Dudley Clarke

For Sir Dudley Clarke, Baronet, see Clarke-Jervoise Baronets.

Dudley Wrangel Clarke, CBE, CB (27 April 1899 – 7 May 1974) was a Brigadier in the British Army who was behind several deception operations during the Second World War and who founded the British Army's Commando force. As well as the Commandos, he is responsible for the name and concept of the US Army Rangers, and the Special Air Service's name.
His brother was the film screenwriter T. E. B. Clarke.

Early life

Clarke was born in Johannesburg on April 27, 1899, to Ernest and Madeline (née Gardiner) Clarke. His father had moved to South Africa from Kingston upon Hull and, after becoming embroiled in the Jameson Raid, settled down working for a gold mining company. During the Second Boer War Clarke and his family were trapped during the Siege of Ladysmith (for which he later tried to claim a campaign medal). The family moved moved to Watford, London in the early 1900s.

Clarke was commissioned in the Royal Artillery in November 1916. Unable to fight with them in World War I due to an age limit, he transferred to the Royal Flying Corps and was posted to Egypt.

World War II

In May of 1940 Clarke became one of Sir John Dill's military assistants. Following their evacuation from Dunkirk he submitted a proposal to Dill for small raiding units, called Commandos, inspired by childhood recollections of similar Boer forces. Clarke went on the first raid into France, with what would later become the British Commandos, and was almost shot in the ear.

During the Second World War, Clarke instituted a scheme whereby he would attempt to make the leadership of Italy think that British General Archibald Wavell would invade Italian Somaliland in 1940; whereas Eritrea was the targeted country. The Italian leadership was fooled, but instead of diverting troops to Italian Somaliland as the British hoped, they ordered their soldiers there to withdraw into Eritrea. Clarke also invented a number of deceptions against the Germans. One idea, codenamed Operation Copperhead, was to establish a look-alike for Bernard Montgomery. The look-alike, M. E. Clifton James, was deployed to the Mediterranean region in an effort to distract the Germans away from the English Channel.

Clarke also was responsible for the creation of the First United States Army Group, a fictitious army group based in south-east England, that was designed to fool Adolf Hitler into thinking that the Allies of World War II were going to invade France at Pas-de-Calais.

In January 1941, Clarke had a meeting with the American Colonel William J. Donovan, and wrote a paper outlining the formation of an American equivalent. As he had recently seen the Western film Northwest Passage, which dramatised the frontier force Rogers' Rangers, Clarke suggested the term "Rangers" as a suitable name. At the same time, Clarke was fabricating the existence of a British paratrooper regiment, the Special Air Service, to prey upon Italian fears of parachutists dropping behind their lines. False documents, genuine (but staged) RAF reports, staged photographs of "SAS soldiers" for the service magazine Parade, and two soldiers dressed in "1 SAS" uniforms hinting at Crete or Libya postings in Cairo were just some of the tactics used to spread the rumour. When David Stirling proposed the idea of small, mobile four-man commando teams, Clarke gave it his full backing as long as Stirling called them the Special Air Service; as a result, the real SAS 'confirmed' the existence of the fictional one in the eyes of the Axis. According to The Guy Liddell (MI5) Diaries, Clarke was detained while operating under cover in Spain and released in November 1941 due to intervention by the Germans. Strangely, he was dressed in women's clothes at the time, the reason for which was not known to Liddell.

Post-war

Clarke left the army in 1947 and, until 1952, went to work at Conservative central office as head of public opinion research. He was also a director of Securicor. He died in London on 7 May 1974.

Personal life

Clarke was a popular figure during his army career, considered to have odd "old world" habits and "an uncanny habit of suddenly appearing in a room without anyone having noticed him enter". He never married following two bad relationships. Firstly with a slavic woman called Nina he met in Weisban, who disappeared after Clarke smuggled currency to her friend in Bulgaria. And later whilst in Sussex a relationship that "meant everything in the world", though the lady refused to marry him. Despite this Clarke was known for having beautiful female acquaintances, which his friends referred to as "Dudley's Duchesses".

Publications

• Seven Assignments (1948), an account of Clarke's military career in deception.
• The Eleventh at War (1952) a history of the 11th Hussars 1934 – 1945.
• Golden Arrow (1955), a thriller.

See also

• Operation Collar
• Operation Cascade

References

Bibliography

• Charles Cruickshank (2004). "Clarke, Dudley Wrangel (1899–1974). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography". Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/30937. Retrieved 6 Dec 2011. 
• Max Hastings (13 Dec 2004). "Our tangled wartime web". The Daily Telegraph. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3633638/Our-tangled-wartime-web.html. 
• Holt, Thaddeus (2004). The Deceivers: Allied Military Deception in the Second World War. Scribner. ISBN 0743250427. 
• Rankin, Nicholas (2008). Churchill's Wizards: The British Genius for Deception, 1914–1945. ISBN 0571221955. 
• Crowdy, Terry (20 Dec 2011). Deceiving Hitler: Double-Cross and Deception in World War II. Osprey Publishing. pp. 352. ISBN 1846031354.