By Matthew Adams
In November 1943, the Allied leaders Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill met at the Tehran Conference to discuss wartime strategy and postwar considerations for World War 2. The three leaders agreed to the opening of a second front in France; Normandy was chosen as the primary D-Day (Operation Overlord) landing location in June 1944.
This amphibious invasion along the coast of Normandy needed a strong element of surprise to ensure the Allies could get a firm foothold in France without being swamped by the German army (Wehrmacht) shortly after landing. To achieve this end, the Allies pursued a strategy of deception, codenamed Bodyguard, that would deceive the Nazis about the primary location for the planned D-Day landing.
At the Tehran Conference, Churchill said, “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” This is the remark from which the Bodyguard operation got its codename. Bodyguard was the overall deception operation for the D-Day landings with two overriding objectives. The first was to prevent the Nazis from concentrating the bulk of their defending divisions in France around the Normandy beach landing area by convincing them through misinformation and visual deception that the Allies planned to strike elsewhere in 1944. A secondary objective was to trick the Germans into thinking the real Normandy invasion was only a diversionary assault after Allied troops had landed in June 1944 to delay the arrival of Wehrmacht reinforcements.
An operation with many fronts
Operation Fortitude was among many suboperations of Bodyguard, but it ranked among the most important. Operation Fortitude also had numerous prongs, as well. For instance, Fortitude North aimed to deceive the Nazis about a potential Allied amphibious landing in Norway launched from Scotland, convincing Hitler to keep many of the German divisions stationed there rather than withdrawing them to France. The objective of the Fortitude South component of this operation was to generate an illusion that the Allies intended to re-establish a front in France by landing most of their divisions on beaches in Pas-de-Calais rather than Normandy.
Pas-de-Calais was a more obvious primary landing point for the Allied invasion of France for a few reasons. Firstly, it was the closest geographic landing spot in France to England across the narrowest part of the English Channel. Pas-de-Calais also had expansive level beaches and provided one of the most direct routes to Berlin. It was all the more strategically important as a launch area for Nazi V-2 rockets. However, Pas-de-Calais was heavily fortified and guarded by the large German 15th Army.
Rather than invade Pas-de-Calais from the sea, the Allies duped the Nazis into believing that was what they planned to do. To do this, the Allies created a fake army called the First United States Army Group (FUSAG) in the Kent area of southeast England. The Allies placed many inflatable dummy tanks, fake landing craft, and wooden warplanes alongside phoney facilities to create the illusion of a military build-up in southeast England for German reconnaissance planes to observe. This illusion was further enhanced by generating fake radio traffic that simulated FUSAG communications.
To add to the charade, FUSAG was placed under the command of the famed U.S. General George Patton. He had been relieved of his command after slapping combat-fatigued troops in 1943 but remained a revered general nonetheless. Patton often attracted media attention and helped to publicize the locations of fake landing craft embarkation points for German interest.
The Allies played a similar trick for Fortitude North in Scotland. There, the Allies created a fake British 4th Army with an Edinburgh Castle headquarters. This army had fake decoy equipment, fabricated military installations, and radio traffic like the one in southern England. To breathe even more life into this deception, the Allies even leaked fake ‘secret’ plans about a Norway invasion operation in the hope of German intelligence catching on.
Garbo and the Double-Cross network
The Allies also fed the Germans a stream of misinformation with the Double Cross System under the direction of the Twenty Committee (or, the “XX Committee”). British counter-intelligence was remarkably effective and captured many of the German spies sent to gather information about Allied operations from the United Kingdom. These captured spies were given a choice of collaborating with the Allies as an alternative to execution. Those who agreed to collaborate became supervised double agents who regularly reported misleading intelligence the Allies wanted the Germans to hear back to their masters with radio messages.
The Spaniard Juan Pujol Garcia, known as Garbo, was among the most instrumental of those double agents. However, unlike captured spies, Garbo was a staunch anti-Nazi who willingly offered his services to the British. He created a fictional network of twenty-seven agents who helped with the grand deception campaign. The Nazis trusted Juan to such an extent he received the Iron Cross.
