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The decisive victory of World War II in Western Europe took place 80 years ago this summer. On 6 June 1944, after months of planning, around 150,000 men from five divisions – two American, two British, and one Canadian — fought their way on to five designated beaches along a 50-mile stretch of the Normandy coastline, soon to be followed by hundreds of thousands more Allied troops in the largest amphibious invasion in history. Codenamed Operation Overlord, this unprecedented seaborne assault was, of course, a landmark success — kickstarting the liberation of France, and paving the way for final victory over Hitler’s armies in the west.
By opening a long-awaited ‘second front’ against Nazi Germany, the Allies were delivering on a promise made by Winston Churchill four years earlier. ‘We shall go back!’, the Prime Minister had assured the House of Commons in a famous speech on 4 June 1940, just hours after the British Army had been evacuated from Dunkirk amid the horror of the German blitzkrieg. But that promise would prove hard to keep, with the armies of the Reich taking an iron grip on mainland Europe in 1941, and a run of catastrophes — from the fall of Singapore (described by Churchill as the ‘greatest disaster’ in British military history) to a devastating series of setbacks in North Africa – pushing Britain to the brink in 1942.
What really changed things were Hitler’s calamitous decision to invade Russia in June 1941, and Japan’s ill-fated attack on Pearl Harbor six months later — a move that led the United States officially to enter the war. With the world’s two most powerful nations now fighting on the side of the Allies, a fightback in Europe would finally become achievable — and by the time Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, the leaders of the new Allied ‘Big Three’, met formally for the first time at the Tehran Conference in late 1943, it had already begun. In the Mediterranean, a turning of the tide in North Africa had provided a springboard for the invasion of Sicily and the beginning of the long fight for Italy; while in Russia, the Soviets had defeated German forces in the titanic struggle for Stalingrad, which broke Hitler’s eastward advance.
But if a full-scale, cross-Channel invasion was now possible, lingering doubts remained in the months leading up to 6 June 1944 — not only for the Allies, but also for the Germans awaiting their next move. When, where, and how, remained very big questions indeed, on which many thousands of lives would soon depend. In our special for this issue — the first of two devoted to the D-Day anniversary — we look at preparations on both sides. Overleaf, Taylor Downing examines the Allies’ elaborate deception plans, designed to catch the enemy off guard; while Graham Goodlad analyses the Germans’ defensive strategy, and the so-called ‘Atlantic Wall’ on which their security would depend.
The great D-Day deception: How the Germans were fooled
In the first part of our series to mark the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings, Taylor Downing uncovers the brilliant deception operation that helped the Allies to victory.
Soon after dawn on Tuesday 6 June 1944, the ramps went down and the first Allied assault troops splashed ashore in Normandy. By the end of the day, roughly 150,000 men and their equipment had landed in northern France. After months of delays due to political arguments about when to open a Second Front, and then a last-minute 24-hour postponement due to a storm passing through the Channel, the invasion was finally on. The German troops in Normandy were caught entirely by surprise. Many had not expected a landing there.
The Germans had known for well over six months, however, that an invasion was coming somewhere along the Atlantic or Channel coast. So how had the Allies managed to launch a major combined operation that caught the Germans entirely off guard? How had German Intelligence, the Abwehr and the Fremde Heere West, failed so completely to predict what would happen?
When President Franklin D Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill had flown to Tehran for their first summit with Stalin in November of the previous year, the so-called ‘Big Three’ had discussed the invasion of northern Europe. Stalin had pressed for it to be launched as soon as possible to lift the pressure on the Red Army in its titanic struggle with Axis forces on the Eastern Front. Stalin said his army was losing 10,000 men a day. A date was set in the spring of 1944. Also discussed were the deceptions that would be necessary to fool the enemy as to when and where the landings would take place. ‘In wartime,’ Churchill told Stalin, ‘truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.’ At this, Stalin cheered.
Two invasions
Soon after Tehran, Roosevelt appointed General Dwight D Eisenhower as Supreme Commander of what was to be called Operation Overlord. General Bernard Montgomery was appointed head of 21st Army Group, a formation that included the British Second Army and the First Canadian Army. And, using the very word Churchill had employed when talking to Stalin, the deception operations were also set in motion, under the blanket name of Operation Bodyguard.
As we have seen in previous issues, Montgomery had become a great enthusiast for the art of deception. In 1942, Operations Bertram and Treatment (see MHM 136, Oct/Nov 2023) had completely fooled the Germans as to where and when his assault at El Alamein would take place. Since then, several other deception operations had misled the enemy as the Eighth Army advanced. And Operation Mincemeat (see MHM 137, Dec 2023/Jan 2024) had made the Germans think that, after North Africa, the next step would be for the Allies to strike against Greece and not Sicily as planned.
