Book Review: The War Magician: David Fisher (1983)

The greatest magic trick in history did not involve Houdini escaping from a water-filled cabinet. Nor did it involve vanishing the Statue of Liberty on television. It did not involve walking through the Great Wall of China. The greatest magic trick in history involved making the Afrika Corps think the unthinkable: that the British Army would attack at El Alamein from the least likely direction.

At stake: thousands of British lives and perhaps the war through the loss of Egypt and the oil fields of the Middle East, altering the path of World War Two.

The performer of this legendary feat: Jasper Maskelyne, the War Magician. Maskelyne was a popular pre-war stage magician who took his skills with him into the British Army with the beginning of the war, along with his knowledge of illusion, lighting, misdirection, mechanical effects, and psychology.

Abracadabra!

Posted to Egypt, he began assembling his Magic Gang while slowly trying to win acceptance from a military establishment that failed to value what he had to offer. That changed abruptly with his initial efforts and he was swamped with assignments.

Among many other things, Maskelyn's Magic Gang hid tanks with structures that looked like trucks from the air, created phony armies when the British were facing great odds and reinforcements were slow in coming, and Maskelyn even used a magic show in the king's palace in Saudi Arabia to locate a clandestine radio transmitter.

Maskelyn slyly hid the Suez Canal, not by vanishing what everyone knew was there, but by creating special attachments for searchlights that blinded pilots so they couldn't see the canal below them, or anything else.

He also hid Alexandria, Egypt. During a crucial period when the important seaport was being bombed nightly, Maskelyn found a smaller but similarly shaped duplicate of the harbor area a short distance down the coast, and carefully matched the city's nighttime lighting with strung lights at the phony harbor location. He even put up a mast with a light at the top to stand in for the Alexandria lighthouse. By blacking out the city and lighting up the decoy, the Germans were led to bomb the phony harbor each night. Simulated bomb hits and smudge pots created evidence of damage in the city for German camera planes the next day while damaged lighting and wiring in the phony harbor was replaced.

After a series of naval reversals, the Magic Gang used plywood, canvas, and paint with lengths of pipe for guns, to convert an ancient rustbucket cruiser into a battleship. With a couple men on board for upkeep, the illusion was a passive threat the Germans and Italians could not ignore, just as the Nazi Tirpitz, confined with 100s of German sailors in a Norwegian harbor, was a threat to the British in the North Sea. Maskelyn's grandest illusion was on the El Alamein battlefield where Montgomery ordered the magician to do somehow fool the Germans into believing that the British were rejecting the sole natural approach along the coast road in the north in favor of advancing across the treacherous sands of the southern front.

Shazam!

Maskleyn performed a lovely feat of misdirection, creating phony canvas tanks in the north which German recon planes could see were phony, provide evidence of real tanks in the staging area of the south, then on the last night before the attack, switch the real tanks to the north, running them into the canvas tank shells where they hid, their tracks behind them raked out and erased while the phony counterparts were transferred in their place to the south. El Alamein was still a bloody battle, but the Germans lost and much of the credit for the British surprise attack was due to Jasper Maskelyn, the War Magician.

Alakazam!

In the broader context, Maskelyn was not the only wonder-worker.

There were some incredible accomplishments in the area of camouflage and misdirection during World War II, such as the Man Who Never Was caper (read the book or see the old British movie about it if you get the chance). There was also the brilliantly successful campaign to convince the Germans that the D-Day landings would be at Calais.

The latter, as everyone knows, worked so well that even when his generals realized the truth, Hitler refused to release his tanks because he remained convinced Calais was the ultimate invasion target. By the time he realized his mistake, it was too late for the Panzers to push the Allies off the Normandy beaches.

Nevertheless, Maskelyn's Egyptian successes make for a fascinating story with some incredible accomplishments. If you can find this book, get it. Check Amazon, Half.com, or the library.

Great book. Over the years, I"ve read it three times.