When an eccentric genius called Geoffrey Pyke proposed
constructing unsinkable aircraft carriers or freighters from enormous icebergs,
Churchill ordered him to proceed – no idea that could conceivably help the
Allies to win the war was too outlandish for this Prime Minister. Pyke’s team
of scientists invented a kind of super-ice, made by mixing in 4 per cent cotton
wool or wood pulp to a slurry of freezing water, making an incredibly tough
substance that melted very slowly which was called in Pyke’s honour ‘pykrete’.
Pykrete became an exhibit at the Quebec conference of August
1943 at which the Allied leadership discussed the plan for the final liberation
of Europe, operation OVERLORD. Churchill had crossed the Atlantic on his way to
the conference on one of the world’s largest liners, the Queen Mary, which
weighed 86,000 tons; but Pyke was proposing something even bigger, a 600-metre
long, self-refrigerating aircraft carrier made from Pykrete, to be called
Habbakuk, which would weigh more than two million tons and could carry and
launch 200 aeroplanes. You could use it to invade Japan! Pyke was already
building a prototype on a lake in Ontario.
Admiral Louis Mountbatten, the head of Combined Operations,
used showmanship to demonstrate the power of Pykrete to the Americans. Two cold
blocks were produced, one of ice, one of Pykrete, and burly General ‘Hap’
Arnold of the US Army Air Corps was invited to demolish each with an axe.
Arnold shattered the brittle ice with a mighty blow. Then it was the Pykrete’s
turn: but the American general howled with pain as the axe-head jarred off the
Pykrete, leaving the block intact. Mountbatten then drew a pistol and finished
off the ice, but once again the Pykrete stood firm and a spent bullet
ricocheted uselessly off it, narrowly missing a senior RAF officer. Churchill
roared with laughter. The demonstration was a propaganda triumph, though in the
event Pykrete was never used.
Churchill had come to Quebec to put on a brave show, and he
was flanked by two fire-eating British warriors who he hoped would impress the
Americans as much as the Pykrete had: the handsome and much-decorated air ace
Wing Commander Guy Gibson VC, DSO and bar, DFC and bar, famous for the
‘Dambusters’ raid, and Brigadier Orde Wingate, ferocious leader of Patriot
guerrillas in Abyssinia and now of bearded Chindits in the Burmese jungle.
The main item on the agenda was the forthcoming attack on
what the Germans called Festung Europa, Fortress Europe. Where was the best
place to enter the Continent if you were setting off from the UK? There were
several options, but the American and British team led by Lieutenant General
Frederick Morgan, called Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander or
COSSAC, charged with planning OVERLORD, had actually decided on Normandy. Yet
Normandy’s fifty miles of beaches did not seem suitable for a massive invasion.
The swirling currents and the daunting difference between low and high tides
(up to 21 feet or 6.4 metres) made unloading heavy gear on sandy beaches
implausible. Conventional wisdom said you required a proper deep-water harbour
with wharves and cranes to disembark the 50-ton tanks, huge guns, and great
pallets of stores necessary for an invasion. Hence the raid on Dieppe on 19
August 1942 – a trial run at seizing a port.
But the bold and imaginative answer that so appealed to
Churchill was huge floating harbours. He had been thinking about this idea
since July 1917, when he imagined a way of seizing two Frisian islands from a
moveable atoll of concrete. In May 1942, he had written a note to Mountbatten:
‘Piers for use on beaches. They must float up and down with the tide. The
anchor problem must be mastered. Let me have the best solution worked out.
Don’t argue the matter. The difficulties will argue for themselves.’ On board
the Queen Mary, on6 August 1943, there was a scientific demonstration in a
bathroom by Professor J. D. Bernal, one of Mountbatten’s physicist boffins, who
put a fleet of twenty paper boats at one end of a half-filled bath. At the
other end, a naval lieutenant made waves with a loofah. The paper boats were
swamped and sank. Then Bernal put more folded newspaper boats into the bath,
but surrounded them with an inflated Mae West lifejacket. The lieutenant made
vigorous waves, and this time the boats did not sink. ‘That, gentlemen,’ said
Bernal, ‘is what would happen if we had an artificial harbour.’
A fortnight later, the Quebec Conference approved the
concept of two artificial harbours – one British and one American, code-named
‘Mulberries’, and said they should be constructed and fully operational two
weeks after D-Day. The Quebec Conference also approved the outline OVERLORD
plan. The team were told to plan in more detail for an assault by three
divisions and three airborne brigades. A section called Ops (B) was set up to
prepare ‘an elaborate camouflage and deception scheme’, but there was only one
officer working on it.
