A pretty thin article about an awesome topic! The Ghost Army was [part of] the post-D-day operational aspect of a wider deception named Operation Bodyguard. Ab

A pretty thin article about an awesome topic! The Ghost Army was [part of] the post-D-day operational aspect of a wider deception named Operation Bodyguard. Absolutely fascinating story - the underlying idea was to convince Axis of an entire non-existent invasion force (which dwarfed the actual Allied forces) and sell the idea that the Normandy invasion was a feint. It worked tremendously - Panzer units stayed in Pas-de-calais for more than a week following D-Day (awaiting the next invasion) before being moved. And even then that was by necessity; Hitler continued to be obsessed about Calais. Bodyguard included fake tanks, landing barges, radio traffic etc. But the impact pre D-Day was low because the German spotter planes weren't great. Much more impactful was the double-agent work which basically sold the story. After D-Day, captured German maps matched exactly the maps the deception experts had plotted... Another fun fact; the Allies told the Germans about D-Day in advance. The top Double Agent (Garbo)[2] ran a fictional network for the Germans, and was authorised to tell them about the invasion at midnight (in a mix up on the German side, his message wasn't received till 8am). Bodyguard was immense - but it was ultimately based on the ideas of Dudley Clarke[3] who was basically Rommel's nemesis (contrary to popular history about Monty) in North Africa. He basically invented the concept of modern deception techniques - including fake troops (fun note: he came up with the name for the SAS, helped form the Commandos and also named the US Rangers). His ideas were picked up by London and a whole deception department formed to arrange bodyguard (they did a crap job planning it, so Clarke ripped up the plan through a subordinate and made them redo it). Fascinating and little known area of history. Sadly most of the literature on it is a bit dry... but there are a load of Wikipedia articles which are OK (although I wrote most of them, so subjective!) and Ben Macintyre has written a couple of decent books on the double agent aspect. (ps in case you hadn't guessed; this is my specialist subject :D) 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Bodyguard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Bodyguard 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Pujol_Garc%C3%ADa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Pujol_Garc%C3%ADa 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dudley_Clarke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dudley_Clarke