Codebreakers Victory (39 page)

John Masterman, the Double Cross Committee and the networks of double agents set about the "grand strategic deception" for which their earlier chicaneries were rehearsals.

Reporting from Scotland, the agents code-named Mutt and Jeff told their controllers about the units making up the Fourth Army; they added the titillating bit that a Soviet military mission had arrived in Edinburgh to discuss plans for a Russian invasion of Scandinavia to coincide with the Fourth's landings in Norway. In his postwar report,
Fortitude,
Roger Hes-keth, who has been described as "the quiet genius behind Fortitude," pointed out that the Germans would have needed no more than one hundred thousand troops to garrison Norway and Denmark but, out of fear of invasion by the largely fictitious Fourth Army, they maintained an average of two hundred fifty thousand there.

Under his code name Tricycle, Dusko Popov traveled to Lisbon to deliver to his spymaster the complete order of battle of the FUSAG forces.

The Polish agent known as Brutus told his spymaster that he had had himself assigned to General Patton's headquarters to serve as liaison officer between FUSAG and the Polish high command. He kept his controller informed daily on the changes in FUSAG's order of battle and on its increasing strength.

The agent known as Tate, who had impressed the Germans with his ability to make friends among the British, made a new friend in Kent—a railway clerk. Tate learned from this gabby—and entirely fictitious—clerk, and reported to Germany's secret service, all the rail arrangements for moving the FUSAG forces from their concentration areas to the embarkation ports, thus affirming the Germans' belief that an invasion of the Pas de Calais was imminent.

A
woman agent code-named Bronx had been given a code system by her spymaster that she could use to indicate possible invasion sites. She would telegraph her bank in Lisbon the amounts she needed to withdraw to meet dental and medical needs. A request for thirty pounds meant a landing south of Sweden, forty pounds one in Norway, and so on. With that invasion's target date delayed into June, she wired to her bank on May 15 that she needed fifty pounds for the dentist. The interpretation of her message was that she had definite news that a landing would be made in the Bay of Biscay area on the west coast of France on or about June 15. Her purpose was to make sure that the Eleventh Panzer Division, quartered in the Bordeaux region, would stay there rather than hurry northward to help repel the Normandy landings. The German high command ordered the division to remain where it was.

Most of all the committee looked to Garbo to deceive the Germans. He and his invented network of agents transmitted convincing details about the massing of troops in Scotland and the steady growth of FUSAG. To increase his credibility with his Abwehr spymasters, the committee allowed him to be the first to reveal that troops of the First Army had been transferred in from Italy, and the first to announce that FUSAG was under Patton's command. By helping burnish Garbo's reputation within the Abwehr to a high glow, these measures would soon pay rich dividends to the Allies.

Allied schemers' efforts to confuse the Germans about the timing of the attack also bore fruit. German commanders were lulled into thinking that a Channel crossing couldn't possibly come in early June. The Soviets cooperated in the scam by leaking misinformation that their offensive in support of the invasion would be delayed until July. As D-Day approached, even the weather joined in the subterfuge. A Bletchley Park decrypt revealed the belief of Field Marshal Rundstedt that the Allies could not make a cross-Channel assault unless they could anticipate four consecutive days of good weather. Since in those first days of June the weather turned foul, the marshal assured Hitler that the invasion was not imminent. Having lost their weather ships in the North Atlantic, the Germans had no way of knowing, as Eisenhower did, of the temporary letup foreseen for June 6. The decrypt of Rundstedt's message influenced Ike's decision to seize upon the slight clearing. To catch the Germans off guard, he judged, would more than compensate for the less-than-fair weather the invaders would encounter. Since the May target date for the invasion had been missed because of a shortage of landing craft, Ike was also more than a little desperate not to lose out on the best June cycle for the offensive.

One of the ways his decision paid off was that when the invasion came, Rommel was back in Germany conferring with Hitler, and several other generals had left their posts to participate in a war game. Rommel had even suggested to the high command that in view of the impossible weather, the armies on the West Wall be given a time of relaxation from their intense vigilance.

