Ike's Spies (14 page)

The whole plan had to be internally consistent, a unified and believable operation. The Allies could hardly hope to make the Germans believe that the assault was not coming in 1944—all the world knew that it was—or that it would come ashore far from the actual site, because it was a relatively simple matter for German intelligence to figure out the maximum distance at which fighter airplane cover could be supplied, and thus define the limits of possible invasion sites. Further, the Germans had good military sense and, for a variety of fairly obvious reasons, they knew that the attack would come somewhere between the Cotentin Peninsula and Dunkirk.

Ike had long ago selected Normandy as the site. Back in 1942, before the decision to invade North Africa had been made, Eisenhower had been planning a cross-Channel attack for 1943. At that time he chose Normandy as the target for numerous reasons—the proximity of the port of Cherbourg for unloading purposes, the narrowness of the Cotentin Peninsula, the nature of the terrain, and the access to the major road network at Caen—but the major factor had been surprise. For all Normandy's advantages, the Pas de Calais had even more. It seemed the obvious target—it was close to Antwerp, Europe's best port, and closer to Germany and to the British home base, and inland the terrain was good—but precisely because it was so obvious, the Germans had their strongest defenses there. That eliminated the Pas de Calais as a target, as far as Ike was concerned, a decision that remained in force
when he took command of the cross-Channel operation again in January 1944.

The aim of
OVERLORD
was to get ashore and stay. Once a solid beachhead was established, the war was as good as won because American productivity would overwhelm the Germans. But landing craft, always short because they were so badly needed in the Pacific as well as in the Atlantic Theater, were sufficient to lift only five divisions to France on D-Day. The follow-up capacity was also limited, painfully so.

To get ashore, Ike absolutely had to fool the Germans into believing that he was landing somewhere other than Normandy; to stay ashore, he needed to fool them into believing that
OVERLORD
was a feint. Otherwise, the Germans would draw on their nearly ten-to-one manpower and armored superiority in France to mount a counterattack of such proportions as surely to drive the Allies back into the sea whence they came. The air forces could help keep the Germans away from Normandy by blowing up bridges and railroad facilities, but by themselves the Allied planes could not keep panzer divisions immobilized. Only a successful deception could do that.

Fooling the Germans would not be easy—the Germans themselves were experts at deception. At the beginning of 1942 they had mounted one of the more elaborate and successful operations of World War II, Operation Kreml. Its objective was to make the Russians think that the main German offensive for 1942 would take place on the Moscow front, not at Stalingrad. As Earl Ziemke writes, Kreml “was a paper operation, an out-and-out deception, but it had the substance to make it a masterpiece of that highly speculative form of military art.” To make it appear real, the German High Command did not inform division commanders and their staffs that it was a phony, depending on the skill of Soviet intelligence officers to pick up hints and find the pieces to fit together into a picture. They used false radio traffic to manufacture dummy armies that supposedly threatened Moscow.

The Germans were successful, probably even more successful than they themselves realized, in an operation that in most of its essentials was similar to
FORTITUDE
(code name for the
OVERLORD
deception plan). In fact, Kreml was exactly like
FORTITUDE
in one especially crucial aspect—both aimed to make the enemy believe the attack would come at the most logical spot. That is, in the
spring of 1942, Moscow was a more sensible target than Stalingrad, just as in 1944 the Pas de Calais was a more sensible target than Normandy.
⁷

The Pas de Calais was the obvious choice for the false target for Normandy because the Germans were already inclined to believe that it would be the landing site. The task was to reinforce that belief, strengthen it, harden it until it became a dogma with both Hitler and the German General Staff. Geography reinforced Ike's choice of Normandy, with the Pas de Calais as the feint, because Hitler would not keep troops in Normandy following major landings at the Pas de Calais for fear of their being cut off from Germany. But he might be persuaded to keep troops in the Pas de Calais after a landing in Normandy, for they would still be between the Allied forces and Germany.

