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
_______________________________ 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
_____________________________ 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
___________________________ 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
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