Churchill's Wizards (52 page)

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.

Operation
FORTITUDE SOUTH
, developed by David Strangeways, aimed in the first instance to convince the Germans that there was another mighty force in Britain, as well as Montgomery's (real) 21st Army Group: this was the First United States Army Group, or
FUSAG
, stationed in the south-east of England, opposite the Pas de Calais, the quick route to Germany via Antwerp and Brussels.
FUSAG
was, of course, notional, a ghost army created and sustained by the deception plan
QUICKSILVER
. It had its own insignia, a black Roman numeral I on a blue background inside a red and white pentagon, and it was supposed to comprise the Canadian First and the US Third Armies.
Most importantly for the story, it was apparently commanded by the profanely theatrical, ivory-handled-pistol-packing US General George S. Patton Jr, ‘Old Blood-and-Guts' himself, from a headquarters at Wentworth, near Ascot. (‘One must be an actor,' Patton once wrote about overcoming ever-present fear.) Hitler thought that Patton – who had got into trouble for slapping a shell-shocked soldier in Sicily – was easily the Americans' best man, because he was ruthless. Of course he would be leading the Allied fightback.

From 24 April 1944 onwards, the eleven divisions of
FUSAG
were brought to life by dummy radio traffic to hoodwink the German ‘Y' or wireless-eavesdropping service. The radio deceivers went on genuine army exercises where they recorded all the radio voice traffic, learned accurate technical terms and questioned people about their activities before writing their own scripts, which they got Allied servicemen in Kent to read out. They tried not to make it sound too polished, because in real life people often did not hear and asked for repeats. For Morse work they got American radio operators of 3103 Signals Service Battalion who had been in Sicily and North Africa, and whose ‘fist' or way of signalling the German listeners might recognise. There was also physical camouflage work, particularly the planting of scores of dummy landing craft – known as ‘big bobs' – at Great Yarmouth, Lowestoft, and on the East Anglian rivers Deben and Orwell, for German aerial reconnaissance planes to spot. The dummy landing craft weighed about six tons, were built out of scaffolding pipes and canvas and floated on 55-gallon oil-drums welded together. They were painted and stained to look old, and were ‘serviced' by crews who hung out washing, flew ensigns, sent up smoke signals and moved around in small boats. The idea was to keep the Germans looking eastwards; the Pas de Calais had to remain the invasion site uppermost in their minds, with the Fifteenth Army there ready to repel an invasion, and Seventh Army in Normandy less on its guard.

Great activity, using lighting at night, was simulated at Dover and Folkestone, where the 2nd Canadian Corps and the US VIII Corps were notionally based. The architect Basil Spence oversaw the building of a fake oil terminal with pipelines, storage tanks and jetties. It was solemnly inspected by King George VI and General Montgomery among other notables, and duly reported in the press – because since early March 1944, Royal visits had been coordinated with the deception planners.

It all worked: a German
Oberkommando
der Wehrmacht
intelligence map, captured later in Italy, of what they believed to be the British Order of Battle on 15 May 1944, reflected their belief that most Allied forces were stationed in the east of the UK. The (mostly imaginary) units the map showed had been carefully built up over the last fifteen months through a mass of detail sent to the Abwehr by their trusted spies in England, who of course were actually MI5-controlled double agents. The three most important were a Pole, Roman Garby-Czerniawski, code-named
BRUTUS
, reporting to Paris, a German, Wulf Dietrich Schmidt, code-named tate, reporting to Hamburg, and our Spanish spy, Juan Pujol García, code-named
GARBO
, now sending his reports directly by coded wireless message to the Abwehr
Kriegsorganisation
in Madrid.

With everything to play for, the battle for morale became all-important. Sefton Delmer's ‘black' radio station,
Soldatensender
Calais
, now broadcast loud and clear, and by early 1944 PWE ‘black' and BBC ‘white' broadcasting were working well together in their different spheres, the distortions of ‘black' weaving a smoke of lies around the ‘white' buttresses of truth. Delmer was working closely with PWE, the BBC, Naval Intelligence and LCS, and had an office in Bush House. Here men and women from the European resistance, Polish, Danish, Norwegian, French and Dutch, came to see him, and he helped them with forged notices, posters, proclamations and identity papers.
Soldatensender Calais
played its part in operation
OVERLORD
, helping to soften up the morale of German troops defending the Atlantic Wall, encouraging slacking by saying, ‘Units which show themselves smart and efficient are drafted to the Eastern Front. Promotion in France is a sure way to death in Russia.' Delmer's cheery-toned but deeply depressing black radio broadcasts abraded German soldiers' confidence by saying that Russian successes were due to their being supplied with (imaginary) American ‘miracle weapons' like the new ‘phosphorus shells', which could destroy reinforced concrete and pierce any armour.

In May 1944, the month before D-Day, Delmer launched a daily newspaper for the German troops named
Nachrichten
für
die
Truppen
or ‘News for the Troops'. It was a joint British–American venture. SHAEF gave him a team of editors and news writers to command, and the paper ran for 345 editions, using rewritten radio material. Two
million copies a day were dropped by American bombers across France, Belgium and Germany, with pieces about German difficulties fighting an air war without fuel, or detailing ‘impossible' political interference with the army leaders' decisions. Delmer, the lifelong newspaperman, later said that this was the wartime enterprise of which he was proudest.

