Dr. Thomas Hatfield, Dean of Continuing Education at The University of Texas at Austin, writes and lectures on the Second World War. related figure

The Crucial Deception The main effort by the Western Allies to defeat Nazi Germany began with the invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944. Surprise, essential to success, was complete. The German high command did not even believe it was the main attack. They believed the "real" invasion would come in mid-July about 150 miles northeast of Normandy near Calais on the Straits of Dover. For weeks after the invasion their decisions were based on this false belief, making the Allies' subsequent battle across Normandy less costly than it might have been. British and American intelligence specialists deceived the Germans with an elaborate deception plan, codenamed Fortitude, causing them to mistake the Normandy invasion for an Allied stratagem to draw their forces from the Pas de Calais region. As a result, they kept some reinforcements from Normandy that might have tipped the balance there. Hitler's chief of staff, General Alfred Jodl, called this mistake Germany's "fatal strategic error." The deceptionists who planned Fortitude were amazed that it remained plausible in enemy minds much longer than they intended. They had hoped to confuse the Germans about Allied intentions and capabilities before D-Day and for at least six weeks thereafter. But the falsehoods of Fortitude endured even into September. On September 10, 1944, when Allied armies had liberated most of France and Belgium and were poised to enter the Fatherland, the German high command alerted its top generals by radio signal that a new American army of at least 100,000 troops was forming in England and would soon move to the continent. Yet the army was fictitious; it did not exist. It was part of the ongoing Fortitude hoax. The British intercepted and decrypted the German radio message: "According report hitherto reliable source [sic]. American troops concentrating on large scale in Southampton area. Report appears trustworthy and fitted in with plans connected with the regrouping of FUSAG." FUSAG referred to the phantom First U.S. Army Group. Fortitude had convinced the Germans that FUSAG was genuine. The success of Fortitude appears more remarkable since in early 1944 almost everyone in Europe and North America knew that the Allies would soon launch the "second front" invasion from Britain against Germany's so-called Fortress Europe. The steady buildup of forces in Britain was too immense to conceal. Churchill and Roosevelt promised Stalin at Teheran in late November 1943 that they would make the cross-channel attack the following spring. From the lowest private in the German army to Adolf Hitler, the Germans expected the attack on the French coast. On November 3, 1943, Hitler issued a directive designating northern France as the theater to receive top priority in 1944."The danger in the East remains, but a greater danger now appears in the West: an Anglo-Saxon landing! . . . If the enemy succeeds in breaching our defenses on a wide front, consequences of staggering proportions will follow within a short time. All signs point to an offensive against the Western Front of Europe no later than spring, and perhaps earlier." Hitler also indicated where he thought the attack would occur."I have decided to reinforce the defenses in the West, particularly at places from which we shall launch our long-range war against England. For those are the very points at which the enemy must and will attack; there-unless all indications are misleading-will be fought the decisive invasion battle." (italics added) Hitler's reference to "places from which we shall launch our long-range war against England" could mean only the Pas de Calais where Germany was constructing launch ramps for the V-1 pilotless planes, precursors of the Cruise missile, which would begin raining down on London during the following summer, each with a one-ton warhead. Other reasons compelled the Germans to focus on the Pas de Calais. Lying next to Belgium on the Straits of Dover, the narrowest part of the English Channel, it has the shortest distance (only twenty-one miles) for air cover and sea transport from Britain. Its firm, expansive beaches could support tanks and heavy vehicles, and it is on a straight line route from Britain to the heart of Germany's heavy industries, the Ruhr. The Germans thought the Allies would have to capture a big seaport right away, and Europe's finest port, Antwerp, is near the Pas de Calais. Yet by fixating on the Pas de Calais, Hitler planted the seed of his and Germany's deception and ultimate destruction. Fortitude's planners understood that the best deception is attained by feeding an opponent with falsehoods which he wants to believe. Hitler operated on intuition rather than intellectual analysis. His pendulum of hunches swung menacingly toward Normandy before D-Day. Even so, most Germans believed his prediction about the Pas de Calais was confirmed in January 1944, when General Dwight D. Eisenhower was appointed Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force with headquarters in southern England. As certain as the Germans might feel about the Pas de Calais, they could not be entirely sure. They needed exact answers to the questions of where, when, and in what strength the Allies would return to the continent. Other deception plans threatened them with attacks in the Balkans, on the Mediterranean coast of France, in the Bay of Biscay, and in Norway. Allied deceptionists feared that a phantom impulse, a blunder, an accurate tip, or even a false report from any source could provoke the Germans to reappraise their bent toward Calais and focus instead on Normandy. Hitler, in a rambling monologue during the spring of 1944, expressed the dilemma he would face when the attack came. "It would be splendid," the Fuhrer muttered, "if one could get a good idea in the first moments of the