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Garbo's Lie: The Deception That Held After the Beaches Fell
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Operation Fortitude and the Double Cross System didn't just help the Allies land on Normandy — they kept 150,000 German troops frozen at Pas-de-Calais for seven weeks after D-Day. This is the story of Juan Pujol Garcia, the fictional spy network that fooled Hitler, and the bodyguard of lies that may have done more to win the war than any division that crossed the Channel.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Here's the thing about D-Day that doesn't get asked often enough. The landings worked.
Garcia was a Spanish citizen with no formal intelligence training and a remarkable gift for fiction. Before the war he'd tried twice to volunteer for British intelligence and been turned away.
The plan carrying all of this was called Operation Fortitude. It sat inside a larger strategic umbrella called Operation Bodyguard, and its goal was simple to state and nearly impossible to execute.
Winston Churchill once said that in wartime, truth is so precious it must be attended by a bodyguard of lies. That phrase didn't describe a single operation.
While Fortitude played its long game, Dwight Eisenhower was dealing with a shorter problem. Weather.
In the early hours of June sixth, thirteen thousand four hundred American paratroopers boarded C-47 aircraft in England. The eighty-second and one-hundred-and-first Airborne Divisions were going in first, hours before the beach landings, to secure the flanks and the causeways behind Utah Beach.
At dawn, five beach landings went in simultaneously across a fifty-mile stretch of Normandy coast. Utah was the westernmost American sector.
While the beaches were being fought over, Garbo was working. His late-arriving message to Berlin was reinforcing exactly what Fortitude needed the Germans to believe.
The Atlantic Wall was supposed to be impenetrable. Two thousand miles of fortification running from the Arctic to Spain.
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