Editing Operation Fortitude (section)

==Planning==
Detailed planning ostensibly sat with [[Noel Wild]] and his Ops (B) staff. In practice, it was a collaboration between Wild and the heads of the London Controlling Section and B1a. Work began in December 1943 under the codename Mespot. Wild's first version of the Fortitude plan was socialised in early January 1943 with SHAEF, political leaders and the staff officers of the 21st Army Group.<ref name=Levine202/> That iteration aimed to take advantage of the likelihood that the Germans would notice invasion preparations in southern England.<ref name=Holt531/> Wild wanted to create the impression that an invasion was aimed at the Pas-de-Calais slightly later in the year (July, instead of June). Once the real invasion had landed, six fictional divisions would then keep the threat to Calais alive.<ref name=Levine203/>

Colonel [[David Strangeways]], head of Montgomery's [[R Force]], raised concerns about the entire plan.<ref name=Levine202/> Strangeways argued that the plan aimed to cover the Allies' real intentions, instead of creating a realistic threat to Calais to which Axis forces would be forced respond in defence.<ref name=Levine203/><ref name=Holt532/> He was concerned the Germans might well be aware of the Allied readiness in southern England and so they would be alert to the risk of an invasion in early June. However, that would realise this gave them several weeks to defeat any bridgehead and return to defend Calais.<ref name=Holt532/> On 25 January, Montgomery's Chief of Staff, [[Freddie de Guingand|Francis de Guingand]], sent a letter to the deception planners that asked them to focus on Pas-de-Calais as the main assault and was almost certainly sent at the behest of Strangeways.<ref name=Holt533/>

With those criticisms in hand, Wild produced his final draft for Fortitude. In the revised plan, which was issued on 30 January and approved by the Allied chiefs on 18 February, fifty divisions would be positioned in Southern England to attack Pas de Calais.<ref name=Levine203/><ref name=Holt533/> After the real invasion had landed, the story would change to suggest to the Germans that several assault divisions remained in England that were ready to conduct a cross-Channel attack once the Normandy beachhead had drawn German defences away from Calais. The plan still retained some of its initial form, most notably since the first part of the story still aimed to suggest an invasion date of mid-July.<ref name=Holt534/> At that point, [[Winston Churchill]] judged 'Mespot' to be an unsuitable name and so 'Fortitude' was adopted from an alternative list on 18 February.<ref group=note>SHAEF was offered a list of names to choose from; Bulldog, Axehead, Swordhilt, Fortitude and Ignite</ref><ref name=Levine202/>

===Strangeways rewrite===
{{blockquote
|quote = I rewrote it entirely. It was too complicated, and the people who made it had not never done it before. Now they did their best – but it didn't suit the operation that Monty was considering.... You see so much depended on the success of that deception plan.
|source = Strangeways, writing in 1996<ref name=Levine208/>}}

Strangeways was still unimpressed with the Fortitude outline, and, according to Ops (B)'s Christopher Harmer, in mid-February, he set out to ride "roughshod over the established deception organization".<ref name=Levine203/> Harmer writes that Strangeways displayed the same arrogance as his commanding officer. Montgomery was famously opinionated and held a low opinion of the London establishment of the "old boys'" of Ops (B) and the LCS. More importantly, however, he had worked under Dudley Clarke in Cairo during the beginning of the war and had extensive experience of deception operations.

In North Africa, he had learned Clarke's maxim that deception relied on getting the enemy to do something, not just to think something, and so his criticism focused on that.<ref name=Levine202/><ref name=Holt50/> He pointed out that convincing the Germans of so many fictional divisions would be difficult, and even more so would be convincing them of Montgomery's ability to manage two entire invasions at the same time.<ref name=Levine205/> Wild's plan outlined ten divisions for the Calais assault, six of them being fictional and the remainder being the real American V Corps and British I Corps. However, the corps would be part of the actual Normandy invasion and so it would be difficult to imply Calais as the main assault after D-Day.<ref name=Holt535/> Strangeways's final concerns related to the effort required for physical deception, as the plan called for large numbers of troop movements and dummy craft.<ref name=Levine205/>

[[File:1st Army Group.svg|thumb|Symbol of the fictional 1st US Army Group, a core element of Strangeway's plan]]

Strangeways's objections were strong, and having responsibility for the plan's implementation, he refused to undertake most of the physical deception. A power struggle ensued throughout February and early March between Ops (B) and Strangeways as to who had authority to implement each part of the deception plan.  Montgomery put his full support behind his head of deception and so Strangeways prevailed.<ref name=Holt536/><ref name=Levine206/> Finally, in a 23 February meeting between R Force and Ops (B), Strangeways tore up a copy of the plan, declared it useless, and announced that he would rewrite it from scratch.<ref name=Levine205/> The established deceivers were dubious about Strangeways's announcement and assumed that he would resubmit the existing plan with some modifications.<ref name=Levine206/> However, he duly submitted a rewritten operation that was met, in Harmer's words, with "astonishment".<ref name=Levine208/>

