22. The Magicians Who Helped Beat Rommel
In the runup to the Battle of El Alamein in 1942, Axis and British forces faced each across a narrow strip of desert. It was a battlefield bounded to the north by the Mediterranean Sea, and to the south by the Qattara Depression, which was impassable to armor and wheeled vehicles. Within those narrow confines, the British set out to deceive the Axis commander, Erwin Rommel, about the location of their upcoming attack. So they came up with a misdirection plan, Operation Bertram, to hoodwink the Desert Fox. That was particularly important, because Rommel faced fuel shortages which made redeployment of most of his troops, particularly the Italians, difficult or even impossible once the fighting began. Wherever Rommel deployed his forces, that is where most of them would remain during the battle, so the British set out to trick him into deploying them in the wrong place.
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). Its personnel were cobbled together from stage magicians, filmmakers, painters, sculptors, and architects, whose task was to flummox the enemy. The CDTC set out to hide the actual troop and materiel buildup in the north, make what buildup could not be concealed appear slower than it actually was, and convince the enemy that the main attack would fall upon the southern sector of the line and not the northern.