The British made sure that they retained executive control over the crucial Channel-crossing and landing part of OVERLORD, the actual D-Day invasion, code-named NEPTUNE. Allied air forces and navies were both under British control. The temporary commander of all the Allied ground forces for NEPTUNE was Montgomery. He and his chief of staff Freddie de Guingand set up their own deception staff, called G (R), modelled on Clarke’s ‘A’ force which had helped Eighth Army so much in the desert. The man in charge of this was David Strangeways, the ‘A’ Force Tactical HQ commander who had led the successful surprise raid into Tunis to seize German intelligence materials, and who was probably Clarke’s best pupil for ingenuity and sharpness.
The first thing Monty did was tear up the NEPTUNE plan that COSSAC had prepared. He thought the Normandy front should be doubled to fifty miles, and preceded by an assault from the sky by three airborne divisions, not three brigades. In the first wave of sea landings, he wanted not three but five divisions on five separate beaches, supported by two more divisions behind. If he did not get this, he said they could find another commander. Eisenhower concurred, but getting what Monty wanted meant a massive increase in ships and equipment, including another thousand landing craft to add to the three thousand-odd already prepared for.
Feldmarschall Erwin Rommel, charged by Hitler with defending the coast of France at the end of 1943, knew that his best chance was to smash the Allied attacks on the beaches, and that the first day would be ‘the longest day’. From desert warfare experience, he was a great believer in anti-vehicle and anti-personnel mines. As well as making a ‘Devil’s Garden’ of obstacles at different tidelines along the beaches, he wanted to mine, wire and fortify the entire coastal strip into a ‘zone of death’ five or six miles deep. To defend the Atlantic Wall, he dreamed of sowing 200 million landmines along the entire coast of France, although he never achieved it. ‘Up to the 20th May 1944,’ says the War Diary of German Army Group B, ‘4,193,167 mines were laid on the Channel coast, 2,672,000 of them on Rommel’s initiative, and most of them after the end of March.’ He also planned to fill all potential landing fields with patterns of ten-foot-high wooden stakes that would rip flimsy gliders apart. Many of the stakes were to be wired to artillery shells whose detonation would cause further carnage.
The Allied intelligence reconnaissance for the D-Day landings was high, wide and deep. Thousands of mapping photos were taken from different angles in the air. Low-level missions along the beaches to photograph the arrays of obstacles the Germans were building were known as ‘dicing’ missions, as in ‘dicing with death’. They were taken so close that you can see individual engineers running for cover, and count their footsteps in the sand. Things seen from the air were sometimes investigated by divers from the sea, and commando raids brought back prisoners and samples of barbed wire and metal defences. Geologists and oceanographers were consulted and recruited. Following an appeal on the BBC wireless in 1942, the great British public had sent in over ten million of their pre-war French beach ‘holiday snaps’. These Brownie Box-photos and picture post-cards were sorted, graded, assembled and scrutinised for tiny details of Normandy.
Through General de Gaulle’s Free French Intelligence service, le Deuxième Bureau, run by ‘Colonel Passy’ or André Dewavrin, the French resistance was mobilised to report on every detail of the German construction of their defences. The Centurie network, radiating out of Caen, eventually had 1,500 agents noting every gun emplacement and mine field, every concrete caisson and fifteen-foot-deep anti-tank trench. One house painter in the resistance managed to purloin a blueprint of the defences from the office of the Organisation Todt that were building them.
The Allies agreed to cross the Channel as two armies, one British, one American, fighting side by side, but not mixed together. The British (including the Canadians) would go in on the left, to SWORD, JUNO, and GOLD beaches, preceded by the paratroopers of the 6th British Airborne Division. The US First Army would go in on the right, to OMAHA and UTAH beaches, preceded by the paratroopers of the US 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions.
