In the 1930s, Jasper Maskelyne was a superstar magician who performed to packed theater crowds across the UK.
A poster from 1931 corresponding to his time at the London Palladium classified him as “England’s greatest illusionist.”
To tell the truth, he was a bit of a dandy, with a touch of Errol Flynn in his pencil mustache and piercing eyes.
Agile, too, based on evidence from a 1937 Pathé film in which he appears to swallow a dozen razor blades. Less agile were the jokes he cracked in front of the camera: “Very nice when they’re fresh, you know?”
Maskelyne’s greatest deception, however, was executed in a theater very different from the one he frequented: the desert near Cairo during World War II.
In his revealing 1949 memoirs, titled “Magic: Top Secret,” he claimed to have led a team that churned out “tricks, scams, and devices designed to baffle and deceive stubborn Axis commanders.”
Beyond the canyons
The smoke and mirrors tactics that Maskelyne and his companions employed for Operation Bertram (as the deception plan for the second battle of El-Alamein in 1942 was called) are still studied by the military today. And a film telling the story of Maskelyne, starring Benedict Cumberbatch in the title role, is ready for production.
Maskelyne shares are also counted in “Spies, lies and deceptions”an exhibition examining the role that fiction, trickery and deception have played in conflicts from the First World War to the present day, which has just opened at the Imperial War Museum in London.
Among the 150 objects on display are devices, official documents, films and photographs, which reveal well-known stories but also other ignored ones, such as that of Noor Inayat Khan, the first wireless operator sent to occupied France.
“We wanted to show that Wars are not always fought and won on battlefields or in the command rooms, but a lot of things happen in the shadows,” said co-curator Michelle Kirby.
Since Maskelyne published his memoirs it has been repeatedly suggested that he exaggerated his actions, although critics’ claims (and Maskelyne’s, too) have been difficult to prove.
“One of the fascinating but complex realities we have had to carefully navigate is that the truth about the specific involvement of individuals behind military deceptions is often difficult to confirm,” Kirby said.
An adventurous volunteer
Maskeylyne was almost 37 years old when war was announced. A scion of the magical aristocracy (his grandfather invented the levitation trick and became famous for exposing fraudulent spiritualists) he volunteered for the Royal Engineers.
He claimed that folk magic techniques could be used for camouflage and demonstrated this to dubious officers by conjuring a German warship in London’s River Thames. from a cardboard model and mirrors.
Shortly afterwards, Maskelyne was approached by Brigadier Dudley Clarke. The purpose? Ask him to join MI9, as part of “Force A”, a special intelligence section whose main mission would be to deceive the enemy.
As Clarke described it in his memoirs, his goal was “to preserve rather than destroy.” It was vital to his success that, instead of simply deceiving the enemy, he was tricked into collaborating with the Allied plans.
According to Maskelyne, Clarke assigned him command of the “Experimental Camouflage Section,” which was nicknamed “the Magic Band” or “the Crazy Band”according to others.
Essays of the great coup
The group allegedly included an electrician, a chemist, a set designer, an architect, a picture restorer, a painter and a carpenter.
Together they were remarkable, Maskelyne said, hide the entire city of Alexandria (Egypt) from German bombers.
And to do this, they simulated night lights of the city, erected fake buildings, a lighthouse and anti-aircraft batteries in a bay almost 5 kilometers away and, when the Luftwaffe arrived, they even blew up some of the fake buildings, so that the pilots believed that they had achieved their goal.
“Deceptions like this are as old as war itself”Kirby explained.
“There are photographs from the American Civil War of logs made to look like mounted weapons, and [en la exposición] “We have a paper mache decoy head that drew fire from snipers in the trenches,” he said.
Although the people in charge of the exhibition admitted that “it had never been done on such a large scale before.”
His greatest moment
According to his memoirs, Maskelyne’s greatest contribution to Bertram was making German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel think that the Allied attack was coming from the south, when in fact British Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s forces intended to attack from the north.
The magician used canvas and plywood to disguise 1,000 tanks as trucks in the north, and created 2,000 fake tanks, plus a fake railway line, water pipeline, radio chatter, and fake construction sounds in the south. The tanks even had their own pyrotechnics.
Maskelyne claimed in his memoirs that Montgomery told him: “The whole war will depend on what happens here… I hope you brought your magic wand with you”.
“It helped the allies achieve complete tactical surprise,” Kirby said.
In fact, when the troops stripped their tanks of their disguises and charged into battle, the Nazis were caught completely off guard.
With the Battle of El-Alamein, the Allies changed the course of the campaign in North Africa.
“Before Alamein we never had a victory. After, we never had a loss”said British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
The “Magic Gang” is said to have disbanded after that, although Maskelyne’s skills are also believed to be behind the fake sabotage of the De Havilland aircraft factory in Hatfield, Hertfordshire in 1943.
To fool German reconnaissance services into believing that a bomb had exploded inside the factory, he constructed wooden replicas of transformers, fake bomb craters, and rubble.
Likewise, Eddie Chapman, a British double agent known as “ZigZag,” was used to inform the Germans of what had happened.
The Iron Cross that the latter received in return will also be exhibited in the Museum.
Maskelyne did not obtain any official recognition for his work in the war, an omission which is said to have bothered him and which probably encouraged him to publish the memoirs, in which he describes his exploits in detail and with little bragging.
The magician even claimed to be on Adolf Hitler’s personal most wanted list.
“The official accounts don’t always match theirs,” admitted Kirby,
However, the curator warned: “The truth of what happens in the shadows of the military is difficult to confirm even today. And so we are unlikely to ever find out how true their version of the story is.”
This text was published in BBC Culture. Beam click here to read the English version.
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