I’ve written about this before — you can check this blog’s archives — but it was mostly about decoy airfields and other “make-believe” facilities. But I thought this hoax deserved a little more explanation. I’ve always thought it was an interesting story and it bears repeating in a little more detail…..
The bottom line is that behind D-Day’s success was one of the most sophisticated deception schemes ever devised. Here’s the way it happened….
Hitler knew the Allies were planning an invasion. And he was sure they’d cross the English Channel at thePas de Calais (what the British call the Strait of Dover) to get to France, because it’s the shortest distance between Great Britain and the continent. But such a landing would put the troops smack dab in front of the strongest section of Hitler’s “Atlantic Wall” — a virtual suicide mission. So the allies chose Normandy for the landings instead.
To mislead the Germans, General Dwight D. Eisenhower and his staff created a mythical 1st Army Group and based it in Britain near Dover. Eisenhower assigned George S. Patton, the American general the Germans most respected, to command this army — that didn’t exist.
To convince the Germans that this “army” was preparing for invasion, Eisenhower’s staff positioned inflatable tanks, balsa wood bombers, and canvas landing craft where the Luftwaffe could photograph them during aerial reconnaissance. Radio operators were assigned to generate routine radio traffic, and bogus intelligence reports and documents were “lost” and fell into the hands of the Germans. Local newspapers in the towns where the “army” was stationed even carried false marriage and death notices.
One elaborate scheme included National Geographic magazine. The U.S. Army prepared a color spread depicting a variety of 1st Army Group insignias — shoulder patches and the like. When the magazine was published, they allowed some issues to be distributed, but then halted the printing, removed the bogus insignias, and released a revised version of the magazine.
The Allies continuously drew attention to the Channel coast in the are of the supposed landing. During the weeks before the invasion, Allied airmen dropped more bombs on that area than anywhere else in France. Naval units conducted longer than expected maneuvers up and down the coast.
On the night of the Normandy invasion, Allied planes dropped silver foil on the “landing site” which German radar picked up as an invasion fleet crossing the channel narrows. At the same time, a radar blackout disguised the real movement toward Normandy. All this was designed to convince Berlin that it needed to prepare for an amphibious assault on Calais. By the time the invasion finally began, Hitler and his generals had been so thoroughly deceived that they believed the Normandy operation was a diversion. Instead of moving their reserve units to stop the Allies from reaching the beachheads, they continued to watch what they thought would be the main attack at, Calais, on the English Channel coast. By the time the Germans realized they’s been deceived, it was too late — the Allied troops had breached the Atlantic Wall and were headed toward Paris.
So the “Phantom Army” achieved its objective — without ever firing a shot.
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