12th March – 20th May 1943 – Europe – A Bodyguard of Lies
The build-up of men and material in Southern England during the spring of 1943 was the necessary precursor to the cross channel invasion and despite the scale of the forces being accumulated no one in charge of the planning was in any doubt that if the Germans could bring the full weight of the forces available in the west against Normandy then at the very least a successful landing would be a far costlier affair, at worst the Allies might be repelled altogether, with incalculable consequences for the course of the war. Such a defeat still would not lead to outright Nazi victory, but it could well persuade Stalin that a separate peace was an acceptable option or force the Western Allies to consider their own deal with the devil in Berlin. The massive intelligence and counter-intelligence operations conducted to ensure this did not happen have been mentioned in passing but given their scale and importance it is worth discussing them in greater detail [1].
The overall codename for the Allied intelligence efforts around D—Day was Operation Fortitude, which was by the spring of 1943 broken down into four major sub-groups, Fortitude North, Fortitude South, Fortitude Med, and Fortitude Aegean. North was focused on fostering the idea that the Allies were seriously contemplating a landing in Norway and made extensive use of radio traffic from non-existent army units and the construction of what appeared to be new airstrips and base facilities in Scotland that Luftwaffe aerial reconnaissance were occasionally permitted to photograph. As with all the best deception plans Fortitude North played into the expectations and fears of the enemy. Hitler was deeply afraid that the Allies would target Norway and Narvik in particular to cut the vital flow of Iron ore from Sweden, without which the German steel industry would be crippled, in effect a repeat of the plan that had come close to succeeding in 1940. The success of Fortitude North meant that not only were requests to reduce the large garrison force in Norway to release troops for other duties rejected by Hitler but he insisted that the garrison be reinforced, and extensive new fortifications built. The garrison in Denmark was also maintained at full strength and would remain stationed in the country well after the Allies were already ashore, meaning they made no contribution whatsoever to the defence of Western Europe or the Reich itself [2].
If Hitler was obsessed with a threat to Norway, then von Kleist and the General Staff were just as focused on the prospect of a larger scale repeat of the Dieppe Raid, with Calais or Cherbourg being considered the most likely targets for a full-scale Allied assault against the Atlantic Coast and reinforcing this belief was the purview of Fortitude South. This naturally used the same tactics of false radio traffic and false bases but on a far larger scale than Fortitude North. These bases were built close to Dover and the shortest route across the English Channel from Calais and were graced with wooden mock-ups of aircraft and even inflatable tanks, all convincing enough when seen from the cockpit of a fast-moving reconnaissance aircraft. As part of this deception the Allies created AUSAG, the Advance United States Army Group, with a detailed order of battle that documents captured later proved that the Abwehr had laid out in intricate detail for the General Staff. One tricky issue for Fortitude South was that the obvious and most likely commander for AUSAG was General Patton. To draw attention away from Patton a rumour was spread that he was in disgrace because of some unfortunate lapse of judgment carried out in full view of the press. So effective was this rumour that Patton had to bite his tongue when offered sympathy or assistance over his predicament, though he apparently found the episode fairly amusing in later years [3].
Fortitude South did not simply concentrate on Calais, it also encompassed another of Hitler’s strategic obsessions, the Channel Islands. The only part of the British Isles to be occupied by Nazi Germany has supplied many disconcerting images of Wehrmacht troops interacting with the locals, giving some flavour of what might have been if Operation Sealion had ever been successfully carried out. Hitler was convinced that given the humiliation suffered by the British in abandoning the islands and allowing them to be occupied they would seek to take them back as soon as they could. This had led to a program of fortification building on Jersey and Guernsey that bore no relation to their real strategic value. The British had concluded in 1940 that the Channel Islands were too easily isolated and they had no intention of trying to retake them when doing so would get them no closer to their goal of driving the Germans out of Western Europe and taking the war into Germany itself, they would still have to cross the Channel after all and the islands would make a poor staging area. As in so many other places the fortification were built on the backs of slave labour, starved, and worked to death in the construction of massive works of concrete and steel that still litter the islands decades later [4].
The deception operations for Fortitude Med and Fortitude Aegean faced an added complication when it came to disguising troop movements as they had to cover the fact that entire divisions were being withdrawn, either as part of Millennium or for service in South East Asia whereas the Fortitude operations based in the UK had the slightly simpler task of misdirecting the Germans as to where the troops massing in Britain were to be unleashed. In North Africa and the Middle East the planners fell back on the old standard of having units moving openly and visibly in one direction by day, while quietly moving in the opposite direction by night. In the case of Fortitude South this meant convoys arriving in Alexandria and Tunis and unloading by day, only to be reloaded by night and columns of trucks and tanks driving the same loop of roads multiple times while radio traffic levels were gradually increased. These operations also made use of yet more dummy vehicles to deceive aerial reconnaissance. Perhaps more than any of the other Fortitude operations those in the Mediterranean relied on the biases of the German high command for their success. Information certainly reached Berlin pointing to the existence of the fake convoys, but it was this information that was dismissed as a deception by a General Staff all too willing to believe that the British would not feel secure in the Mediterranean until they had removed Italy from the war. Indeed, there were still those in London agitating for an invasion of Italy after Millennium had pinned down German forces in the west as an alternative to the proposed follow up landings in the south of France. Churchill did not let go of his hobby horse until the Autumn of 1943.
