For february 2003 issue

SCIENCE IN CRIME DETECTION-113

DECEIVING THE ENEMY IN WAR

‑Dr. Anil Aggrawal

This time I am going to tell you how nations deceive each other in war. They deliberately mislead each other to gain an unfair advantage. For instance a nation may have decided to attack its enemy nation at a point A. If somehow they can convince the enemy nation, that the point of attack was going to be point B, several thousand miles away from A, the enemy nation will send all its forces to the point B. This leaves point A totally unguarded, making it very easy for the first nation to attack.

Something very similar occurred during the second world war. We all know that the Second World War took place from 1939 till 1945. Hitler’s Germany, Italy and Japan were on one side. These were known as axis powers. Historians generally see them as evil powers. On the other side were allies, or so-called “friendly nations”. These included Britain and France mainly, but later on USA and USSR also joined them. The war ended in 1945, with the dropping of Atom Bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US. This convinced Japan, and the rest of axis powers that they could not take on the Allies anymore, and they surrendered.

However defeating Hitler was no mean task. Lots of brains were required to confound Hitler. The incident I am relating to this time, is very interesting, because in this incident, the English managed to convince Hitler, that they were going to hit point B (Greece), while actually they were going to hit point A (Sicily).

Once the Germans had surrendered in North Africa, the need for a new disinformation campaign emerged. Although the Allies had decided to invade the southern coast of Sicily to provide a base for later landings on the Italian mainland, it remained essential to keep the Germans guessing. This meant providing them with false information, but in such a way that its veracity would not be called into question.

The intention was to convince the Germans that the Allies were planning to invade Greece, as a plausible alternative to Sicily. The problem was that a careless radio message would not be acceptable, and if the Germans saw through the deception, they might conclude that Sicily was the true target. They would know only too well that really important messages were carried in locked briefcases, chained to the wrists of couriers. So how could a courier be made to fall convincingly into enemy hands, with the vital information still intact?

Eventually, the Allies decided that the only realistic scenario would be to suggest to the Germans that the aircraft carrying a courier and his secret documents had crashed into the sea. This would account for a case containing sensitive documents being washed up on the coast of Spain, where Allied aircraft regularly flew offshore and where there was a strong German intelligence presence, who were likely to be told of the documents’ discovery. One snag remained, however - the courier’s body would have to be washed ashore still chained to the case.

This meant finding a recently dead body, in a condition that would suggest death by drowning, following an airplane crashing into the sea. Enquiries to London coroners produced the corpse of a young man who had died from pneumonia, which would produce similar physical signs to drowning. This allowed the deception plan, known as Operation Mincemeat, to be set in motion. The body was clothed in Royal Marines uniform and given documents that identified him as Major William Martin. In his pockets were letters from his father, girlfriend, and bank manager, together with ticket stubs from a recent performance at a London theatre. His briefcase contained letters from the office of the Chief of the Imperial General Staff and from Lord Louis Mountbatten to officers on the staff of General Alexander, commanding in the Mediterranean.

The content of the letters was vital. Rather than simply announcing that the Allies were intending to land in Greece, they discussed detail changes in the plan, of which the recipients would already be aware, but which would come as a revelation to the Germans. They cunningly referred to the plan under the genuine covername for the Sicily landings, Operation Husky.

The theory was that any references German agents might pick up to this operation would add to their conviction that the information was genuine. In an additional master stroke, they also referred to a deception plan that was being mounted to convince the Germans and Italians that the landings were to be made on Sicily instead, and to certain operations the Allies could not hope to hide, like the practice landings on the Tunisian coast and the heavy attacks on Sicilian airfields, as being designed to add credibility to this plan.

The body of “Major Martin” and the vital briefcase were loaded onto a Royal Navy submarine, which surfaced off the Spanish coast on the night of April 30, 1943. The corpse was lowered into the water at a spot where the currents would carry it ashore near the port of Huelva, where German diplomats were particularly active.

After two weeks of progressively stronger British representations for the return of the body, and the case and its contents, the Spanish authorities handed them over. All the documents were still in their sealed envelopes. However, laboratory examination showed that they had been opened and resealed, implying that copies of the papers were already on their way to Berlin.

By the time the Sicilian landings went ahead, 10 weeks after the submarine cargo was washed up on a Spanish beach, there were only two German divisions defending the coast, reinforced by an Italian garrison of doubtful morale. Powerful German armored divisions had been switched to Greece and Crete, together with naval units that might have disrupted the landing forces. Rommel set up his Greek headquarters on the very day that Allied troops were wading ashore on Sicily, and although the campaign to liberate the island was hard-fought, it ended with the Germans having to flee to the mainland.

After the war, captured documents showed that the Abwehr (German military intelligence) had been doubtful about the authenticity of the documents, but Adolf Hitler had been convinced that they were genuine, and the Operation Mincemeat deception campaign was proved to have been totally successful.

However, in the long and tortuous history of campaigns of misinformation and deception, the following case is the one that stands unchallenged as the most complex, ambitious, and successful of all time. This is the Fortitude deception campaign mounted by the British and Americans in World War II, which actually resulted in a whole German army being kept out of the Normandy fighting until it was too late. To do this, the Allies had to use double agents, electronic intelligence, radar intelligence, communications intelligence, and false intelligence in a cleverly orchestrated campaign.

The dilemma facing both the Allies and the Germans was deciding where the cross-channel invasion would land on the coast of France. There were only two sensible options: the Pas de Calais and Normandy. The former offered the shortest sea crossing from Britain, and the shortest route to the German heartland, but contained the heaviest and most formidable units in the German order of battle. The latter, while being less heavily garrisoned, required a longer and more dangerous sea crossing, and meant that much greater distances had to be covered before Germany itself could be threatened.

