Elinor Florence, Author

Bestselling Historial Fiction Author

D-Day: Decoys and Dummies

The D-Day decoys were part of Operation Fortitude, an elaborate, mind-boggling hoax that used rubber tanks, canvas ships, plywood aircraft, and even dummy soldiers to fool the Germans about where we secretly planned to land on D-Day.

D- Day decoys included rubber tanks like this one, being hoisted on the shoulders of four soldiers.

Everyone knew the Allies would eventually try to take back the continent. But when, and where? To refresh your knowledge of geography, Pas-de-Calais is an easy hop, just thirty miles away (about fifty kilometres) from England’s coastline. So it made perfect sense that the Allies would invade Calais.

But in fact, they secretly selected the beaches of Normandy, about one hundred miles away, or one hundred and sixty kilometres.

Here’s a map showing the relative distances.

Map of English Channel with both Pas-de-Calais and Normandy clearly marked.

The top-secret date was selected — the early hours of June 6, 1944.

To keep the destination under wraps, an elaborate plan called Operation Fortitude used multiple layers of trickery. The most striking was the creation of two phantom armies: one in Scotland appearing to threaten an invasion of Norway, and the other in southeast England appearing to threaten Pas-de-Calais.

The latter, known as Quicksilver, established the imaginary First U.S. Army Group, headed by a real blood-and-guts general, Lieutenant General George S. Patton. His selection as head of the fake army was a stroke of genius, because the Germans believed he would play a major role in the invasion.

D-Day Decoys

A team of camofleurs and theatre set designers was brought on board to mock up an entire fake army on the coast around Dover, the closest point to Calais. They created what was basically a rubber army. Here’s a photo of a fake tank under construction.

A wood frame skeleton of a fake tank takes shape, one of the D-Day decoys created prior to the invasion of Europe.

The shell was covered with rubber. The photo at the top of this page shows four men carrying a rubber tank, which must have been a shocking sight to those who didn’t know it was a “spoof,” as the dummy tanks were called.

(This incident appears in my wartime novel. My heroine is an aerial photographic interpreter, tasked with studying aerial photos of the fake army to check how realistic they look. Read more about the book here: Bird’s Eye View.)

Here’s another shot of a rubber tank, looking pretty darned authentic.

Two realistic-looking rubber tanks sit side by side, one occupied by two soldiers and the other having its cover adjusted by a third soldier.

As a double blind, the dummy tanks were covered with camouflage — netting and fake leaves — but then the camouflage was allowed to deteriorate in the weather, so the Germans would see what they assumed were real tanks underneath.

Not only tanks, but inflatable trucks were created. Again, pretty convincing, don’t you think?

An inflatable army truck sits beside a building, complete with cab, box, and six large tires like black balloons, while a soldier stands beside the front wheel.

It doesn’t seem that plywood aircraft like this one could fool the German photo interpreters, but apparently they did.

German aerial reconnaissance wasn’t nearly as sophisticated as that used by the Allies, for good reason. The Allies needed to spy from the sky on the entire European continent, to find out what the enemy was doing. The Germans didn’t have to try as hard, because they had nothing to look at except Britain. This proved their downfall in the case of Operation Fortitude.

A fake plywood aircraft, one of the D-Day decoys, sits on the ground, its wooden supports clearly visible from the ground but not from the air.

This fake aircraft looks much better than the first one.

A fake fighter aircraft complete with propellers and painted insignia cannot be distinguished from a real fighter from a distance.

Here’s a twenty-five-pound gun, made of plywood.

A large cannon on wheels pulled by a military vehicle is made out of wood and painted to resemble a real cannon.

One of the most intensive efforts went into simulating the “invasion fleet.” The dummies themselves, code-named Bigbobs, were made of canvas stretched over a steel frame, floating on an array of 45-gallon oil drums.

Building the Bigbobs was very labour intensive, as each kit had more than five hundred parts, filled six or seven three-ton trucks, and took twenty men six hours to assemble. When complete, each one weighed eight tons and looked convincingly like a real landing craft.

Dummy landing craft are shown here, tied together on a river near the coast.

A row of three fake boats with flat decks, strung together on a river, resemble authentic landing craft.

To make sure the enemy aircraft got close enough to take some good pictures of the fake army, the anti-aircraft gunners had to do some fancy shooting — their shells had to get close enough to make it seem real, but obviously they had to miss!

Here’s a photo of women in uniform, members of the Auxiliary Territorial Service. They weren’t allowed to fire the guns, but they served as aircraft spotters and told the anti-aircraft guys when to get ready.

Two young women wearing military uniforms and helmets, their eyes concealed by round dark glasses, peer into the sky, each with her own set of powerful binoculars.

And here are the anti-aircraft guns themselves, known as ack-ack guns for the distinctive sound that they made. The English coast was heavily defended.

Four soldiers in British uniforms and metal helmets prepare a heavy artillery gun for firing into the sky at incoming German fighters.

