Paul Addison
Gabbo & Bovril
Churchill’s Wizards: The British Genius for Deception 1914–1945
By Nicholas Rankin
Faber & Faber 466pp £25 order from our bookshop
‘In wartime’, Churchill told Stalin at Teheran, ‘truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.’ Discussing the preparations for the forthcoming cross-Channel invasion, the two warlords were agreed on the importance of plans to deceive the Germans about allied intentions. The key plan, the work of a secret circle of British officers who wrote the script, was FORTITUDE, an entirely fictitious operation accompanied by all the appropriate theatrical props: bogus wireless traffic, dummy tanks, landing craft and so on. A British Fourth Army in Scotland was to invade Norway. Another phantom force, the United States First Army Group supposedly under the command of General George Patton, was stationed in the south-east of England, apparently poised for an assault on the Pas de Calais. At the core of the conspiracy was a truly fantastic web of misinformation supplied to the Germans by Juan Pujol, a Spanish double agent originally known as BOVRIL but happily, and felicitously in view of the starring role he played, renamed GARBO.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553
'The authors do not shrink from spelling out the scale of the killings when the Rhodesians made long-distance raids on guerrilla camps in Mozambique and Zambia.'
Xan Smiley on how Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/what-the-secret-agent-saw
'Thirkell was a product of her time and her class. For her there are no sacred cows, barring those that win ribbons at the Barchester Agricultural.'
The novelist Angela Thirkell is due a revival, says Patricia T O'Conner (£).
https://literaryreview.co.uk/good-gad