"I'll bet it fooled the enemy MI for 5 whole minutes" Topic

So, I am reading a book on Pegasus Bridge. It mentioned the British named their second (as in created second, not numbered second) airborne division the 6th, in order to fool the Germans on how many airborne divisions they had. Really? That can't have worked more than like five minutes.

I have read this sort of thing about other countries as well.

It is done to confuse movements.

While I don't have any specific references to the examples you mention, there are numerous examples of the Germans being fooled by that sort of Allied counter-intelligence effort and they frequently listed whole divisions, corps, armies and even army groups that didn't exist. The 'First US Army Group' being the most famous example.

At a smaller scale, 151 Para, which was raised in India, was renumbered 156 Para when it was moved to the UK, in an effort to conceal the movement from Japanese intelligence.

While I don't have any specific references to the examples you mention, there are numerous examples of the Germans being fooled by that sort of Allied counter-intelligence effort and they frequently listed whole divisions, corps, armies and even army groups that didn't exist. The 'First US Army Group' being the most famous example.

Of course, later in the war the Germans also listed many of their own divisions, corps and armies that no longer existed…
I don't know about the Allies, but I think the Germans changed their divisional signs several times during the war for purposes of security. These kind of things may not work for long, but they might give you a slight edge for a short time.

It is part of the game. The Finns did a complete rename during the Winter War and that only lasted 3 months!

How long did the German high command think Normandy was a "Diversion"? This kind of thing happens in business too, you NEVER give your first company ID 1 (and least you don't tell them if you do!)

Military intelligence is a tricky thing – in the winter of 1941 the Germans were being attacked by Russian divisions they didn't know existed, so I imagine this sort of thing might be more effective than one might think

On a smaller scale – the few Westland Whirlwinds manufactured kept being assigned to new squadrons in order to give the impression that there were far more of them then was the case.

How long did the German high command think Normandy was a "Diversion"?

Don't know if you meant this as a rhetorical question or not, but the German High Command (OKW) thought it was a diversion until the Allies broke out of the bridgehead, destroyed the German armies, and went racing across France. The massive Allied deception effort kept the OKW fooled until it was entirely too late for them to do anything about it.

Jim

I gather that the SAS got their name because the British had a number od paper units designed to fool the Germans. With the SAS, they simply activated one of them.

I suppose it's one of those things that require relatively little effort to do, so it's worth doing even if there's only a 10% chance of fooling the enemy, since the payoff can be out of proportion to the effort spent.

And well, if you can confuse your own officers, what chance does the enemy have? :-)

Or how about that whole german army group that drowned. after the allies said the english channel dried up after a very hot summer.

When the Chinese began to intervene in Korea prisoners would say they were from the "62nd Volunteer Unit" and the unit was a few hundred men strong. Other prisoners gave differing information that UN HQ Intel types were totally confused as to the strength of the Chinese forces coming into the country. There is speculation that some of these "POWs" were plants for the very purpose of confusing UN forces. By the time they found out that the various unit numbers were entire divisions or armies the Chinese offensive began with 250,000 troops infiltrated into North Korea. An outstanding deception plan backed up with an even more outstanding infiltration of masses of infantry.

Ferrari numbered the 39 chassis (the only ones that ever existed) of the 250 GTO in such a fashion as to give the impression that there were the required number of manufactured cars. (I don't know how many that was, but the 250 GTO never came close to numbering what was required by the "rules".) Evidently this was not discovered until some years after it was too late. If it works in peacetime, I'm sure it has worked in wartime. (Btw, each of those cars now sells for millions in the teens at the very least, all the way up to well over $50 USD million….)

It's amazing what one can figure out if the enemy labels their stuff logically link . Though on the other hand I did hear tnat the US army HQs in ww2 Europe had to be assigned british military 'interpreters' to explain what the uk and commonwealth allied unit nomenclature actually meant.

Back when I was freelancing, I numbered my first client invoice as 'Invoice number 51', and went on from there.

I didn't want my few clients to know how few of them I had, or that I hadn't ever done this before.

The Germans continually overestimated allied divisional numbers throughout the NWE campaign..including airborne divisions (iirc they thought there were 8 allied airborne divs) -their intelligence simply wasn't very good. Exactly why this was I'm not entirely sure, the fact that allied divisions were generally much larger might have something to do with it, plus there being far more ghq units in allied armies, lack of decent air recce, not having any spy network worth talking about plus a almost universally hostile population = poor intel