Military historian and author Flint Whitlock says that Operation Fortitude was “the real key to success on D-Day.” To pull off the deception, the Allies created a “dummy army” called the First U.S. Codenamed Operation Fortitude, the Allies used every trick in the book-and invented a few new ones-to convince German intelligence that the D-Day invasion would absolutely occur in Calais. The reason Germany chose to double-down Nazi defenses along the Calais coast was not only because of its proximity to England, but because Hitler fell hook, line and sinker for one of the most successful military deception schemes since the Trojan horse. Meanwhile, the rest of the French coastline, including the northern beaches of Normandy, was less fiercely defended. The Nazi’s message was clear-attempt to storm Calais and we will drive you into the sea. From the start, the top candidate for an Allied invasion was believed to be the French port city of Calais, only 20.7 miles across the English Channel from Dover.Īs part of Joseph Goebbels’ Nazi propaganda machine, the Germans installed three massive gun batteries along the Calais coast with their 406-mm cannons pointed at Dover. But without the money and manpower to install a continuous line of defense, the Nazis focused on established ports. To ready for an invasion, in 1942, Germany began construction on the Atlantic Wall, a 2,400-mile network of bunkers, pillboxes, mines and landing obstacles up and down the French coastline.
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