It provided camouflage during the siege of Tobruk; a dummy railhead at Misheifa, and the largest of all, Operation Bertram, the army-scale deception for the decisive battle of El Alamein in October 1942.

The unit's leader, Geoffrey Barkas (1896–1979) served in the 1915 Gallipoli campaign and then in the later part of the Battle of the Somme in France, where he won a Military Cross.

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

The Camouflage Development & Training Centre (CDTC.ME) was set up at Helwan (Camp E) in November 1941, as the theatre counterpart of the original CDTC established at Farnham Castle.

The Commandant was a regular officer, Major John Sholto Douglas, from the well-known Scottish family,[15] with the British zoologist Hugh Cott, by now a captain, as chief instructor.

[6] Regular liaison with Proud kept the staff abreast of the responses from their colleagues on the front-line, out in the Western Desert, as well as any developments from Home, with training adjusted to reflect the latest changes.

Barkas assigned the artist Steven Sykes to build a convincing dummy to divert enemy attention from the real railhead at Capuzzo bringing materiel for Operation Crusader.

Proud improvised, using scrap wood, salvaged textiles to make camouflage nets, and even foodstuffs—camouflage paint was made by mixing rancid flour with spoiled Worcester sauce, described by Barkas as "a revolting but highly adhesive paste".

The reason for the surprising offer was in itself a deception, requiring numerous vehicle tracks in an area away from actual targets to give enemy tactical reconnaissance planes the impression that dummy facilities, also built by Proud, were being visited intensively.

[22][23] 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.

[29] Barkas described Operation Bertram as the task of providing props for the biggest 'film production' on which I ever expect to be engagedWinston Churchill, announcing victory at El Alamein in the House of Commons in London on On 11 November 1942, praised the success of Operation Bertram, and implicitly the work of the Camouflage Directorate, as follows:[31] By a marvellous system of camouflage, complete tactical surprise was achieved in the desert.

The Xth Corps, which he had seen from the air exercising fifty miles in the rear, moved silently away in the night, but leaving an exact simulacrum of its tanks where it had been, and proceeded to its points of attack.A wide range of camouflage and deception techniques and devices were invented or developed by the unit.