Brigadier Dudley Clarke was known for the ingenious deceptions he carried out during the Second World War. Field Marshal Alexander believed that he did as much to win the war as any other individual officer. Clarke is commemorated by a blue plaque at his former home, 34 Rutland Gate.

Dudley Clarke was born on 27 April 1899 in Johannesburg, South Africa. After the Boer War, in which his father participated, the family returned to the UK and Clarke attended Charterhouse School in Surrey. He stayed with relatives in Aldershot during his school years and was impressed by the ceremonial pomp of the peacetime army stationed there.

Interwar military service

In 1916 Clarke entered the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. Aged 17 he became a second lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery but was too young to fight in the First World War. In 1918, after flight training, he was posted to Egypt with the Royal Air Force, where he stayed until 1919. He was promoted to lieutenant and transferred back to the Royal Artillery.

Clarke continued his military service between the wars, serving in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). While on leave in 1922, during a time of concerns about a war between Britain and Turkey, he reported to the British commander in Constantinople (Istanbul), who employed him on special missions. He received several promotions, and tutoring from Bernard Montgomery enabled him to attend the Staff College, Camberley, which was seen as the height of an Army officer’s education. He requested a posting to Aden in 1935 and served in Palestine in 1936–8.

Second World War

Clarke was promoted to lieutenant-colonel in late 1939, following the outbreak of the Second World War. As Deputy Assistant Military Secretary at the War Office, he set up the Commandos, a coastal raid force which he imagined as having ‘a dash of the Elizabethan pirate, the Chicago gangster and the Frontier tribesman, allied to a professional efficiency and standard of discipline of the best Regular soldier’. The Commandos shaped the subsequent creation and evolution of the Special Air Service (SAS) and influenced the development of the modern US Army Rangers.

In 1941 Clarke was arrested in Madrid by the Spanish police. He was dressed in women’s clothing and gave unconvincing reasons for this, but the Governor of Gibraltar, Viscount Gort, judged that he should return to duties.

Clarke was called to Egypt by General Sir Archibald Wavell, the Commander-in-Chief of British forces in the Middle East, who Clarke had impressed with his ‘original, unorthodox outlook on soldiering’ while in Palestine. Clarke was given responsibility for strategic deception in North Africa, secret work to which he brought ingenuity and a ‘somewhat impish sense of humour’. He held the role for five years, developing deception ploys that helped to win battles and campaigns by causing the enemy to take decisions based on mistaken assumptions. His work undoubtedly saved lives.

By 1942 Clarke’s ‘A’ Force – which coordinated the deception effort – had used double agents, pretend wireless traffic, false paperwork and dummy tanks to convince enemy high command that the full Ninth and Tenth Armies were in the Eastern Mediterranean. In fact, hardly a single fighting division was present. Another notable success that year saw German commander Rommel convinced that Montgomery would attack his right flank in November,  so when the second battle of El Alamein began in October – with the main attack on the left – he was on leave in Germany. The battle is regarded as an important turning point in the war.

Coordinating deceptions

Clarke and Wavell realised that deceptions needed to be coordinated to avoid compromising real operations or strategies. They oversaw the creation of the London Controlling Section in 1942. The Americans were persuaded to develop a similar unit providing full physical support to deceptions by 1944. That year, Operation Bodyguard successfully distracted German attention from the real Allied invasion plans in Normandy.

Clarke was promoted colonel and appointed OBE in 1942, then CBE in 1943. By 1945 he had been further promoted to brigadier and CB. He was awarded the American Legion of Merit ‘for exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service … he has contributed in an unusual degree to the success of the Allied campaigns and to the welfare of the Allied personnel in the Mediterranean Theater.’

Post-war work

Clarke retired from the army in 1947 and became head of public opinion research at Conservative Central Office, then later a director of Securicor. He was keen to control the narrative of wartime deception and was permitted to write Seven Assignments (1948), which covered the period before ‘A’ Force, and to write and broadcast about the Commandos. However, security services were opposed to public revelations of wartime secret operations and Clarke was denied permission to write about ‘The Secret War’.

Clarke died on 7 May 1974 and the full extent of his wartime contributions only became public knowledge later. His name finally appeared in the official history with the publication of Strategic Deception, the fifth volume of British Intelligence in the Second World War, in 1990.

Further reading

• Charles Cruickshank, ‘Clarke, Dudley Wrangel (1899–1974)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) (access with a UK public library card)
• Whitney Bendeck, Diversion and Deception: Dudley Clarke’s ‘A’ Force and Allied Operations in World War II (2021)
• Nicholas Rankin, Churchill’s Wizards: the British Genius for deception 1914–1945 (2008)
• Tom Petch, Speed. Aggression. Surprise. (2023)