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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

29. Flim Flam Works

Eighth Army soldiers capturing an Axis tank crew during the Battle of El Alamein. BBC

Operation Bertram’s deception worked. When the Battle of El Alamein commenced with a massive artillery bombardment on the night of October 23^rd, 1942, Axis commanders were surprised that the British Eighth Army’s main thrust came in the north, and not in the south as they had expected.

As British planners had predicted, fuel shortages prevented the Axis from effectively redeploying troops from the southern sector to reinforce and meet the threat to the north. The battle ended in a complete British victory, and a retreat that culminated six months later in the complete surrender of all Axis forces in North Africa.

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.