6 Insane Stories of a Magician Who Helped Win WWII | Part 3

#4.

 

The Alexandria Harbor Deception

Although Egypt was technically an independent country at the outbreak of the war, its habit of hosting British troops made it a ripe target for Axis forces, especially since the Suez Canal was just a boat ride away from the Alexandria harbor. Speaking of the Alexandria harbor, wouldn't it be crazy if a magician and his ragtag gang of magical misfits hid an entire harbor from aerial bombers there?

The mission was simple. The harbor at Alexandria was critical to the Allies; it housed the royal fleet and served as the avenue to deploy reinforcements. Naturally, the Axis powers wanted to destroy it. Jasper Maskelyne was supposedly charged with the task of not letting that happen.

To set up his trick, Maskelyne first needed to move the entire harbor. About a mile away from Alexandria was another body of water called Lake Mariout. The port and the lake were separated only by a narrow isthmus of land:



So at night, and from 8,000 feet in the air, a bomber might have a hard time distinguishing one from the other. But it wasn't just a matter of setting up full-scale dummy harbor. Maskelyne had to make the Germans believe they were actually engaged in battle and that they had won. Otherwise, they'd just hit the right target the next day. So Maskelyne not only had to build a fake Alexandria harbor but also had to fake a war zone for the next day's reconnaissance pictures.

In the weeks leading up to the bombing (that intelligence assured them was totally going to happen), Maskelyne and his team created a 1:1 scale model of the Alexandria harbor using canvas ships and plywood buildings. More importantly, he duplicated the light grid and harbor lighthouse. But that was only half of the illusion. The other half was painting bomb craters on huge sheets of canvas and creating papier-mache bricks by the truckload.


From German archives

When the night of the attack arrived, the lights at Alexandria went off, the lights at Mariout went on and the Luftwaffe totally fell for the switcharoo. Maskelyne had anti-aircraft batteries on the ground fake-fighting back with fake shells, as well as a whole team over at the real Alexandria, setting up the rubble show for the next day. The craziest part of the story wasn't just that it worked, but that it worked for eight more nights.

Or not.

While the story has been reported in publications as reputable as The Boston Globe, some skeptics say the massive trick would have been impossible or ineffective, or that the actual stunt was much smaller or was the work of someone else and that Maskelyne just took credit like the asshole he was.



If you're about to take to Google to try to find out the truth, good luck. Maskelyne's Wikipedia entry repeats these stories as historical fact, citing a 1983 book about Maskelyne which itself seems to rely on a 1949 book about Maskelyne called Magic: Top Secret, whose main source was, uh, Jasper Maskelyne.


A totally objective account of absolute truth.

Again: Either the man was the greatest illusionist in history or was one of its biggest bullsh*t artists. Because the stories only get bigger and stranger from here ...