As the story goes, Jasper Maskelyne outfoxed the Germans by making the Suez Canal disappear. From my safe distance high atop Civilization’s Hill of Knowledge, built on all the things we’ve learned in the 85 years since 1941, I feel confident that the Suez Canal is visible these days. If it wasn’t, I think we’d’ve heard about it by now.
Who Was Jasper Maskelyne?
Maskelyne was assigned to the staff of Brigadier General Dudley Clarke
General Clarke’s previous command had him running an intelligence collecting operation in the Middle East. His new assignment was to form the first department devoted to deceiving the enemy. Most of his team’s work involved double agents, deliberate information leaks, fake radio messages, all designed to make the enemy’s life harder.
Another part of General Clarke’s team focused on camouflage
We know camouflage is a word that describes concealment through color or pattern by making something appear to be part of the natural surroundings. Certain plants, animals, fish, birds, snakes, and insects perfected their camouflage over more years than most of us can even imagine. In the desert, where all is flat, dusty- and sandy- colored, soldiers draped dusty, sandy- colored netting over their tanks to keep them from being spotted on the ground by enemy aircraft overhead.
Jasper Maskelyne was a stage performer, a skilled illusionist chosen to be on the camouflage team for his ability to play tricks on our eyes
He came from a family of stage performers. The specialty of three generations of Maskelynes was making things appear to be what they’re not. They were illusionists who pulled white rabbits from black top hats and plucked wing-flapping doves from the air – as if by magic. Nothing up the sleeve.
Tricking the human eye is ridiculously easy
Our eyes are on the front of our heads because that’s where our prey is, the thing that deep within our lizard brain tells us to hunt, capture, kill, and eat. Prey animals have eyes on the side of their heads to reduce the risk of having predators sneak up behind them and attack from the rear.
The camouflage team’s task was to deceive the enemy
Camouflage was particularly important in Northern Africa, where Rommel was chasing the insufferable little pecksniff Monty around, in spite of what the gallant men of the Rat Patrol told us kids.
And then we have Alister MacKenzie
MacKenzie was a doctor when World War One came around. When he was commissioned, MacKenzie asked if he could work in the camouflage section because the idea really interested him. Attempting to discourage him from such obvious nonsense, those who outranked him told him he would be given the rank of major if he came into the army as one of the trained, practicing physicians they needed. But they’d give him the much lower-status and lower-pay rank of lieutenant because he was only an amateur camoufleur.
MacKenzie didn’t care
He joined the camouflage team. When the war was over, Alister switched once again, this time to golf course design. His most famous work is Augusta National, which he built in a fruit orchard along with Bobby Jones, the Greatest Amateur in the History of Golf, the opinion of most really good golfers.
MacKenzie used what he learned about camouflage to bedevil poor golfers and fill good ones with awe and delight. He did it back when they used to “lay the course upon the land.” Now they do it with bulldozers.
MacKenzie put his knowledge of creating illusions to shape the ground in ways that made close things seem farther away than they actually were. And far things closer, of course. MacKenzie would tempt the golfer into looking over here when he oughtta be looking over there.
MacKenzie claimed “the brilliant successes of the Boers (during his service in South Africa) were due to great extent to their making the best use of natural cover and the construction of artificial cover indistinguishable from nature”
He also believed from his own experience that there is a rare and natural connection between a camouflage officer and a golf course architect because both have artistic temperaments and scientific educations. It’s that barely overlapping Venn diagram thing, isn’t it?
It was like that when I was a researcher
The scientific types and I got along. They liked me because I knew my math and science, but thought I was a bit artsy. The artists liked me, too, thinking I was a bit scientific, but okay. I was proud of my interlocking reputations.
It’s pretty much taken for granted that Maskelyne – the showman – claimed large chunks of accomplishments that weren’t his
A half dozen others received formal credit as leaders, but not Maskelyne, who wouldn’t have contributed any more than anyone else.
French theorist Roland Barthes said myth is not about hiding the truth, but distorting it
Myths are about creating simple narratives even the simple can follow, not objective collections of facts they can’t understand. Right about here, regular readers are thinking of fans of what is generously called professional wrestling, which is something like roller derby but without the wheels. Most, not all, admit the whole thing is a fake, but they don’t care. They’re in the arena watching the gladiators’ scripted and choreographed spectacle.
Why are there so many myths about Maskelyne?
What set him apart was that he was the first to write his memoirs. Maskelyne captured the public eye with tales of when he was the Chief and everyone else was an Indian (period-correct). Maskelyne claimed to have led the team that mass-produced “tricks and swindles and devices intended to bewilder and mislead the crop-headed Axis commanders.”
I looked into it and found crop-headed referred to hair cut ruthlessly close to the scalp on the sides and around the ears. If you’ve seen a war movie with Nazis in it, you understand the further meaning of crop-headed, a haircut also worn by prisoners and laborers. In the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines called such haircuts the visually-delightful whitewalls, a reference surely missed by millions of Young Moderns.
In Trinidad & Tobago, it is illegal for civilians to wear camouflage clothing of any kind, except, of course, when it isn’t
Here’s Nadia Batson on stage in a photo taken by Newsday
When asked to comment, the National Security Minister said “the law against camouflage clothing is only broken when someone dresses in a way that could lead to him/her being mistaken for a soldier.” Newsday added that “otherwise the penalty was a $1,000 fine and 18 months in jail.”
My name is David Allan Van Nostrand and I wrote this article, along with more than 500 others on this site alone. Ever since I was a kid with an insatiable curiosity and a knack for learning, I’ve observed, analyzed, and made sense of hundreds of different subjects and topics. Today, in addition to writing, I help organizations solve difficult problems requiring imaginative solutions. What can I take a closer look at for you? What questions can I help you answer?
Bonus
Maskelyne also served in the Kenyan Police Special Branch, helping defeat the Mau Mau uprising. And here’s a totally sideways bit we have Wikipedia to thank for: “While in Madrid, he (Maskelyne) was arrested wearing women’s clothing, in circumstances that remain unclear.”
