Sun Tzu's Art of War and Classic Military Deceptions

The art of military tactical deception is as old as war itself. The Chinese warrior Sun Tzu's classic study on war written in 510 B.C., Ping Fa (The Principles of War, aka The Art of War), recognizes that all warfare is based upon deception; make your way by unexpected routes, Sun Tzu writes, attacking unguarded spots. [i] The Chinese have studied Tzu's work carefully for centuries. The Japanese, wanting to learn more about their enemy, studied the work as well, as did the Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Tzu emphasized the importance of espionage for a successful military campaign going as far as to define the various spies, two of them being important to the art of deception: converted spies (the double agent), and condemned spies (spies provided with false information so if they are captured they will unwittingly deceive the enemy). [ii]

The Greeks attacked the Trojans, so Homer tells us, by hiding in a huge wooden horse that was wheeled into the walls of Troy and presented as a gift. Virgil's version of the Trojan Horse introduced the deceptive agent of Sinon, the fake, defecting Greek captain who persuades the Trojans that the Greeks had mistreated him and in fact had sailed away but left a wooden horse as an offering to the gods. Taken in by the ruse, the Trojans wheeled the magnificent offering into the city's gates only to have Greek soldiers spring from its stomach and start the battle that destroyed Troy and gave the Greeks victory.

In 1294 B.C. Pharaoh Ramses II led his Egyptian army against the Hittite's city of Kadesh. Two Hittite soldiers, claiming that they were deserters, offered to lead the Pharoah directly to the enemy but instead led them into a Hittite ambush. [iii]

Alexander the Great (356-323 B.C.) used specially designed scrolls to hide secret messages from his enemies. [iv] A scroll with a secret message was hidden in a report that was wound spirally around the staff in a way that "the secret message could be deciphered from the characters that appeared in a straight line along the staff."

The Japanese Ninja were highly skilled agents of deception. The word Ninja derives from ninjitsu, defined as the art of making oneself invisible. In the twelfth century the Ninja were used by warlords on spy missions using their stealth techniques to obtain intelligence.

The participants of the two world wars of the twentieth century used deception as a major weapon. The Germans concealed soldiers in merchant ships and captured the Norwegian cities of Narvik and Bergen in 1940. Nine Nazi military ships disguised as peaceful cargo ships under the flags of neutral or allied nations raided unsuspecting ships for months with deadly consequences. The German seamen, who acted as stealthily as spies and honorable as pirates, bombarded coastlines, sank ships, and supplied U-boats.[v]

The British, Americans, and Russians agreed at the Tehran Conference of 1943 to engage in a massive ruse de guerre in hopes of confusing the Nazis as to the real plan and date of the Allies' invasion of Europe. Indeed a group of operations was launched in the next months to carry out, as Churchill put it, a "bodyguard of lies."

Sun Tzu and the Civil War

As author Bevin Alexander points out, it is certain that no Civil War generals were aware of the Sun Tzu classic, The Art of War, since the work became widely known in the West during the twentieth century.

How did General Lee fare during the greatest battle of the Western Hemisphere: The Battle of Gettysburg. The master of war strategy would have recognized Lee's early strategies during the battle as positive; he avoided the Army of the Potomac's strength and set up positions that made the Union wonder how Lee would attack.

However, Alexander points out that when Lee found that Lee's failure to seize the key terrain of Cemetery Hill and Culp's Hill on the first day of battle would haunt the Confederates for the next two days. Lee's troops were exhausted from their march and Tzu warns that "first on the battlefield waits for the enemy fresh . . . the last on the battlefield charges into the fray exhausted."

And what of Lee's decision to engage in the most famous of the encounters of Gettysburg: Pickett's Charge. Though General Longstreet begged Lee to reconsider his attack into a well fortified group of Union soldiers at the famous "copse of trees," Lee ordered Pickett to attack. Sun Tzu advised that a leader should not ". . . attack well regulated formations," making Alexander surmise that Sun Tzu would not have engaged in either Pickett's Charge or the Gettysburg battle at all.

