Geoffrey Barkas Geoffrey Barkas ( born Geoffrey de Gruchy Barkas , 27 August 1896 – 3 September 1979 ) was an English film maker active between the world wars . Barkas led the British Middle East Command Camouflage Directorate in the Second World War . His largest " film set " was Operation Bertram , the army - scale deception for the battle of El Alamein in October 1942 . Early life . Barkas was born in 1896 to parents from Jersey families . His father was Albert Atkin Barkas ( b . 1861 ) and his mother was Anna Julia de Gruchy ( b . 1863 ) ; both were from St . Helier . In the First World War , he served in the 1915 Gallipoli campaign at Suvla Bay , and then in the later part of the Battle of the Somme in France , where he won a Military Cross . Film . Between the wars , Barkas worked on silent films and then feature films , starting as a writer and producer , and then directing his own films such as " The Manitou Trail " and " The Lumberjack " ( 1925 ) and " The Third Gun " ( 1929 ) . He co - directed with Michael Barringer ( " Blockade " , " Q - ships " , " The Infamous Lady " ) , Anthony Asquith ( " Tell England " ) , Berthold Viertel ( " Rhodes of Africa " ) and Milton Rosmer ( " The Great Barrier " ) , he also edited " Red Ensign " directed by Michael Powell . Work became increasingly difficult to find in the economic depression of the 1930s , and after directing the critically acclaimed African exteriors for Robert Stevenson ' s King Solomon ' s Mines in 1937 , it dried up altogether . In 1927 he married scriptwriter Natalie Webb ( 1899 - 1979 ) in Wycombe , Buckinghamshire . She wrote an account in 1934 of the production of Barkas ' film " Palaver " . WWII camouflage . Learning to teach camouflage . Having found life hard in the film industry during the depression in 1937 , Barkas joined Shell - Mex / BP under Jack Beddington , who guided Barkas into military camouflage . In May 1940 , he was rapidly drafted into the Royal Engineers with a summary 10 - day basic training course , followed by a camouflage course at the Royal Artillery camp at Larkhill , where modern concerns such as hiding from aerial and infra - red photography were taught alongside traditional techniques . He began in Northern Ireland in 1940 , teaching army drivers how to camouflage their vehicles . He found that they regarded their camouflage nets as " cloak [ s ] of invisibility " , and in consequence would park trucks out in the open , covered by nets not " garnished " with the provided strips of canvas or hessian . His response was to print a training pamphlet , designed to be entertaining as well as instructive . It contained " an instructional poem " called " The Sad Story of George Nathaniel Glover " . Glover was a driver who " never , never could be made / To Park his Lorry in The Shade " and who uses a net " Which he had thrown across the bonnet , With not a stitch of garnish on it . " The result is that a bomb falls exactly on target , and when his friends come to find him " Not One Trace did they discover / Of Driver George Nathaniel Glover " . The army allowed the pamphlet to be published , and it became popular enough to spread from Northern Ireland across all British Army commands . Barkas ' s next step was to run popular demonstrations of camouflage . He would assemble about 60 trucks , coaches and smaller vehicles and discuss with the non - commissioned officer s how to hide these from the air . They would agree that a line of trucks could be parked by a hedge and all together draped with nets to appear as a thick belt of vegetation , or arrange a vehicle as a pitched - roof outhouse to a building . Then the commanders would arrive , and Barkas would give a speech about camouflage methods to defeat aerial reconnaissance . He would then signal the start , the unit would hide all its vehicles , and a moment later , using his film - making skill with timing , an aircraft would arrive and start observing . It rarely found more than a few of the vehicles . The experience in northern Ireland gave Barkas the idea that every theatre of war is naturally patterned . When an army unit goes against the grain of the pattern , he reasoned , it becomes conspicuous ; to hide , it has to go with the pattern . He developed a simple illustration of this point , by dropping a collar stud on a carpet . When it fell on a plain area , it was easy to see ; when in a patterned area , it had to be searched for . Director of