← Back to the front page

A Memorable History of Deception and Spy Capers

Khalid Elhassan June 7, 2020 34 min

Operation Mincemeat - World War II — Items recovered from Major Martin and his briefcase. BBC

6. Operation Fortitude

An inflatable tank, next to the real thing. Zenith Press

Operation Bodyguard turned into a massive, sprawling, and multifaceted deception plan. All of its components aimed to prevent the Germans from discovering the when and where of the Allied invasion of France. One of Bodyguard’s sub-plans was Operation Fortitude, which created a fictitious “First US Army Group” (FUSAG) in southeast England under the command of General George S. Patton. Fortitude used a variety of schemes to sell the Germans on the existence of FUSAG.

Fake radio traffic was conducted between fictitious FUSAG units. German aerial reconnaissance was allowed to overfly and photograph concentrations of FUSAG tanks and transports. In reality, the tanks and transports were just inflatable dummies, that looked like the real thing from the air. Most importantly, German intelligence was fed fake reports via double agents and turned spies, about FUSAG’s intentions to invade the Pas de Calais. A subsidiary, Fortitude North, created a fictitious British Fourth Army in Scotland, and convinced the Germans that it planned to invade Norway, in order to tie down the hundreds of thousands of Germans there.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.