landing, which is the diversion and which is the full-scale assault." About the same time, Eisenhower referred to the landings rather differently in a comment to his chief deception officer: "Just keep the [German] 15th army out of my hair for the first two days. That's all I ask." The German 15th army defended the Pas de Calais. As it happened, Hitler mistook the real assault for the diversion, and Eisenhower's deception staff did better than he had asked. Invasion planners expected the margin for success on Normandy's beaches to be narrow. A textbook used at the U.S. Army's Command and General Staff School before the war instructed that "Descents upon a hostile coast, if opposed, have a very small chance of success." (italics added) General Douglas MacArthur, while head of the U.S. Army, had contended that amphibious landings were not feasible, when opposed. Both were echoing conventional soldierly thought after the enormous losses inflicted by the Turks on the British making amphibious landings on the Gallipoli peninsula at the Dardanelles Straits in 1915. If the Germans could learn when and where the landings would occur, they could concentrate their reserves from other parts of France and western Europe and push the invading force back into the sea before it could be enlarged and consolidated to defend itself. Erwin Rommel, the legendary German general who commanded coastal defenses from Holland to the Loire told his staff: "The major moments of weakness will occur during the actual landings and shortly afterwards." Against men wading through the surf after a sea voyage, German forces massed near the invasion area could be overwhelming. They would know the terrain and could get to the invasion beaches by walking or riding bicycles, if necessary; both were common modes of transportation in the German army. Bernard Montgomery, the British general who commanded the ground forces during the invasion, worried that the German army usually met an attack with a counter-attack and that powerful units of the German army, particularly the 21st Panzer (armored) Division, were only a few miles from the landing beaches. So it was absolutely clear to the invasion planners that the landing forces had to get ashore with minimal opposition. General Frederick Morgan, the Britisher who directed invasion planning, later wrote that "the ultimate aim [was] that the eventual blow would come where the enemy least expected it, when he least expected it, and with a force altogether outside his calculations." In a word, Morgan's "ultimate aim" was deception. The Germans maintained a large intelligence organization called the Abwehr to learn where, when, and in what strength the invasion would occur. Its sources were photo-reconnaissance, cryptographers, captured documents, spies in Britain and elsewhere, British newspapers and radio, informants in European resistance movements, and prisoners-of-war, including Allied airmen shot down over occupied Europe. For their part, the deceptionists sought to mislead the Abwehr with bogus or inaccurate radio reports, visual displays of mock equipment, fake port facilities and military installations, gossip in neutral embassies, deliberate leakage of alleged confidential information, and, of course, double agents. In the invasion, the Germans were completely surprised when the Allies sent the largest naval and air forces ever assembled-5,333 ships and 10,500 airplanes-across 100 miles of stormy sea and sky to Normandy on the night of June 5, 1944. This mighty armada was at sea for three days and remained unknown to the enemy until it appeared in the mist of morning light off Normandy's coast. Yet, even then, the Germans did not believe it represented the "real" invasion. Walter Warlimont, a German general stationed in Hitler's headquarters, wrote in his memoirs that staff officers "had not the slightest idea that the decisive event of the war was upon them." The Normandy invasion was a complete tactical and strategic surprise. The bad weather which caused Eisenhower to delay the invasion for one day explains the tactical surprise, but the fact remains that the Germans were surprised at every level of command. The German situation report on June 5 stated "Invasion not imminent." By the end of the next day, 176,000 Allied troops were ashore in France. Surprise depends on concealment, or "security." But it was not enough for Allied planners merely to conceal their intentions and strength. Success in Normandy depended heavily on the Germans believing the real invasion was coming elsewhere. Eisenhower approved the deceptionists' proposal to reinforce the German prejudice that the "real" invasion was coming in the Pas de Calais. Not only must the Germans believe the deception; they must do something quite specific. They must keep the bulk of their forces clustered round the Pas de Calais rather than Normandy before, during, or after the invasion for as long as possible. Hitler himself was the ultimate target of the deception effort because from 1941 onward he made operational as well as strategic decisions, imposing his will at the battlefield level. Victory could hinge on deception that required both good security (concealment) and good intelligence (information) about what the Germans were thinking and doing. Fortunately, the Allies had advantages in intelligence and security that may be unique. Unknown to the Germans, the British-led by Cambridge University mathematicians-were decrypting some German ciphers encrypted with the Enigma machine considered unbreakable by the Germans. This was the Ultra Secret, and the information obtained was called Ultra. British cryptographers broke the Abwehr cipher in December 1941 and read it to the end of the war. This provided an irreplaceable running check on how German intelligence was reacting to the deception-generated misinformation, Allied developments of which they were or were not aware, their worries, intentions, and beliefs. With Ultra, the