Churchill's Wizards

Churchill's Wizards

by Nicholas Rankin

Faber and Faber HK$400

The British penchant for eccentricity seems to flourish in wartime. How else to explain boffin Geoffrey Pyke's plan to construct a two-million-tonne aircraft carrier from ice and wood pulp before the invasion of Normandy in 1944 - and the enthusiasm that Churchill and Mountbatten showed for the project? Habbakuk, as the scheme was called, never came to fruition, although numerous other less hare-brained ideas played a large part in the Allied victories in the two world wars.

More importantly, the thinking that was prevalent in the early stages of the first world war - that 'gentlemen did not read somebody else's mail' - was soon dispensed with as the British secret service grew from a minor department with little influence into an important factor in all operations.

Nicholas Rankin's Churchill's Wizards: The British Genius for Deception 1914-1945, skates over four decades of British skulduggery in all its many forms, from the fake trees erected as observation posts in the battlefields of Flanders to the Nazi secret agents captured in England and subsequently turned against their former employers.

Rankin freely admits to a love of theatre, stating that the audience willingly suspends its belief to enjoy the performance. He writes: 'Deception ... in ordinary life is wrong because it corrodes trust, which is the basic glue of human relationships. But deceiving your enemy in wartime is common sense. If the war is just, then deception is justified.'