…an Entire Allied Army from Rommel
"IN OTHER circumstances, it would have been delightful. Colonel Dudley Clarke finished his meeting, walked across the Egyptian sand, stripped and then plunged into the cool blue water of the Mediterranean for a pre-lunch swim. It was 1942, and trunks weren't British Army issue, so the officers at the headquarters of the Eighth Army swam naked. The prime minister, Winston Churchill, had recently joined them in this, to general delight.
But Clarke had heavy matters on his mind as he enjoyed the water. He'd just been briefed on the situation facing the British forces, and their plan to deal with it. A lot of men were going to die in a few weeks, and if he didn't do his job right, there was a terrible danger that most of them would be on his own side.
And the problem was that his job was to deliver the impossible. It was set out by one of the men Clarke was meeting: "You must conceal 150,000 men with a thousand guns and a thousand tanks, on a plain as flat and as hard as a billiard table, and the Germans must not know anything about it, although they will be watching every movement, listening for every noise, charting every track."…"
link
Armand