Allied tricksters took advantage of the Germans' belief that Normandy couldn't be the sole objective of the landings because that coast lacked a port large enough to support so massive an operation. The Allies built artificial harbors, code-named Mulberries, and floated them into place soon after the troops had gone ashore. Protected by breakwaters formed of huge sunken concrete blocks and intentionally grounded ships, the Mulberries for a time provided an unloading site whose capacity was greater than any natural harbor in northern France.

With all these guileful preparations working in the invasion's favor, D-Day was a surprise to the Germans and a success for the Allies. Yet the hold on the beaches was slim, the whole enterprise vulnerable to a massive counterattack. It was time for the second phase of Fortitude to begin—to confirm the German leaders' conviction that Normandy was only a sideshow meant to divert attention and resources from the main assault on Calais.

At this point Fortitude hinged on Garbo. To further strengthen his image as the Germans' most reliable source of inside information, Eisenhower had agreed to a further step recommended by the Twenty Committee. On the morning of D-Day, Garbo would give the Germans warning that the invasion ships were on their way across the Channel—too late for the defenders to do much about it but early enough to enhance Garbo's standing with his controllers. Ike specified, however, that the message was not to be sent until three o'clock on the morning of the landings, which were set for six thirty. Since Abwehr operators were off duty from midnight to seven a.m., the timing was a problem for Garbo. Ever inventive, he cooked up a scheme that required the operators to stay on duty throughout the night. Despite the agreement, and much to Garbo's annoyance, on D-Day morning the ops were not at their sets; his message was read only after the beaches had been invaded. How he blasted his controller for their failure! He and his agents had gone to all this trouble and danger to find out when the attack would begin and it had all been in vain!

With the Abwehr now set to believe anything he transmitted, Garbo was ready for the climactic moment of his double-agent career. On D plus one, he told his contact, "It is perfectly clear that the present attack is a large-scale attack but diversionary in character to draw the maximum of our reserves so as to be able to strike a blow somewhere else with assured success. The constant aerial bombardment which the area of the Pas de Calais has suffered and the strange disposition of these forces give reason to suggest an attack in that region of France which at the same time offers the shortest route for the final objective of their delusions—Berlin."

His message went straight to Hitler, and it had a dramatic effect. After mulling over the situation for several days, the führer made his decision. As elements of the Fifteenth Army were moving out of the Pas de Calais to mount a powerful counterattack against the beachhead, he not only ordered the troops not to move; he also called back the ones who had already departed for Normandy.

On June 10, when Churchill and General Marshall joined the Allied chiefs in London's Operation Room, a secretary brought in the Ultra decrypt that revealed what Hitler had ordered. "We knew then that we'd won," Ron Wingate, one of the generals at the meeting, later recalled. "There might be very heavy battles, but we'd won."

The success of the grand deception was enhanced by the Germans' overestimates of the Allied forces arrayed against them. Accepting Garbo's order-of-battle assessments, they believed that in Britain they were opposed by seventy-five divisions; the actual number was less than fifty. In the Mediterranean theater they estimated that to mount a Balkans attack the Allies commanded seventy-one divisions, whereas the true figure was thirty-eight—a difference of 250,000 men. As for their own troops, the Germans were deluded into deploying ninety divisions all over Europe, ready to fight invading armies that didn't exist.

Essential to the whole undertaking was the role of the codebreakers. As Don Bussey, one of Bletchley Park's Ultra Americans, wrote, "Ultra made a tremendous contribution to the success of the deception planning for the Normandy landing because we were able to follow through Ultra not only what the German forces were doing but also that Fortitude was working so well. The Germans still believed well into July that Patton had an army in southeastern England that was going to come across to the Pas de Calais, so they couldn't send reinforcements to Normandy." General Omar Bradley said of the deception that because of it the enemy was "paralyzed into indecision" and made the grave tactical error of "committing his forces piecemeal."

