COR KSCR E W M IN DS
17
October 1917, the British attacked again, rolling back the thin Turkish line at Beersheba. By December, the British had taken Jerusalem. Meinertzhagen crowed that his haversack ruse had been ‘easy, reliable and inexpensive’. But victory may also be attributed to another devious Meinertzhagen ploy: the dropping of hundreds of cigarettes laced with opium behind Turkish lines. Some historians have argued that the haversack ruse was not quite the success Meinertzhagen claimed. The Turks may have been fooled. Or they may just have been incredibly stoned. The ruse was updated and deployed once more early in the Second World War. Before the Battle of Alam Halfa in 1942, a corpse clutching a map that appeared to show a ‘fair going’ route through the desert was placed in a blown-up scout car. It was hoped that Rommel’s tanks would find the map, be misdirected into soft sand and get bogged down. In another variation on the theme, a fake defence plan of Cyprus was left with a woman in Cairo who was known to be in contact with Axis intelligence. But the most recent variant had been plotted, with pleasing symmetry, by Peter Fleming, Ian Fleming’s older brother, an intelligence officer serving under General Archibald Wavell, then Supreme Allied Commander in the Far East. Peter, who shared his brother’s vivid imagination and was already a successful writer, concocted his own haversack ruse, codenamed ‘Error’, aimed at convincing the Japanese that Wavell himself had been injured in the retreat from Burma and had left behind various important documents in an abandoned car. In April 1942, the fake documents, a photograph of Wavell’s daughter, personal letters, novels and other items were placed in a green Ford sedan, and pushed over a slope at a bridge across the Irrawaddy River, just ahead of the advancing Japanese army. Operation Error may have been great fun, but ‘there was never any evidence that the Japanese had paid any attention to the car, much less that they drew any conclusions from its contents’.
HW806783_Text
11/12/2012 13:03:54