[2] In the First World War, he served in the 1915 Gallipoli campaign at Suvla Bay, and then in the later part of the Battle of the Somme in France, where he won a Military Cross.

Work became increasingly difficult to find in the economic depression of the 1930s, and after directing the critically acclaimed African exteriors for Robert Stevenson's King Solomon's Mines in 1937,[3] it dried up altogether.

They would agree that a line of trucks could be parked by a hedge and all together draped with nets to appear as a thick belt of vegetation, or arrange a vehicle as a pitched-roof outhouse to a building.

He arranged a flight to observe the desert from the air, noting patterns that he named as "Wadi", "Polka Dot" and so on that he hoped to use for camouflage.

[18] To get his fledgling unit recognised, he printed an unusually elegant booklet called "Concealment in the Field" in Cairo,[b] the idea being to produce something clear, readable, and above all obviously different from the mass of army manuals.

[19] Barkas set up the Middle East Camouflage Development and Training Centre (CDTC.ME) at Helwan, Egypt in November 1941, with the zoologist Hugh B. Cott as his chief instructor.

[2] Barkas further built up his unit's ability in deception by getting one of his best officers, the artist Steven Sykes to build a convincing dummy railway at Misheifa to divert enemy attention from the real railhead at Capuzzo bringing materiel for Operation Crusader.

[20] Barkas' camouflage unit helped Montgomery to victory at El Alamein through a large scale deception codenamed Operation Bertram which ran from August 1942 until the actual battle in October.

The deception succeeded, leading Rommel's staff to believe the allied attack would be in the south, and to deploy substantial forces there.

[29] The book explains the inside story of the use of camouflage to deceive the enemy as described by Winston Churchill in his speech on 11 November 1942, announcing victory after the Battle of El Alamein:[2][21] I must say one word about ... surprise and strategy.

Routt who describes Tell England as "a compounded act of disinheritance" of Australia's part in World War I, but who also notes the "multiple expositions" of the film, "artistic, committed, sexy, evil".

Routt justifies these descriptions with reference to the film's ambiguity about the morality of the war, and its supposedly improper sexual subtexts.