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The QF Sites were used more in England than North Africa, but the British did use them there too to fool Rommel's air support.

Maskelyne is credited with a lot of crazy illusions during the Second World War. Here's a list of the ones that I have looked into.

1. Made General Gort see the Graf Spee sailing up the Thames (after the Spee had already been sunk at Montevideo)
I could only find one reference of this. Gort never has made mention of this in any report I could find so I think this most likely FALSE.

2. Making British tanks look like trucks in North Africa.
Maskelyne arrived in North Africa on the 10th of March 1941 as part of a team of 12 camouflage officers. They made camouflage paint using of all things a mixture of Worcester sauce and camel dung to get the color right. The key to making the tanks look like trucks was to put a highly reflective piece across the front of the canvas covering so that it had the properties of a windshield. This one is TRUE.

3. Hiding the city of Alexandria.
The idea here was to use the same technique like that of the Q sites to make Alexandria appear about 20 miles west of where it really was so that German bombers would hit the fake site instead of the real city. Unfortunately, this tale is only related in David Fisher's account on Maskelyne (The War Magician) which has no documents backing it up. Odds are this one is FALSE

4. Hiding the Suez Canal.
This is the one you were asking about. Actually, the way the task is portrayed it was not so much hiding the canal as making it almost impossible to hit with bombers. Lights would be used in a cycling and strobing fashion to blind the bomber pilots trying to make an attack. Unfortunately, this one is also only mentioned in Fisher's book and there is no sources that back up the claim (well, William Bruener's Undercover Tales of World War II mentions it, but the source he uses is Fisher's book). So again, this is quite possibly FALSE.

5. Disguising a cruiser to look like a battleship.
This one would be really cool, but while the other possibly false accounts may just be a declassification away from being confirmed, this one is absurd. This is another one only attributed by Fisher and the way he describes it actually makes it appear that the effort was to disguise a cruiser to look like a battleship trying to look like a cruiser. Of all of them this one is almost definitely FALSE.

6. Operation Sentinel.
This one is pretty cool. Operation Sentinel was part of the preparations of an expected attack by Rommel at Alam Halfa Ridge south of El Alamein in late 1942. Sentinel was an effort by Maskelyne and the rest of the camouflage team to create two fake divisions at a forward position in front of Rommel while the actual divisions worked their way into a flanking position. This was done by creating huge fake ammo dumps, fake soldiers, vehicles, tanks, and even a maze of fake tire and tread tracks into the desert. This one is absolutely TRUE.

7. The pseudo-destruction of the Mosquito manufacturing plant.
This is an account from Ben McIntyre's Agent Zigzag in which the double agent Edward Chapman led German officials believe that he had completed his mission to sabotage the plant. This deception did indeed happen complete with creating a fake boiler that from the air appeared to have been blown through the wall of the plant's power station. As far as Maskelyne being involved, that is a bit iffy. There are no records of where Maskelyne went after the camouflage unit in North Africa was disbanded. He may have been involved in this but what documentation there is out there on the subject does not mention him by name. So I say to this one MAYBE.

This concludes my information overload. :)