Dudley Clarke (1899–1974) was an officer in the British Army, known as
a pioneer of military deception operations during the Second World War.
His ideas for combining fictional orders of battle, visual deception and
double agents helped define Allied deception strategy during the war.
Clarke trained with the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War,
and then led a varied career doing intelligence work in the Middle East.
In 1936 he was posted to Palestine, where he helped organise the British
response to the 1936 Arab uprising. Early in the Second World War,
Clarke proposed, and helped implement, an idea for commando raids into
France. In 1940, he was placed in charge of strategic deception in
Cairo, and was called to London in 1941 as his deception work had come
to the attention of Allied high command. Throughout 1942 Clarke
implemented Operation Cascade, an order of battle deception which added
many fictional units to the Allied formations; by the end of the war the
enemy accepted most of the formations as real. From 1942 to 1945, Clarke
continued to organise deception in North Africa and southern Europe. He
retired in 1947 and lived the rest of his life in relative obscurity.
Read more: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dudley_Clarke>
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Today's selected anniversaries:
27 BC:
Gaius Octavianus was given the title Augustus by the Roman
Senate when he became the first Roman emperor.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus>
1809:
Peninsular War: French forces under Nicolas Jean de Dieu Soult
attacked the amphibious evacuation of the British under Sir John Moore
in Corunna, Galicia, Spain.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Corunna>
1919:
The Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified
by thirty-six of the forty-eight states, establishing the prohibition of
alcoholic beverages in the United States.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eighteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution>
1938:
Benny Goodman performed a concert at New York City's Carnegie
Hall which has been considered instrumental in establishing jazz as a
legitimate form of music.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benny_Goodman>
1945:
World War II: Adolf Hitler and his staff moved into the
Führerbunker, where he would eventually commit suicide.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%BChrerbunker>
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Wiktionary's word of the day:
smurf account:
(Internet slang) An alternate account used by a known or experienced
user to appear to be someone else.
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/smurf_account>
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Wikiquote quote of the day:
We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance
altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an
instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only
intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical,
desimplifying.
--Susan Sontag
<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Susan_Sontag>