FORTITUDE

FUSAG was fake, but
Patton was very real.

Allied Operation FORTITUDE was a program of deception—and a supplemental operation—to Operation OVERLORD, the Normandy Campaign. At the center of the FORTITUDE deception was the entirely fictitious First United States Army Group (FUSAG) ostensibly commanded by the very well-known American officer, Lt. Gen. George S. Patton. In what today would be termed a military information support operation, FUSAG was given a network of installations, had its own imaginary organizational structures, fabricated radio message traffic, conjured up plans, missions, and briefings, even false insignia. The ghost command had its own— 

“training grounds, a communications network, plans, orders of battle, and a specific target, the French coast between Calais and Boulogne, or even, so the Germans were encouraged to believe, farther northeast [and thus further away from Normandy] on the Belgian and Dutch coasts.”[1]

German intelligence agents in England repeatedly confirmed much of this “evidence” which completely fooled the German high command, including Hitler, as to both the magnitude of the Allied forces available and the intended target for their imminent cross-channel attack So convinced were the Germans of the reality of FUSAG, that even after the Normandy landings had begun, the German high command kept the powerful 15th Infantry Division positioned, and most of their Panzer units held in reserve, to defend against what they were sure would be soon coming, the main cross-channel attack by Patton’s forces striking the Calais area, 100-150 miles northeast of Sword Beach. 

As evidenced by the German high command’s decisions regarding its Panzer reserves and its heavily armed 15th Infantry Division, not only is the Third Reich’s strategy for its defense of its western approaches discovered, but the fundamental purpose of Operation FORTITUDE is revealed. Its purpose was to fool the Germans into thinking the invasion would come at a place far away from the area of the actual landings. German uncertainty as to where the landings would occur left them with no choice but to defend well over a thousand miles of coastline from Denmark in the north to the Bay of Biscay in the west, forcing them to violate Frederick the Great’s dictum that he who defends everything defends nothing. Once the invasion came, the deception wrought by FORTITUDE remained so strong that senior commanders up to and including Hitler remained steadfast in their conviction that it was just a feint and that the real invasion would come further up the coastline. 

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[1] Martin Gilbert, D-Day (Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley and Sons, 2004), 61.