Co-ordinating the effort required awesome organisation and logistics. The Allies had to marshal and maintain over 2 million men, 11,000 aircraft, and 7,000 ships in England. The prodigious industrial output to meet their requirements had to be matched by efficient distribution. The engineering work behind the landings was staggering, and thousands of construction workers were recruited to work night and day. The Petroleum Warfare Department pioneered PLUTO (Pipeline Under The Ocean), ready to pump millions of gallons of petrol across to the invaders. To get the astonishing volume of men, equipment and supplies ashore in north-western France, Churchill’s pet project, the technologically ingenious ‘Mulberry’ floating harbours, were essential. Two were to be constructed off Normandy. Over a hundred enormous 6,000-ton reinforced concrete caissons called ‘Phoenixes’ (each 60 feet high, 60 feet wide and 200 feet long) would be towed across the Channel from Selsey Bill and Dungeness by some of the fleet of 132 tugs and then filled with sand from ‘Leviathans’ so they sank to form a breakwater in the Bay of the Seine. Outside this artificial reef was a floating line of ‘Bombardons’ towed from Poole and Southampton to calm the waves, and inside, in shallower water, a line of ‘Gooseberries’, formed from two dozen redundant merchant navy vessels, Liberty ships and one old dreadnought that were scuttled and sunk where needed. In the calmer waters within the two-square-mile Mulberry harbour, strong Lobnitz or ‘Spud’ pier heads were sunk deep into the sand which allowed long bridges or floating roadways to the shore, known as ‘Whales’, to float up and down with the tides. The menagerie of code-names was augmented by power-driven pontoons called ‘Rhinos’ and amphibious vehicles known as ‘Ducks’.
Further amazing engines onshore also sprang from Churchill’s ‘inflammable fancy’: armoured tank bulldozers and ploughs, special fat-cannoned Churchill tanks for blasting blockhouses, other ‘Crocodile’ Churchill tanks that could squirt petrol and latex flames over a hundred yards, great machines for laying fascines across mud or barbed wire, or for thrashing their way with flailing chains clear through exploding mine fields. These devices came from Churchill’s direct encouragement and protection of a brilliant maverick, Major General Sir Percy Hobart of 79th Armoured Brigade, and were collectively known as ‘Hobart’s Funnies’.
The deception plan for NEPTUNE, the cross-Channel attack, was called Plan FORTITUDE, and its object was ‘to induce the enemy to make faulty dispositions in North-West Europe’. FORTITUDE NORTH aimed to keep Hitler worrying about Scandinavia, and the danger to Germany posed by an Allied attack on Norway and Denmark. Dummy wireless traffic and bogus information from double agents indicated that the (notional) British Fourth Army in Scotland, supported by American Rangers from Iceland, was going to attack Stavanger and Narvik and advance on Oslo. British deceivers also worked hard on the neutral Swedes. The commander-in-chief of the Swedish Air Force was asked for ‘humanitarian’ assistance in the event of an Allied invasion of Norway. As his office was being bugged by the pro-Nazi chief of Swedish police, this information went straight to Berlin. When Hitler read the transcript he ordered two more divisions to reinforce the ten already in Norway. Thus 30,000 more soldiers were diverted away from France.
Operation FORTITUDE SOUTH, developed by David Strangeways, aimed in the first instance to convince the Germans that there was another mighty force in Britain, as well as Montgomery’s (real) 21st Army Group: this was the First United States Army Group, or FUSAG, stationed in the south-east of England, opposite the Pas de Calais, the quick route to Germany via Antwerp and Brussels. FUSAG was, of course, notional, a ghost army created and sustained by the deception plan QUICKSILVER. It had its own insignia, a black Roman numeral I on a blue background inside a red and white pentagon, and it was supposed to comprise the Canadian First and the US Third Armies. Most importantly for the story, it was apparently commanded by the profanely theatrical, ivory-handled-pistol-packing US General George S. Patt
on Jr, ‘Old Blood-and-Guts’ himself, from a headquarters at Wentworth, near Ascot. (‘One must be an actor,’ Patton once wrote about overcoming ever-present fear.) Hitler thought that Patton – who had got into trouble for slapping a shell-shocked soldier in Sicily – was easily the Americans’ best man, because he was ruthless. Of course he would be leading the Allied fightback.