At the next Allied Conference, held in Teheran from 28
November to 1 December 1943, Joseph Stalin, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston
Churchill concerted their ‘plans for the destruction of the German forces’. The
American and British Allies promised to leave the Balkans alone but agreed to
help relieve the pressure on Russia by opening ‘the Second Front’ in May 1944,
invading northern France in operation OVERLORD and southern France in operation
anvil (which in the event got delayed). Stalin agreed to coordinate his big
push on the Eastern Front with the Allied attack in the west, and all agreed on
the need for a deception plan.
By now, the Wavell/Clarke thesis that major operations
should have a cover plan, if practical and useful, was taken for granted. The
Soviets believed in military deception, which they called maskirovna. An
American deceiver later sent to Moscow to coordinate OVERLORD deception plans
with the Russians was talking to a Russian deceiver when the subject of the
media came up. When the American said that in a democracy you could not use the
press to fool your own people, the Russian shrugged, ‘Oh well, we do it all the
time.’ It was at Teheran that Churchill said to Stalin, ‘In wartime, truth is
so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies,’ and
Stalin replied, ‘This is what we call military cunning.’
On 6 December John Bevan of LCS was brought in to work up
the strategic deception plan for OVERLORD, and gave it a new name, BODYGUARD,
in a nod to the Prime Minister’s observation. Strategically, it aimed to make
the Germans dispose their forces in the wrong places – in the Balkans, in
northern Italy, in Norway and Denmark, anywhere but northern France. Later, the
operational challenge would be to deceive the Germans about exactly when, where
and in what strength the invasion was coming. This part of the deception plan
would evolve down an endless series of forking paths as executive control
shifted.
Dwight Eisenhower was given command of OVERLORD (‘Over Lord
and Under Ike’ was the joke) and he took up his responsibility in January 1944,
when what had been COSSAC became SHAEF, Supreme Headquarters Allied
Expeditionary Force. Eisenhower brought his own chief of staff, Walter Bedell Smith,
with him, so Frederick Morgan became his deputy. The Ops (B) or deception side
of COSSAC expanded as bigger fish started to arrive at SHAEF. Dudley Clarke’s
deputy in ‘A’ Force, Colonel Noel Wild, arrived from Tunis to take over, and
also became the SHAEF member on the Double Cross Committee. Major Roger Hesketh
of SHAEF intelligence worked closely with Tar Robertson and the other officers
in MI5’s Section B1A which controlled the double agents. Hesketh and Wild were
also in close touch with John Bevan and others at LCS. Deception was a small
club in an old boys’ network; the official historian Michael Howard described
them as ‘a handful of men who knew each other intimately and cut corners’.
The British made sure that they retained executive control
over the crucial Channel-crossing and landing part of OVERLORD, the actual
D-Day invasion, code-named NEPTUNE. Allied air forces and navies were both
under British control. The temporary commander of all the Allied ground forces
for NEPTUNE was Montgomery. He and his chief of staff Freddie de Guingand set
up their own deception staff, called G (R), modelled on Clarke’s ‘A’ force
which had helped Eighth Army so much in the desert. The man in charge of this
was David Strangeways, the ‘A’ Force Tactical HQ commander who had led the
successful surprise raid into Tunis to seize German intelligence materials, and
who was probably Clarke’s best pupil for ingenuity and sharpness.
The first thing Monty did was tear up the NEPTUNE plan that
COSSAC had prepared. He thought the Normandy front should be doubled to fifty
miles, and preceded by an assault from the sky by three airborne divisions, not
three brigades. In the first wave of sea landings, he wanted not three but five
divisions on five separate beaches, supported by two more divisions behind. If
he did not get this, he said they could find another commander. Eisenhower
concurred, but getting what Monty wanted meant a massive increase in ships and
equipment, including another thousand landing craft to add to the three
thousand-odd already prepared for.
Feldmarschall Erwin Rommel, charged by Hitler with defending
the coast of France at the end of 1943, knew that his best chance was to smash
the Allied attacks on the beaches, and that the first day would be ‘the longest
day’. From desert warfare experience, he was a great believer in anti-vehicle
and anti-personnel mines. As well as making a ‘Devil’s Garden’ of obstacles at
different tidelines along the beaches, he wanted to mine, wire and fortify the
entire coastal strip into a ‘zone of death’ five or six miles deep. To defend
the Atlantic Wall, he dreamed of sowing 200 million landmines along the entire
coast of France, although he never achieved it. ‘Up to the 20th May 1944,’ says
the War Diary of German Army Group B, ‘4,193,167 mines were laid on the Channel
coast, 2,672,000 of them on Rommel’s initiative, and most of them after the end
of March.’ He also planned to fill all potential landing fields with patterns
of ten-foot-high wooden stakes that would rip flimsy gliders apart. Many of the
stakes were to be wired to artillery shells whose detonation would cause
further carnage.