Allies could overhear the Abwehr talking to itself. A second intelligence advantage came from the Americans who had broken the Japanese diplomatic cipher before the war and eavesdropped on their radio messages throughout the war. Messages from Baron Oshima, the Japanese ambassador to Berlin, to his foreign ministry in Tokyo were particularly useful. When Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican challenger to President Roosevelt in 1944, seemed prepared to make a campaign issue of Allies' codebreaking advantage as it related to the Pearl Harbor disaster, General George C. Marshall, the head of the U.S. Army, sent him a secret letter saying that, "...our main basis of information regarding Hitler's intentions in Europe is obtained from Baron Oshima's messages from Berlin reporting his interviews with Hitler and other [German] officials to the Japanese government. These are still in the codes involved in the Pearl Harbor events." Oshima spoke frequently with Hitler or other top Nazis and inspected their defenses. He obliged the Allies by transmitting lengthy summaries that were sometimes read in Washington before they were read in Tokyo. In October 1943, for instance, after touring German defenses on the French coast, Oshima messaged home a description of what he had seen and heard, inadvertently giving the Allies their first overview of German preparations for the invasion. If the Allies' intelligence was excellent, their security was superb. Wartime Britain was an island fortress under siege. The internal security agency, M.I.5, roughly analogous to the FBI, controlled the flow of information into and out of the country. Except for an occasional quick low-level flight across the Channel, German penetration of British air space after 1941 was mostly at the pleasure of the RAF, and the citizenry was vigilant about reporting suspicious behavior that suggested espionage. As for German agents, Ultra's ability to listen in on the Abwehr enabled M.I.5 to know when and where spies would be inserted into the country and to arrest them when they arrived, usually near their point of landing by parachute or submarine. With this extraordinary security, M.I.5 apprehended and controlled all German espionage agents in Britain. It is a remarkable truth that every active German agent in Britain was located (about 120), taken into custody, and either converted ("turned") to work for the Allies or executed (seventeen) with the exception of one who was reprieved. The turned agents continued to communicate with their Abwehr masters but only communications that M.I.5 allowed them to send. Within M.I.5, the double agents were controlled by a small group called the Twenty (XX) Committee chaired by an Oxford don and future vice-chancellor, John Masterman (later Sir John). He labeled the systematic use of the double agents the "double-cross system." Always conscious that they were preparing for the day when the Allies returned to the continent, the Twenty Committee met weekly to decide what information could be safely conveyed to the Germans by the double agents. The goal was to build up the double agents' credibility by feeding the Germans plausible falsehoods as well as accurate information they either had or would obtain anyway, while giving away nothing vital. The double agents communicated with their Abwehr controllers by radio telegraphy, courier, mail, or personal contact. A novelist and mystery story writer, Masterman was also a famed amateur athlete, having represented England in tennis, hockey, and cricket. Now he was a pivotal player in the high stakes game of the century. His shrewd fiction-plotting may explain why he was drafted for the "XX" Committee, which managed the complex manipulations of the double agents. After the war, Masterman would rightly claim for the double-cross system that "for the greater part of the war we did much more than practice a large scale deception through double agents; by means of the double-cross system we actively ran and controlled the German espionage system in [Britain]." The double-cross system originated in the late 1930s almost by accident. Arthur Owens, a Welsh electrical engineer and civilian employee of the navy, was contacted by the Abwehr while traveling in Germany. Owens pretended to be receptive and accepted a radio from them. When he returned to England, he reported his contact to M.I.5, which responded by confiscating his radio and putting his name on the list of suspects detained when war broke out in September 1939. Owens then agreed that the radio should be used to reestablish contact with the Abwehr under the direction of M.I.5. His prison warden, an amateur radio operator, became his supervisor. Owens made contact with the Abwehr in Hamburg. The Germans welcomed the dialogue with Owens and put the first double agent into operation. After giving Owens the codename of Snow, the British followed with names for the double agents that ring like bells-Balloon, Bronx, Brutus, Careless, Carrot, Dragonfly, Lipstick, Mullet, Mutt and Jeff, The Snark, Sniper, Teapot, Tricycle, and Zigzag. The most successful of these was Juan Pujol, a Spaniard whom the British codenamed Garbo because they considered him the world's greatest actor. Masterman described him as "a genius, a man of great industry and ingenuity coupled with a passionate and quixotic zeal for the task [who] worked an average of six to eight hours a day drafting secret letters, enciphering, and planning for the future." After arriving in England on April 24, 1942, he communicated with the Germans in Lisbon by mail for the first year, writing 315 letters that averaged 2,000 words each. For the last two years of the war he also sent more than 1,200 messages by radio. The Garbo collection in British archives runs to more than fifty volumes. Until the Allies had an actual plan of attack, though, there could be no deception plan. Consequently, Garbo transmitted as much "confusing bulk" as possible and