From 24 April 1944 onwards, the eleven divisions of FUSAG were brought to life by dummy radio traffic to hoodwink the German ‘Y’ or wireless-eavesdropping service. The radio deceivers went on genuine army exercises where they recorded all the radio voice traffic, learned accurate technical terms and questioned people about their activities before writing their own scripts, which they got Allied servicemen in Kent to read out. They tried not to make it sound too polished, because in real life people often did not hear and asked for repeats. For Morse work they got American radio operators of 3103 Signals Service Battalion who had been in Sicily and North Africa, and whose ‘fist’ or way of signalling the German listeners might recognise. There was also physical camouflage work, particularly the planting of scores of dummy landing craft – known as ‘big bobs’ – at Great Yarmouth, Lowestoft, and on the East Anglian rivers Deben and Orwell, for German aerial reconnaissance planes to spot. The dummy landing craft weighed about six tons, were built out of scaffolding pipes and canvas and floated on 55-gallon oil-drums welded together. They were painted and stained to look old, and were ‘serviced’ by crews who hung out washing, flew ensigns, sent up smoke signals and moved around in small boats. The idea was to keep the Germans looking eastwards; the Pas de Calais had to remain the invasion site uppermost in their minds, with the Fifteenth Army there ready to repel an invasion, and Seventh Army in Normandy less on its guard.
Great activity, using lighting at night, was simulated at Dover and Folkestone, where the 2nd Canadian Corps and the US VIII Corps were notionally based. The architect Basil Spence oversaw the building of a fake oil terminal with pipelines, storage tanks and jetties. It was solemnly inspected by King George VI and General Montgomery among other notables, and duly reported in the press – because since early March 1944, Royal visits had been coordinated with the deception planners.
It all worked: a German Oberkommando der Wehrmacht intelligence map, captured later in Italy, of what they believed to be the British Order of Battle on 15 May 1944, reflected their belief that most Allied forces were stationed in the east of the UK. The (mostly imaginary) units the map showed had been carefully built up over the last fifteen months through a mass of detail sent to the Abwehr by their trusted spies in England, who of course were actually MI5-controlled double agents. The three most important were a Pole, Roman Garby-Czerniawski, code-named BRUTUS, reporting to Paris, a German, Wulf Dietrich Schmidt, code-named tate, reporting to Hamburg, and our Spanish spy, Juan Pujol García, code-named GARBO, now sending his reports directly by coded wireless message to the Abwehr Kriegsorganisation in Madrid.
With everything to play for, the battle for morale became all-important. Sefton Delmer’s ‘black’ radio station, Soldatensender Calais, now broadcast loud and clear, and by early 1944 PWE ‘black’ and BBC ‘white’ broadcasting were working well together in their different spheres, the distortions of ‘black’ weaving a smoke of lies around the ‘white’ buttresses of truth. Delmer was working closely with PWE, the BBC, Naval Intelligence and LCS, and had an office in Bush House. Here men and women from the European resistance, Polish, Danish, Norwegian, French and Dutch, came to see him, and he helped them with forged notices, posters, proclamations and identity papers. Soldatensender Calais played its part in operation OVERLORD, helping to soften up the morale of German troops defending the Atlantic Wall, encouraging slacking by saying, ‘Units which show themselves smart and efficient are drafted to the Eastern Front. Promotion in France is a sure way to death in Russia.’ Delmer’s cheery-toned but deeply depressing black radio broadcasts abraded German soldiers’ confidence by saying that Russian successes were due to their being supplied with (imaginary) American ‘miracle weapons’ like the new ‘phosphorus shells’, which could destroy reinforced concrete and pierce any armour.
In May 1944, the month before D-Day, Delmer launched a daily newspaper for the German troops named Nachrichten für die Truppen or ‘News for the Troops’. It was a joint British–American venture. SHAEF gave him a team of editors and news writers to command, and the paper ran for 345 editions, using rewritten radio material. Two million copies a day were dropped by American bombers across France, Belgium and Germany, with pieces about German difficulties fighting an air war without fuel, or detailing ‘impossible’ political interference with the army leaders’ decisions. Delmer, the lifelong newspaperman, later said that this was the wartime enterprise of which he was proudest.