When Montgomery returned to Britain at the end of 1943 to begin detailed preparation for Overlord, he brought with him Lieutenant-Colonel David Strangeways, his head of deception-planning from the Eighth Army. In many ways, Strangeways had similar characteristics to his boss. He held strong opinions, and was arrogant and happy to air his forthright views to everyone, including officers well above him in rank. The son of a Cambridge doctor, Strangeways had chosen not to follow his father’s calling but instead joined the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment in 1933 as a regular officer. He led his men from the front and, at Dunkirk, saved several of his troops by wading out through the surf to an abandoned barge and loading them into it. Over the next couple of years, he moved into Intelligence, but he did not view himself as a deskbound planner, and whenever possible got out to the front to see things for himself. When German troops surrendered at Tunis, he led a special force on a dash into the city to capture documents and cipher machines before the enemy had time to destroy them.
When Strangeways started to study the deception plan that was already in the pipeline for Overlord, he was not impressed. The basic idea behind the plan was to deceive the Germans into thinking there would be two invasions, and to confuse them as to when and where they were coming. Strangeways tore into the plan, and offended many by saying he thought it was useless. He argued that, in order to make the Germans do what the Allies wanted, they had to be made to believe that the Normandy invasion, when it came, was simply a feint intended to divert troops into Normandy, and that the real invasion was still to come in the Pas de Calais region, across the Channel at its narrowest point. This would ensure that the Fifteenth Army, based in the Pas de Calais where the Germans thought an invasion was likely, did not divert troops and armour into Normandy.
In order to make German Intelligence believe the main invasion would take place against the Pas de Calais, Strangeways argued that it was necessary to dramatically increase the Order of Battle in Britain. Dudley Clarke, the pioneer of British deception operations, had learned the importance of exaggerating the number of troops available to the Allies three years earlier in North Africa. Learning from Clarke, Strangeways argued that they had to make the Germans think there were enough extra British and American troops in Britain to form an entirely new Army Group in the south-east of England. The deceivers initially thought it was going to be impossible to invent an entirely phoney Army Group consisting of several separate Armies and Corps. At the end of February 1944, however, Eisenhower’s Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) agreed with the plan. A new name was given to it: Operation Fortitude South.
An imaginary army
There was a planning formation already in existence that the Germans had got wind of through a radio intercept. This was the First US Army Group, which came to be known from its acronym as FUSAG. It was not then in use as an operational combat force, but instead was intended to take over in Normandy once the number of American troops there had grown to the size required to be placed into a complete Army Group. Now, however, the First US Army Group provided the skeleton on which could be hung an entirely new and imaginary army. In early 1944, FUSAG existed on paper only. Soon it would become a major pretend formation under the command of SHAEF.
To be credible, FUSAG had to include some real troops as well as fictional ones. The US Third Army, based in Cheshire, was therefore allocated to the new Army Group. They would be joined by the First Canadian Army. In truth, these troops were preparing for Normandy – but now they were listed as training for a second invasion in the Pas de Calais. Many more units, entirely fake, would soon join them.
SHAEF quickly decided that the real invasion force that was assembling in the south-west of England should do so under conditions of the strictest secrecy. They must be fully camouflaged and even use smokeless fuel so plumes of smoke did not give them away. However, it was decreed that FUSAG – which was supposedly gathering in Kent, Essex, and Suffolk – should follow a policy of ‘discreet display’, whereby German reconnaissance aircraft would occasionally be allowed to observe what was taking place.
In order for this to look real, FUSAG had to employ a variety of visual deceptions. It had already been found during earlier deception operations that technicians, designers and carpenters from the film industry were particularly good at producing dummies or models of vehicles that looked believable on aerial reconnaissance photos. So the film technicians were now given a new task. They set to work producing 250 large landing craft (LCTs) made out of canvas and wood, with steel frames floating on empty oil drums. Some of these phoney LCTs were 170 feet long and 30 feet wide. An entire Company was trained in assembling these craft, which were lined up from Folkestone to Dover, along the rivers Orwell and Deben in Suffolk, and from Lowestoft to Yarmouth. They looked just like the real thing from above, but had a tendency to blow upside-down if a strong wind caught them. Fortunately, no German reconnaissance plane came over after a storm, when it would have discovered soldiers frantically struggling to right the cumbersome fake landing craft!