Camouflage . At the end of 1940 , Barkas and his camoufleurs were sent to Egypt , where he arrived on the " Andes " on New Year ' s Day 1941 . He arranged a flight to observe the desert from the air , noting patterns that he named as " Wadi " , " Polka Dot " and so on that he hoped to use for camouflage . During 1941 the structure of the camouflage unit changed and grew rapidly , at first with little official recognition and constantly shifting names . To get his fledgling unit recognised , he printed an unusually elegant booklet called " Concealment in the Field " in Cairo , the idea being to produce something clear , readable , and above all obviously different from the mass of army manuals . He was surprised to have this at once recognised as an " operational requirement " by the British Army ' s Middle East command , that is , as an essential item for every army unit . Barkas set up the " Camouflage Development and Training Camp " at Helwan , Egypt in November 1941 , with the zoologist Hugh B . Cott as his chief instructor . He was promoted to the new position of " Director of Camouflage " , with the rank of lieutenant - colonel . Dummy railhead for Operation Crusader . Barkas further built up his unit ' s ability in deception by getting one of his best officers , the artist Steven Sykes to build a convincing dummy railway at Misheifa to divert enemy attention from the real railhead at Capuzzo bringing " materiel " for Operation Crusader . This complex piece of deception involved 6 miles of dummy railway , a dummy train , dummy sidings , and a selection of dummy tanks to look as if they had been delivered by the railway . More than 100 bombs were dropped on the Misheifa railhead , at least halving the attacks on the real thing at Capuzzo . Barkas noted that " camouflage men must be among the few otherwise sane beings who yearn to be bombed . " The pioneering effort ' s success was achieved in a few weeks , amidst severe shortages of men and raw materials . Deception for El Alamein . Barkas ' camouflage unit helped Montgomery to victory at El Alamein through a large scale deception codenamed Operation Bertram which ran from August 1942 until the actual battle in October . Among other things , 600 tanks were disguised as supply lorries in the northern sector , while dummy tanks , supplies and a complete dummy pipeline were deployed in the south . The deception succeeded , leading Rommel ' s staff to believe the allied attack would be in the south , and to deploy substantial forces there . Barkas made Tony Ayrton his deputy for Bertram . Ayrton worked tirelessly to put in place all the complex schemes , and to repair them when they were hit by a dust storm . Barkas described Operation Bertram as Post - war . After the war , Barkas returned to film - making , working for the Rank Organisation making children ' s films including " The Little Ballerina " . He was made an " Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire " ( OBE ) . Barkas and his wife Natalie wrote about his experiences in his book " The Camouflage Story ( from Aintree to Alamein ) " . The book explains the inside story of the use of camouflage to deceive the enemy as described by Winston Churchill in his speech on 11 November 1942 , announcing victory after the Battle of El Alamein : Reception . Alan Burton writes that " Ultimately , though , [ Barkas ' s film ] " Tell England " extols the British class system : if modern war is unpleasant , young gentlemen , forged in the public schools , can nonetheless be counted upon to make the ultimate sacrifice and do their duty . " Burton also quotes W . D . Routt who describes " Tell England " as " a compounded act of disinheritance " of Australia ' s part in World War I , but who also notes the " multiple expositions " of the film , " artistic , committed , sexy , evil " . Routt justifies these descriptions with reference to the film ' s ambiguity about the morality of the war , and its supposedly improper sexual subtexts . In other words , concludes Burton , we should not dismiss all such early " Great War " films as simple and naive . Stephen Bourne writes that " Contemporary critics praised the quality of the African locations [ in " King Solomon ' s Mines " ] , filmed by Geoffrey Barkas , and the tense atmosphere created in the scenes set in the African village and mines . " Barkas won an Oscar ( " Best Live Action Short Film " ) in 1936 for his direction of " Wings Over Everest " .