In the majority of our psychological operations (PSYOP) articles we select a
specific leaflet campaign and then study it in depth. This article will be somewhat
different. We will discuss the theme, "deception and disinformation" which may
or may not have a major leaflet connection. In every case the psychological operation was
meant to confuse the enemy and encourage him to react in a way favorable to U.S. forces.
Some operations featured radio traffic; some involve the construction of real or fake
military materiel, and others feature rumors or false newspaper reports.
Each of these operations has been covered in depth in various books and military
after-action reports. We will just briefly discuss them and attempt to show how they were
all part of the "black" side of PSYOP, the use of misleading and deceptive
information to achieve a military goal.
SET THE CHANNEL ABLAZE
A deception and disinformation campaign that might have helped the British stave off a
German invasion from France involved a rumor that they had the ability to set the English
Channel ablaze.
As the victorious German army gazed wistfully across the 21 miles of the English
Channel in 1940, they were unaware that the British had almost no arms with which to
defend themselves. Everything had been left behind on the beaches of Dunkerque. All of
Britain was ripe for the taking. In occupied France the Germans were building landing
barges and troops were being trained for an amphibious assault. It was just a matter of
time.
The British Chiefs of Staff admitted "Should the Germans succeed in establishing a
force with its vehicles in this country; our Army forces have not got the offensive power
to drive it out." The weapons situation was so bad that in Manchester several rifles
used in the Indian Mutiny were obtained from the Zoological Gardens and issued to the
troops.
Meanwhile, the British were calling up everyone, building a civilian guard, and asking
for old hunting rifles to be donated to defend the realm. They also devised several
invasion scenarios, planning what steps to take when the German ships were sighted.
One plan involved dousing the channel with oil, then setting it ablaze to burn the
Germans alive before reaching the shore. Of course, they did not have the ability to do so
and therefore could only use deception, rumor, and propaganda to imply that the island was
protected by a wall of fire.
Sefton Delmer
Sefton Delmer, Director of Britain's "Black" Radio during WWII, talked about
the British deception plan in Black Boomerang, The Viking Press, New York, 1962.
Delmer ran numerous black radio and leaflet operations for Great Britain during WWII. He
spoke perfect German and could imitate the speech patterns of both the elite and working
social classes.
I went on the air in the BBC studio and did a little more teasing. I pretended to
have a telephone conversation with my old friend Göring, told the story of my smooth and
uneventful voyage, and taunted him with his inefficiency. A few days later I followed this
up by broadcasting an English lesson for would-be invaders.
He goes on to talk about his English lesson to the Germans. The original wartime tape
was played at a 1st PSYOP Battalion Command Briefing about PSYOP at Fort Bragg, NC, July
1973. Some of the tape is as follows:
We English, as you know, are notoriously bad at languages, and so it will be best,
meine Herren Engellandfahrer, if you learn a few useful English phrases before visiting
us.
For your first lesson we will take: Die Kanaluberfahrt. The Channel crossing, the
Channel crossing.
Now just repeat after me: Das Boot sinkt. The boat is sinking; the boat is
sinking.
Das Wasser ist kalt. The water is cold. Sehr kalt, very cold.
Now, I will give you a verb that should come in useful. Again please repeat after me,
Ich brenne, I burn. Du brennst, you burn. Er brennt, he burns. Wir brennen, we burn. Ihr
brennt, you are burning.
Yes, meine Herren, in English, a rather practical language, we use the same word
"you" for both the singular and the plural. Ihr brennt, you are burning. Sie
brennen, they burn.
And if I may be allowed to suggest a phrase: Der SS Sturmfiihrer brennt auch ganz
schon, The SS Captain is also burning quite nicely, the SS Captain is also burning
quite nicely!
Delmer concludes:
Crude stuff, but excellent in one important respect. The line about burning in the
Channel fitted in perfectly, as of course it was intended to, with the information which
our deception services had planted on Admiral Canaris, the head of Hitler's espionage. Our
rumor agencies too, had been busy spreading it everywhere. The mean murderous British, it
said, had apparatus in readiness with which they were going to set the Channel and the
beaches on fire such time as Hitler launched his boats.
This was a lie. But it went over so well that it is believed by many Germans to
this day.
Releasing the oil to set the Channel ablaze
The British went so far as to actually build some large oil pipes that stretched out
into the English Channel. They made a great show of using them to set the channel afire.
Journalists were invited to watch the demonstration.
Peter Fleming mentions the technology in Operation Sea Lion, Simon and
Schuster, NY, 1957:
One of the few wholly successful experiments, which took place on 24 August on the
northern shores of the Solent is described by the head of the Petroleum Warfare
Department.
Ten pipes were rigged from the top of a thirty-foot cliff down into the water well
below high water mark and ten Scammel tanker wagons connected to them delivered oil at the
rate of about 12 tons an hour. Admiralty flares and a system of sodium and petrol pellets
were used for ignition and within a few seconds of the pumps being started a wall of flame
of such intensity raged up from the sea surface that it was impossible to remain on the
edge of the cliff and the sea itself began to boil.
Fleming goes on to say that although the limited experiment was a complete success, it
was extremely costly in steel, manpower and valuable oil. The Chiefs of Staff approved
50-miles of what the British called "Flame barrage," but the only complete
sections were in Deal, St. Margaret's Bay, The Shakespeare Cliff, Rye and Studland Bay.
John Baker White discusses the plan in The Big Lie, New York: Crowell, 1955.
London: Evans, 1955. White says:
Fire has played always an important part in defense against invasion. The Crusaders
made unpleasant acquaintance with it in the Holy Land, as did the Spanish Armada with
Drake's fireships. it was natural, therefore, that in 1940 it should figure prominently in
our anti-invasion plans. The Finns had shown us in their short but gallant struggle with
Russia the effectiveness of the "Molotov Cocktail" in dealing with armored
vehicles. Countless thousands of these modern versions of the Chinese fire bottle were
issued to the Home Guard, who had great difficulty in finding safe places in which to
store them. Incendiary bombs were one of the chief weapons used by the R.A.F. in its
attacks on the barges massing in the Channel ports.