In the excellent Ken Follett thriller titled Eye of the Needle, a German spy (code-named Needle, and played by Donald Sutherland in the movie) has photos of the fake army which he has to get back to headquarters in Berlin, so he can blow the whistle before the invasion begins. (See my list of favourite wartime novels here: Best Wartime Fiction.)

Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett, book cover image has author's name in bold red type and the titled in black type on a white background, with an image of a blood-tipped sword bearing a Nazi eagle and swastika on its handle.

But the deception went much farther than visual.

In what was called a “closed loop,” double agents leaked false information to the enemy. Thanks to the British code-breakers working at Bletchley Park, their headquarters northwest of London, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces General Dwight D. Eisenhower and the British government deciphered radio traffic that showed the Germans were buying into the deception. The closed loop was working!

This is Bletchley Park today, where some of the best minds in the world spent the war.

Bletchley Park is a stately red brick mansion with several wings and pointed gables, distinguished by multiple rows of paned windows with white trim.

Other methods were used, too. Radio transmissions were faked, sending out false information to the Germans. The Allied reconnaissance aircraft flew two-for-one missions — for every flight over Normandy, they made two flights over Calais, to make the Germans think that Calais was the real target. And Calais was also the target for plenty of pre-invasion bombing.

Just prior to the invasion, further tricks were carried out. Lancasters dropped tinfoil strips called Window, which confounded German radar and disguised the position of the real bombers.

Sepia photograph of an aircraft above the clouds, showers of silver tinsel dropping from its belly.

Dummy paratroopers made of rubber were tossed out over Calais.

A brown rubber inflatable human figure with no features hangs from a white parachute.

Imagine the tension in the early morning hours of June 6, 1944 when the Allied forces swept ashore on the beaches of Normandy in France.

It was a staggering logistical feat. Some 175,000 men were landed on the first day, a number that swelled to 325,000 in the first week and eventually to 2.5 million. They were delivered by 5,300 ships and supported by 50,000 vehicles and 11,000 planes.

Never before or since have so many weapons of war been together in one place.

Classic photograph taken on D-Day shows hordes of army trucks on the beach, small human figures dashing everywhere, the sea almost black with landing ships, and the sky filled with barrage balloons.

Meanwhile, the German forces were spread pretty thin (which serves them right for being so greedy). They had a whole bloody continent to defend. Their forces were scattered among Italy and Russia, the Balkans, Greece, Norway, southern France and northern France.

Even after June 6th, the Allies tried to keep the Germans guessing where the next blow would fall. If they ceased to believe in the Calais threat, then the substantial German forces guarding Calais would be sent to Normandy.

That’s when the Ghost Army went into action. This was a unit of eleven hundred men who had been hand-picked from New York and Philadelphia art schools and given a unique mission: to impersonate U.S. Army units to deceive the enemy. For a few weeks after D-Day, they put on a “travelling road show” in France with inflatable tanks and fake radio transmissions.

They even used audio recordings they had made back in the U.S., the sounds of armored and infantry units played with powerful amplifiers that could be heard twenty kilometres away. Here’s a photo of three Ghost Soldiers with one of their 500-pound speakers. Let’s hope they wore earplugs.

Three American soldiers in uniform with metal helmets stand at attention in front of a truck bearing a gigantic set of speakers on the back.

They staged more than twenty full-scale battlefield deceptions, often operating very close to the front lines. The unit is the subject of a 68-minute PBS documentary available for streaming.

Cover of an old VHS movie has the title Ghost Army, with a black silhouette of a soldier and a tank against a blue background, and the caption "On the front lines of World War II, illusion was their ultimate weapon."

In these days of instantaneous global communication, it seems incredible that such a large-scale fraud involving so many different stunts and so many thousands of people could have been successful.

Thankfully, the Allies pulled it off!

* * * * *

STAR WEEKLY AT WAR

Here’s a classic image of a caring nurse and a dashing wounded soldier on the cover of the August 23, 1941 issue. The Star Weekly was a Canadian newsmagazine. During the Second World War, a colour illustration with a wartime theme appeared on the cover each week. See all my covers here: Star Weekly at War.

Read about the illustrator who created the image here: Elizabeth Cutler.

Star Weekly magazine cover dated August 23, 1941 has a colorful illustration of a soldier in a khaki greatcoat with a bandage wrapped around his head and a cigarette in his mouth, and a nurse in a blue double-breasted uniform, white pinafore and cap gazing at him lovingly.

 

About Elinor Florence<br>

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I’m a lover of history and all things vintage. My passion for the past is reflected in my novels, my collections, my travels, my home on Lake Windermere, and the monthly letter that I have been sending to my dear followers for the past eleven years. You are warmly invited to join my list. I don’t ask for anything but your email address. However, you are welcome to tell me something about yourself because I love hearing from my readers.
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