Middle East Command Camouflage Directorate

The unit's leader, Geoffrey Barkas (1896–1979) served in the 1915 Gallipoli campaign and then in the later part of the Battle of the Somme in France, where he won a Military Cross. Between the wars, Barkas was a filmmaker, working as a writer, producer, and director. In 1937, Barkas joined Shell-Mex/BP under its publicity director Jack Beddington, who guided Barkas into military camouflage. In May 1940, he was rapidly drafted into the Royal Engineers by Beddington's brother Freddie, with a summary 10-day basic training course, followed by a camouflage course. He developed his thinking in Northern Ireland in 1940, teaching, running demonstrations, and writing an instructional pamphlet. ==Foundation==

Origins At the end of 1940, Barkas and his camoufleurs were sent to Egypt, where he arrived on the British troopship on 1 January 1941. He arranged a flight to observe the desert from the air, noting patterns that he named as "Wadi", "Polka Dot" and so on that he hoped to use for camouflage. To get his fledgling unit recognised, he printed an unusually elegant booklet called "Concealment in the Field" in Cairo, the idea being to produce something clear, readable, and above all obviously different from the mass of army manuals. He was surprised to have this at once recognised as a formal operational requirement by the British Army's Middle East Command, that is, as an essential item for every army unit. Barkas was promoted to Director of Camouflage with the rank of lieutenant colonel. Camouflage Training & Development Centre, Middle East The Camouflage Development & Training Centre (CDTC.ME) was set up at Helwan (Camp E) in November 1941, as the theatre counterpart of the original CDTC established at Farnham Castle. The Commandant was a regular officer, Major John Sholto Douglas, from the well-known Scottish family, with the British zoologist Hugh Cott, by now a captain, as chief instructor. Regular liaison with Proud kept the staff abreast of the responses from their colleagues on the front-line, out in the Western Desert, as well as any developments from Home, with training adjusted to reflect the latest changes. The centre had a development wing, commanded by a captain from the Royal West African Frontier Force, A. E. Upfold, with a workshop and an experimental section. These produced "a stream of new ideas for dummy vehicles, tanks, aircraft and all the other portents of impending battle". Every new device was carefully tested by observation from the air, through collaboration with the Royal Air Force. == Deception operations ==

Dummy railhead for Operation Crusader One of Camouflage's first major deceptions was the dummy railway at Misheifa. Barkas assigned the artist Steven Sykes to build a convincing dummy to divert enemy attention from the real railhead at Capuzzo bringing materiel for Operation Crusader. This complex deception involved of dummy railway, a dummy train, dummy sidings, and a selection of dummy tanks, all made of gerida palm hurdles and other simple materials, to look as if they had been delivered by the railway. More than 100 bombs were dropped on the Misheifa railhead, at least halving the attacks on the real thing at Capuzzo, giving the lie to the jokes Tobruk's harbour had been heavily bombed by the Luftwaffe (the German air force), and several wrecked ships made approach difficult. Proud and Murray Dixon built dummy jetties and dummy wrecked barges, under which small but vitally important gunboats and transports could be hidden. The Royal Navy thanked Proud after the siege "for his most efficient assistance". ==Techniques and inventions==

A wide range of camouflage and deception techniques and devices were invented or developed by the unit. ==Key people==

The camouflage directorate consisted mostly of officers recruited from people who were artists in civilian life, many of whom were already well known. Hugh Cott was an exception, being an expert in animal camouflage with his then recently published textbook, Adaptive Coloration in Animals (1940), a book that had the distinction of being popularly carried for practical advice by army officers. ==The end of physical deception==

Camouflage's Operation Bertram may have been the last army-scale physical deception, argues the writer and film director Rick Stroud, since all subsequent major deceptions, including those of Operation Bodyguard to protect the Operation Overlord "D-Day" landings in Normandy, have consisted mainly of electronic measures, though with physical touches, like the work done by architect and camoufleur Basil Spence to create a dummy oil storage facility for ships at Dover. Since then, the advent of reconnaissance satellites and continuous electronic monitoring have made army-scale deception ever more difficult. ==References==