Which D-Day?

To avoid the kind of miscalculation that foiled Operation Camilla, it was essential that ‘Operation Overlord’, the invasion of Normandy, and ‘Operation Neptune’, the seaborne portion of the landings, be covered by what Churchill dubbed ‘a bodyguard of lies’.

‘Operation Bodyguard’ would thus instil general confusion through disinformation. It was designed to make the Germans think multiple attacks would occur in places as far away and varied as southwestern France, Italy and the Balkans. ‘Operation Fortitude’ was the most important and northerly portion of Bodyguard, promoting the idea of invasions targeted at Calais, and at Narvik and Stavanger, in Norway.

To do this, an entire network of double agents was systematically and patiently recruited throughout the course of the war, handled by Thomas Argyll ‘TAR’ Robertson.

In the run-up to D-Day, with TAR Robertson’s careful supervision, these men and women would apply Clarke’s ideas by disseminating disinformation on a massive scale. In fact, at this point, the story becomes so fantastical that it invites comparisons to fiction.

One fitting example is the classic World War 2 adventure film ‘Where Eagles Dare’, starring Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood. They play MI-6 and OSS-affiliated commandos sent to rescue an American general from a citadel in the Bavarian Alps - the general crash landed over enemy territory and has knowledge of the upcoming D-Day operation. Burton and Eastwood’s elite team must get to him before the Germans discover the critical importance of what he knows… at least, that’s the official story.

But the plot soon thickens and it turns out that there may be a traitor, or traitors, hiding amongst the rescuers and that the ‘general’ is a fake. By the end, it’s become clear (well, clear to anyone able to keep up with the ever-shifting storyline) that the entire thing is a giant stunt by British intelligence to expose Germany’s network of spies in Britain. With the list of German agents duly tucked into his pocket, Burton leads Eastwood and two female companions (Mary Ure and Ingrid Pitt) in a daring and action-packed escape.

Cue spectacular gun battles, a fight on top of a cable car, lots of explosions and a bus chase to the airport where they all jump aboard a plane back to England. But there’s one last plot twist: Burton’s boss, who’s waited aboard the plane for them, is the top German double agent in Britain, Burton reveals. He jumps to his death to avoid execution right before the fantastic score by Ron Goodwin plays over the closing credits.

Naturally, the film’s plot stretches credibility. Staging a crash in hostile territory and sending a rescue team to be there at the exact moment the Judases in their midst meet up with a key enemy leader and are obediently double-crossed into revealing an entire spy network? Isn’t that a bit of a ridiculously dangerous, elaborate and convoluted way to have gone about it?!

Having said that, both Levine’s account and that of Ben Macintyre in the BBC documentary and book of the same name, ‘Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies’, show that the espionage backstory to D-Day isn’t actually that dissimilar to Where Eagles Dare. Double agents, spy networks, treachery and the prospect of any number of key players falling into enemy hands and revealing all in a nail-biting finale – the same elements are all there.

The major difference is that the real-life version didn’t involve elite commandos but an eclectic mix of eccentric personalities drawn from all manner of places.

And not all of them, Levine shows, would seem to have been good spy material:

This sounds like the bumbling attempts at spying and counter-espionage made by Lee Harvey Oswald in the years before he shot JFK. Owens, like Oswald, appears to have been driven by a desire for attention, and to have wanted to be important in some way.

The obvious question then is why any intelligence organisation would want such a liability-of-a-man working for them? Here too, Levine’s account proves enlightening:

In other words, this was a two-way problem, one the Germans struggled with as well, and which in the end worked to Allied advantage.

Like Owens, one of those turned to the Allied side was a mentally unstable woman named Lily Sergueiev, a Franco-Russian, who had no great loyalty to either the Germans or the British. Her real love was her pet dog ‘Babs’, which had to be quarantined in Gibraltar before ‘Treasure’, as Lily was codenamed, could come to England.

Once in Britain, her role in Fortitude involved bicycling around the south east, picking up whatever signs of military activity she could from observation and conversations she overheard.

There of course was no invasion force assembling in the south east. The vast numbers of vehicles the Germans thought they’d detected massing near Dover through (limited) aerial reconnaissance were nothing but wooden and canvas planes, and inflatable tanks. But Treasure’s ‘chicken-feed’ (bogus intelligence) was dutifully passed onto her German handler and added credibility to the idea that this was, in fact, the force Hitler expected would strike Calais.

This ‘army’ was lent additional credibility by the man the Allies chose to lead it. Someone who, as well as being admired by Hitler, was about the most conspicuous commander they had (with the possible exception Douglas MacArthur.) As Jonathan Mayo explains in ‘D-Day: Minute by Minute’:

But it was more likely that TAR Robertson and his colleagues at MI-5 were piss soaking paper bags in the tense days before D-Day. Just one of many close calls they had came when Babs was supposedly hit by a truck in Gibraltar and killed.

Bizarrely, to this day, nobody knows for certain what Babs’ true fate was, given that all files relating to the canine appear to have been systematically removed from the records.