The Army had discarded flame-throwers after the First World War, so none was
available in 1940. A considerable number were improvised hastily from pressure-greasing
equipment collected from garages and service stations. Filled with mixtures based on
gasoline, fuel oil and creosote they were fairly effective weapons with a strictly limited
life and range. There remained the problem of applying fire to the defense of beaches, and
the machine finally adopted was operated on the same principle as the garage pressure
greaser. From a pump and supply tank set back from the shore the combustible
mixture was pumped, through pipes buried in the beach, to a series of flash points. In the
same way as a truck garden irrigation system sprays water over a wide area, these points
sprayed fire over the beaches down as far as the low-water mark. In operation they were a
frightening spectacle, with clouds of thick, blinding black smoke through which shot great
jets of red flame. It is difficult to say to what extent the pipe-line network could have
been disrupted by bombardment, but this apparatus gave confidence to defending forces
whose battle equipment was very meager.
Some of the details of the plot are told by James Hayward in The Bodies on
the Beach. It is a study of the various myths surrounding the planned German invasion
of Britain in 1940, and in particular the legend of an actual invasion attempt repulsed by
the burning sea.
James Hayward also reported his findings of the English Channel flame barrage in issue
84 of After the Battle, Battle of Britain Prints International Ltd. Church House,
Church Street, London, E15 3JA and again in another book: Shingle Street - Flame,
Chemical and Psychological Warfare in 1940 and the Nazi invasion that Never Was, LTM
Publishing, 40 Prior way, Colchester, Essex, CO4 5DH. UK 1994.
He says that In September 1940, civilians in the village of Crostwick, a few miles
north of Norwich, were surprised by the sudden appearance of an apparently endless convoy
of army trucks and ambulances. The vehicles moved very slowly. When questioned, one driver
told a local woman that they were carrying the bodies of German soldiers washed up on the
Norfolk coast, the grisly aftermath of a failed invasion attempt.
Later that same month, troops were dispatched to Folkstone to search the beach between
Hythe and St Mary's Bay for dead Germans. About a dozen were found, all wearing field-grey
Wehrmacht uniforms. Some were burned from the waist down, and all seemed to have been in
the water for some time. On 21 October the corpse of a German anti-tank gunner, Heinrich
Poncke, was recovered from the beach at Littlestone-on-Sea. This was reported in the press
and by the BBC.
American broadcaster William Shirer reported long hospital trains in Berlin, most
of the men suffering from burns. The New York Times of 15 December claimed that
there had been two attempts to cross the Channel, and in both instances the Nazis were
literally consumed by fire.
British Leaflet 473
British leaflet 473 uses humor to disguise its message that invading
England means horrible death for the Germans. The British code is actually EH 473 although
only the numbers appear on the leaflet. The internal "EH" represents
"Electra House." The leaflet is larger than usual at 21 x 27 cm. At the top of
the leaflet a German soldier is depicted looking at a large open book, WIE FAHREN
GEGEN ENGELLAND (We Journey against England). This is the title of the
famous German military tune that tells of their coming attack on England:
Our flag waves as we march along,
it is an emblem of the power of our Reich,
and we can no longer endure
that the Englishman should laugh at it.
So give me thy hand, thy fair white hand,
Ere we sail away to conquer Eng-el-land.
At the bottom of the leaflet there is a parade of goose-stepping German
soldiers in bathing suits and life jackets boarding an invasion barge. The center consists
of three vertical columns in German, French and Dutch. The title at the head of all the
columns is "The Little Invasion Interpreter." There are 15 phrases listed under
"Before the Invasion." Another 15 are listed "During the Invasion,"
and a final 13 "After the invasion." The columns continue on the back of the
leaflet where two further images are depicted. At the top the invasion fleet is seen being
destroyed, while at the bottom the white cliffs of Dover are shown pristine and secure
beneath a Union Jack. Some of the phrases of the leaflet are:
The sea is vast - cold - surging.
This is a bomb - a torpedo - a shell - a mine
Our boat capsizes - sinks - burns – explodes.
The sea stinks of fuel oil.
The water burns here
Look how well the Captain burns.
The British dropped this leaflet over Germany and occupied Europe during
24 bomb raids from 1 February to 25 April 1941.
A rumor spread through France said that 80,000 German troops perished. Hospitals in
Occupied France are filled with Nazi soldiers, all of them suffering from severe burns.
Thousands of dead Germans have been washed ashore.
A story mysteriously appeared that said that there had been mutinies in September, with
many German troops refusing to face the burning sea once again when they learned that a
third attempt at invasion was being planned.
Heavy flame-throwers in action
Where did these stories come from? John Baker White tells us more about this part of
the operation in a chapter entitled "The Sea is on Fire!" He had just viewed the
testing of the flame barrage apparatus and was wondering if he could build a PSYOP
campaign from what he had witnessed. Some selected comments from the chapter are:
Setting the sea on fire. Setting the sea on fire. Setting the sea on fire. As we drove
back to London the words went round and round in my mind.
I think we all saw the same sort of picture. The fleet of invasion barges approaching
the coast suddenly engulfed in a sheet of flame…
Before the eight-word rumor was fed into the "Pipeline" that ran to the bar
of the Grand Hotel in Stockholm, the Avenida in Lisbon, the Ritz in Madrid, and other
places in Cairo, Istanbul, Ankara and elsewhere, not forgetting New York, it had to get
over certain hurdles. It had to be technically watertight, so that the German chemical
warfare specialists could not shoot it down as impossible. The next hurdle was to get it
past the committee that had to study all rumors before they were launched. This was a very
necessary precaution, because it was quite possible for the rumor inventors to manufacture
a story that would quite unwittingly disclose something of operational importance.
