D-Day Deception: Garbo's Fake Spies, Rubber Tanks and Stagg's Forecast

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After the August 1942 Dieppe raid, where more than 60 percent of roughly 6,000 mostly Canadian troops were killed, wounded or captured, Allied planners ruled out attacking a fortified port and chose the open beaches of Normandy for Operation Overlord. To hold German forces at the Pas de Calais, Operation Fortitude invented the First U.S. Army Group in Kent under George S. Patton, with inflatable tanks photographed from 20,000 feet and fake radio traffic. Spanish double agent Juan Pujol Garcia, codenamed Garbo, fed his handlers in Madrid true information timed to arrive too late to use, and reports from a network of informants he made up. Engineers built Mulberry harbors from Phoenix caissons, laid the PLUTO fuel pipeline under the Channel and fielded Percy Hobart's specialized tanks.

A storm forced Dwight D. Eisenhower to delay from June 5, and RAF meteorologist James Stagg forecast a brief clearing for June 6. German forecasters predicted two weeks of gales, so Erwin Rommel went home for his wife's birthday while Hitler kept four elite panzer divisions under his personal command after splitting the rest between Rommel and Geyr von Schweppenburg. At Omaha Beach, six foot swells swamped the Duplex Drive tanks. Rangers under James Rudder climbed Pointe du Hoc to find the guns moved inland, and later destroyed them in an orchard. Caen, meant to fall on day one, took until late July, and at the Falaise Pocket Omar Bradley ordered Patton to halt at a boundary line while more than 20,000 German soldiers escaped.

• Operations Taxable and Glimmer dropped strips of foil called Window in overlapping patterns to fake convoys on German radar.
• Dummy paratroopers stuffed with firecrackers were dropped to simulate rifle fire on landing.
• Rommel planted mines, Belgian gates and the poles known as Rommel's asparagus to wreck landing craft and gliders.
• Only about 90 of Rudder's 225 Rangers could still hold a weapon the next day.
• Allied pre-invasion bombing killed between 11,000 and 19,000 French civilians, with up to 19,000 more killed during the ground campaign.