of tons of matériel, that were to be used for the decisive attack at El Alamein. Barkas had been hoping for such an opportunity, and now he was being offered the chance to camouflage perhaps the largest desert battle ever attempted. Barkas and Ayrton went out onto the beach dunes to sit and think. Barkas recalled the sacked Jasper Maskelyne, a stage magician who had briefly worked for him, saying he needed his vanishing tricks now. Ayrton agreed, suggesting they use Sunshields to make the tanks seem to be trucks, and vice versa. By the end of that afternoon they had typed up a plan and presented it to de Guingand and Richardson. They proposed to create two dummy armoured brigades to deploy in the south. They would give the appearance of not being ready by making it seem the tanks had not moved from their forming-up areas (Murrayfield and Melting Pot). Dummy tanks would replace them there; while they would mimic trucks when they arrived in the forward Martello area. Richardson asked if they could use something like Steven Sykes's dummy railhead which had worked so well at Misheifa. Barkas answered that he intended to build a dummy water pipeline to go down south, and to be obviously not ready. Within two weeks Barkas's plan was accepted, but with one change requested by Montgomery: the dummy armour was doubled to represent a whole armoured corps of over 600 vehicles. Richardson integrated the camouflage plan with the main plans: in Barkas's words, Richardson "amplified it a great deal to fit in with all the other major considerations, which he knew and I didn't." Barkas, a former film director, was set to work "on the task of providing props for the biggest 'film production' on which I ever expect to be engaged". Work began on 27 September, giving 4 weeks before the day of the attack. Execution The operation had two aims: creating the appearance of army units where none existed and concealing the real armour, artillery and matériel at the front. Barkas observed that "the concealment of the huge assembly of the Armoured Corps was essentially a piece of military planning by Army Headquarters, with Camouflage carrying out certain specific tasks". Since it would be impossible to hide the existence of such a large number of vehicles, especially of tanks in the Martello area, Barkas planned instead to make the