons, Wavell made them an independent unit and gave it the official designation Camouflage Experimental Section.
Now Wavell’s emissary told the men of the Camouflage Experimental Section about a crucial and urgent mission that was being assigned to it. With the greatest of speed, the green tanks were to be repainted with a substance that would blend with the desert.
“General Wavell wants you to whip up a batch of suitable paint,” the officer told Lieutenant Frank Knox, in peacetime a don (professor) at England’s prestigious Oxford University.
“How much of a batch?” Knox asked.
“Ten thousand gallons,” was the reply.
Knox winced. There wasn’t a pint of desert camouflage paint in North Africa—except for that held by the Germans.
A mini-crisis was at hand. The crucially needed new tanks could not be used on the desert without the camouflage paint, and it would take weeks before an emergency paint request from London could arrive.
Creating ten thousand gallons of sand-colored coating, one tough enough to withstand the blast-furnace heat of the desert, would be a daunting task. Solving the riddle was largely put in the hands of Lance Corporal Philip Townsend, a skilled painter who had worked mainly in oils in civilian life.
When the brooding Townsend had been interviewed to join the group of British conjurers, he said, “I know all there is to know about paint. I know pigment, I know mixing.” He added: “I know hard work. I’m not here to make new pals. I just want to be left alone to do my job.”
Now the artist was indeed being “left alone” to solve the seemingly unsolvable problem: miraculously causing a huge amount of desert-colored paint to suddenly appear. What was needed, he explained to the other six members of the Camouflage Experimental Section, was a substrate (or base) to hold fast the color, and a pigment to provide it.
“Almost anything that hardens can be used as a base,” he added. “All we really need is to find a liquid or powder that is soluble to whatever pigment we use. Then we’ll need some coloring substance.”
All seven Britons scoured Cairo and its environs for a suitable substrate. Finally their efforts were rewarded when they discovered a huge dump just north of Cairo. An old-timer among British officers in the Middle East called it “the largest military junk pile in the world.”
While rooting through the cargo raised from a torpedoed freighter, the scroungers came upon scores of sealed tin drums that contained a thick brown substance. A tiny taste solved the riddle: Worcestershire sauce. Hundreds of gallons of it. Townsend knew he had the paint base.
More scrounging at the dump turned up tons of spoiled flour and an equal amount of cement. All these materials were loaded into trucks and taken back to the group’s tent camp, where paintmaster Townsend could experiment until he had developed the proper mix of Worcestershire sauce, cement, and flour. He developed the mix, but it was bright red, making it useless in the desert. Now they needed a pigment to turn the paste a sand color.
Townsend tried every coloring substance he could find to put in the mix, including assorted inks, powders, and melted crayons. Nothing worked. He was about ready to concede defeat. Then one day he was strolling down a dirt path and accidentally stepped into a pile of camel droppings.
The paintmaster felt a surge of elation. He reached down and picked up one of the dried, hard, sandy brown chips. “This is it!” he exulted. It was the perfect color, and the supply was unlimited. After several tests, he hit on the proper mix. Camel dung made a perfect, although malodorous, desert-brown paint pigment.
Now the “Dung Patrol” was born. One of the magicians or an Egyptian worker hired for the job trailed every camel caravan leaving Cairo. Oases in the surrounding desert were inspected daily. Each dawn, the streets of Cairo were swept for night leftovers.
The Dung Patrol operated with military precision. A small metal scoop was designed and assigned to each man. A tongue-in-cheek slogan was conceived: “We stand behind every camel!”
Watching the Dung Patrol in action, large numbers of Arabs were angry. For hundreds of years, camel droppings had fueled the local bread ovens, so the Britons had to hustle to beat angry Arab men and women to the suddenly prized camel pats.
In the tiny tent encampment, the ingredients for the paint were mixed by Townsend and his Egyptian helpers in huge washing tubs that had been “borrowed” late one night from an army field laundry unit. Soon some two thousand gallons per week were being produced. The finished product was turned over to a British engineer company, which did the actual tank painting.
Now General Wavell was ready to launch Operation Battleaxe, an offensive to inflict a crushing blow on General Rommel’s force, which was arrayed near the western border of Egypt.