Eisenhower, in his report to the Combined Chiefs of Staff, summed up Fortitude's success: "The German Fifteenth Army, which, if committed to battle in June or July, might possibly have defeated us by sheer weight of numbers, remained inoperative throughout the critical period of the campaign, and only when the breakthrough had been achieved were its infantry divisions brought west across the Seine—too late to have any effect upon the course of victory."

 

 

Stalemate in Normandy

 

Prior to D-Day, the codebreakers had informed Allied chiefs of a deep split in German generals' attitudes as to how best to repulse the invasion. As overall commander in the West, Rundstedt believed that in view of the vast expanse of the coastal area, the sensible course was to depend primarily on mobile reserves held inland, ready to move in strength to wherever the Allies landed. Erwin Rommel, arriving to take up his new duties, came to an opposite conclusion. He felt strongly that the Germans must meet and overwhelm the Allies on the beaches, must hold the coast "absolutely." He was aware, from his experiences in North Africa, how reserves could be made immobile by Allied air supremacy. He also argued that experience in the Mediterranean theater had shown that the Allies did not move quickly and boldly away from their bridgeheads; a continuation of that cautious pattern would provide him the opportunity, with powerful forces close to the coast, to smash the attackers before they could gain a foothold.

The two generals settled on a compromise. Rundstedt agreed to move infantry divisions forward while keeping nine armored divisions in reserve. Rommel was also bound by Hitler's orders not to move his strongest command, the Fifteenth Army, out of the Pas de Calais.

The division of forces worked in the Allies' favor. As Omar Bradley observed, "The result was a defensive crust on the beaches that was too thin to destroy us and reserves too small for von Rundstedt's war of maneuver."

Eisenhower resolved that the Normandy landings would not follow the Mediterranean pattern. The troops were to land and then immediately begin to push inland. After Montgomery's British and Canadian troops, as a lead example, had made their landings on their three assigned Normandy beaches, Monty's Second Army was to drive toward Caen and take this important road and railway hub the first day.

What frustrated this bold plan was partially the result of an odd shortfall in BP's information. Montgomery's landings were only lightly opposed, and the Second Army did begin its push toward Caen. Ultra had warned that a German infantry division at Caen had been replaced by the much more formidable Twenty-first Panzer Division. Further, Ultra disclosed that instead of remaining in place as a cohesive unit, the division had dispersed in the Caen area. Details of this deployment, unfortunately, were not revealed. It remained for Montgomery's army to discover how cleverly the panzer division had disposed its strength. The division's infantry and antitank gun units had been placed at great advantage on the Periers Ridge. Behind them was a battalion of field guns. Still farther back were the tanks, grouped to launch a counterattack. Progress for the Second Army quickly ground to a halt, four miles from Caen.

When the troops and the tanks of the Twenty-first did counterattack they succeeded, for a time, in opening a corridor that linked them with the troops still holding out on the beaches. It was a moment of great peril for the Normandy invasion. If Rommel had been free to rush the mobile forces of the Fifteenth into the battle, he might well have made good on his coastal strategy. Thanks to Fortitude, however, the Fifteenth stayed in place. Monty's troops put up a gritty defense, knocking out 50 of the Twenty-first's 127 tanks. When a large Allied glider fleet sailed over the beaches and behind the battle lines, the Twenty-first withdrew and the beachhead was saved.

The Allied timetable, however, was shredded. Caen was not taken until late July. The Americans to the west became locked in vicious fighting in the difficult French hedgerow country known as the
bocage.
All over Normandy the fighting was stalemated.

As June and then July wore on, though, the Allies were relieved that at least the worst nightmares about the invasion had not come to reality. Rommel had not forced another Dunkirk. With each passing day, more men, armor and supplies flowed into Normandy. There was growing confidence that the Allies' foothold in France could not be dislodged.

When FUSAG made no move and the Pas de Calais attack saw no landings for weeks after D-Day, it might be supposed that the Double Cross agents had exhausted their credibility and brought their usefulness to an end. Not so. Masterman has noted that "no single case was compromised. Those agents who took part were more highly regarded by the Germans than ever."