The burning-sea rumor was passed back, approved, with the pungent remark. "No
objection, but we think it a pretty poor effort." It then passed out of our hands,
though in conjunction with the political warfare experts certain elaborations were
started. Several weeks went by, and nothing happened, No come-backs from neutral capitals,
no traces from postal censorship, not a word from that hive of rumor, the Café’
Bavaria in Geneva, no gossip from prisoners of war. All of us who looked upon the burning
sea as our own particular baby started to get very despondent, until one morning there
came the news for which we had been waiting. A Luftwaffe pilot shot down over Charing in
Kent and taken to the Cockfosters reception center for interrogation said that in his
Geschwader they knew of the "English burning sea defenses." Three days later
another Luftwaffe man volunteered the same information-and he came from a different
airfield.
Over the next two weeks or so the rumor seemed to spring up like mushrooms in the dark
from all over the place, with some most interesting trimmings. It was given impetus by two
wonderful strokes of luck. The R.A.F., using incendiaries on routine bombing of invasion
barges in Calais harbor, happened to catch a German battalion in an invasion exercise.
Since Calais at that time was an uncomfortable place in which to keep wounded men, and
since some of the worst burned needed specialist attention, they were sent to hospitals in
the Paris region. Thanks to the French underground, the burning-sea rumor had already had
some circulation in the capital. Almost within a matter of hours it was all over Paris
that the men in the hospitals had been burned in an abortive attempt at invasion. The
French, who at this period of the war had not lost their sense of humor, would pretend to
warm their hands at Germans sitting next to them in cafes and restaurants.
As the days passed rumor piled upon rumor, and then came a third stroke of luck. So
convinced had the German Command become that the British really had a means of setting the
sea on fire, they started to experiment with the fireproofing of barges. At a camp in
Normandy they armored a barge with asbestos sheets which they filled with troops and
steered into a pool of burning gasoline. All on board were burned to death. Some of the
dreadfully charred bodies drifted out to sea and were washed up at various points along
the French coast.
One of the mysteries of the whole operation I have not been able to solve to this day;
nor, I think, has anyone else. That is how the rumor got back to Britain… It took on
many guises. Men in German uniforms being brought ashore at Harwich, Newhaven and Dover
with their faces and hands covered in bandages. A convoy of ambulances arriving in the
dead of night at a hospital outside Norwich, and an "S.O.S." sent to other
hospitals in the area for antiburn dressings. A great pillar of smoke rising from Sandwich
Bay and the secret burial of hideously charred bodies in the sand dunes. These were but a
few of the forms the rumor took, and there are plenty of people in Britain who to this day
remain convinced that there was an invasion attempt in 1940 and that it was defeated by
setting the sea on fire.
In mid-October 1940 1 had to go down to Portsmouth on duty, and one of the calls I made
was on a well-known admiral. Having sworn me to secrecy he told me in great detail of the
abortive invasion attempt, of the success of our secret weapon, of the heat-buckled hulks
of landing craft washed ashore near Selsey, of the hundreds of charred corpses along the
high-water line on Chesil beach. "I've seen 'em myself, my boy," he said with a
note of triumph in his voice. "Hundreds of 'em, so many you couldn't count
them." I felt that it was one of the occasions on which it would be unkind as well as
unwise to contradict a superior officer. Imagination is a very powerful thing, as we were
to discover many times before the war was over.
The chief press censor in Britain, Rear-Admiral George Thomson, later said
"In the whole course of the war there was no story which gave me so much trouble as
that of the attempted German invasion, flaming oil on the water and 30,000 burned
Germans."
Of course, none of this happened. Operation Sea Lion, the planned German
invasion of the British Isles in September 1940 was never authorized. Hitler postponed
Operation Sea Lion indefinitely on 17 September 1940. However, the threat
of invasion was by no means ended. Had the Germans attempted such a risky mission, it
would have very likely ended up with most of their ships sunk by the Royal Navy and Royal
Air Force before they even set foot on English soil. The few Wehrmacht divisions that may
have made it would probably have been cut down on the beaches, and there would be no
miracle evacuation for Hitler’s troops.
All of the deception and disinformation was part of "black" operation,
created by the Directorate of Military Intelligence, MI6, and the Special Operations
Executive (SOE) to make sure that "Sea Lion" stayed postponed permanently.
The Sea Afire
The British project to set fire to the English Channel was depicted on the History
Channel's Secrets of War, Episode 51, and entitled "Psychological
Warfare." Narrator Charlton Heston mentions that the British publicly set the Channel
on fire for the cameras, but in their propaganda they neglected to say that just a small
area of coastline was protected. Heston also states that, "Documents found after the
war confirmed that the German High Command believed that the British had a workable plan
to set fire to the English Channel."
On 25 September, British coastal defense units were told that "a scheme was afoot
to produce an impenetrable barrage of flame on the sea to prevent or destroy enemy ships
attempting a landing." Flame barrages were recommended at the following localities;
Bawdsey, Mouth of River Deben, Mouth of River Orwell, and Felixstowe, from Ferry to
Landguard Fort. No flame barrages were installed further north than Shoeburyness.
There are still those who believe the story. In the midst of researching this
propaganda campaign, I received this letter:
My father who is now 90 was stationed on the South Coast in WWII somewhere near
Hythe and he can clearly recall burnt bodies being pulled from the sea dressed in German
ARMY not Navy or Air Force uniforms. They were all taken to a makeshift mortuary and the
troops involved were each individually reminded of the penalties for breaking the Secrets
Act and one officer of the unit was taken away after having discussed it with another unit
commander. What exactly happened there he cannot say but he is convinced this had
something to do with the operation you talk of.
It is hard to determine if this was a successful black propaganda campaign. Although
it might have caused the Germans to think more cautiously, it is doubtful that it stopped
the invasion. The British rumor that a small German landing had been repulsed, and later
that a large invasion flotilla had been incinerated halfway across the Channel did spread
across occupied Europe and to America, then filtered back to Britain. It might have
encouraged the occupied nations to believe that the war could still be won, and may have
helped Americans believe that Great Britain would be able to block an invasion. It
probably had little effect on the Germans since they clearly knew that they had not
attempted to invade England. In truth, It was Göring's inability to defeat the Royal Air
Force that stopped the invasion. But, perhaps the rumors helped, and certainly they gave
support and hope to the British and the occupied people of Europe.
