Brigadier Dudley Wrangel Clarke, ( – ) was an officer in the British Army, known as a pioneer of military deception operations during the Second World War. His ideas for combining fictional orders of battle, visual deception and double agents helped define Allied deception strategy during the war, for which he has been referred to as "the greatest British deceiver of WW2".
Clarke was also instrumental in the founding of three famous military units, namely the British Commandos, the Special Air Service, and the naming of the US Rangers.
Born in Johannesburg and brought up near London, Clarke joined the Royal Artillery as an officer in 1916 but transferred to the Royal Flying Corps after finding he was too young to fight in France. He spent the First World War learning to fly, first in Reading and then Egypt. Clarke returned to the Royal Artillery in 1919 and had a varied career doing intelligence work in the Middle East. In 1936 he was posted to Palestine, where he helped organise the British repression of the 1936 Arab uprising. During the Second World War, Clarke joined John Dill's staff, where he proposed and helped to implement an idea for raids into France – an early form of the British Commandos.
In 1940, Archibald Wavell called Clarke to Cairo and placed him in charge of strategic deception. As a cover, he was employed to set up a regional organisation for MI9, a British escape and evasion department. The following year Clarke received a war establishment and set up Advanced Headquarters 'A' Force with a small staff to plan deception operations. Once satisfied with the department's structure, he pursued intelligence contacts in Turkey and Spain.
In late 1941 Clarke was called to London, where his deception work had come to the attention of Allied high command. Shortly afterward, while in Madrid, he was arrested wearing women's clothing, in circumstances that remain unclear. He was released and after being questioned by the governor of Gibraltar, allowed to return to Cairo.
During Clarke's absence, deception hierarchy in Middle East Command had become muddled. Colonel Ralph Bagnold had taken over deception planning, pushing 'A' Force aside. Clarke was sent to El Alamein, where Allied forces were on the retreat, to work on deception plans. Upon his return, Bagnold was sidelined and 'A' Force reinstated as the primary deception department. Throughout 1942 Clarke implemented Operation Cascade, an order of battle deception which added many fictional units to the Allied formations. Cascade was a success; by the end of the war the enemy had accepted most of the formations as real.
From 1942 to 1945, Clarke continued to organise deception in North Africa and southern Europe. After the war, he was asked to record the history of 'A' Force.
He retired in 1947 and lived the rest of his life in relative obscurity. As well as pursuing a literary career that produced two histories and a thriller, he worked for the Conservative Party and was a director of Securicor. He died in London in 1974.
Early life
Clarke was born in Johannesburg on . His father, Ernest Clarke, grew up in Kingston upon Hull and moved to South Africa in the late 19th century, where he became embroiled in the Jameson Raid. Ernest managed to avoid prison for his part in the raid and, via a co-conspirator, obtained a job at a gold mining company. Once settled, Ernest married Madeline Gardiner, and a short while later, Dudley was born. During the Second Boer War, the Clarke family was trapped in the siege of Ladysmith. Although an infant at the time of the siege, Clarke later tried to claim a campaign medal. Soon afterwards, the family returned to England, moving to Watford, where Clarke's brother, the screenwriter T. E. B. Clarke, was born in 1907.
From an early age, Clarke wanted a career in the armed forces. In 1912, he attended Charterhouse School, where he was exposed to the glamorous parties and smart uniforms of the nearby military presence at Aldershot, including the newly formed Royal Flying Corps.
First World War and inter-war period
Eager to be in active service, Clarke applied to sit the Army Entrance Exam in 1915, as soon as he had reached the minimum age of sixteen and a half. To his own surprise (he had petitioned the Charterhouse headmaster for a recommendation, allowing him to bypass the exam, on the expectation of failing), he passed and in early 1916 attended the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich.
In November 1916, Clarke was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Royal Artillery. When his regiment deployed to France, Clarke had to stay behind because, aged 17, he was too young to fight. Frustrated, he applied to join the Royal Flying Corps and transferred to the School of Military Aeronautics in Reading in . The following April he was posted to Egypt to complete his flight training, where he stayed until . Despite his promotion to the rank of lieutenant, Clarke transferred back to the Royal Artillery on his return to England.
After the war, Clarke had a varied military career that began with a posting to Mesopotamia in 1919. During the Iraqi revolt of 1920, he helped evacuate Europeans from the region by boat. While on extended leave in Turkey in 1922, he became involved in the Chanak Crisis, a threatened Turkish attack on British and French troops. Clarke volunteered to help the local British force and was tasked with feeding misinformation to Turkish nationalists – a first taste of the activities that would define his later military career. In 1925, during another period of leave, Clarke covered the Rif War for the Morning Post.