The Allied intelligence reconnaissance for the D-Day
landings was high, wide and deep. Thousands of mapping photos were taken from
different angles in the air. Low-level missions along the beaches to photograph
the arrays of obstacles the Germans were building were known as ‘dicing’
missions, as in ‘dicing with death’. They were taken so close that you can see
individual engineers running for cover, and count their footsteps in the sand.
Things seen from the air were sometimes investigated by divers from the sea,
and commando raids brought back prisoners and samples of barbed wire and metal
defences. Geologists and oceanographers were consulted and recruited. Following
an appeal on the BBC wireless in 1942, the great British public had sent in
over ten million of their pre-war French beach ‘holiday snaps’. These Brownie
Box-photos and picture post-cards were sorted, graded, assembled and scrutinised
for tiny details of Normandy.
Through General de Gaulle’s Free French Intelligence
service, le Deuxième Bureau, run by ‘Colonel Passy’ or André Dewavrin, the
French resistance was mobilised to report on every detail of the German
construction of their defences. The Centurie network, radiating out of Caen,
eventually had 1,500 agents noting every gun emplacement and mine field, every
concrete caisson and fifteen-foot-deep anti-tank trench. One house painter in
the resistance managed to purloin a blueprint of the defences from the office
of the Organisation Todt that were building them.
The Allies agreed to cross the Channel as two armies, one
British, one American, fighting side by side, but not mixed together. The
British (including the Canadians) would go in on the left, to SWORD, JUNO, and
GOLD beaches, preceded by the paratroopers of the 6th British Airborne
Division. The US First Army would go in on the right, to OMAHA and UTAH
beaches, preceded by the paratroopers of the US 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions.
‘Mulberry’ floating harbours
Co-ordinating the effort required awesome organisation and
logistics. The Allies had to marshal and maintain over 2 million men, 11,000
aircraft, and 7,000 ships in England. The prodigious industrial output to meet
their requirements had to be matched by efficient distribution. The engineering
work behind the landings was staggering, and thousands of construction workers
were recruited to work night and day. The Petroleum Warfare Department
pioneered PLUTO (Pipeline Under The Ocean), ready to pump millions of gallons
of petrol across to the invaders. To get the astonishing volume of men,
equipment and supplies ashore in north-western France, Churchill’s pet project,
the technologically ingenious ‘Mulberry’ floating harbours, were essential. Two
were to be constructed off Normandy. Over a hundred enormous 6,000-ton
reinforced concrete caissons called ‘Phoenixes’ (each 60 feet high, 60 feet
wide and 200 feet long) would be towed across the Channel from Selsey Bill and
Dungeness by some of the fleet of 132 tugs and then filled with sand from
‘Leviathans’ so they sank to form a breakwater in the Bay of the Seine. Outside
this artificial reef was a floating line of ‘Bombardons’ towed from Poole and
Southampton to calm the waves, and inside, in shallower water, a line of
‘Gooseberries’, formed from two dozen redundant merchant navy vessels, Liberty
ships and one old dreadnought that were scuttled and sunk where needed. In the
calmer waters within the two-square-mile Mulberry harbour, strong Lobnitz or
‘Spud’ pier heads were sunk deep into the sand which allowed long bridges or
floating roadways to the shore, known as ‘Whales’, to float up and down with
the tides. The menagerie of code-names was augmented by power-driven pontoons
called ‘Rhinos’ and amphibious vehicles known as ‘Ducks’.
Further amazing engines onshore also sprang from Churchill’s
‘inflammable fancy’: armoured tank bulldozers and ploughs, special fat-cannoned
Churchill tanks for blasting blockhouses, other ‘Crocodile’ Churchill tanks
that could squirt petrol and latex flames over a hundred yards, great machines
for laying fascines across mud or barbed wire, or for thrashing their way with
flailing chains clear through exploding mine fields. These devices came from
Churchill’s direct encouragement and protection of a brilliant maverick, Major
General Sir Percy Hobart of 79th Armoured Brigade, and were collectively known
as ‘Hobart’s Funnies’.
The deception plan for NEPTUNE, the cross-Channel attack,
was called Plan FORTITUDE, and its object was ‘to induce the enemy to make
faulty dispositions in North-West Europe’. FORTITUDE NORTH aimed to keep Hitler
worrying about Scandinavia, and the danger to Germany posed by an Allied attack
on Norway and Denmark. Dummy wireless traffic and bogus information from double
agents indicated that the (notional) British Fourth Army in Scotland, supported
by American Rangers from Iceland, was going to attack Stavanger and Narvik and
advance on Oslo. British deceivers also worked hard on the neutral Swedes. The
commander-in-chief of the Swedish Air Force was asked for ‘humanitarian’
assistance in the event of an Allied invasion of Norway. As his office was
being bugged by the pro-Nazi chief of Swedish police, this information went
straight to Berlin. When Hitler read the transcript he ordered two more
divisions to reinforce the ten already in Norway. Thus 30,000 more soldiers
were diverted away from France.
