British Stage Magicians Lull Hitler’s Forces Into Disaster
In October of 1942, Hitler’s Afrika Korps, under the command of his favorite general, Erwin Rommel, faced British forces in the Egyptian desert near a hamlet named El Alamein. The ensuing Battle of El Alamein was to be fought in a narrow strip of land bounded to the north by the Mediterranean Sea, and to the south by the Qattara Depression, which was impassable to armor and wheeled vehicles.
The British planned to attack in the north, and to conceal that they created a specialist unit known as the Camouflage, Development, and Training Centre (CDTC). The CDTC was cobbled together from stage magicians, filmmakers, painters, sculptors, and architects, and tasked with flummoxing the enemy. They came up with a misdirection plan, Operation Bertram, to deceive Rommel about British intentions regarding the direction of their upcoming attack.
That was particularly important because Rommel faced fuel shortages that made redeployment of his troops, particularly the Italians, difficult once fighting commenced. Wherever Rommel deployed his forces, that is where most of them would remain during the battle, so the British set out to convince him to deploy them in the wrong place. The British planned to attack in the north, so the CDTC set out to hide the actual troop and materiel buildup in the north, and to make what buildup could not be concealed appear smaller than it actually was. They also set out to convince the Germans that the main attack would be in the south, not the north.
To that end, the British fed the Germans misinformation via turned spies. And because the CDTC was heavy on magicians, they borrowed heavily from stage magic. They built wood and canvass contraptions to fool German aerial reconnaissance by making concentrations of armor in the north appear like trucks, and make transport trucks in the south look like menacing concentrations of tanks. To misdirect Hitler’s forces about the buildup of supplies and munitions, the CDTC set up fake ammunition dumps. Water was the most precious resource in the desert, so wherever the enemy concentrated water was a strong hint that he planned on doing something nearby. So the CDTC’s stage magicians built a 200 mile dummy water pipeline to the southern sector of the Alamein line.
The deception worked, and Hitler’s forces concentrated in the north. When the Battle of El Alamein commenced on the night of October 23, 1942, Axis forces were surprised that the British Eighth Army’s main thrust came in the north, and not in the south as had been expected. As predicted, fuel shortages kept Hitler’s forces from effectively redeploying troops from the southern sector to reinforce and meet the threat to the north. The battle ended in a complete British victory, and a retreat that culminated 6 months later in the complete surrender of all Axis forces in North Africa.