Over the inter-war period, Clarke became involved in the theatre and drama establishments of his postings. In 1923, he re-formed the Royal Artillery Officers Dramatic Club and was responsible for the Royal Artillery's display at the 1925 Royal Tournament. In 1933 and 1934, he wrote and directed two Christmas pantomimes.
Palestine In 1936, Clarke was posted, at his request, to Palestine, just in time to participate in the 1936 Arab uprising. The British presence in Jerusalem was minimal at that time, comprising two battalions of infantry and a motley collection of air and armour under the command of . Clarke, as one of only two staff officers, was faced with organising an effective response to guerrilla warfare. He first set to work improving communications between the small Royal Air Force contingent and the army. It was here that he met Tony Simonds, an intelligence officer sent to the region with express orders to set up an intelligence network. Clarke and Simonds worked to feed reliable information to British forces.
Toward the end of 1936, more troops were dispatched to Palestine. Lieutenant-General John Dill was placed in command, and Clarke became his chief of staff. In 1937, Dill was replaced by Major-General Archibald Wavell, the commander who would later give Clarke free rein in Middle Eastern deception operations. In the preface to Clarke's 1948 book, Seven Assignments, Wavell wrote about their time together in Palestine:
Second World War
At the outbreak of the Second World War, Clarke was promoted to lieutenant-colonel and began working on intelligence tasks. He worked with Wavell in the Middle East to research possible Allied supply lines, undertook two trips to Norway (in an effort to maintain its neutrality), and conducted secret missions in Calais and Ireland.
In Clarke became a military assistant to Sir John Dill, now a full general and Chief of the General Staff, at the War Office. On , inspired by childhood recollections of similar Boer forces as well as experiences during the Arab uprising in Palestine, Clarke sketched out an idea for small amphibious raiding parties, called Commandos. On , while Dill was inspecting the troops evacuated from Dunkirk, Clarke suggested the idea to him, and the prime minister approved the plan on the following day. Clarke, under Brigadier Otto Lunde, was tasked with setting up a new department, MO9, and began to recruit soldiers for what would later become the British Commandos.
The first raid into France, Operation Collar, took place on 24 June 1940. Clarke obtained permission to accompany the 120-strong force, but was not allowed to go ashore. The attempt was not a major success, with only one of the four units managing to kill enemy troops. While waiting on the beach for his men to return, Clarke's boat was apparently spotted by a German patrol. Somehow Clarke was injured in the ear during, he said, an exchange of fire. Ernest Chappell, who was also on the beach, said that the patrol had not opened fire.
1941: Cairo
In Cairo, Archibald Wavell, Clarke's old commander in Palestine, was commanding the North African campaign. He believed that deception was a key part of warfare. On 13 December he summoned Clarke to Egypt, telling high command he wished to set up "a special section of Intelligence for Deception". While awaiting Clarke's arrival, Wavell initiated a successful deception against the Italian forces at Sidi Barrani. Clarke reached Cairo on 18 December, to be greeted by Tony Simonds – another old hand from Palestine. Wavell put Clarke in charge, albeit under great secrecy, of broad strategic deception operations in North Africa. He held this position, under subsequent Mediterranean commanders, for the next five years.
On his arrival in Cairo, Clarke began to build a network of useful contacts. He befriended Lieutenant-Colonel Raymund Maunsell, who operated Security Intelligence Middle East (SIME), the agency in charge of counter-espionage in the region. Maunsell later worked closely with Clarke, helping to feed misinformation to the enemy via double agents. Clarke's first deception was a scheme to mislead Italian forces into expecting an invasion of Italian Somaliland instead of Eritrea, the real Allied target. Operation Camilla fooled the Italian leadership completely but instead of diverting troops as the British hoped, they withdrew their forces into Eritrea. From this failure Clarke learned a first lesson, one he would teach to many other deception officers during the war: that the key to deception was not to make your enemy think what you wish but to get them to do what you want.
Clarke had not forgotten his previous pet scheme: the Commandos. In , he met the American Colonel William J. Donovan while the latter was touring the region. Clarke's description of the 1940 British unit inspired Donovan to emulate the idea. Clarke suggested the name "Rangers", after the frontier force Rogers' Rangers in the film Northwest Passage, for Donovan's unit. In May of the following year the United States Army Rangers were founded.
In February, Clarke suffered from an attack of jaundice that put him out of action for about six weeks. He was visited regularly by Maunsell who was, by that time, a firm friend.
'A' Force At first Clarke worked alone and in secret, under the official title "Intelligence Officer (special duties) to the Commander-in-Chief". He had neither staff nor official mandate, and worked from a "converted bathroom" at the British Army headquarters, Cairo. His cover role was to establish a regional department for MI9, the less secret organisation tasked with helping Allied servicemen in escape and evasion tactics. Far from being a token cover, Clarke ran MI9's Middle East department, in tandem with his deception work, until . Clarke's one-man show in deception was not to last long.