Reddit reviews The Meinertzhagen Mystery: The Life and Legend of a Colossal Fraud

I just thought I'd share some of the information about Meinertzhagen that I got from reading Brian Garfield's The Meinertzhagen Mystery. What the book goes into is how Meinertzhagen faked many stories about his life and stole credit away from others. His biggest frauds were in the field of ornithology. He was known as being a great ornithologist in his time and even made a huge donation to the British Museum. In the 1990s, it was discovered (through a lot of painful academic work) that many of the specimens he donated had been stolen (even from the British Museum itself) and a lot of the supposed find locations of the specimens were changed to hide the thefts.

That was just to show that the claim that he stole credit for the Haversack ruse might not be as crazy as it first sounds.

SPOILERS (as these events take place in 1917)

Background: The British are planning on attacking Beersheba, but they want the Ottomans to think they are going to attack Gaza. The key is to take Beersheba with the wells still intact to be able to advance farther from there.

On September 12, 1917 (October 10 in the Ottoman calendar for 1917*), a horseman rides out near Beersheba, is attacked and then purposefully drops a haversack that he makes sure his attackers notice and pick up. Inside the haversack is a fake British war plan that discusses attacking Gaza and that there will be a feint attack toward Beersheba to try to lure more Ottomans away from Gaza. On October 31, Allenby's forces capture Beersheba before the Ottomans can destroy the wells.

Meinertzhagen would eventually claim that the idea and execution of the haversack ruse were both his. In fact, Brig. Gen. Sir Philip Chetwode came up with a variety of deceptions for Allenby to try to fool the Turks (p. 24-5*). The haversack ruse itself was the idea of James Dacres Belgrave (p. 27).

One discrepancy in Meinertzhagen's account is that he gave the date of the ruse as October 10, 1917 (possibly from a misreading of a Turkish source). Arthur Neate claims to have carried it out on September 12 (p. 32). After the war, Meinertzhagen came out in the press saying that he carried out the ruse. Neate disputed this (Belgrave died in 1918). Meinertzhagen then countered that there must have been two such attempts at it and at one point even claimed it was tried three different times (p. 35). Most likely, it was only done the one time by Neate.

As for the effectiveness, German Gen. Kress von Kressenstein claims that it was quickly identified as a fake, although there was a lot of discussion about it (p. 29). Allenby's attack worked not because the Ottomans were fully convinced the main attack would be on Gaza, but because they thought (wrongly) that they would have enough time to destroy the wells before the British took Beersheba. [I'd be interested in hearing from someone who knows more about this.]

I know I'm just basing all of this off of one source, but Garfield does seem to have done his research. I would be interested if anyone knows any more about this story than I do. I highly recommend Garfield's book. I'm not trying to take anything away from von Lettow-Vorbeck, but one reason (of many) why he was so successful may have been that Meinertzhagen was the intelligence officer in charge of gathering intelligence on von Lettow-Vorbeck. According to Garfield, he didn't do a good job.

*Page numbers refer to Garfield's book.

* The Ottomans were bringing the Islamic calendar in line with the Gregorian calendar this year, so there were only 306 days to their calendar (p. 36).