The British “Underground Propaganda Committee” spread
thousands of rumors
Before we leave this deception campaign we should mention that there were dozens of
such stories being written and disseminated by the British. Besides leaflets, newspaper
and radio stories, in an attempt to raise the morale of occupied Europe and lower the
morale of the German military, civilians and their allies, the secret British
“Underground Propaganda Committee” produced well over eight thousand rumors,
(they called them “Sibs” from the Latin sibalare – to hiss).
Researcher Lee Richards mentions the “whisper campaign” and many of these rumors
in his book Whispers of War, Psywar.org, 2010. In regard to British propaganda
rumors about the dangers of a cross-channel invasion and British secret weapons he lists
dozens of moral-destroying rumors. The British were clearly working overtime attempting to
make the invasion look like a perilous undertaking. I have selected a few of the more
interesting ones:
13 July 1940 – Britain has a new and deadly sea mine designed for the
special purpose of preventing the landing of German troops in shallow-draught
boats…Another type of mine is concealed beneath the runways of airfields. It cannot
be seen from the air and is remote controlled. It will destroy German aircraft attempting
to land troops on British airfields.
27 July 1940 – Britain has a wireless controlled bomb-carrying aircraft…
27 September 1940 – The British have a mine dropped from aircraft that
spreads a thin film of highly inflammable liquid over the surface of the water…
17 October 1940 – The British have perfected a flamethrower for use in their
aircraft…
31 January 1941 – Two hundred sharks have been sent from Australia to
Britain and released in the Channel.
I particularly like that last one because in December, 2010, after a string of shark
attacks in Egyptian waters, the South Sinai Governor stated that this could be a plot to
destroy Egyptian tourism by the Israeli Mossad. A good rumor never dies.
THE INVASION DECEPTION
The stories of how the Allies tried to fool the Germans about the time and place of the
invasion of Europe are legion. Everyone knows of Patton’s phantom army group, the
fake radio traffic to indicate that the real invasion force was still in England, the
rubber tanks and aircraft placed wherever a German reconnaissance aircraft might spot
them, and all the other collateral operations. We will discuss them briefly, and then talk
about a black operation run by Sefton Delmer, Director of Britain’s "black"
radio operations.
14th Army Patch
The most notable deception plan was surely the creation of the First United States Army
Group (FUSAG), a totally nonexistent force created and placed under the command of General
George Patton in southeast England with an order of battle larger than that of
Montgomery's 21st Army Group. The mission of FUSAG was to deceive the Germans into
believing that the real invasion of France would be at Pas de Calais, not Normandy. On
paper, FUSAG was comprised of the 14th Army, 2 Corps, 1 Armored Division, 5 Airborne
Divisions, and 14 Infantry Divisions. Added to this force were 1 Airborne and 9 Infantry
Divisions that had been activated but not actually raised bringing the FUSAG's total force
to 30 non-existent divisions. This deception was named "Operation Quicksilver."
Jon Latimer mentions the various operations in Deception in War, The Overlook
Press, NY, 2001.
He says that Quicksilver was broken into six parts. Quicksilver I was the story that
the invasion would be launched at Calais several weeks after the Normandy feint.
Quicksilver II was the use of radio traffic to deceive the Germans. A special radio
signals unit, the 5th Wireless Group, introduced a number of original features. All
traffic was recorded in advance and equipment was devised that made it possible for one
transmitter to simulate six, so that the complete traffic of a divisional headquarters and
its brigades could be broadcast by a single radio truck.
Army Second Lieutenant Richard Kolks was an electrical engineer and an expert in
radio. They wanted radio experts in Europe and Richard suddenly found himself on a
converted B-17 on his way to England. His son-in-law Rob Schorry told me:
<>He was moved into the Communication division, where they selected and trained the
radio operators with distinctive “fists” (those who had easily recognizable
radio key techniques). They sent a lot of radio traffic in code; codes both broken and
unbroken by the enemy. But there was also the occasional uncoded message that said
“The General’s (Patton) dog is sick again!” etc., to let the Germans know
that Patton and FUSAG was still where they should be.
On the night of D-Day June 6, 1944, their boss, Colonel Oliver, came into the
operations center and said “We’ve done it boys, we’ve done it! The Panzers
haven’t moved!”
Dummy Gun and Plane
Quicksilver III was the fake landing craft all long the British coast. Fake vessels
resembling Landing Craft Tanks (LSTs) were known as "big bobs" and other
inflatable dummy craft as "wet-bobs." Some were moored in those creeks and
inlets between Great Yarmouth and the Thames estuary, but the larger proportion of them
were concentrated around Kent and eastern Sussex. The designers of Shepperton Film Studios
were enlisted to build a giant "oil storage facility and docking area near Dover.
This stretched several miles and was complete with storage tanks, pipelines, jetties,
terminal control points and anti-aircraft defenses.
Quicksilver IV and V the bombing scheme where the area around Calais would be heavily
bombed to look like the softening up before invasion.
Quicksilver VI the use of 65 fake lighting schemes along the British coast to fool the
Germans into believing in a major buildup with railroad and naval traffic.
The phantom force was located near Dover, just across the Channel from the supposed
target. The planners had construction crews build dummy installations of plywood and
canvas and dot them with an array of inflatable tanks and vehicles. They also anchored a
vast armada of rubber landing craft in the Thames River estuary, where German
reconnaissance aircraft were certain to spot them. Eisenhower assigned Patton, the
American general the Germans most respected, to command the phantom army and saw to it
that known enemy agents received information on the status of Patton's force. Allied naval
units conducted protracted maneuvers off the Channel coast near the location of the shadow
army, and components of Patton's fictitious command indulged in extensive radio
trafficking to signal to German intelligence analysts that a major military organization
was functioning. A careful plan of aerial bombardment complemented the ploy. During the
weeks preceding the invasion, Allied airmen dropped more bombs on the Pas de Calais than
anywhere else in France.
