in the House of Commons, Winston Churchill praised the camouflage operation. Planning Bertram was devised by Dudley Clarke to deceive Erwin Rommel about the timing and location of the expected allied attack by the Eighth Army. It consisted of physical deceptions using dummies and camouflage, concealing real movements, in particular of Montgomery's armour. Bertram was accompanied by electromagnetic deceptions codenamed "Operation Canwell" using false radio traffic. The front line was relatively short: it stretched from the Mediterranean Sea in the north, near El Alamein railway station, to the effectively impassable Qattara Depression in the south, a distance of only about 30 miles. It was therefore clear to the enemy that the attack must come in this space, and since the only road was in the north, surprise and full-scale attack in any other location might have been thought unlikely. The deceptions were planned to make the enemy believe that the attack would take place to the south, far from the coast road and railway, and about two days later than the real attack. Soon after his arrival on 8 August 1942, the new Middle East commander, Harold Alexander, visited Geoffrey Barkas's camouflage unit at Helwan to assess its ability to implement Bertram. He looked at everything intently, but seemed most interested in the woodworking shop. On 16 September 1942, Freddie de Guingand, Montgomery's chief of staff, summoned Barkas and Tony Ayrton to Eighth Army headquarters near Borg-el-Arab. He told them this was to be top secret, that Alexander had been impressed by his visit to Helwan, and that he wanted Camouflage's advice. He introduced Charles Richardson, who worked for Dudley Clarke's secretive 'A' Force and was to implement the deception Montgomery needed. Richardson had not been trained in deception planning, given the accelerated training of staff officers in 1940, nor had he ever prepared a deception plan before. He was determined it should succeed, since, as he wrote, "if it failed it would do far more damage than having no plan at all". de Guingand outlined the basic plan: an attack in the north, along the line of the coast road, with a feint some 20 miles to the south. The tanks would take two days to move into battle position from their forming-up positions. Engineering work was already under way. He then astonished them by asking them to hide the hundreds of tanks and field guns, and the thousands