He saw crowds of children in the parks, and concluded that evacuation had been a failure. Faber watched such things-he was considerably more observant than the average railway clerk. There were signs, of course and Henry Faber, cycling from Waterloo Station toward Highgate, noted them: piles of sandbags outside important public buildings, Anderson shelters in suburban gardens, propaganda posters about evacuation and Air Raid Precautions. The city did not look much like the capital of a nation at war. Barrage balloons floated majestically in bright blue skies, and soldiers on leave flirted with girls in sleeveless dresses on the streets of London. Then, when the spring came, it was glorious. The snow and the blackout combined to make motoring perilous road accidents doubled, and people told jokes about how it was more risky to drive an Austin Seven along Piccadilly at night than to take a tank across the Siegfried Line.

One day in January the Glasgow-London train arrived at Euston twenty-four hours late. Villages in the English countryside were cut off by the snow and the Thames froze over. IT was the coldest winter for forty-five years. Still and all, one suspects something like this must have happened. It is also known that they suspected a trick, and that they tried very hard to discover the truth. It is known that the Germans saw the signs they were meant to see in East Anglia. The truth seems to be that there were very few MI5 did capture nearly all of them.

After the war a myth grew up that MI5 had rounded up the lot by Christmas 1939. Were there any spies? At the time people thought they were surrounded by what were then called Fifth Columnists. It would have been a miracle if none of Hitler’s spies ever got to know about it.

Literally thousands of people were involved in perpetrating the trick. It was a huge, near-impossible deception. The object was to fool the enemy into preparing for an invasion via the Pas de Calais, so that on D-Day the Normandy assault would have the advantage of surprise. The ships were rubber-and-timber fakes, the barracks no more real than a movie set Patton did not have a single man under his command the radio signals were meaningless the spies were double agents. Patton was seen in his unmistakable pink jodhpurs walking his white bulldog there were bursts of wireless activity, signals between regiments in the area confirming signs were reported by German spies in Britain.

Reconnaissance planes brought back photographs of barracks and airfields and fleets of ships in the Wash General George S. My thanks to Malcolm Hulke for invaluable help, generously given.ĮARLY in 1944 German Intelligence was piecing together evidence of a huge army in southeastern England.

The eye of the needle novel