===Quicksilver===
Strangeways's revised Fortitude plan and an operational implementation, dubbed Quicksilver, invented an entire new field army but crucially without significant fictional forces. The skeleton of the new force already existed in the form of the [[First United States Army Group]] (FUSAG), commanded by [[Omar Bradley]]. It had been formed for administrative purposes but never used, but the Germans had discovered its existence through radio intercepts. Strangeways proposed activating the unit, with a series of fictional and real formations.<ref name=Levine206/> The order of battle for the army would be intended to represent the bulk of Allied forces in England and therefore the main Allied threat.<ref name=Holt578/> To add credence to the importance of FUSAG, Bradley was replaced by Lieutenant General [[George Patton]], whom the Germans held in high regard and who was known to be a competitor to Montgomery.<ref name=Holt541/>

The Fortitude South story would be that FUSAG was being prepared to invade [[Pas-de-Calais]] some weeks after an initial diversionary invasion. That would allow [[Operation Neptune]]'s landings to be passed off as a distraction from the later main invasion.<ref name=Levine207/> Pas-de-Calais offered a number of advantages over the real invasion site, such as by being the shortest crossing of the [[English Channel]] and the quickest route into Germany. As a result, [[Erwin Rommel]] had taken steps to fortify that area of coastline heavily. Strangeways felt that would help the deception seem realistic in the minds of German high command.<ref name=LatimerFortitudeSouth >Latimer 2001, pp. 218–232</ref>

A deception of such a size required significant organisation and input from many organisations, including [[MI5]], [[Secret Intelligence Service|MI6]], [[Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force|SHAEF]] via Ops B, and the armed services. Information from the various deception agencies was organised by and channelled through the London Controlling Section. To help keep the approach well-organised, Strangeways divided the implementation stages into six subplans, codenamed Quicksilver.<ref name=Holt578/><ref name=Levine207/>

{| class="wikitable"
|+ Quicksilver Sub-Plans
! Plan !! Special Means !! Description
|-
| Quicksilver I || Leaks || The basic "story" of Fortitude South was to be leaked, under Quicksilver I, largely through the double agent network and some diplomatic channels.<ref name=Deuve231/>
|-
| Quicksilver II || Wireless traffic || Radio deception was used to simulate the movement of troops across the south of England, with German listening posts expected to pick up the traffic.<ref name=Deuve234/>
|-
| Quicksilver III || Physical deception || A display of dummy landing craft, including associated simulated wireless traffic, road signs, and restricted areas.<ref name=Deuve238/>
|-
| Quicksilver IV || Physical preparations || Any invasion target would have been prepared with attacks in advance of landings and so Quicksilver IV covered a number of air activities including bombing of the Pas-de-Calais beach area and tactical railway bombing immediately before D-Day.<ref name=Deuve239/>
|-
| Quicksilver V || Physical Deception || Overall increased activity around [[Dover]] (such as by giving impression of extra tunnelling and additional wireless stations) to suggest embarkation preparations.<ref name=Deuve242/>
|-
| Quicksilver VI || Physical Deception || Night lighting deception to simulate activity at night in places that dummy landing craft were situated.
|}
[[File:DecoyLCT.jpg|thumb|Dummy landing craft, used during Fortitude, at an unknown location in the South-East of England]]

The FUSAG deception was not implemented primarily with dummy tanks, aeroplanes, or other vehicles. At that stage of the war, the Germans were unable to fly reconnaissance planes over England and so Strangeways felt that such effort would have been wasted.<ref group=note>It has been suggested that the Army later encouraged the idea that the dummies were used to draw attention away from some of the other means of deception, such as double agents.</ref><ref name=Holt536/> However, temporary buildings were constructed and dummy landing craft were stationed at likely embarkation point in the East and the South-East of England.<ref name=Holt537/><ref name=Howard120/> As the FUSAG commander, Patton paid many of them a visit, along with a photographer, to ensure that their location was noted.<ref name=Gawne/> The landing craft, built from wood and canvas and nicknamed Bigbob's, suffered from being too light. Wind and rain flipped many of them over or ran them to ground during the operation.<ref name=Janeczko162/>

Instead of extensive physical measures, most of Strangeway's plan relied on radio signals and leaks through double agents. Managing that information flow had to be done with caution since leaking supposed top-secret invasion plans would have been very obvious. Instead, the deceivers used tactics developed by Clarke in Cairo. Agents were allowed to report minutiae such as insignia on soldiers' uniforms and unit markings on vehicles to allow the Germans to build up a picture. The observations in the south-central areas largely gave accurate information about the real invasion forces since Clarke had stressed that using as much real information as possible led to better outcomes. Reports from the South-West of England indicated few troop sightings, but in reality, many units were housed there in preparation for D-Day. Reports from the South-East depicted largely-notional Quicksilver forces. That approach aimed to convince German intelligence services of an [[order of battle]] for the Allied forces that placed the centre of gravity of the invasion force opposite Pas-de-Calais.<ref name=Masterman223/>