← Back to the front page

Fake Vampires, Wailing Ghosts, and Other Fascinating Psy-Ops and Military Deceptions

Khalid Elhassan January 29, 2020 33 min

North Vietnam - Viet Cong Fighter — Viet Cong. Wikimedia

31. Using Flim-Flam to Fool the Desert Fox

Making a tank look like a truck. Obscure Histories

The British planned to attack Rommel in the north. To conceal, that a specialist unit is known as the Camouflage, Development, and Training Centre (CDTC) was cobbled together from filmmakers, stage magicians, painters, sculptors, and architects, and tasked with flummoxing the enemy.

A British Crusader tank masquerading as a truck in the desert. Wikimedia

The CDTC set out to hide the actual British troop and materiel buildup in the north. They also sought to make what buildup could not be concealed appear slower than it actually was. All their efforts were geared towards convincing the Axis commanders that the main attack would fall upon the southern sector of the line, and not the northern.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.