On 5 November 2024 I was invited by Stuart Hadaway of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force in WW1 Group to present my paper on Colonel Stewart Francis Newcombe titled Lies, Deception and Subterfuge. The paper focused on Newcombe’s distinguished war career and achievements, especially in connection to T.E. Lawrence and the Arab Revolt, as well as briefly touching upon other areas of service before he arrived in Cairo as head of Military Intelligence in 1914. Newcombe’s story is one of love, war and politics, but for this talk I also explored a story of lies, deception and subterfuge, presenting a range of contradictory claims surrounding the so-called Haversack Ruse, one element in an arsenal of deceptions employed by General Allenby prior to the Third Battle of Gaza in November 1917.
But before that, I began the talk by describing my own journey in pursuit of Newcombe's remarkable story:
Several people encouraged my early research, but the author H.V.F. Winstone went further. Victor Winstone is well-known for his 1982 book The Illicit Adventure, a distillation of his research that had gone into individual biographies of many Middle Eastern personalities such as Gertrude Bell, Captain Shakespeare, Parker Pasha, and Lieutenant-Colonel Gerald Leachman. Beginning life as a history of the Arab Bureau in Cairo, it soon expanded into a wider study of the political and military intelligence apparatus in the Middle East during the years 1898 to 1926.
In retrospect, Winstone made a few factual errors and misplaced assumptions in the interpretation of his research, partly due to a bias against the legend that had been created around Lawrence of Arabia, which he described as “a story of stupefying naiveté,” and one in which he believed all previous history, all fact and sense had been swamped by the Lawrence myth. It was perhaps why he brought characters out into the light after they had languished too long in Lawrence’s shadow.
Further biographies followed, with Lady Anne Blunt and the archaeologists Leonard Woolley and Howard Carter, but it was obvious from footnotes in The Illicit Adventure that Winstone had gathered papers from people close to the Newcombe family that he hoped would form the backbone of a proposed biography. However, despite considerable experience in the genre he later admitted he fell short in his attempt, as seen in the following intriguing letter written to me in reply to my persistent intrusions into his retirement when I had by then hit a wall in my own faltering adventure into discovering Newcombe’s life story:
What an interesting exchange you keep up,” he wrote. “I often wondered if you might make a breakthrough where I signally failed, but rather doubted it, having myself come up against implacable and at times most unpleasant opposition from MI5/6 and MoD. As you have obviously discovered these people do not, in common parlance, ‘take prisoners.’ For years I had my own watcher who stopped at nothing to prevent my books from being written and published. On one occasion I had to threaten legal action against my own publisher in order to prevent the abandonment of several years’ work.
So I am not surprised to learn that you are roughly as you were with SFN. I would greatly applaud success, but I find it hard to know how I could help. Could you pose a few questions and see if anything opens up? It is all so long ago and the fight with 6 has taken its toll. But I soldier on at 84. Don’t despair. It would be great if you could pull it off.
As ever
Victor Winstone
Undeterred by the thought of MI5 knocking on my door, I pressed on in pursuit of the illusive Colonel Newcombe and after further prodding, Winstone summoned up the energy to dig deep into a pile of wicker baskets he kept under his bed and came up with some fascinating papers that galvanised the project. There wasn’t much, but among the papers were some first-hand accounts that not only confirmed but added substantially to the publicly held research material I had previously obtained. It was the encouragement I needed. The journey began again, an adventure in biographical research that has changed course over the years, as our relationship with empire-building and our own colonial past continues its path of re-evaluation. Newcombe’s fascinating life as a military man may have been set against the backdrop of crumbling empires, uneasy nation-building, and within the legends of Arabia, but the focus today is on his role in helping to shape the Middle East that emerged when the war ended and the peacemakers took centre stage. As Lawrence put it so eloquently:
“We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves: yet when we achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to remake in the likeness of the former world they knew. Youth could win, but had not learned to keep, and was pitiably weak against age. We stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their peace.”
Newcombe’s life spanned the reigns of six monarchs from Victoria to Elizabeth and through numerous wars and skirmishes, right through to the Suez Crisis in 1956, the year he died, when that debacle would prove to be the death knell not just of the British Empire but of all the empires of Western Europe.
The war that is at the core of this story – the First World War – was meant, according to H.G. Wells, to be the war that will end war. So vast was its reach that Wells said: “It is war not of nations, but of mankind. It is a war to exorcise a world-madness and end an age.” He wrote those words in 1914 even before the horrors of a new industrialised war had fully coalesced into a perfect storm of unprecedented slaughter and appalling human suffering, where there were no easy triumphs, no prancing victories. Three years later, US President Woodrow Wilson echoed Wells’s sentiment with his own version of “a war to end all wars” to support his call to bring the US into the conflict in order to “make the world safe for democracy.” They were both wrong. The First World War did not bring everlasting peace, its final act of reckoning at Versailles became merely a stepping-stone to a second and more devastating world war.
As the Spanish-American philosopher, George Santayana, poignantly observed, “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”
HAVERSACK!
During my talk to the Egyptian Expeditionary Force in WW1 Group I discussed an often-overlooked comment by Lawrence in his book Seven Pillars of Wisdom concerning a dropped haversack.
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| Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen |
In the annals of war, the Haversack Ruse has gained a legendary status in the art and science of military deception, disinformation and surprise. According to the accepted legend, this intricately planned and audaciously executed ruse was attributed to the wildly eccentric Major Richard Meinertzhagen when he was attached to Allenby’s Intelligence Department and has since been described as one of the most original and inspired examples of the art of deception.
However, evidence suggests that Stewart Newcombe had in fact carried out an almost similar exploit some four months prior to Meinertzhagen. My paper went on to explore the important question as to whether Newcombe had in fact originated the Haversack Ruse, albeit a ploy that can trace its roots back through history to military deceptions (MILDEC) carried out by such practitioners as the Chinese (as described in The Art of War, an ancient military treatise originating from the 5th Century BC), and the ancient Egyptians and Greeks (one thinks of the guile of the Trojan Horse under Odysseus’ leadership). Much later, the haversack deception was updated early in WW2 when Rommel’s forces discovered a burnt-out scout car with a corpse clutching a map that appeared to show a “fair going” route that bypassed minefields in the North Africa desert. The hope was that Rommel’s tanks would take the bait and get bogged down in soft sand. Then, in the run up to the invasion of Sicily, James Bond creator Ian Fleming from Naval Intelligence came up with "A Suggestion (not a very nice one)" to plant misleading papers on a corpse that would be found by the enemy, in what became known as Operation Mincemeat, a deception that bore all the hallmarks of the original Haversack Ruse, along with supporting diversions and feints designed to confuse the enemy and reinforce the deception.
There always remained the intriguing question regarding the Haversack Ruse that centred on the fact that the ploy has been so deeply embedded in military folklore that few historians have ever questioned to whether or not it had played any significant part in the success of the battle for Gaza. What can be said is that the potential doubts surrounding deceptions such as this and others throws just as much confusion and suspicion around their authenticity that the doubt has almost as much effect on the outcome as the reality.
So, was Newcombe’s ploy an intriguing and hitherto unremarked addition to the age-old art of military deception and the forerunner of the famed Haversack Ruse? It was an intriguing question, with even Lawrence, in typical mischievous fashion, throwing doubts and confusion into the mix. The answer was no less compelling and will be discussed in a separate post.