Whatever the case, the already mentally unstable Treasure was positively livid and threatened to take revenge on the British. Unbeknownst to them, she had a secret code she could have typed out when sending her coded messages to her German handler - this would have indicated she’d been compromised. He’d have then known any subsequent messages from her were bogus, something that could have raised suspicions about the expected attack on Pas de Calais.

Fortunately, Treasure decided not to use the code, and the deception continued to be convincing to the Germans, for now.

This was helped along no end by another member of the XX (Double Cross) scheme: Juan Pujol Garcia – aka ‘Garbo’.

He was a Spaniard who’d come to Britain to assist with the war effort because he saw it as a vital bastion holding out against the political extremes of communism and fascism.

He’d managed to convince the Germans that he had an entire sub-network of agents feeding him information about the British. There was ‘Rags’, an Indian poet, a Portuguese commercial traveller, a collection of zealous Welsh fascists known as ‘The Brothers of the Aryan World Order’ and multiple others.

All 27 of these people (or rather, ‘people’) existed entirely in his head; it was this ability to spin lies so convincingly that earnt him his name – that of the Swedish film star of the era, Greta Garbo (because he was such a good actor.)

Garbo’s job, Macintyre explains, was to help “(reinforce) the fiction of a vast American army assembling in Kent. His imaginary network (of agents) spanned the country, the lies from each agent reinforcing the lies from the others. An illusion made all the more convincing after one agent who knew too much was suddenly eliminated from the spy ring.

There very nearly was a slip – not from Garbo, but from his wife, who was sick of being cooped up at home, disallowed as she was to go out in case it endangered his activities. She threatened to jeopardise his work unless she could go back to Spain to see her mother.

MI-5 shut her down by threatening to lock her up.

His main contact there, and the person who’d passed along the tip on Pearl Harbor, was a man named Johnny Jebsen. The two of them had a fast friendship that pre-dated the war and, in fact, Jebsen had indirectly played a role in turning Popov into the double-crossing spy he became:

Eventually, Jebsen too would enter the Double Cross world, which wasn’t entirely surprising. He had told Popov at one point that, “If you want to destroy a team (referring to the Abwehr), the best way is to become a part of it”.

And yet, while he proved another useful asset to the British, his debut caused a serious dilemma for them.

Once brought on board, ‘Artist’, as he was codenamed, gave an early ‘gift’ to the British: the identity of every German spy in Britain. But when the British not only didn’t arrest any of them but allowed their messages back to Germany to continue, Jebson soon surmised that every single one of them was a British double agent. The cracking of the enigma code early in the war had already helped greatly to track them through their messages to their German handlers and to then intercept them when they’d come to Britain.

As noted, this approach had serious drawbacks. The trouble with double agents is that they might become triple agents, switching back over to German allegiance, either because of innate temperament or through pressure after having been caught. That was a particularly worrying prospect when it came to Artist:

In other words, once the Germans learnt that their spies were actually British spies, it would become obvious that, in fact, it was Normandy that was the target while Calais was the diversion, not the other way around.

This danger pressed British intelligence away from the use of explicit scenarios fed through double agents, and back towards Clarke’s original vision:

Of course, the solution was far from full proof. Part of the reason double agents were needed was precisely because the Germans hadn’t achieved air superiority over Britain and therefore had limited capacity to observe bogus troop build ups near Dover and Edinburgh.

The other dilemma was that Tar Robertson knew from Bletchley Park intercepts of German messages (which had been going on since Enigma was cracked) that they were beginning to suspect Jebsen. If captured, he could reveal all under Gestapo torture. But if he was suddenly pulled out and stopped having regular personal contact with his boss in Lisbon, the Germans might realise their messages were being read and change their codes, blinding the Allies.

Then, as Macintyre explains, an invitation came that ‘Artist’ couldn’t turn down:

“(A little over a month before D-Day,) Jebson was summoned to the offices of German counter-intelligence in Lisbon to receive a medal, for his services to the Third Reich. But there, his luck ran out. He was ambushed, drugged and smuggled out of Portugual.”

Tar Robertson was soon notified:

According to Levine, “General Wavell once asked Clarke, ‘What is your deception work worth to me?’ ‘On the evidence of captured documents,’ replied Clarke, ‘three divisions, one armoured brigade and two squadrons of aircraft’.”

By D-Day, it was worth a hell of a lot more than that.

As Jacob F Field notes in ‘D-Day in Numbers’, approximately 156,000 Allied soldiers made it ashore by the end of June 6, sustaining a relatively modest 10,000 casualties in the process (though Joshua Levine points out this is probably an underestimate.)

28,845 men stormed Sword Beach, sustaining 630 casualties; 21,400 went up Juno, for 1,200 casualties sustained; 24,970 charged Gold, with only 400 casualties; 20,000 men, and 1,700 motorised vehicles made it ashore at Utah with a mere 187 casualties taken. And at Omaha, there were 2,400 casualties, but 34,000 men made it ashore.

