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.This belief was backed up bythe unsuccessful raid on Dieppe, which seemed to showthat the Allies did indeed plan to seize a major port as theonly logical means of facilitating the rapid build-up of forcesthat would be necessary for a successful invasion.171 Secret History Book 23/9/04 4:08 pm Page 172S ECRET H I STORYIn practice, the Allies had drawn the opposite conclusionfrom the Dieppe debacle, which had shown that there was littlechance of capturing a port intact, and in working condition.Instead, British and American ingenuity devised means ofworking without a port, thanks to the floating concrete har-bours of the Mulberry project and the undersea oil pipelineproject Pluto (see below).Allied planners were able to select analternative invasion target, while arranging a massive deceptionbased on the more obvious area.This deception would contin-ue even after the D-Day landings and the invasion ofNormandy, to pin down German forces in the Pas de Calais andprevent the arrival of reinforcements in the Normandy area.As with the deception operation in Scotland, Fortitude Southrevolved around a fictitious army group the First US ArmyGroup, or FUSAG that would muster in Southeast England.This notional army was under the command of General GeorgeS Patton, a charismatic but unpredictable figure who had fallenfrom favour in Allied circles because of incidents of poor judge-ment, but who was very highly regarded by the Germans.Theythought it entirely likely that he would be leading the assaultforces, and were misled by his actions during the build-up toD-Day and by his absence from Normandy after the landings.They could not conceive that the Normandy invasion could bethe main event if Patton was not present.A leavening of real units was attached to FUSAG and sta-tioned in the area to enhance the credibility of the ruse.As theytransferred to Normandy after D-Day, they would be replacedby fictional units, many drawn from the fake Fourth ArmyGroup in Scotland.In this way, FUSAG lived on for severalmonths after the D-Day landings themselves.Numerous sub-operations helped to ensure the plausibilityof FUSAG and confirm German beliefs that Southeast Englandwas to be the jumping off point for the main invasion.Themain sub-plans were codenamed Quicksilver I VI.QuicksilverI was the central deception that FUSAG would launch the172 Secret History Book 23/9/04 4:08 pm Page 173R USES AND D ECEPTI ONmajor Allied invasion on the Pas de Calais, some weeks afterthe Normandy operation.Quicksilver II involved the genera-tion of huge volumes of bogus radio traffic, created by specialunits, some equipped with transmitters that could multiplytheir signals so that one operator could appear to be six.Otherswere based in trucks that spent all day haring around the Kentcountryside, broadcasting from as many different locations aspossible to give the impression of multiple units.The fake radio traffic was produced with incredible atten-tion to detail and subtle touches.It reproduced the frequencyand pattern of a real army group, and the operators replicatedthe individual broadcasting quirks and styles that the eaves-dropping Germans would expect to hear from the signals menattached to each unit.The messages themselves came from ascript book prepared by the planners at Supreme HeadquartersAllied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF).This included the nowcelebrated message: 5th [Battalion] Queen s Royal Regimentreport a number of civilian women, presumably unauthorised,in the baggage train.What are we going to do with them takethem to Calais?Other Quicksilver operations included arranging dummylanding craft and other craft around the coast of southeastEngland, and dummy aircraft on southeastern airfields,together with fake lighting schemes to add to the illusion of abuild up, or help to divert enemy bombers attacking the realjumping off area.Such illusions had been perfected earlier inthe war to deceive German bombers into getting lost, missingtheir target towns or aiming long or short.Set designers fromShepperton Film Studios were employed to create an impres-sive fake oil storage and docking facility near Dover.The kingand General Montgomery paid highly publicised visits to thesite and special effects, using smoke generators and flares, cre-ated a convincing response when the facility was hit by long-range German shells.The fake storage facility was a cover forthe real operation, the Pipeline Under The Ocean PLUTO.173 Secret History Book 23/9/04 4:08 pm Page 174S ECRET H I STORYThe business end of this top-secret technology was concealedbehind a number of innocent facades.For instance, one pump-ing station was disguised as a seaside ice-cream stall.EvenAllied bombing raids on the Continent were carefully arrangedto foster the impression that the Calais region was the primarytarget.For every bombing run on Normandy, there were two inthe Calais region.In May 1944, a high-ranking German prisoner of war,General Hans Cramer, was set to be repatriated on healthgrounds
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