The Normandy landings, the largest amphibious invasion in world history, were an eminent success thanks to a grand deception plan that made the Germans look for the enemy in the wrong places. The 11th instalment of ‘Tactics &Tacticians’ unravels the massive deception plot.
The closing years of the World War II. The Allies—Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union—were planning an invasion to liberate Europe that had fallen fully to the Nazis. The Russians, trouncing the Germans from the Russian hinterland, would attack from the east. But what about the west? There, even France in the westernmost end of the European continent, had fallen to the Germans. The Allies decided to gather a massive army on the island of Britain and ferry them to the continent by sea and air.
German spies, having learnt of the plan, desperately tried to find out where the Allied forces would land. It would be easy to shoot down approaching boats, flying aircraft, and paratroopers, and scuttle the invasion even before it touches land. The Germans augmented their espionage network in Britain. Every wireless and phone message from Britain, every movement of military vehicles, construction work at airfields, production in factories—in short, all Allies military and even industrial activities — came to be monitored by German spies.
Based on the reports they sent for about five months, the German high command was convinced that two new military bases had become operational. One, they learnt, was in southern Britain under the US Army General George Patton. The other was in Edinburgh in the north, where the new Fourth Army was being readied within an old fort.
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Further surveillance confirmed the report. Flag cars of generals were spotted at both locations. There was constant wireless activity, and even signs of military exercises at night on nearby grounds. Spies had also managed to get photos of hundreds of aircraft parked at airfields near both bases.
Meanwhile, a small British commando team infiltrated into Nazi-controlled Norway and destroyed some German arms depots. This was a standard practice - before launching a large-scale attack, most armies would try to send special sabotage teams to sabotage the enemy's armouries and other facilities. With this, the German commanders became convinced that the enemy was attempting landings in two places. One, from southern Britain to Calais in France, and the other from Edinburgh to Norway. The Germans accordingly reinforced their garrisons in Calais and in Norway.
Finally, when the enemy arrived on the D-Day, June 6, 1944, the Germans were taken by surprise. The three and a half lakh soldiers in ships, boats, and aircraft landed not in Calais or Norway, but in Normandy, France. The German army was stunned.
In reality, what had been happening in southern Britain and Edinburgh for four months was a massive deception drama designed to hoodwink the German spies. The aircraft that the spies had spotted at the bases were mostly cardboard models (see the film The Eye of the Needle). The military exercises, the generals' car journeys, and the wireless messages were all a humongous ruse.
It is said that this deception operation, codenamed Operation Fortitude, took more time to plan and carry out than did the actual Normandy landings. This vast deception in the history of World War, originally proposed by Noel Wild and John Bevan from the London Controlling Section in late 1943, was revised by Colonel David Strangeways, head of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery's R Force deception staff.
