THE GREAT D-DAY DECEPTION

From blow-up tanks to wooden landing craft and an entire fake oil storage facility built along three miles of Kent coast, a new book reveals how the film industry helped create a ghost army to fool the German high command ahead of June 6, 1944

- Taylor Downing

THE BRAVERY of the men who splashed ashore under enemy fire on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944, nearly 80 years ago, can never be doubted. However, few would have known one of the reasons for their success came from the skills of film industry technicians - the likes of scenery designers, carpenters and set dressers.

How did their unlikely contribution to the success of D-Day come about?

Crucial to victory in 1944 was a brilliant and well-developed deception operation, carried out by Allied intelligence officers. The Germans knew that an invasion was coming, but they did not know where or when. So Operation Fortitude, as it was codenamed, set out to fool the Germans into thinking that when the invasion came it would be across the shortest stretch of the English Channel, from the Kent coast around Dover to the occupied French coast, along the Pas de Calais.

The Germans had already built fearsome defences along this stretch of coast. Heavy guns protruded from giant concrete casements and bunkers.

Beaches were mined and machine guns placed where they could cover landing zones with bullets. The Allied deception plan had to confirm in the mind of the German military High Command that this was where the big invasion battle would be fought.

To do this, the deception planners of Operation Fortitude created a fake Army Group made up of a fictional combination of more than a quarter of a million Allied soldiers from the US, Canada and Britain. It was called the First US Army Group and was supposed to be based in Kent, Essex and Suffolk, from where it could launch an assault upon the French coast around Calais.

But given such a unit did not actually exist, how could they pretend a quarter of million men were preparing to launch an invasion?