The Dennis Wheatley 'Museum' - Dennis Wheatley in World War II: a supplement

Dennis Wheatley creates his 'Deception Bible'

A sample page and the conclusion of DW's original 'Deception Bible' taken from his unpublished memoirs

Click on the image to enlarge

In the early days before Bevan joined it, the small Department was so little known, and the plans for the next stage of the war were so fluid, that DW and his colleague Lumby were able to achieve little, although Stanley did use DW to write a further series of papers on a variety of subjects, not all of which had anything to do with Deception.

While DW and Lumby were whiling away their time unable to get anything useful done, DW embarked on a series of self-initiated projects.

One thing which struck DW was that, while Dudley Clarke had impressed the Chiefs of Staff so much that they had agreed to set up an enlarged and more centralised version of his 'A Force' in London, he had left no detailed guidance on how the job was to be done.

In June 1942, DW therefore set about writing out his own thoughts on the matter in a paper he called 'AN ATTEMPT TO SET OUT THE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF ENEMY DECEPTION'.

In this document he started with basic principles, and then went on to enumerate forty-nine ways in which the wrong impression of what the Allies were intending to do could be fed to the enemy.

When Johnny Bevan came in (see next section), he re-cast it into the approved official form, added two further methods to the forty-nine that DW had originally thought of, and had the amended document re-issued with the title of 'THE IMPLEMENTATION OF MILITARY DECEPTION'.

During our search we were unable to find a copy of either document in the National Archives, although that may simply mean that they are hiding away awaiting re-discovery, and it seemed at one stage that the document and its forty-nine (or fifty-one) methods might be lost.

In the final stages of compiling this supplementary exhibition however, DW's earliest known draft of his memoirs was discovered, and it contains a full chapter devoted to this paper which reproduces the version that DW submitted to Oliver Stanley - and then to Bevan - in its entirety.

A couple of pages of from this newly found document are shown in this exhibition.

DW related in his memoirs how the amended document became the department's 'Bible', and that as each new member joined the Department, their first duty was to master its contents.

It is possible, therefore, that DW's document can be regarded as one of the operational cornerstones of the department.

References : DW's unpublished memoirs, 'A', Chapter 15.
The Deception Planners, pp 34-36.

The complete text of this Deception 'Bible' was published in 'Dennis Wheatley: An Unpublished Miscellany' in 2023.

Provenance : Private Collection