Operation Quicksilver

Plan Bodyguard included Operation Quicksilver, one of the most ambitious Allied deceptions in the history of war was launched during World War II in an effort to lead the Germans to believe that the First United States Army Group would launch an attack at Pas de Calais in France from southeast England. Much of the deception was carried out by the 23^rd Headquarters Special Troops, a group of soldiers that comprised several talented artists and designers with the ability to create a fake army complete with lifelike dummy Tomahawk fighters and Spitfires, inflatable dummy three-ton trucks, dummy Sherman tanks built on a framework over a jeep, dummy landing craft, as well as inflatable armored cars, twenty-five-pounder guns and anti-tank guns. The fake hardware was used throughout the European theater of war in hopes of steering the Germans in the wrong direction when analyzing aerial reconnaissance.[vi] The deception involved more than hardware; entire special headquarters, wireless units, research units were created in a variety of organizations within MI6, OSS and various intelligence naval and army intelligence groups. The 23^rd was created by U.S. Navy command when the American film actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr. convinced them that the Allied war effort could benefit with a unit of deceivers.[vii] The fiction became so elaborate that the deception confounded not only the Germans but also the Allied high command and had the potential of creating inconsistencies in the actual operations.[viii] Through this kind of deception the Allies led the Germans to believe they had 80 divisions in Britain though they had only 37.

A Spaniard, the double agent Juan Pujol Garcia (aka Garbo), punctuated the deception by sending a wireless message to the Nazis on June 9, 1944 that the Normandy invasion was simply "a diversionary maneuver designed to draw off enemy reserves in order then to make a decisive attack in another place," a position that Hitler believed to be true.

The Man Who Never Was -- Operation Mincemeat

In 1942, the London Controlling Section (LCS - responsible for devising deceptive schemes) prepared to mislead Hitler into believing an attack on Sicily was too obvious. He would need to be led to think that the Allies would invade both Greece, for a thrust into the Balkans, and Sardinia as a stepping stone to the south of France. The deception was devised. It was code named "Trojan Horse."

Though "Trojan Horse" was an appropriate name, the operation would eventually take on the more famous title of "The Man Who Never Was," and be recognized as one of history's greatest pieces of deceptive espionage, technically labelled Operation Mincemeat.

The idea was old: place false papers in the hands of the enemy in hopes they would believe the information true and act on it.

The original idea for "The Man Who Never Was" came from Lt. Cmdr. Ewen Montagu, a member of a British naval intelligence department responsible for liaison between other deception agencies. He proposed that a body be disguised as a staff officer and have him carry high-level papers that would show the Allies' intention of attacking somewhere other than Sicily.

After the execution of the plan Montagu realized that it appeared the German high command had taken Major Martin's information seriously and the beaches of Sicily were only lightly defended. On July 23rd, almost two weeks after the Sicily invasions, Hitler still believed that the main invasion would come into Greece. Hitler's fears had be¬come a reality: the encirclement of his Third Reich; but this time the final thrust into "the soft underbelly of Europe," might not come from the Balkans but from Italy. However, could Hitler be sure? He never was.

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/681521/the_man_who_never_was.html?cat=37

[i] Sun Tzu (c. 555 B.C. - 496 B.C) was an early 4^th-century B.C. Chinese general and contemporary of Confucius.

[ii] Deacon, Richard. Spyclopedia, Silver Arrow, London, 1987, pp. 146-7.

[iii] Latimer, Jon. Deception in War - The Art of the Bluff, the Value of Deceit, and the Most Thrilling Episode of Cunning in Military History, from the Trojan Horse to the Gulf War, Woodstock, New York, 2001, p. 6.

[iv] Deacon, Richard. Spyclopedia, Silver Arrow, London, 1987, p. 78.

[v] Duffy, James P. Hitler's Secret Pirate Fleet - The Deadliest Ships of World War II, Praeger, Westport, Connecticut, 2001.

[vi] Brown, Anthony Cave. Bodyguard of Lies, Harper Row, New York, 1975, p. 461.

Cruikshank, Charles. Deception in World War II, Oxford, New York, 1979.

[vii] Gerard, Philip. Secret Soldiers. Dutton, New York, 2002.

[viii] Brown, Anthony Cave. Bodyguard of Lies, Harper Row, New York, 1975, p. 462.