In fact, the strength of the Pas de Calais defenses had led the Allies to decide on Normandy from the outset. However, a massive deception campaign was mounted to assure the Germans that the landings would take place in the Pas de Calais. First of all, the network of German agents operating under British control sent a series of carefully coordinated messages that enabled the Germans to build a picture of massive forces being assembled in the south-east of England, ready for landings in the Calais area. At the same time, no signs were revealed of the real buildup of troops in the southwest, in preparation for Normandy.

The spies’ messages were reinforced by all other channels of information. Large numbers of false radio signals were sent from transmitters in the south-east, and genuine messages from Montgomery’s headquarters in Hampshire were sent by landline to a transmitter in Kent, so that these too could be added to the evidence for the buildup in the south-east. In case reconnaissance aircraft were sent over from France, dummy tanks, guns, aircraft, and landing craft were massed in fields and river estuaries in the east. When Allied aircraft began the huge campaign of pre-invasion attacks on German forces in France, the planners took care that three sorties were made against the Pas de Calais for every two against targets in Normandy.

The heart of the deception was to be the entirely fictitious FUSAG, or First US Army Group, the force earmarked for the Pas de Calais landings, to be commanded by the very real General George S. Patton. Calculated leaks revealed his presence in eastern England, and details of individual American units were fed back by the German spies, directed by their Allied spymasters. Even the most trivial snippets of information added to the overall impression. In neutral Geneva, British agents bought all available copies of the Michelin maps of the Calais area, an action carefully noted and reported by their German opposite numbers.

The picture was reinforced by a genuine German general too - Hans Cremer, former commander of the Afrika Korps, who was being repatriated to Germany in May 1944. En route to London from a prison camp in Wales, his car was diverted through south-west England. Because all location names and signposts had been removed as an anti-invasion measure in 1940, there was nothing to tell him that he was not being driven through southern and south-eastern England, and he was able to see signs of the huge buildup of men, weapons and materials ready for the invasion.

When the landing forces actually sailed, a new deception campaign swung into action. The German radar stations watching the entire Channel coast were destroyed by Allied fighter-bombers, except for two in the Pas de Calais area. These were deceived by two precision bomber squadrons of the Royal Air Force, which spent the entire night flying an exact pattern that allowed them to drop metallic foil strips to create echoes on German radar simulating a huge invasion force approaching across the Channel at low speed. In case the Germans sent naval craft to investigate this ominous radar picture, it was reinforced by a small fleet of naval motorboats, each towing a large radar-reflecting balloon. Sound equipment aboard the boats reproduced the noise of engines, anchors being dropped, loudspeaker commands, and bugle calls.

On land, the deception was intensified when large numbers of dummy parachutists were dropped all over the invasion area, loaded with firecrackers to simulate small-arms fire. Small Special Forces teams were also dropped with record players and loudspeakers to create the sounds of pitched battle in the darkness, confusing the German defenders as to the positions of their enemies.

It could be thought that the value of all these deceptions would have vanished once the landings had taken place. At that stage, under normal circumstances, the Germans would have known the truth, and could have taken action accordingly. But it was here that the most brilliant twist in the whole campaign was mounted. Messages from their agents in Britain were used to remind the German spymasters of the huge forces still remaining in southeastern England and not used for the Normandy landings. Their worries were compounded by vital information from their most respected agent of all, Garbo. Two days after the invasion, Garbo had been ordered by his Allied controllers to report to the Germans that two units, the British Third Infantry Division and the Guards Armoured Division, were on their way to Normandy, on the grounds that the Germans would soon discover the units’ presence for themselves, and this information would heighten the agent’s standing and credibility.

At that moment, when they were on the point of ordering seven divisions to move from the Pas de Calais to crush the Normandy invasion, Garbo sent another message, a marathon two-hour signal, which explained that Normandy was intended as a feint attack, intended to lure the powerful German Fifteenth Army from its positions in the Pas de Calais. Once the Germans reacted to the bait, and moved their most powerful forces westward, the real Allied blow would fall behind them, and with it the Pas de Calais, and the direct route to Germany.

This inspiration turned the tables completely. The more determinedly the Allies attacked in Normandy, the more it would appear that they were trying to provoke the Germans into reacting. Only by holding back their most powerful units could they frustrate the Allied plan, so they kept the Fifteenth Army where it was for six vital weeks. By the time the Germans finally realized that FUSAG was a complete fabrication, Patton was in Normandy, leading the breakout from the bridgehead that eventually would sweep through northern France and help drive the Germans back to the borders of the Reich.

Captions to figures:

001.jpg: “The body of “Major William Martin” of the Royal Marines, dressed in uniform with a life preserver and showing all the postmortem signs associated with drowning after an airplane crash.

002.jpg: Some of the carefully selected evidence carried on the body to establish “Major Martin’s” identity.

003.jpg: “Major Martin’s” pass, admitting him to Combined Operations Headquarters, accounted for the importance of the documents he was carrying and helped establish that they were genuine.

004.jpg: Maintaining the Fortitude deceptions prior to D-Day meant providing huge numbers of dummy forces in south-eastern England to attract the attention of German reconnaissance flights: This photograph shows a dummy Spitfire fighter

005.jpg: Another devise to confuse the Germans: a sketchy framework for a dummy Hurricane fighter-bomber

006.jpg: This device meant for confusion is probably the most interesting: a framework that could be fitted to a Jeep to make it look like a Sherman tank from the air!

This article has (2401) words

Dr. Anil Aggrawal, M.D.

Professor of Forensic Medicine

Maulana Azad Medical College

New Delhi‑110002