David Strangeways

David Inderwick Strangeways DSO, OBE (26 February 1912 – 1 August 1998) was a Colonel in the British Army who helped organize several military deceptions during World War II. After leaving the Army in 1957, he took holy orders.

Strangeways was born in Cambridge, the third son of Dr. T. S. P. Strangeways, founder of the Strangeways Research Laboratory. He attended Cambridgeshire High School for Boys and later Trinity Hall, Cambridge, reading History.

Strangeways was commissioned into the Duke of Wellington's Regiment in 1933 and served in the 1st Battalion based at Aldershot then Malta. After the outbreak of World War II, he was sent to France where he participated in a rearguard action while the British forces tried to reach Dunkirk. Strangeways successfully managed to evacuate part of his battalion on a Thames barge.

In 1942, Strangeways' career in military deception began in earnest. Sent from the War Office in London to Cairo, he reported to General Sir Harold Alexander with deception plans designed to fool the Axis powers as to the time and place of the Allied invasion of North Africa. The deception relied upon convincing the Axis powers that the massed landing craft were destined not for North Africa but to relieve beleaguered Malta. To bring about the deception, novelist and fellow deception officer Dennis Wheatley, based at the London Controlling Section, supplied Strangeways with a letter to an acquaintance in Cairo and a copy of his latest novel. The book, with the letter left inside, was then left at a Cairo hotel for enemy agents to find.

...
Wikipedia