soc.history.war.world-war-ii

"L2008" wrote in message
news:fpl4gu$tbe$1@aioe.org...

> Jasper Maskelyne. A stage illusionist who came up with all the methods to
> deceive the Germans. He was quite brilliant. He had searchlights that
> shined up from the Suez canal and way to the size of it, with rotating
> prisms. This confused German Italian pilots who would not see the exact
> position of the canal beneath.
>
> The British Army made tanks look like trucks and trucks look like tanks,
to
> deceive. He created a dummy Alexandria harbour and the Germans bombed that
> instead.
>
> There was talk of Tom Cruise playing him in film titled The War Magician.
>
>
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article400181.ece

Instead, a film was made of the William Stevenson book A Man
Called Intrepid, in which David Niven acted William Stephenson
(chief of British Security Co-ordination, New York City, a real
person) inventing camouflage for Auchinleck's army in the
North African campaign (an insult to Maskelyne, besides
being untrue.) The root problem was that spymaster Stephenson
when old and senile was persuaded to tell Toronto Star reporter
Stevenson about his war activities; and narrated everything that
came to mind, e.g. stories about SOE and intelligence in other
theatres: and the book presented all this as things Stephenson
had done. There is a moral somewhere in this for students of
the WW2 newsgroup.

--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)