In some ways Fortitude Aegean had the easiest time of the deception plans because even as the British were working to persuade the Axis that an attack on Greek territory there was an actual operation in the works, though this had little to do with Churchill’s grand ambitions. Fortunately the plan for Operation Jasper was able to work in tandem with Fortitude Aegean to ensure it retained the element of surprise and its execution helped to persuade the Axis of the veracity of the misinformation being passed to them [5].
Underpinning all these deception efforts was the information being relayed to the Abwehr by their network of agents in Britain, a network in fact being run by MI5. The terrible performance of the Abwehr operations in Britain have been advanced as evidence of where the true sympathies of Admiral Canaris, head of the Abwehr, really lay. He was no supporter of Hitler and the Nazi regime but even so there are rather more mundane explanations for the subversion of Abwehr operations by the British than sabotage by Canaris and much of the unravelling of the German network can be traced back to the invasion scare of 1940. While fear of Fifth Columnists and German paratroopers led to any number of luckless innocents being harassed and arrested it also made life all but impossible for the genuine agents Germany attempted to deliver to Britain, especially as their language skills and local knowledge fell far short of the standard required to go unnoticed. Once arrested these Abwehr agents were offered a simple choice, be shot as a spy or work for the British, a large number chose the latter and as further agents were dispatched with orders to contact their predecessors they were also scooped up and either imprisoned or turned [6].
Not every Abwehr agent had to be coerced into co-operation, perhaps the most famous example of this was Eddie Chapman. A petty criminal who had been locked up for several criminal offenses on Jersey when the Channel Islands were occupied Chapman volunteered to work for the Germans and after some reluctance he was accepted by the Abwehr, trained, and parachuted into Britain, where he promptly turned himself into the authorities and was recruited by MI5 and eventually sent back to occupied Europe. He was a valuable operative for the British while being highly regarded by the Germans also, to the extent that he was even awarded with the Iron Cross for his efforts. His codename of Agent Zigzag reflected the complexity of the operations he was involved in but also suggested that MI5 was never entirely certain where his loyalties lay.
Perhaps the most extraordinary agent of the war was Juan Pujol Garcia, who started out not as an MI5 or Abwehr operative but as independent motivated by little more than his detestation of the Nazis. Pujol was a Spaniard and offered his services to the British as an agent, only to be rejected. Undeterred he created his own fictious identity as an ardently pro-Nazi Spanish official and began passing false information, much of which was based on guesswork about Britain and its culture that was almost hilariously inaccurate. Nonetheless he became a trusted agent and when the British became aware of his operations MI6 finally brought him into the fold and gave him the codename Agent Garbo. Agent Garbo became the centre of a cottage industry of fictitious agent and informants who became the source of a wealth of false information passed to the Germans and Pujol played a major role in reinforcing the German belief that the Pas de Calais was the main allied target. He achieved a unique distinction in that he was awarded both an Iron Cross and the MBE, the Germans never realized that their master spy spent the entire war deceiving them [7].
Allied plans depended on more than just the flow of false information to the Germans but the information flowing from the Germans to their agents. The questions they were asked to answer about Allied preparations revealed their own preoccupations and the ULTRA decrypts revealed much about how effective the false information being sent to the Germans was. Importantly by 1943 the Allies were also making strides in breaking the Lorenz cipher. Used at the highest levels of the Nazi regime this was a far more complex system than Enigma, nonetheless through a combination of human error on the part of German users and the ingenuity of the code breakers they were able to not only read the code but mechanize the decryption process, culminating in the creation of one of the earliest digital computers Colossus at the end of 1943, though this came too late to warn the Allies of the Germans final gamble in the west [8].
Between Fortitude and ULTRA the British ‘had the Germans coming and going’ and this massive advantage in intelligence operations was vital to prospects of success on D-Day, proving so successful that some in the German high command still hesitated to fully commit the available reserves to Normandy for fear it was simply a diversion from the ‘real’ invasion [9].
[1] It is massive topic and this just going to be an overview of the alt version.
[2] Norway was a much closer run thing here than IOTL, so Hitler’s paranoia is worse, if possible.
[3] So what did happen with Patton IOTL is just a cover story here, and the fake army is AUSAG rather than FUSAG.
[4] of course these ludicrous structures are still to be found all across Europe since destroying them would be simply too expensive and/or dangerous.
[5] And Operation Jasper will have its own updates soon.
[6] I honestly think that whoever was running the Abwehr the British network was doomed to failure with a poor pool of potential agents and a hostile suspicious population.
[7] It would have been criminal to let these two be butterflied away.
[8] Which will also of course have its own updates in due course.
[9] And naturally there are a lot more updates on Millennium to come.
