THE ALLIED D-DAY INVASION OF NORMANDY ON JUNE 6, 1944, AND THE LITTLE KNOWN HISTORY THAT MADE FREEDOM FOR EUROPE POSSIBLE

By

Vladimir Badmaev, MD PhD

Seventy-five years ago, on the early morning of June 6, 1944 - the day D-Day - the force of 156,000 soldiers from Britain, US, Canada, countries of occupied Europe, and also from Australia and New Zealand launched a naval, air, and land assault on German-occupied west of Europe, across the English Channel with the landings on coastal France, on the beaches of Normandy. Codenamed Operation 'Overlord,' the Allied landings on the Normandy beaches marked the start of the liberation of west of Europe from German occupation.

Little is known, however, about a significant event that preceded this historical event. The success of D-Day was made possible by a military Operation Fortitude - the code name for an elaborate and the most enormous scale World War II military deception, employed by the Allied forces to confuse the military strategy of Germans and forces of Axis. The Fortitude ploy consisted of two plans, North and South, to mislead the German high command as to the location of the Allied invasion of Europe, away from Normandy.

Both Fortitude plans involved creating phantom field armies based in Edinburgh to invade Norway (Fortitude North) and Dover Strait or Pas de Calais, the strait at the narrowest part of the English Channel at the invasion of Continental Europe (Fortitude South). The operation was intended to divert Axis attention away from Normandy and, after the raid on June 6, 1944, to delay reinforcement by convincing the Germans that the landings were purely a diversionary attack.

Operation Fortitude utilized unprecedented scale combinations of physical deception, e.g., nonexistent infrastructure and equipment (rubber tanks, planes), dummy airfields, fake radio communication activity, leaks through diplomatic channels, and the double agents.

In the movie, The Eye of the Needle, based on Ken Follett's book with the same title, a German spy codenamed Needle is close to unmasking Fortitude's operation. The fictitious spy, played by Donald Sutherland, has photos of the fake Fortitude army to get back to headquarters in Berlin. The photographs would blow the whistle before the invasion begins. Fortunately, this fictitious spy failed in his mission, and the rest is history - as we know it today.