Military Service
A soldier during the First World War, Wheatley was gassed in a chlorine attack at Passchendaele and invalided as a second lieutenant of the Royal Field Artillery after service in Flanders, on the Ypres Salient, and in France at Cambrai and St. Quentin. In 1919 he assumed management of the family wine merchant business but in 1931, after a decline in business due to the depression, he began writing and married his second wife.
During the Second World War, Wheatley was a member of the London Controlling Section, which secretly coordinated strategic military deception and cover plans. His literary talents gained him employment with planning staffs for the War Office. He wrote numerous papers for the War Office, including suggestions for dealing with a German invasion of Britain (recounted in his works Stranger than Fiction and The Deception Planners). The most famous of his submissions to the Joint Planning Staff of the war cabinet was on "Total War". He was given a commission directly into the JP Service as Wing Commander, RAFVR and took part in advanced planning for the Normandy invasions.
Read more about this topic: Dennis Wheatley
Famous quotes containing the words military and/or service:
““My ancestors were all famous for military genius.”
My Lady smiled graciously. “It often runs in families,” she remarked: “just as a love for pastry does.””
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)
“Night City was like a deranged experiment in Social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button. Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you’d break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either way, you were gone ... though heart or lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger with New Yen for the clinic tanks.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)