When WW2 started i was a stage magician but i offered my services to the military but although they accepted me, they were not really sure how they could best use my skills because we all knew that getting the Nazi's to pick a card and me guessing it wasn't going to make Hitler and his stormtroopers march back out of Belgium wondering how the hell i knew it was the seven of spades.
They considered using me as a troop entertainer but parading around the troops pulling rabbits out of hats while dressed in a spangly shirt didn't appeal so i performed an illusion to prove that i could be used elsewhere and floated a 16,000 ton German Battleship down the Thames, not the actual battleship, but the illusion of it using a small model and strategically placed mirrors but to everyone who saw, their was a freaking 610 foot German ship in the Thames.
Suitably impressed, the top brass decided that a military magician may come in handy after all and promoted me to major and gave me a team of the best artists, carpenters, electricians and criminals called the very cool 'A-Force' and let us take out act to the battlefield to use magic to trick Axis forces.
First up was freeing captured POWs from hostile camps who under the Geneva Convetion were allowed care packages from humanitarian groups and even the dumbest Nazi guard would notice hacksaw and chisel shaped packages turning up so we created a number of clever ruses to get the escape tools they required to them so we hid maps inside playing cards, saw blades inside cricket bat handles and shoelaces embedded with wire.
While the German guards were left wondering why the entire Old Boys Second XI hadn't turned up for their usual afternoon knock around, i had moved onto my next trick, disappearing the Suez Canal and Alexandria Harbour.
The harbour housed the royal fleet and naturally, the Axis powers wanted to destroy it but my mission was to make that not happen so i created an identical fake Harbour on a lake a mile away with plywood ships and buildings and placed revolving tin mirrors with spinning searchlights to disguise the canal and blind the bomber pilot and when the Luftwaffe came and for eight nights they bombed the wrong target.
We repeated the ruse several more times with strategically important buildings which meant the Germans were bombing the hell out of building made of painted canvas and fake bricks but turned the dial up to 11 with the biggest and best illusion, creating a whole fake army complete with tanks, ammunition and all the other things which you would find in a war zone.
All we had to do was trick the Afrika Korps into thinking their attack was coming from the south, when it was actually coming from the north so me and the A Force concocted an army of 2,000 inflatable tanks in the South along with fake supply dumps, storage buildings, ammunition piles and railway lines.
Along came the Nazis who were looking South when the attack came from the North and the scene of pouting Nazi's tricked again.
After the war i resumed my magic career but appearing at the Bognor Conservative Club never had the same appeal after taking on the might of the German Army so i gave it all up to run a driving school and the only thing i turned anything into was a car into a driveway.
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