{"id":51890,"date":"2017-05-16T00:05:41","date_gmt":"2017-05-16T07:05:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/?p=51890"},"modified":"2017-05-17T01:41:42","modified_gmt":"2017-05-17T08:41:42","slug":"wizards-of-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/2017\/05\/wizards-of-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Wizards of War"},"content":{"rendered":"
The following is an article from Uncle John\u2019s Bathroom Reader<\/a><\/em><\/div>\n
\"DummyShermanTank\"<\/a>

Inflatable Tank<\/p><\/div>\n

To help win World War II, the Allies used every skill they could come up with\u2014including illusion, trickery\u2026and magic.<\/em><\/p>\n

WIZARD SCHOOL<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 1940 Britain\u2019s Ministry of Home Security created a military unit dedicated to \u201ccivil camouflage.\u201d Their job would be to provide safety through \u201cseriously ridiculous deception.\u201d The unit of camoufleurs\u2014soldiers tasked with finding ways to hide equipment and troop movements from the enemy\u2014would be trained at the Camouflage Development and Training Centre at Farnham Castle, Surrey. The camouflage office\u2019s odd cast of characters included artists, movie set designers, cartoonists, and a third-generation stage magician named Jasper Maskelyne. (Unrelated fact: Maskelyne\u2019s grandfather invented the pay toilet.)<\/p>\n

In 1941 the city of Alexandria, Egypt, was home to a million people. Controlling its harbor allowed Allied forces to replenish supplies and troops for the desert war raging in North Africa. That made it a prime target for German Luftwaffe bombing raids. Major Geoffrey Barkas\u2014a former filmmaker appointed head of Middle Eastern Camouflage\u2014called on Jasper Maskelyne and the team of camoufleurs known as the \u201cMagic Gang.\u201d Their mission: conceal the entire port, including the battleships and merchant vessels docked in it. \u201cWe can\u2019t cover it up. We can\u2019t disguise it. And we can\u2019t hide it,\u201d Maskelyne reportedly said. \u201cThere\u2019s only one solution left to us, isn\u2019t there? Move it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Magician\u2019s Dummy<\/strong><\/p>\n

Maskelyne and his team proceeded to construct a \u201cdummy\u201d port complete with mock battleships and submarines on an inland lake about three miles away from the real harbor. They installed real antiaircraft guns and searchlights, and rigged up remote-control explosives. The team consulted nighttime aerial photos of the actual city, and then planted lights in the sand and mud to make the fake site look as much like Alexandria as possible. Meanwhile, the real city of Alexandria went black.<\/p>\n

Reports say that German bombers pounded the fake Alexandria (rather than the real one) for eight nights in a row. Sources agree that the ruse protected the real city from possible destruction. They disagree on one crucial factor: Maskelyne\u2019s role in the deception.<\/p>\n

Official records offer little information about the magician\u2019s wartime exploits, but his ghostwritten memoir, Magic: Top Secret<\/em><\/a>, tells tale after tale of battlefield prestidigitation led and organized by Maskelyne. A writer named Richard Stokes has devoted an entire website to debunking the memoir. According to Stokes, the book was Maskelyne\u2019s most effective piece of camouflage\u2026\u201cingeniously compact, built from recycled tree carcass, and weighed only thirteen ounces. And it has fooled people for sixty years.\u201d<\/p>\n

MAKING MINCEMEAT OF HITLER<\/strong><\/p>\n

Prior to the 1943 invasion of Sicily, a dead man became a key player in another very effective WWII deception. On April 30, a corpse washed up on the coast of southwestern Spain. The body was dressed in the uniform of Britain\u2019s Royal Marines. An ID found on the body identified the man as Major William Martin. Chained to the dead major\u2019s wrist: a black attach\u00e9 case.<\/p>\n

The Nazis couldn\u2019t wait to get their hands on that case, and before long a helpful Spanish official had given one of Hitler\u2019s agents a look at the documents inside. They identified the dead officer as an expert in amphibious landings. His mission, seemingly thwarted, was to deliver top-secret information about Allied plans to attack German-held Greece and Sardinia. The coded letter Martin carried was addressed to Admiral Andrew Cunningham, commander of the Mediterranean fleet. It asked the commander to return Major Martin to his ship and have him \u201cbring some sardines with him\u201d\u2014a rather obvious allusion to Sardinia.<\/p>\n