Dummy Tank and Troop Carrier
The Allies used various techniques to get the Germans to believe that this force was in
preparing for the invasion. These techniques ranged from double agents, false radio
traffic, "lost" documents, false marriage and death notices in local papers
where the unit was noted prominently. One deception included the use of the magazine National
Geographic. The magazine prepared a full color layout showing a wide variety of unit
insignias that included many from the mythical FUSAG. In order to sell the deception, the
Army allowed some issues to be distributed, then after a few days, suddenly pulled all the
magazines off the newsstands, and replaced them with a revised version.
It was not only German troops in France that needed to be fooled. Nicolas Booth
mentions in ZigZag, Arcade Publishing Co., NY, 2007, that there were 28 German
divisions in Norway that the Allies hoped to immobilize there by hinting that an Invasion
of that nation might be in the planning stages:
Using double agents and simulating activity by false radio reports, they made it
appear that a powerful force of allied ships and soldiers would soon be making its way
toward Norway…
As a later intelligence summary prepared for the Führer makes clear, all the
evidence indicated another determined attack on Norway that autumn. The German Supreme
Command believed - as the Allied deception staff wanted them to – that there would be
four to six divisions involved.
Some businesses went so far as to reproduce the shoulder patches in hopes of securing a
government contract. The Army quickly bought thousands of them and even issued them to
troops at their points of embarkation so that the patches could be seen by German troops
and their civilian agents.
Wood and inflatable dummy trucks
In preparation for the attack, British counterintelligence agents used captured Nazi
spies to feed the German high command false information that the invasion would come at
Calais, a French port north of Normandy that was closer to England. The press was
encouraged to write stories about Patton's travels in England to give the impression that
he was preparing his phantom army to invade at Calais.
Latimer says that the most important source of information as far as both sides were
concerned were the double-agents. Of these, the most significant was undoubtedly Garbo.
This fake spy who allegedly ran 14 agents sent about four transmissions a day to his
German handlers. As the invasion neared, other double agents such as Brutus, Tricycle,
Treasure and Tate were added to the deception plan.
In one very imaginative operation, prisoner of war German General der Panzertruppen
Hans Cramer was scheduled to be repatriated to Germany. He was purposefully driven to
London through what he was told was southern and south-eastern England. He met and had
dinner with General Patton who was introduced as the commander of the U.S. First Army
Group, then sent home on a neutral Swedish ship. Upon his return he immediately reported
that Allied troops and equipment were bound for Calais.
Moving an inflatable tank
Operation Quicksilver was an overwhelming success. Although American commanders doubted
that their ruses would have much effect, their schemes succeeded far beyond expectations.
The Germans became so convinced that the Pas de Calais would be the Allied target that
they held to the fiction until long after the actual attack had begun. As a result,
nineteen powerful enemy divisions, to include important panzer reserves, stood idle
on the day of the invasion, awaiting an assault that never came, when their presence in
Normandy might have told heavily against the Allied attack. The German high command kept
the bulk of their reserve forces there for almost 2 months after the Normandy invasion and
refused to release troops from defensive duty there to prevent the Allies from
establishing their beachheads. Patton would later be transferred to command the 3rd US
Army and would be instrumental in the Allied push through France and later in stopping the
German's Argonne Offensive in late 1944.
Corporal Wally Watson, 23rd Headquarters, 12th Army Group, Special Troops, United
States Army, 1944-46 took part in some of the deception and subterfuge. His unit was
assigned four general types of deception; sonic, visual, radio traffic, and infantry
support. They had inflatable tanks that they would move into an area under cover of
darkness and inflate. The sonic company would play recordings of tank movements, officers
and NCOs giving orders, or whatever it took to convince the enemy that there was a large
Allied force in front of him. The Quartermaster Company sent fake radio transmissions
ordering supplies, and moving imaginary people around. Much information on the 23rd was
classified until 1997, and as a result much of their contribution to the victory in Europe
has gone unnoticed. Readers interested in learning more about army units that were
involved in deception are encouraged to read Ghost Army of WWII by Jack Kneece and Secret
Soldier - the Story of World War II's Heroic Army of Deception, Philip Gerard, Dutton,
NY, 2002.
Sefton Delmer tells of his small part in the invasion deception in Black Boomerang,
The Viking Press, N.Y., 1962.
He was not involved in fooling the Germans about the place of invasion. They were
already well aware that the Allies had landed. He saw his job as fooling the Germans about
the success of the invasion, telling them that their lines were broken, that they could be
overrun and surrounded, and that their best hope was to leave their defensive lines and
flee to safety.
Nachrichten für die Truppen
Delmer was already regularly dropping the newspaper Nachrichten für die Truppen
(News for the troops) on the German forces in occupied Europe. He describes the newspaper:
Of all the enterprises I launched during the war, this "News for the
Troops" is the one of which I am proudest. This was a joint British-American venture,
and the readiness with which my American friends at the Office of Strategic Services and
SHAEF’s American psychological-warfare boss General Bob McClure placed a team of
first-class editors and news writers under my orders, I still consider to have been the
greatest compliment paid me at any time in my war-time career.
The newspaper team worked in yet another prefabricated barrack which had been
erected in haste in the compound. Every night, for 345 consecutive nights, they put the
paper together.
If the Soldatensender (Delmer’s black radio station, "German
Soldier’s Radio Calais") was what Donald and I called "Gray,"
Nachrichten was a dirty off-white. Unlike other Allied leaflets it did not proclaim that
it was issued by command of General Eisenhower of SHAEF. Nor did it, like
"black" leaflets claim to have some German or non-Allied source. Nachrichten
just dropped from the heavens, as an offering of the sublime objective truth. It did not
refer to the Allies as the enemy. They were the Anglo-American forces or the Russians. The
Germans were Die Deutschen Truppen.