In addition, hundreds of dummy tanks were built out of rubber and canvas. They could be picked up and carried to their location. They were lined up in rows – just as was happening with real tanks in the south-west of England – to form giant depots waiting for embarkation. On one occasion, an angry bull charged one of these vehicles, which instantly deflated on being pierced. Another dummy tank was quickly brought in as a replacement.
To check that these dummy encampments looked realistic, an RAF reconnaissance plane was flown over them and the experienced photo-interpreters at RAF Medmenham in Buckinghamshire examined the sites. They were not impressed, however. The sites lacked a human presence, and the photo-interpreters said the Germans would almost certainly not be fooled. So a battalion was sent in to ‘man’ the various fake encampments. They stoked fires in the morning as though brewing up, and hung out towels and laundry on washing lines.
A complete dummy oil depot was constructed near Dover, apparently consisting of storage tanks, pipelines, pumping stations, jetties, barracks, and anti-aircraft defences. It was to mirror the PLUTO pumping station in the south-west – but here, of course, was made up only of canvas, scaffolding, fibreboards, and sections of old piping recycled from bomb-sites in London. When completed, King George VI was photographed visiting the site, which was then reported in the papers. All of this was recounted to Berlin by the double agents who had been sent by Germany and ‘turned’ by MI5 (see MHM 138, Feb/Mar 2024). The Abwehr thus rapidly gathered a mass of information about depots of vehicles and vast groups of men assembling in south-east England.
A natural showman
To convince German Intelligence that such a large force existed, FUSAG also had to create the sort of radio traffic that this many troops would generate, knowing that it would be picked up by German radio listening stations. Signallers therefore started sending a vast number of messages supposedly from Army to Corps, from Corps to Divisions, from Divisions to Brigades, and vice versa. In addition to training instructions about preparing for amphibious operations, they would include gossip about upcoming courts martial and new officer appointments, as would have been the case in reality.
One final piece was needed to give FUSAG the credibility it needed. A general who would convince the Germans he could lead a major invasion force had to be appointed commander. General George S Patton fitted the bill perfectly. The Germans thought the 59-year-old American was one of the best generals the Allies had to offer, and easily accepted he would be appointed to command a major amphibious operation. Patton was at the time still in disgrace after a series of incidents in Sicily, where he had slapped and abused men in field hospitals suffering from war trauma. Eisenhower had considered sending him home – but had kept him on because he respected his aggressive style of leadership and hoped to find a future role for him. In late April 1944, Patton took command of FUSAG. Always immaculately attired in a crisply laundered uniform, with knee-length cavalry boots, a pistol on his belt, and proudly displaying his general’s three stars, Patton travelled around south-east England giving bullish speeches to the men of his imaginary army. Everywhere he went, press and photographers followed him. And his presence was discreetly revealed in the press without publicly admitting his role, as this would of course have been kept secret if real. Patton was a natural showman, and played the part of commander of an Army Group with vigour and conviction.
The vital role of FUSAG continued even after D-Day had taken place and the Allies had landed in Normandy. The German Fifteenth Army, with 19 infantry and two armoured divisions, had to be kept in the Pas de Calais, away from the fighting front. Two of the double agents now working for MI5, Juan Pujol García (codenamed ‘Garbo’) and Roman Czerniawski (‘Brutus’), now came to the fore. They continued to send messages to the Abwehr that Normandy was just a ruse and that the major invasion was still to come in the Pas de Calais. Some of these messages got up to the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), the high command of the armed forces, and several were read by Hitler himself, who became convinced that a second invasion was coming. All of this was only possible, of course, because for months the Allied deceivers had successfully been building up the size of FUSAG, so that it seemed to be an Army Group of sufficient numbers to mount a major assault against a well-defended coastline, with enough tanks and landing craft available, and a commander of sufficient ability to mount such an operation. For several weeks after the 6 June landings, right up to the end of July, the Fifteenth Army largely remained stationed along the Pas de Calais, waiting for an assault that never came. Meanwhile, 200 miles away in Normandy, the decisive battles of the war were taking place.
What if…?
It is one of the biggest ‘what ifs’ of the war – but had these German divisions been sent to Normandy, they would at the very least have made the battle to break out from the beaches more difficult. At worst, they might have thrown the Allies back into the sea. Michael Howard, the official historian of strategic deception in the Second World War, summed it up when he wrote that Operation Fortitude was ‘the most complex and successful deception operation in the entire history of war’.
Taylor Downing’s new book The Army that Never Was – D-Day and the Great Deception is published in hardback on 23 May (Icon Books, £25)
All images: Wikimedia Commons, unless otherwise stated.
You can read the second part, Hitler’s Fortress Europe: Planning for defeat? by Graham Goodlad here
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