Hitler took the bait, transferring troops to Greece and clearing the way for Allied forces to attack the real target. On July 10, 1943, the project code-named \u201cMincemeat\u201d ended with an invasion by 160,000 Allied troops\u2026into Sicily, not Sardinia. As for the corpse? \u201cMajor Martin\u201d wasn\u2019t a Royal Marine. He was a vagrant whose body had been spirited out of a London morgue for use in what became one of the most successful military deceptions ever staged. Note: Mincemeat\u2019s planners included Charles Fraser-Smith, the real-life model for Q in Ian Fleming\u2019s James Bond novels, and without him, the operation couldn\u2019t have succeeded. Fraser-Smith created the container that kept the vagrant\u2019s body \u201cfresh\u201d for days, until it could be dumped in the water off the coast of Spain.<\/p>\n

TANKS FOR NOTHING<\/strong><\/p>\n

On June 6, 1944, a pair of French bicyclists watched in awe as four American soldiers picked up a 40-ton Sherman tank and turned it around. \u201cAmericans are very strong,\u201d one of the soldiers quipped. Had the U.S. Army bred a team of superhuman Captain Americas? No, they had created a top-secret unit\u2014the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops\u2014and manned it with a thousand artists, designers, and audio technicians. Their job was to create a deceptively realistic army division consisting of inflatable tanks, cannons, jeeps, trucks, and airplanes.<\/p>\n

In just a few hours, the 23rd could assemble airfields filled with rubber planes, motor pools stocked with rubber jeeps, and battle formations with rows and rows of rubber tanks. To complete the illusion, 500-pound loudspeakers mounted on jeeps broadcast a barrage of combat sound effects. The 23rd\u2019s fake-outs had a serious purpose: to divert German forces from the \u201creal\u201d action and give Allied troops the advantage.<\/p>\n

Many members of the 23rd were art students, recruited from schools in New York and Philadelphia, including fashion designer Bill Blass, painter Ellsworth Kelly, and photographer Art Kane. Others were showmen, such as Captain Fred Fox, a former member of Princeton University\u2019s Triangle Club musical-comedy troupe. Fox knew that rubber tanks wouldn\u2019t be enough to convince the enemy. The 23rd, he insisted, must consider itself \u201ca traveling road show\u201d and be ready to perform \u201cat a moment\u2019s notice.\u201d<\/p>\n

The presentations must be done with the greatest accuracy and attention to detail. They will include the proper scenery, props, costumes, principals, extras, dialogue, and sound effects. We must remember that we are playing to a very critical and attentive radio, ground, and aerial audience. They must all be convinced.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And it worked. According to recent reports, the \u201cGhost Army,\u201d as it was known, staged more than 20 operations over the course of the war. Their deceptions are believed to have saved between 15,000 and 30,000 American lives, and they did it all without their fellow soldiers ever knowing of their existence. The Ghost Army remained top secret until 1985\u2014forty years after World War II ended.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>This article is reprinted with permission from Uncle John’s Canoramic Bathroom Reader<\/a><\/em>. Weighing in at a whopping 544 pages, Uncle John\u2019s CANORAMIC Bathroom Reader presents a wide-angle view of the world around us. It\u2019s overflowing with everything that BRI fans have come to expect from this bestselling trivia series: fascinating history, silly science, and obscure origins, plus fads, blunders, wordplay, quotes, and a few surprises.<\/p>\n

Since 1987, the Bathroom Readers\u2019 Institute<\/a> has led the movement to stand up for those who sit down and read in the bathroom (and everywhere else for that matter). With more than 15 million books in print, the Uncle John\u2019s Bathroom Reader series is the longest-running, most popular series of its kind in the world.<\/p>\n

If you like Today I Found Out<\/a>, I guarantee you’ll love the Bathroom Reader Institute’s books, so check them out<\/a>!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The following is an article from Uncle John\u2019s Bathroom Reader To help win World War II, the Allies used every skill they could come up with\u2014including illusion, trickery\u2026and magic. WIZARD SCHOOL In 1940 Britain\u2019s Ministry of Home Security created a military unit dedicated to \u201ccivil camouflage.\u201d Their job would be to provide safety through \u201cseriously ridiculous deception.\u201d The unit of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":179,"featured_media":51893,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-today-i-found-out","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/179"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51890"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51890\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51894,"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51890\/revisions\/51894"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51893"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}