THE WARTIME CONJUROR

The Times online has published an article stating, "From bamboozling the Nazis in the war to fooling the Taleban this week, nobody lies better than those famous stiff upper lips." Of particular interest to this editor was the section on "The Wartime Conjuror" of WWII "The most remarkable wartime conjuror was, in fact, a conjuror, Jasper Maskelyne, a magician and inventor who founded the “Magic Gang” with the aim of baffling the enemy by artifice. Maskelyne's gang built fake submarines, trucks and planes, concealed part of the Suez Canal from the air with giant mirrors and, most famously, deployed 2,000 dummy tanks in the North African desert before the Battle of El Alamein."