The execution of
FORTITUDE
involved thousands of men and women in dozens of distinct tasks and roles,
FORTITUDE
included dummy armies, fake radio traffic, false spy reports, and elaborate security precautions. It was a joint venture, with British and American officers working together in complete harmony. In terms of the time, resources, and energy devoted to it,
FORTITUDE
was unique in the history of warfare—never before had any commander gone to such lengths or expense to deceive his enemy.

The British and American governments had given Ike tremendous resources to draw upon. This vast force needed a single guiding head. Someone had to give it direction; someone had to take all the information gathered, make sense of it, and impose order on it; someone had to maintain a grip on all the various acts of subterfuge going on at once; someone had to decide; someone had to take the responsibility.

It all came down to Eisenhower. This put enormous pressure on him, pressure that increased geometrically with each passing day. “Ike looks worn and tired,” Butcher noted on May 12. “The strain is telling on him. He looks older now than at any time since I have been with him.”
⁸

Under the weight of his responsibilities, the number of cigarettes he smoked went up, to an average of eighty Camels daily while his hours of sleep went down, to an average of not much more than four hours per night. But Ike could take it.

He enjoyed attacking the problems posed by
FORTITUDE
. “I like all this,” he scribbled along the margin of one set of proposals for
deception.
⁹
Obviously he did not himself initiate the specific programs, but he had to approve them all, make sure they were coordinated, and order the time of execution.

General Harold R. Bull, head of the Operations Division (G-3) at
SHAEF
, exercised day-to-day control of the deception plan. He worked closely with the
LCS
and its American counterpart, the Joint Security Control (
JSC
).
LCS
and
JSC
were the organizations responsible to Ike's bosses, the Combined Chiefs, for devising and coordinating strategic cover and deception schemes. The one they came up with for
OVERLORD
was complex, wide-ranging, and dangerously ambitious.

Operation
FORTITUDE
, as Ike approved it, was designed to make the Germans think that the invasion would begin with an attack on southern Norway, launched from Scottish ports in mid-July, with the main assault coming later against the Pas de Calais. The attack on Norway would be the responsibility of a nonexistent British “Fourth Army,” while the wholly imaginary First United States Army Group (
FUSAG
) would make the landings at the Pas de Calais. There were other elements to
FORTITUDE
, designed to pose threats to the Biscay coast and the Marseilles region, to keep Hitler worried about possible landings in the Balkans, and in general to distract German attention away from Normandy, but Norway and the Pas de Calais were the big operations.

FORTITUDE
built on German preconceptions. Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, commanding German forces in the West, agreed with Hitler that the invasion would come “across the narrower part of the Channel,” for such obvious reasons as shorter distance, which would reduce ships' and planes' transit time, closeness to the Ruhr and the Rhine, the heart of the German industrial system, and because the V-1 missile-launching sites were located near the Pas de Calais. Rundstedt felt that the Allies might make diversionary landings elsewhere, but the Pas de Calais was the certain site of the main attack.
¹⁰

To get the Germans to look north, toward Norway, instead of south, toward Normandy, for the diversionary attack, the Allies had first of all to convince their enemies that they had sufficient strength to carry out such a diversion. The task was doubly difficult because of Ike's acute shortage of landing craft—it was touch and go as to whether there would be enough lift capacity to carry five divisions ashore at Normandy alone. Ike had been forced to put the
target date for
OVERLORD
back from early May to early June, in order to have another month's production of landing craft on hand for the assault, and the Combined Chiefs had been forced to cancel a simultaneous landing in the South of France because there were no landing craft available. Ike, in short, had neither the men nor the landing craft to make a diversion.

To make the Germans believe the opposite, the Allies had to create fictitious divisions, on a grand scale. This was done chiefly by radio signals. There is a delicious irony here. The Germans thought that with Enigma they had the best encoding machine for radio signals in the world. They also believed that they were the best in intercepting and decoding the enemies' signals. They were right about both conceits, but drew the wrong conclusions. As much as any other factor, these two beliefs caused the German defeat.

