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THE GREATEST MAGIC TRICK IN HISTORY?

"Maskelyne's crowning achievement came in 1942 with his involvement in Operation Bertram, prior to the battle of El Alamein, which turned the tide against the Germans in north Africa."
Channel 4, UK.

“Nobody can deny that Maskelyne helped to win the Battle of El Alamein ... Making Rommel vanish was Maskelyne’s masterpiece.”
Banks-Smith, The Guardian, 2002

Finally came the grandest of grand illusions: on the eve of the battle of El Alamein, Maskelyne concealed an entire army of 150,000 men, 1,000 tanks and 1,000 guns, on a plain “as hard and flat as a billiard table”, and simultaneously created a false one in a completely different part of the desert..
The Times, 2004

"For his greatest trick, Maskelyne helped to win the Battle of El Alamein by creating an entire array of 'tricks, swindles, and devices' to convince Erwin Rommel that the British counter-attack was coming from the south, rather than the north."
Ben-Macintyre author of Agent ZigZag, 2007

Contrary to the claims in the quotations above, the hard evidence leads me to a more mundane conclusion: Jasper Maskelyne was not involved in either the creation or the implementation of the Alamein deception plan.
 

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