For the most part the paper always told the truth, and although the news was always
meant to destroy the morale of the German soldier, generally the news stories were
straight-forward and without embellishment. Delmer had his enemy set up for the kill and
now it was time to go "black" on him. He told Hans Gutmann, one of his chief
news writers to prepare a special story that would "suggest to the garrisons of the
Atlantic Wall defensive works that their line has been breached, that they are cut off,
and that they might as well give up. We don’t want to say that of course. All we do
is give them a picture of a situation from which they can draw their own
conclusions."
British radio broadcast
Later that same day the Allies invaded France. The British black radio went on the air
pretending to be a German announcement, "The enemy is landing in force from the air
and the sea. The Atlantic Wall is penetrated in several places. The command has ordered an
alarm grade 3." Meanwhile, Delmer was racing to his printing plant to have the
newspaper made ready for dissemination. He says that the front page was
"splendid" and the job was rushed to the point where he had one million copies
in American B-17 bombers for airdrop over Normandy in just a few hours.
The newspaper, dated 6 June 1944 had the headline "Atlantic Wall breached in
several places – Armor penetrates deep into the interior: bitter fighting with
parachute commandoes." The text goes on to explain that the latest messages from the
front state that the Anglo-American armor broke through the Atlantic rampart in several
places two hours after daybreak along the coast of France. Other articles tell of the
Soviet preparations for an offensive and of the German Army in Italy retreating and
being broken up into two sections out of contact with each other.
This article is a good example of the anti-morale and defeatist type of news found
in the Nachrichten. The text of story is:
Italian Retreat split in Two
German troops have never been forced to go through situations like those the soldiers
in Kesselring's army are experiencing right now during their retreat from Rome.
Thousands of Anglo-American bombers, fighter planes and military aircraft
continually attack the separate fighting groups of the German army in Italy,
blanket-bombing them and shooting at everything in sight.
Hundreds of burning, wrecked and bombed trucks are on the streets. Convoys more than
100 kilometers behind the fighting lines are incinerated by the rockets of fighter planes.
The flat land of the Roman Country side offers no cover. The breakdown in front of Rome
has split the German army in Italy into two parts which are in full retreat without being
in contact with each other.
Remainders of four divisions; the 3rd tank grenadiers, the 4th paratroopers, the 65th
and 334th infantry division are withdrawing along the coast as best they can.
Anglo-American armor and infantry attack close behind them.
Help not expected
East of Rome, the remainders of nine German divisions flood the mountains. The retreat
to the North is already blocked. The Anglo-American fighters and bombers attack them
continually. They are ambushed by paratroopers.
It has proven impossible to reunite the divided troops in the mountains or near the
coast into one defensive line or to restore communications between them. The two forces
are on their own. The divisions and regiments are intermingled together and confused.
Stories on the back tell of Jäger units being transferred to East – and
reports of American bombers in Russia. Even though this propaganda was the main feature of
the news story, Delmer adds, "Our reports were written to fit in with the Allied
deception plan which was to mislead the Germans into the belief that the invaders were
striking at the mouth of the Seine and at Calais." So, at the same time Delmer was
claiming that the attacks were a success; he was also implying that they were feints and
the real blow was still to come. Delmer concludes:
To top the whole thing off, Donald McLachan and Hans Gutmann had produced a
box-insert under the heading Was bereit Steht (What is available). It showed the tenuous
German resources and gave a most alarming picture of the over-extended German defense
front. I will quote just three sentences from it: "An average of 18 Luftwaffe
aircraft go with each German division in the West. At the time of the battle of France
there were eighty German aircraft to each German division. During last week’s battle
of Rome the Anglo-Americans had 160 aircraft for each of their divisions.
Although Delmer was proud of his work, the Germans did stand and fight and the Allies
took a terrific beating before they were gradually able to push inland. It would appear
that Delmer’s operation in frightening the German Army was a failure. However, Hitler
held his panzer divisions after the initial invasion awaiting the real strike by
Patton’s Third Army further south, so that part of the plan seem to have worked to
perfection.
OPERATION PERIWIG – THE FAKE
GERMAN UNDERGROUND MOVEMENT
Count Claus Shenk von Stauffenberg
With all the publicity surround the Tom Cruise movie Valkerie, telling the story of Count Claus Shenk
von Stauffenberg’s attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler, there are many people who
believe that there was a strong anti-Nazi movement within Germany. In fact, there was not.
There was, however, an attempt by the British to trick the Germans into believing such a
movement existed. Its story is told in part in SOE’s Ultimate Deception: Operation
Periwig
, Fredric Boyce, Sutton Printing, UK, 2005.
The Allies were constantly looking for an anti-Nazi organization within Germany.
Unfortunately, there was none. There were several attempts by various generals to
eliminate Hitler, but there was never a serious organized opposition within the German
people. Because the British wanted to attack German morale and cause their security forces
some additional problems, a decision was made to run a black deception operation that
would make the Hitler government believe that there was an organized anti-Nazi movement
within Germany. It was called Operation Periwig.
The British PSYOP Order of Battle
Just as the American propaganda organization started out as the Coordinator of
Information (COI) and later became the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and Office of
War Information (OWI); the British went through similar growth problems. In 1939 there
were three organizations duplicating each others work. There was Section D of the Secret
Intelligence Service (SIS) also known as MI6 with the mission of covert offensive action;
the Military Intelligence Research Unit of the War Office tasked with the preparation of
guerrilla weapons and tactics against Germany; and Electra House, a propaganda unit
attached to the Foreign Office also known as the Department of Propaganda in Enemy
Countries. They were combined into the Special Operations Executive (SOE).
Winston Churchill ordered SOE to “Set Europe ablaze.” It was to promote
sabotage and subversion and supply arms and equipment to anti-Nazi movements in occupied Europe.
In 1940 its London headquarters was 64 Baker Street where it used the cover name
Inter-Services Research Bureau. SOE initially consisted of three branches; SO1
(Propaganda), SO2 (Active Operations) and SO3 (Planning).