In addition to this total of 129,215, the remainder were mostly made up by the 13,348 men of the American 82 and 101 Divisions, 4,000 more in support flown in by glider and, according to the MoD, 8,500 British paratroopers. This may or may not have included Pathfinder teams – small paratroop units sent ahead to help establish drop zones. And elsewhere, 2,240 men of the SAS were dropped across the French coastline to disrupt the German response by launching raids and working with the French resistance. A fitting use for the brainchild Clarke co-parented.

In addition, 10,521 combat aircraft were flown over France on D-Day, with 113 of them being shot down. Allied air superiority was clearly achieved – these aircraft participated in 15,000 sorties (missions out from and back to base, with some aircraft obviously performing more than one sortie that day); the Germans only managed a measly 319 sorties.

The Allies dropped over 7 million pounds of bombs. Although that sounds less impressive when one considers that cloud cover prevented the vast majority of these from hitting their targets. One American B-17 Flying Fortress could carry 8,000 lb of bombs, and so 900 of them could have carried the day’s bomb load.

Though, of course, there were British bombers, so there wouldn’t have been that many B-17s, but this does demonstrate why so much air traffic that day was, in fact, bombers.

On June 5, there was actually a total of 15,766 aircraft ready to go in Britain – 5,049 fighters, 3,467 heavy and 1,645 light and medium bombers. This makes a total of 10,161 combat aircraft. The Forces Network contacted Field, who confirmed that the remaining 360 that performed combat duties on June 6 may simply have been non-combat aircraft seconded into combat roles.

6,939 ships were used to transport most of the invasion force to Normandy. Fully 4,126 of these were landing craft.

The BBC has said that over 12,000 vehicles and 1,500 tanks were brought ashore, though when fact checking, the D-Day Museum told the Forces Network this figure can only be a very rough estimate. Such was the chaos and confusion of D-Day.

Although annoying for journalists and historians, chaos and confusion was advantageous for spies, as Levine makes clear:

In fact, the Germans continued to believe in the deception after the war had ended – and with good reason:

It is only since the 1990s that much of the relevant government material has been made public. That was too late for the Fortitude spies to gain wide public recognition.

Garbo moved to Venezuela after the war where he became a Spanish teacher and ran a bookshop, dying in 1988, though he at least was invited to meet the Duke of Edinburgh at Buckingham Palace in 1984.

Dudley Clarke retired from the Army as a Brigadier and started a literary career, as well as working for the Conservative Party. He died in 1974. Tar Robertson, meanwhile, became a sheep farmer – he died in 1994.

Bronx moved to the South of France after the war and ran a gift shop. In 1995, the Director General of MI-5 got word that she’d run out of money and Bronx was given a cheque of £5,000 as, according to Macintyre, “a way of making the point that her wartime service (was) still remembered and appreciated”. She died shortly thereafter, aged 85. Brutus, meanwhile, remained in Britain after the war, becoming a printer and acquiring several cats (32, at one point.) He died in 1985 at the age of 75. Treasure moved to Detroit and lived, presumably happily ever after, surrounded by dogs.

Popov moved to France and married twice. His second wife and their sons were unaware of his past life as a spy until he published his memoirs in 1974. He died in 1981, aged 69, always wondering what had happened to his good friend Johnny Jebsen, who was last seen being taken away from Sachsenhausen concentration camp by the Gestapo in 1945.

Tar Robertson, Macintyre says, presumed he’d been caught up “in the last murderous spasms of the Nazi regime… and tossed into some unmarked mass grave”.

But then again, “perhaps he made good his escape (in) the chaos and confusion of those final days”, eager to avoid awkward questions from German authorities after the war about his questionable business activities during it.

Thus, although it’s reasonable to presume he was killed, his ultimate fate remains unknown.

For more on the other ‘unsung heroes’ of D-Day, click here; and visit the Forces Network's D-Day 75 page for more D-Day content.

For more about Bodyguard and Fortitude, read ‘Operation Fortitude’ by Joshua Levine and Ben Macintyre’s book (and the BBC documentary of the same name) ‘Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies’. And see ‘D-Day in Numbers’ by Jacob F Field and ‘D-Day: Minute by Minute’ by Jonathan Mayo for more on the Normandy landings.

Read ‘Tragedy at Dieppe’ by Mark Zuehlke and ‘Gallipoli 1915’ by Tim Travers for more on those operations.

For illustrated histories of events covered here, read Osprey Publishing's four-volume account, 'D-Day 1944 (1) Omaha Beach' and 'D-Day 1944 (2) Utah Beach & the US Airborne Landings’, both by Steven J Zaloga, 'D-Day 1944 (3) Sword Beach & The British Airborne Landings' and 'D-Day 1944 (4) Gold & Juno Beaches’, both by Ken Ford, as well as ‘Dieppe 1942’ by Ken Ford, ‘Gallipoli 1915’ by Philip Haythornthwaite and 'Pegasus Bridge' by Will Fowler. Visit Osprey Publishing for more military history titles.

Thanks to the D-Day Museum in Portsmouth and Jacob F Field for help with fact checking.