The British Fourth Army, scheduled to invade Norway in mid-July, existed only on the airwaves, but that did not mean that its creation was a simple matter of sending out a few random messages. The Allies had to fill the air with an exact duplicate of the real wireless traffic that accompanied the assembly of an army, some of it in cipher, some in the clear. Colonel R. M. MacLeod was in command of the operation. He was told in his briefing, “The Germans are damn good at interception and radio-location. They'll have your headquarters pinpointed with a maximum error of five miles. And it won't take them more than a few hours to do so. What is more they'll be able to identify the grade of the headquarters—whether army, divisions, corps, or what not—from the nature of the traffic and the sets being used.”
¹¹

Twenty overage officers were involved at army headquarters in Edinburgh Castle; fake corps and division headquarters were scattered across Scotland. Through the spring of 1944, they exchanged messages: “80 Div. requests 1800 pairs of crampons, 1800 pairs of ski bindings …” “2 Corps Car Company requires handbooks on engine functioning in low temperatures and high altitudes.” “7 Corps requests the promised demonstrators in the Bilgeri method of climbing rock faces …”
¹²

Other elements in the deception involved planting stories in Scottish newspapers, such as reports on “4th Army football matches,” or
BBC
programs like “a day with the 7th Corps in the field.” German spies in Scotland, operating under the close supervision
of their British controllers, sent messages to Hamburg and Berlin about the heavy train traffic, new division patches seen on the streets, and rumors among the troops about going to Norway. Wooden twin-engined “bombers” appeared on Scottish airfields. British commandos made a series of raids on the coast of Norway, designed to look like preinvasion tactics.
¹³

ULTRA
provided feedback, letting the Allies know what the Germans swallowed and what they rejected. It showed that Hitler had taken the bait. He not only kept his garrison troops in Norway, he reinforced them. By late spring, he had thirteen army divisions stationed there, along with 90,000 naval and 60,000 air personnel, including one panzer division.
¹⁴
This was more than double the force Germany needed in Norway for occupation duties. It was a major triumph for the Allies—a maximum return on a minuscule investment.

The other main part of
FORTITUDE
, creating
FUSAG
to threaten the Pas de Calais, was even more elaborate. It included radio traffic for an army group, dummy landing craft inadequately camouflaged, fields packed with papier-maché tanks (jeeps dragging chains drove around to create dust and tracks), and the full use of the Double-Cross System. The spies reported intense activity—construction, troop movements, an increase in the volume of train traffic across the Midlands, and the like—all the activities that would have taken place in fact if the Pas de Calais were the target. Everything the spies said had to match what the radio signals were revealing to the Germans, with the emphasis on hard fact. As Masterman wrote, “Speculations, guesses, or leakages, would have little or no effect on the German military mind, for the German staff officer would make his own appreciations and his own guesses from the facts put before him. What he would require would be the location and identification of formations, units, headquarters, assembly areas and the like.”
¹⁵

At Dover, across from the Pas de Calais, the British built a phony oil dock. They used film and theater stagehands. The King inspected it. Eisenhower gave a speech to the “construction” workers at a dinner party held at the White Cliffs Hotel in Dover. The mayor made satisfied remarks about the “opening of a new installation” in town. The
RAF
maintained constant fighter patrols; German reconnaissance aircraft were permitted to fly overhead, but only after they had been forced to 33,000 feet, where their cameras
would not be able to pick out any defects in the dock. Dover resembled an enormous film lot.

The capstone to
FORTITUDE
was Ike's selection of General George S. Patton to command
FUSAG
. The Germans thought Patton the best commander the Allies had (Patton agreed) and expected him to lead the assault. Eisenhower thought Patton an excellent commander for certain specific situations, most of all in the pursuit of a retreating enemy, but not the man for
OVERLORD
, which required a breadth of vision and an ability to get along with the British (especially Montgomery) that Patton did not possess. Ike's plan was to use Patton after the Allies broke out of the Normandy beachhead. At that time Patton would take command of the U. S. Third Army for the drive through France.
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