MAY 1944…
Before taking a foothold on the French coasts, the Allies imagined vast poisoning campaigns grouped under the name Fortitude and designed to convince the Germans of a landing in the Pas-de-Calais. Allied intelligence services flooded the Germans with false information about the place, but also the date of the D-Day. Real armies but a logistics of cardboard-pulp are deployed in the south-east of England in the region of Kent: ghost airfields, fictional petroleum complex built near Dover, inflatable vehicles, wooden planes lined up in the fields and the Along the roads …
Observing and bombing missions are conducted regularly in the north and north-east of France. A staff for a fictitious high command exercised by General Patton is even installed for the occasion, the FUSAG, the First United States Army Group. False HQ, false infrastructure, fake parks of equipment, but also false radio links with Montgomery and very many coded messages sent on the airwaves. In May 1944, Marshal Von Rundstedt was persuaded that the landing would take place north of the Seine. The deception so well that the Germans long believed that a second landing would take place in the region of Calais in July with an army twice as large as those they were to discover on 6 June 1944.