Meanwhile, Juan Pujol’s role as ARABEL, the Abwehr agent, was also moving steadily towards its climax. He was by now the chief spy in an extensive (and entirely fictional) network code-named ALARIC. He had not only invented, for his Abwehr spymasters, four supposedly important contacts providing him with information, he had also recruited seven equally imaginary sub-agents who in turn got military information from some fifteen notional sources. So Agent THREE in Glasgow, the Venezuelan student called Carlos (‘recruited’ or invented while Pujol was still in Lisbon), supposedly knew a drunken NCO in the RAF, a British infantry officer and a Communist Greek seaman who had deserted but who wanted to help the Russians open the Second Front. Agent FOUR, a Gibraltarian NAAFI waiter based in Kent, got much information about the arms depot and underground railway in the imaginary ‘Chislehurst caves’ from a guard stationed there, and many details about FUSAG (including gossip about quarrels between US & UK Commanders) from an American NCO based in London. Agent SEVEN, an ex-seaman in Swansea, was particularly active, with sub-agents in Exeter and Harwich, and also apparently knew a Wren in Ceylon, a soldier in the 9th Armoured Division, an Indian fanatic, and the leader and ‘brothers’ of the Aryan World Order Movement, a group of extreme Welsh Nationalists.
These colourful imaginary agents and sub-agents were spread across the country, and Pujol sent their ‘information’ on by radio. From 1 January to 6 June 1944, he sent 500 wireless messages from London to Madrid, putting over the deceptions that SHAEF wanted. From Madrid, ARABEL’S reports went to Oberkommando der Wehrmacht and to Fremde Heeres West, the German Intelligence department dealing with the Allied armies in the west. The false information made them calculate the number of divisions in the UK as seventy-seven, overestimating them by 50 per cent. The whole fantastic spider’s web of inventions was not just the work of the writing partners Pujol and Tomás Harris. They were advised by David Strangeways and LCS, and behind them, by the presiding genius of ‘A’ Force, Dudley Clarke.
Now Pujol’s role as GARBO went up a notch. Permission was granted to let ARABEL break the news of the Normandy landings, to give him even greater credibility with the Abwehr. So, just before D-Day, Pujol’s imaginary Agent FOUR apparently broke out of a high-security army camp at Hiltingbury together with two American deserters and brought ARABEL the news that the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division, having been issued with 24-hour ration packs and vomit bags, had left the camp. This information was transmitted eight minutes after those very Canadians landed on JUNO beach, just before 8 o’clock on the morning of 6 June 1944. It was too late for the Germans to do any more to prepare for the landings, but Pujol retained his status as the Abwehr’s top man in Britain.
With hindsight, the Bailey bridge of history seems solid, with its incidents all bolted together in due order. But before the event, things are very different. On the eve of D-Day, the future was blank, unclear. Nothing was inevitable; everything was at hazard. Eisenhower knew it was a gamble he could lose, and handwrote the gloomy message he would have to give if the landings failed.
Winston Churchill was feeling his responsibilities, and his age. He had been Prime Minister for four long years, actively running a country that was fighting for
its life in the greatest conflict the world had ever known. His mind went back to the past, to the ‘hecatombs’ of WW1 which he had survived but thousands and thousands had not. He worried about the D-Day landings too, telling an American visitor, ‘It is not because I can’t take casualties, it is because I am afraid what those casualties will be.’ At the back of his mind was Gallipoli, the amphibious landing that wrecked his political career nearly thirty years before. Things had also gone wrong in the landings at Narvik, at Dieppe, and at Anzio in Italy where it had taken four months for 125,000 men to break out from the trap of the beachhead. What would happen in Normandy? Six months short of his seventieth birthday, Churchill the warhorse now determined to be there, watching the D-Day landings from a bombarding ship. King George VI said he would do the same. This caused consternation. What if Monarch and Prime Minister were to be killed? Both men were finally dissuaded. On the night of Monday, 5 June, Churchill dined with his wife and then spent time in the Map Room, glaring at the dispositions. Before going to bed, he said to Clementine, ‘Do you realise that when you wake up in the morning 20,000 men may have been killed?’
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