I would love to know how many false alarms and how far up the chain of command they got ….The Germans probably had such alerts every week, this contributes greatly to a kind of complacency that it's just yet another false alarm…
Yep yep yep.
Too often in historical review we focus in on one event (the actual landings), without considering all the preceded and surrounded that event.
As I understand it* the US deception efforts were rather single-minded and the methods rather uni-dimensional. It was mostly "the REAL landings will be in the Pas de Calais" -- with every deception re-enforcing that one simple message.
The British deception efforts were substantially broader and more nuanced. They included several efforts to convince the Germans that the landings were imminent prior to D-Day, to desensitize them. One of those was even focused on Normandy -- a deliberate (and nuanced) effort in late April to get the Germans to think the landings would be on the Normandy coast within a matter of days. It involved a "morale boosting" visit by the King himself to troops on the SE coast (in Sussex?)-- positions that would be right if they were preparing to cross to Normandy. The trip was covered by the press, although wartime censorship prevented some key bits of information about units and locations (but not street signs and city names in the backgrounds of pictures). To re-enforce the theme they leaked information about what units he had visited in just one or two press reports (units that MI5 was confident the Germans expected to participate in any landings). The whole show was timed to coincide with the movement of shipping into the SE ports, which German aerial recon were sure to pick up.
After the Germans had had some time to digest this, put the pieces together, and get alarmed, a set of leaks were placed through their double-agent network of secret night time unit movements away from Sussex northward. So the Germans got alarmed that the Allies would land in Normandy, then got relieved that the Allies would not land in Normandy, and so built up some resistance to intelligence that it would be / was Normandy.
And in the process they were encouraged to get curious about where those troops might be going… to feed the next narrative.
Any where in France should not have been a surprise.
Indeed. But anywhere in France was a BIG area to cover. And the "should not have been a surprise" extended beyond just France. There was also a deeply-held concern that the Allies would land in Norway. The "war on the periphery" approach in the Med seemed to feed into this narrative inside German intelligence assessments. The British deliberately fed this theme too, including a trip by the King to the Orkneys (actually a rather dangerous trip in wartime!) for more "morale boosting" visits with the troops, that was again covered by the press, and (again AIUI) linked to the leak campaign of the movement of troops northward from the SE ports. All of this was both positive for British morale (the folks at home loved to see the King visiting the troops, without much care of which units or where), but also deliberately orchestrated on the conviction that the Germans would be looking for what units and where in those reports in the British press, to piece together their own appreciation of British force deployments and intentions.
So as to what the Germans knew on D-Day, well, their problem was not so much that they didn't know enough, but that they knew too much. Obvious to say "They had these 10 key pieces of information -- any fool could see the pattern!" It's harder when you realize "They had these 947 pieces of information -- and these 10 pieces were key to seeing the pattern." Filtering out the key information was their challenge.
Or so I believe. Could be wrong. Been known to happen.
-Mark
(aka: Mk 1)
* AIUI only. I do not profess to have made any great study on the topic. Welcome corrections and new information.
's first experience with 1:4800 scale naval models.