Garbo’s most significant contribution was a telegram sent that wrongly informed Hitler the Normandy invasion was a diversion before imminent landings in Pas-de-Calais three days after Allied troops had set foot in France. That translated message read, “It is my opinion that because of the strong readiness of the military troops in southeast and east England and because they are not taking part in operations, the ones they do take part in are diversion manoeuvres with the purpose to draw attention to them and therefore to strike on a completely different location.” This telegram convinced Hitler to turn around reinforcements sent to Normandy shortly after the initial landing.
The Allies could monitor the effectiveness of their D-Day deception campaign by reading decrypted enemy messages. This was possible because British intelligence had cracked the Enigma code that encrypted German radio traffic. Ultra was the name given to the information passed on to Allied commanders from those decrypted enemy messages.
Some decrypted Japanese messages also provided insight into the effectiveness of Operation Fortitude. Among the most significant of these messages came from Japan’s ambassador to Germany, Hiroshi Oshima. One of his transmissions provided details about a conversion the ambassador had with Hitler regarding anticipated Allied operations in France during 1944. That transmission highlighted Hitler’s conviction the Allies would launch a major attack across the Strait of Dover with diversionary actions in Norway, Denmark, and the French Mediterranean coastline.
Allied aircraft contributed to the D-Day deception campaign from the air. The Allies bombed the Calais area even more extensively than Normandy. This aerial bombardment did serve some genuine military objectives for disrupting railways and bridges. However, the intensive bombing in northern France also made it seem more plausible the Allies would invade Pas-de-Calais rather than Normandy from the German perspective.
Deception from Above
Another piece of Operation Fortitude, Operation Titanic, was a part of the air deception to assist the D-Day landings on 5-6 June. It was then that the RAF dropped hundreds of fake dummy parachutists (Ruperts) around the Caen area. A few real SAS men parachuted with the dummies to activate fake battlefield sounds with loudspeakers. This fake airborne assault aimed to divert German attention away from Normandy’s landing beaches as Operation Overlord began.
To further support this deception, the RAF dropped small strips of aluminium across the English Channel. These strips of aluminium reflected radar signals to generate blips on radars. The dropping of the aluminium confused German radar and it made it look more like an invasion fleet was heading toward the Pas-de-Calais area.
All these pieces of deception contributed to the Allies effectively securing beachheads in Normandy on June 6, 1944, from which to thrust into France. The effectiveness of Operation Fortitude was highlighted by the fact that the 15th Army remained in Pas-de-Calais throughout June and much of July to forestall a large Allied landing there that never happened. This is confirmed by a passage within “Eisenhower’s Own Story of the War” book that says, “The German Fifteenth Army remained immobile in the Pas-de-Calais, contained until the latter part of July by what we now know from high-level interrogation was the threat of attack by our forces in the southeast of England.”
Critical Luck
Operation Overlord might have fallen apart had the Germans thrown the full might of the 15th Army into Normandy during the critical month of June. That army could have feasibly overwhelmed the Allies by sheer weight of numbers alone if fully committed to battle during that period. However, Operation Fortitude had effectively fooled the Nazis into thinking a large Allied amphibious landing would still happen in the Pas-de-Calais area even after British, American, and Canadian forces touched down in France.
The rest of the Overlord campaign after the Normandy invasion was a triumph for the Allies that culminated with the liberation of Paris in August to break the Nazi stranglehold of France. Operation Bodyguard and its Fortitude subcomponents paved the way for one of the most significant Allied victories of World War 2 by convincing the Nazis the primary attack would happen in the Pas-de-Calais area. This effective deception did not necessarily ensure a victorious Allied invasion of France from the outset, but it greatly increased Operation Overlord’s chances of success.
Matthew Adams is a freelancer who has produced a variety of articles for various publications and websites, such as Swing Golf Magazine, Windows Report, Naval History, Military History Matters, Artilleryman, dotTech, Naval History, Against the Odds, Argunners, History Lists, and Bright Hub. Matthew is also the author of Battles of the Pacific War 1941-1945.