All the ingredients of a gripping spy thriller are there – intrigue, espionage, lies and black propaganda.
An elaborate British wartime plot succeeded in convincing Hitler that the Allies were about to stage the bulk of the D-Day landings in Pas de Calais rather than on the Normandy coast – a diversion that proved crucial in guaranteeing the invasion’s success.
Now fresh documentary evidence has come to light showing how Britain’s army of code-breakers received advance word that the Nazis had been fooled – meaning Allied troops had the go-ahead to attack.
Great article.
If you ever get the chance, please watch the 1956 movie, ”The Man Who Never Was,” based on the 1953 book of the same name, based on truth.
Operation Mincemeat was a successful British deception plan during World War II.
As part of the widespread deception plan Operation Barclay to cover the intended invasion of Italy from North Africa, Mincemeat helped to convince the German high command that the Allies planned to invade Greece and Sardinia in 1943 instead of Sicily, the actual objective.
This was accomplished by persuading the Germans that they had, by accident, intercepted “top secret” documents giving details of Allied war plans.
The documents were attached to a corpse deliberately left to wash up on a beach in Punta Umbría in Spain.
Wikipedia.
Then, if you want more, read about the amazing Jasper Maskelyne.
I checked a book on him out from the library because it was so expensive.
Jasper Maskelyne was a world famous magician and illusionist in the 1930s.
When war broke out, he volunteered his services to the British Army and was sent to Eygpt where the desert war had just begun.
He used his skills to save the vital port of Alexandria from German bombers and to ‘hide’ the Suez Canal from them.
He invented all sorts of camouflage methods to make trucks look like tanks and vice versa.
Working for military intelligence, he put on a stage show inside the Royal Palace in Cairo in order to locate an enemy spy’s radio transmitter.
On Malta he developed ‘the world’s first portable holes’: fake bomb craters used to fool the Germans into thinking they had hit their targets.
His war culminated in the brilliant deception plan that won the Battle of El Alamein: the creation of an entire dummy army in the middle of the desert.
Wow!