Wikipedia:Today's featured article/January 16, 2013

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. (Full article...)

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