Lieutenant-Colonel Roger Hesketh was a member of General Eisenhower’s deception unit, Ops B, and was a key figure in Operation Fortitude, the great Allied deception carried out against the Germans to support the Normandy campaign. After the war, Hesketh wrote a book on Fortitude, and in it he asked the question: of all the elements employed to deceive the enemy, from the fake runways and aircraft, to the dummy airborne troops, and the double agents feeding disinformation, which one had the greatest effect? Which part of Fortitude had actually fooled the Germans?
On examining the German records after the war, and interviewing their commanders, one key piece stood out over all the others: MI5’s Spanish double agent ‘Garbo’ and his message of 9th June 1944 to German intelligence in which he warned that the Normandy landings were a trap meant to divert the best Germans troops away from the Pas-de-Calais. Other factors had helped, Hesketh concluded, not least the other double agents feeding the Germans the story of a fictional build-up of Allied troops around Dover. But it was Garbo’s D+3 message that made Hitler himself give the counter order that stopped the powerful German reserves in France and Belgium from attacking the Allied soldiers struggling to get a toe-hold on the Normandy coastline.
Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, head of German high command, said as much himself. When shown the text of Garbo’s message after the war he agreed that it had been the reason why the Führer ordered his crack reserves to stay close to the narrowest part of the Channel.
‘There you have your answer,’ he said. ‘If I were writing a history I would say, with ninety-nine per cent certainty, that that message provided the reason for the change of plan.’
No other double agent or factor within the deception set up had such a dramatic and powerful effect. Garbo - an ordinary-looking yet highly imaginative and complex Spaniard called Juan Pujol - was the single most important part of the success of Fortitude.
‘Taking the evidence a a whole,’ Hesketh concluded, ‘the reader will probably agree that GARBO’s report decided the issue.’
Other double agents working for MI5 played important roles in the success of Fortitude - notably ‘Brutus’ (Roman Czerniawski) and ‘Tricycle’ (Dušan Popov). But Brutus’ loyalties were always first and foremost to Poland, while Tricycle had effectively been taken off Fortitude in the months before D-Day owing to doubts over his cover. Those who were involved at the time were in no doubt that Garbo was the truly indispensable member of the double cross team.
‘Garbo was the man who developed into our real star,’ wrote Ewen Montagu, ‘probably out-doing even Tricycle.’
John Masterman, who ran the XX Committee overseeing the double cross system, agreed. A fan of cricketing analogies, Masterman described Garbo in these terms, comparing him with one of the earlier - and ultimately disappointing - double agents, ‘Snow’: ‘If in the double cross world SNOW was the W.G. Grace of the early period, then GARBO was certainly the Bradman of the later years.’ International cricket was suspended during the war, but Australia’s Donald Bradman was the leading batsman of the day. Today, he is not only regarded as the finest cricketer ever, but possibly the greatest athlete of any sport. Masterman was describing his double agent in the most flattering terms he could think of. The Garbo case, he concluded, was nothing short of ‘the most highly developed example’ of the art of deception.
And would the invasion of Normandy have succeeded without the deception plan? Could all those thousands of soldiers have managed to fight their way off the beaches and deep into France had Fortitude not been set up to protect them from the best German troops then available in Western Europe?
Some historians prefer to downplay the importance of Fortitude, yet Allied commanders at the time were convinced that it was pivotal. It was the reason why the deception was carried out in the first place.
Considering the numbers of German troops available in France and Belgium, and the speed with which the Allies could get men and equipment on shore, the success of Fortitude was not a mere bonus that would help keep casualty rates down, it was crucial to the success of the invasion itself. Deception planners in London had already envisaged a scenario where no deception was carried out, estimating a timetable showing how quickly the Germans would pour men into the invasion area once the assault started. If the enemy correctly assumed that Normandy was it - that there was no second invasion coming in the Pas-de-Calais - and as a result sent the bulk of its forces in to repel the invaders, then by D+25 they would have some thirty-one divisions in Normandy, including nine Panzer divisions. That scale of build-up, Eisenhower and the other Allied commanders knew, was impossible to match. They had the floating Mulberry harbours, which they could use to ship supplies and men into France at a rapid rate. But even with these it would not be enough to bring in enough soldiers and armour to combat such imposing numbers.
‘In short,’ historian Stephen Ambrose concluded, ‘if Fortitude did not work, if the Germans pulled their Fifteenth Army away from the Pas-de-Calais and hurled it against Normandy, Overlord would fail.’
In a conflict involving so many millions of people, in which so many died, it seems frivolous, perhaps, to boil it all down to one or two men, a mere handful whose words and decisions changed the course of history. Other factors could also have had a decisive effect on the success of D-Day - the weather in the Channel over those crucial few days in early June, for example. And others also played their part - not least the soldiers who landed on the beaches, risking their lives to begin the slow process of liberating Europe from the Nazis. And yet the importance not only of the deception operation, but of Garbo’s role in it, seems incontrovertible, as Eisenhower himself later acknowledged to Pujol’s case officer, Tomás Harris.
‘You know,’ he told Harris after the war, ‘your work with Mr Pujol most probably amounts to the equivalent of a whole army division. You have saved a lot of lives.’
Jason Webster is the author of The Spy With 29 Names, published by Chatto & Windus. For more information visit http://www.jasonwebster.net.
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