There’s an urban legend where the Krauts were building a fake military base using wood and canvas and the allies waited for them to finish it and drop a single wooden bomb on it.
whether or not that’s real, that’s hysterical
Even if I were a german soldier in that situation I’d laugh my ass off.
It definitely helped that we had both completely compromised the German spy network in Britain, as well as cracking their codes.
The spies let the British feed critical bits of false intelligence to the germans, in a stream of good, if slightly useless or out of date, intelligence.
The breaking of enigma then meant we could monitor, in near real time, how the Germans reacted to it. Limiting the intelligence just enough to make them feel they worked for it, but not so much they missed it.
The culmination was on D-day. Agent Garbo actually messaged the Germans warning them that the landings were on their way to Normandy, before they arrived. However, the British knew exactly how long it would take to actually reach the people that mattered. It arrived just after reports of the landings happening. It was then followed by a panicked warning. The Normandy landings were a diversion, and the main force was leaving for Calais! This kept the German tanks tied up for a critical 3 days.
Don’t forget stationing General Patton with the decoy army. They believed he was the most aggressive general and surely would be heading the invasion. Little did they know he had already been sidelined for beating officers with shell shock.
Putting a real general in charge of it probably helped too.
Decoys aren’t new, but the scale of pulling the wool over German eyes on this scale required more sheep than all of Ireland and New Zealand combined.
OP, context where?
There is a great book about it:
Context is that Germans bought whole pa de cale deception operation and didn’t guard Normandy as much