Meanwhile, Juan Pujol's role as
ARABEL
, the Abwehr agent, was also moving steadily towards its climax. He was by now the chief spy in an extensive (and entirely fictional) network code-named
ALARIC
. He had not only invented, for his Abwehr spymasters, four supposedly important contacts providing him with information, he had also recruited seven equally imaginary sub-agents who in turn got military information from some fifteen notional sources. So Agent
THREE
in Glasgow, the Venezuelan student called Carlos (‘recruited' or invented while Pujol was still in Lisbon), supposedly knew a drunken NCO in the RAF, a British infantry officer and a Communist Greek seaman who had deserted but who wanted to help the Russians open the Second Front. Agent
FOUR
, a Gibraltarian NAAFI waiter based in Kent, got much information about the arms depot and underground railway in the imaginary ‘Chislehurst caves' from a guard stationed there, and many details about
FUSAG
(including gossip about quarrels between US & UK Commanders) from an American NCO based in London. Agent
SEVEN
, an ex-seaman in Swansea, was particularly active, with sub-agents in Exeter and Harwich, and also apparently knew a Wren in Ceylon, a soldier in the 9th Armoured Division, an Indian fanatic, and the leader and ‘brothers' of the Aryan World Order Movement, a group of extreme Welsh Nationalists.

These colourful imaginary agents and sub-agents were spread across the country, and Pujol sent their ‘information' on by radio. From 1 January to 6 June 1944, he sent 500 wireless messages from London to Madrid, putting over the deceptions that SHAEF wanted. From Madrid,
ARABEL'S
reports went to
Oberkommando
der Wehrmacht
and to
Fremde
Heeres West
, the German Intelligence department dealing with the Allied armies in the west. The false information made them calculate the number of divisions in the UK as seventy-seven, overestimating them by 50 per cent. The whole fantastic spider's web of inventions was not just the work of the writing partners Pujol and Tomás Harris. They were advised by David Strangeways and LCS, and
behind them, by the presiding genius of ‘A' Force, Dudley Clarke.

Now Pujol's role as
GARBO
went up a notch. Permission was granted to let
ARABEL
break the news of the Normandy landings, to give him even greater credibility with the Abwehr. So, just before D-Day, Pujol's imaginary Agent
FOUR
apparently broke out of a high-security army camp at Hiltingbury together with two American deserters and brought
ARABEL
the news that the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division, having been issued with 24-hour ration packs and vomit bags, had left the camp. This information was transmitted eight minutes after those very Canadians landed on
JUNO
beach, just before 8 o'clock on the morning of 6 June 1944. It was too late for the Germans to do any more to prepare for the landings, but Pujol retained his status as the Abwehr's top man in Britain.

With hindsight, the Bailey bridge of history seems solid, with its incidents all bolted together in due order. But before the event, things are very different. On the eve of D-Day, the future was blank, unclear. Nothing was inevitable; everything was at hazard. Eisenhower knew it was a gamble he could lose, and handwrote the gloomy message he would have to give if the landings failed.

Winston Churchill was feeling his responsibilities, and his age. He had been Prime Minister for four long years, actively running a country that was fighting for its life in the greatest conflict the world had ever known. His mind went back to the past, to the ‘hecatombs' of WW1 which he had survived but thousands and thousands had not. He worried about the D-Day landings too, telling an American visitor, ‘It is not because I can't take casualties, it is because I am afraid what those casualties will be.' At the back of his mind was Gallipoli, the amphibious landing that wrecked his political career nearly thirty years before. Things had also gone wrong in the landings at Narvik, at Dieppe, and at Anzio in Italy where it had taken four months for 125,000 men to break out from the trap of the beachhead. What would happen in Normandy? Six months short of his seventieth birthday, Churchill the warhorse now determined to be there, watching the D-Day landings from a bombarding ship. King George VI said he would do the same. This caused consternation. What if Monarch and Prime Minister were to be killed? Both men were finally dissuaded. On the night of Monday, 5 June, Churchill dined with his
wife and then spent time in the Map Room, glaring at the dispositions. Before going to bed, he said to Clementine, ‘Do you realise that when you wake up in the morning 20,000 men may have been killed?'

Thirty years before, Philip Gibbs and the other journalists had been barred from the front by Lord Kitchener. But by 1944, media-savvy generals like Montgomery were welcoming news organisations like the BBC. At D-Day, Richard Dimbleby had eighteen reporter colleagues: Guy Byam jumped with the paratroops, Chester Wilmot went in on a glider, Richard North in a landing-craft, Stanley Maxted in a minesweeper, and other BBC correspondents were with different units and at SHAEF HQ with their 40-lb ‘midget' recorders, getting actuality and eyewitness accounts from the battlefield.
War Report
, broadcast nightly after the nine o'clock news from 6 June 1944 until 5 May 1945, was a new kind of radio reportage. The war correspondent joined the combatants in the field on behalf of the citizens at home, bringing the front line into the back parlour.

Sefton Delmer's radio scooped the world with its report of the landings at 4.50 a.m. on D-Day, taken almost verbatim from a teleprinter flash on Goebbels's DNB news service, but augmented with extra disinformation. Delmer was also proud of that night's edition of
Nachrichten
für
die
Truppen
, which reported that the Atlantic Wall was breached in several places, and that attacks were taking place at the mouth of the Seine and at Calais. This claim was carefully coordinated with the deception planners to spread maximum confusion.

In operation
TITANIC
in the darkness before the dawn of D-Day, handfuls of SAS men from Fairford in Gloucestershire were dropped from the sky at four sites behind the German lines, attended by scores of dummy parachutists, the simple sacking ones known as ‘Paragons', the more elaborate inflatable rubber ones christened ‘Ruperts'. They parachuted down with assorted pyrotechnics that simulated the sound and the chemical smell of battle. The few real SAS men shot off flares and fireworks, stirring up the ants' nest with plenty of noise, and then slipped away to join the French resistance or to make their way back to the British lines. Because the best way to deal with parachutists is to tackle them as soon as they land, thousands of German troops were out scouring woods and fields inland, and so were not ready to fight the forces landing on the beaches.