On 11 September 1941 the Political Warfare Executive (PWE) was announced. It was
headquartered in Woburn Abbey and had the mission of spreading propaganda by leaflet and
radio. The PWE actually was created from SOE’s SO1 branch, which had itself been
formed from the old Electra House unit.
The two agencies worked fairly well together though there was certainly much
infighting. This mostly ended in late 1943 when due to the coming invasion of Europe;
psychological warfare was made a responsibility of the Supreme Headquarters Allied
Expeditionary Force (SHAEF). A Psychological Warfare Division (PWD) was created within
SHAEF. This division was made up of a combined force of American OWI and British PWE
operatives.
The Periwig Plan
The Periwig Planning Section was set up within the German Directorate of the SOE on
12 November 1944. The SOE and PWE were to use every method possible to convince the
Germans of an anti-Nazi organization, to include dispatch of agents and supplies, false
messages in easily broken code, open appeals over the radio and in leaflets, and the
planting of rumors, what the British call “sibs.” SOE was certain that they
could cause administrative chaos within Germany. There was even hope that perhaps British
Intelligence was wrong, and there actually were German resistance movements that might be
motivated to arise by the British campaign, especially among Germany’s Catholics.
There was resistance to the plan. If the Germans were convinced of a resistance movement
within their borders, they might increase security, making it more difficult for Allied
agents in the Third Reich to accomplish their missions.
One of the darker operations was to have German double-agents airdropped into their
homeland with defective parachutes. Such an operation is mentioned in Between Silk and Cyanide, Leo Marks, Simon and
Schuster, 2000. The author mentions a British agent being told by his commanding general
that a German volunteer who was dropped on his homeland with fake Periwig codebooks met
with an “accident.”
You will be sorry to hear that your friend Schiller has met with a fatal
accident. They will have found the code books on him by now so get a move on with those
dummy messages…
The People’s Radio
There were many such plans. Some would have been very deadly for innocent civilians
as the British considered putting sabotage plans and codes in the baggage of individuals
traveling to Germany. There was a discussion of preparing a radio transmitter that looked
like the “People’s Radio” that every German was allowed to own. They
British copies would be battery powered and could be dropped by aircraft where they would
automatically turn on and transmit for brief periods on and off for up to seven days,
making the security forces think there was active radio traffic to Britain from within
Germany.
Other plans proposed the dropping of empty parachutes, empty containers, radios,
propaganda and sabotage material, documents, German uniforms, carrier pigeons and various
other objects that would imply that agents and supplies had been entered into the Third
Reich.
Periwig Postcard
Courtesy of www.Psywar.org
The Periwig postcard has red typewriter text that says in part:
If you want to spare yourself unnecessary pains, pay attention to the following
instructions…The more vigorously you jump, the more reliable is the break of the
neck... Don't hesitate! The Horst Wessel Standard is calling! Heil Hitler!" /p>
To show that the resistance movement was using the German post, in an operation
called “G.7,” a number of postcards bearing threats were sent to prominent
Germans. The cards are sometimes called “the horse cards” because they bear a
cancel of a horse in red ink, allegedly the symbol of the underground movement.
There were actually so many plans and rumors that I hesitate to list them all since
it would take several thousand words. Let me summarize thusly. The possible operations
were broken up into: Agents, genuine activity, plants (neutral and occupied countries), Germany,
wireless telegraph, the post, suspicious activities, rumors, pamphlets, the British
Broadcasting Corporation and the Press. To study one category; “Pamphlets”
entailed the distribution in neutral, occupied and German territory of pamphlets
consisting of instructions, hints about the existence of the organization, details of an
escape organization and encouragement to malinger, desert, strike or slow work production.
Different propaganda was prepared for each target group. Among those groups and the
code allotted to each was the Wehrmacht (German
armed forces - W), the separatists (S), the church (C), Railway workers (R), foreign labor
(F), industrial and mining labor, the Party and police (P) and the industrialists (I).
There are other codes whose meaning is unknown. An example of the coded operations is R.5
which involved the planting of a fake Reichsbahn
(National Railway) circular concerning sabotage which would fall into the hands of a Swiss
railway official. Operation C.1 was a letter from an alleged Catholic group to a Bishop
demanding his cooperation with the resistance movement.
Some agents were actually dropped into Germany. Lee Richards mentions the operations
in British Black Propaganda – Operation Periwig, on his psywar.org website:
The first two Bonzos (German volunteers) were dispatched on the night of
2/3 April. Dressed in military uniform they were parachuted into the Bremen area. One
agent, Gerhardt Bienecke, using the alias Breuer, was assigned the task of supplying codes
and a signals plan to SS-Sturmbannführer Dr. Eggen in Berlin. The codes were disguised in
a packet of coffee which had to be passed on to Dr. Eggen using cut-outs or, as a last
resort, by direct contact. The mission of the second agent, Leonhardt Kick, alias
Kauffmann, was to act as a courier for a Bremen resistance cell. W/T equipment including
the high-speed squirt transmitter was parachuted with him. Kick later reported that his
W/T equipment was lost during the jump and probably ended up in the hands of the German
authorities, just as SOE had hoped it would. He also claimed to have shot one of two
Gestapo men who doubted the authenticity of his papers. After which he traveled to the
town of Delmenhorst and awaited the arrival of Allied troops. Bienecke surfaced in the
Russian zone in August 1945 and had by all accounts tried to fulfill his mission.
A second pair of agents was parachuted on the night of 18/19 April west of Chiem
See. Otto Heinrich, alias Hoffmann, and Franz Lengnick, alias Lange, were dropped in
Luftwaffe uniforms and tasked to contact a resistance organization in the Bavarian
mountains. They were to train them in the latest techniques of preparing landing
operations for the exfiltration of important persons. They both survived the mission and
alleged to have in fact contacted several small resistance groups and undertaken an
unsuccessful sabotage operation. Of course their stories could not be substantiated.
