From: Nigel Hay -MILWEB (Nigel@milweb.net)
Date: Fri Sep 10 2004 - 10:59:25 PDT
Ah, I name the guilty the famous British illusionist of WW2 Jasper
Maskelyne - my father once saw him on stage
The man who invesnted the inflatable tanks, "moved " the harbour at
Alexandria and generally worked magic on the german army.
All the Maskelynes were magicians. A Maskelyne invented the coin-in-the-slot
lavatory door and was, therefore, responsible for the enduring euphemism of
spending a penny, which has defied inflation and decimalisation.
On the outbreak of war, he was posted to the western desert. Resisting the
army's assumption that he was good for nothing but amusing the troops, he
collected a group of like-minded mavericks to work on camouflage. He called
them his crazy gang. An electrician, chemist, stage-scenery maker,
architect, picture restorer, painter and a carpenter who, he added, had
never earned more than £3 a week in his life.
For his first trick he made jeeps look like tanks with a superstructure of
plywood. (As the jeep scuttled across the sand it looked endearingly like an
old lady at the seaside holding up her skirts.) For his second, he made
tanks look like trucks. For his big finish, and David Copperfield would
appreciate this, he made Alexandria Harbour and the Suez Canal vanish.
German bombers were misdirected to a mock Alexandria built in an adjacent
bay and the Suez canal was masked with mirrors.
This trick was so clever I could not understand it even when a professor of
physics and astronomy explained it. Particularly when a professor of physics
and astronomy explained it. He devised a spinning mirrored cone which split
a searchlight beam into a dazzling vortex nine miles wide at the top.
Imagine a spinning shuttlecock with feathers of light. Then he filled the
night sky with shuttlecocks.
Dr Badsey of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst said drily, "A number of
people with unusual jobs end up writing How I Won the War Single-Handedly.
You are not actually under oath when writing your own memoirs."
Nobody can deny that Maskelyne helped to win the Battle of El Alamein.
Montgomery's counter-attack was coming from the north. It was, therefore,
crucial that Rommel should expect it from the south. Maskelyne
mass-produced, as he put it, "Tricks and swindles and devices intended to
bewilder and mislead the crop-headed Axis commanders." His 2000 dummy tanks
left dummy tracks and spat dummy gunfire. The airwaves were full of dummy
bustle: "People rivetting things together and muffled oaths as they dropped
hammers on their toes." Rommel calculated that the dummy pipeline could not
be completed before November so he went home on leave. Monty attacked.
Making Rommel vanish was Maskelyne's masterpiece.
Somehow you feel that, because the ghost army never existed, it is still
there, sweating, swearing, waiting for the order to attack.
Maskelyne received no official recognition. For a vain man this was
intolerable and he died an embittered drunk. It gives his story a poignancy
without which it would be mere chest-beating.
----- Original Message -----
From: "J. Forster" <jfor@quik.com>
To: "Military Vehicles Mailing List" <mil-veh@mil-veh.org>
Sent: Friday, September 10, 2004 7:36 PM
Subject: Re: [MV] OFF TOPIC: Possible hoax.. more
> IMO, they could well be fake documents though. Faked by someone on the
right to
> embarrass Kerry. (not my idea.. Nightline last night)
>
> -John
>
> See:
>
> http://home.tiac.net/~cri_a/piltdown/piltdown.html
>
>
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