Conclusion
The Periwig Operation appears to have been a failure. The concept was to overtax the
German security apparatus and force them to waste time constantly looking for resistance
operations within the Third Reich. It soon became clear that the German security forces
were far greater than any small threat that a propaganda operation could send against
them. There might have been some minor discomfort to the German security, but the British
were simply unable to put together an operation large enough to cause any damage. Some
critics of the propaganda operation say that all it accomplished was to convince many
people outside Germany that there was a viable German underground. That resulted in the
myth of the “good” Germans who had fought in the resistance against Hitler. PWE
Propaganda Chief Sefton Delmer mentions this myth in Black Boomerang:
How ironic is this legend of the good upright patriotic Germans of the Wehrmacht
being the bitter enemies of the Nazi Party and the Gestapo! How ironic that this legend
should now be the justification for all those things happening I hoped would not happen.
For the Germans forgetting that they were responsible for Hitler, for their rearmament,
and the revival of their ambitions of territorial conquest. (`Restoration of Germany's
lost territories' is what they call it today.) For the return of Hitler's judges and civil
servants to key posts in the new Germany. Ironic, because the propagation of that legend
was the work of my unit and my men… We bolstered and built up the legend to help in
the overthrow of Hitler. Now, in this flourishing, rebuilt, reinvigorated Germany it is
being used to summon back his ghost.
KOREA 1950-1953
The Far East Command report Psychological Warfare Operations states:
To support the planned September landings at Inchon, Far East Command devised a
leaflet campaign to support deception operations designed to convince the North Koreans
that a U.S. amphibious landing was planned for the Kunsan area rather than 100 miles north
at Inchon. Leaflets dropped near Kunsan and other cities along the southwest coast
encouraged civilians to stay away from beaches and dock areas and coincided with the
appearance of a U.N. naval task force and commando landing at Kunsan.
THE ADEN EMERGENCY 1963-1967
Beer Bottle Bombs
Sometime truth is stranger than fiction. In two motion pictures the dropping of
empty bottles was featured. In the 1966 motion picture Cast a Giant Shadow Frank Sinatra plays an
American member of the fledgling Israeli Air Force who flies an unarmed biplane
over Arab forces and drops seltzer bottles on the enemy in an attempt to frighten or
disorient them.
In the 1980 movie The Gods Must be Crazy a member of the Sho tribe name Xixo
finds an empty cola bottle that has been thrown from an airplane over the Kalahari Desert.
The bottle turns out to be a curse sent by the Gods to his peaceful society and he
attempts to walk to the end of the earth to throw it away.
Political Officer Peter Hinchcliffe was assigned to Aden during the
“Emergency” when Arab nationalists tried to overthrow the British-supported
government. He was the representative of the Government of Aden liaising between the
authorities in Aden and the up-country sheikhs and sultans. He told me of a British
deception operation that involved empty bottles:
Another example of PSYOP was the dropping of empty beer bottles on rebelling
tribesmen from a Shackleton bomber at 20,000 feet. The bottles whistled as the came down
but when hitting the ground they disintegrated silently. The tribesmen were led to believe
that these were time bombs which would be activated unless they made their peace with
government. I can not vouch for the accuracy of this but it was widely talked about as a
tactic when I was in South Arabia. My impression at the time was that PSYOP was not
taken seriously, was generally crude and unimaginative and no way could cope with the
inspirational nationalistic rousing output of Cairo Radio-Saut Al Arab-which was beamed
into every transistor in the land and with which our feeble propaganda broadcast from Aden
could in no way match.
THE PHILIPPINES – VAMPIRES!
Vampire
General Edward Lansdale (USAF) is mentioned in The Vietnam Experience - Passing
the Torch, Boston Publishing Company, MA, 1981. He was the master of “Dirty
tricks.” Lansdale had served with the Office of Strategic Services in WWII. In the
1950s, Lansdale was transferred to the Philippines-based Joint United States Military
Assistance Group (JUSMAG), to advise the intelligence services of the Armed Forces of the
Philippines that were then faced with a serious threat to national security posed by the
Communist Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan, (People's Liberation Army). While involved in the
campaign against the HUKs, Lansdale helped create an ingenious military and intelligence
operation that utilized a local and much feared legend: that of the terrifying Asuang
Vampire. He said in his book In the Midst of Wars: An American’s Mission to
Southeast Asia, Harper & Row, New York, 1972:
To the superstitious the HUK battleground was a haunted place filled with ghosts
and eerie creatures…One PSYWAR operation played upon the popular dread of an Asuang,
or vampire, to solve a difficult problem…Local politicians opposed Magsaysay’s
plan of moving more troops out of defensive garrisons to form further mobile and
aggressive battalion combat teams. In one town local bigwigs pointed out that a HUK
squadron was based on a hill near town. If the troops left, they were sure the HUKs would
swoop down on the town and the bigwigs would be their victims.
A combat psywar squad was brought in. It planted stories among town residents of
an Asuang living on the hill where the HUKs were based. Two nights later, after giving the
stories time to make their way up to the hill camp, the psywar squad set up an ambush
along the trail used by the HUKs. When a HUK patrol came along the trail, the ambushers
silently snatched the last man of the patrol, their move unseen in the dark night. They
punctured his neck with two holes, vampire-fashion, held the body up by the heels, drained
it of blood, and put the corpse back on the trail. When the HUKs returned to look for the
missing man and found their bloodless comrade, every member of the patrol believed that
the Asuang had go t him and that one of them would be next if they remained on that hill.
When daylight came, the whole HUK squadron moved out of the vicinity.
The Eye of God
Symbol of "The Eye of God"
Lansdale also took part in a program called “The Eye of God.” The
concept was to get very exact and personal information about the enemy and then broadcast
to him, using the names of officers and troops and pointing out that they were being
watched. The guerrilla was made to believe that he was being watched at all times and had
no secrets from the government. The Philippine Army later made use of the “Eye of
God” against local HUK sympathizers. At night, while they slept, a PSYWAR team would
sneak into town and paint an eye on the wall of a house facing the suspect.