began creating a network of fictitious agents. His "confusing bulk" included material from Blue Guide tour books, maps, and outdated railway schedules. He was so convincing that the Madrid office of the Abwehr ceased infiltrating agents into Britain. By 1944, Garbo had fabricated a nonexistent network of sub-agents stationed in Scotland, Wales, and England whose existence was accepted as real by the Abwehr. The accompanying chart depicts his imaginary world of espionage agents. Garbo was the only real person in the network. Ultra divulged that Garbo's messages to the Abwehr in Madrid were promptly sent to Berlin where they made an excellent impression. He received this message from the Abwehr on September 18, 1943: "Your activity and that of your informants gives us a perfect idea of what is taking place over there; these reports, as you can imagine, have an incalculable value and for this reason I beg of you to proceed with the greatest care so as not to endanger in these momentous times either yourself or your organization." Ultra revealed that the double agent Brutus was also very credible to the Germans. As a result, the major burden of foisting the agents' part of the Fortitude deception on the Germans fell to Brutus and Garbo. Brutus was a Polish army officer whom the Germans had captured. Believing that he had been "converted" to collaborate with them, they allowed him to "escape." In October 1942, Brutus reached England and told the truth to M.I.5, urging that he should be used in what he called the "great game" to double-cross the Germans. As a Polish officer, Brutus could be fictitiously assigned for liaison with Allied armies where he could collect military information valued by the Germans. From early 1944, the double-cross system directed its full attention toward the grand deception of misleading the Germans about the coming invasion. The cultivation of fictitious Allied military units in Britain became the major activity of the deceptionists. From the other side of the hill, the Germans intensified their efforts to learn about preparations in Britain and turned for assistance to Garbo. He was ready. On January 5, 1944, the Abwehr asked Garbo to learn everything he could about Allied military intentions: the dates and locations of forthcoming operations; and strengths of all land, sea, air, and amphibious forces that might be used in those operations. He was told to include possible operations against Norway and Denmark as well actions against the Channel coast. Fortitude had two geographic parts, and Garbo deployed his imaginary agents to cover both of them. Fortitude North threatened an attack on Scandinavia by a nonexistent British Fourth Army in Scotland. Fortitude South aimed to convince the Germans of two untruths. One was that the main attack would occur in the Pas de Calais. The foundation for this contention was FUSAG, the fictitious army positioned in southeast England near Dover. The second was that the attack on Normandy was merely a diversionary operation to be followed about forty-five days later by the main assault on the Pas de Calais. In fact, the real invasion force destined for Normandy, 21st Army Group, assembled west of Dover in the south and west of England. For the Germans to take both threats seriously, they had to be convinced that the Allies possessed sufficient resources to implement a second attack after Normandy. To be successful, Fortitude had to persuade them that the Allies had about 50 percent more troops available in Britain than were actually there. Part of the inflated troop strength was in Scotland where the bogus British Fourth Army existed mostly on the airwaves and in the reports of the double agents. In actuality, it was about 400 men sending radio messages to each other that simulated the presence of an entire army. The Germans heard, for example, the schedule for a mountain training exercise by the nonexistent British 58th Division. Garbo covered Fortitude North with two fictitious sub-agents: Carlos, a Venezuelan student based in Glasgow, and agent 3(3), a Greek sailor on Scotland's east coast. When Carlos reported seeing the insignia of the 58th Division on the streets of Edinburgh, the Germans concluded the radio signals they had picked up were valid. If the fictitious 58th Division trained with the 55th Division that did exist and the 80th Division that did not exist, the radio transmissions had to simulate the activities of all three divisions. Garbo, fictitiously employed in the Ministry of Information in London, feigned the receipt of reports from his nonexistent sub-agents and radioed alleged summaries to the Abwehr in Madrid, sending five or six messages each day. After Brutus pretended an inspection of Polish forces in Scotland in April 1944, his report to the Abwehr conveyed the composition of the entire British Fourth Army as the Fortitude planners wanted it represented. In German eyes, the credibility of the bogus British Fourth Army was enhanced by the reputation of its commander, Andrew Thorne. Thorne had become acquainted with Hitler while serving as a military attachØ in Berlin in the early 1930s and it was hoped his name might draw added German attention to the threat from Scotland. To help project the fiction of Fortitude South and FUSAG, Garbo deployed three nonexistent sub-agents-7(2) Donny, 7(4) Dick, and 7(7) Dorick. They reported an operating oil dock at Dover which actually was a prop built by Hollywood stagehands and dummy landing craft in channel ports as well as fields speckled with planes, tanks, and trucks made of rubber or planks and fabric. More importantly, they reported the presence of fictitious military units whose existence was simulated by radio signals generated for German ears listening on the other side of the English Channel. A few hundred men driving around the countryside in jeeps and trucks simulated the radio traffic of an army group on the move. To command FUSAG, Eisenhower chose General George S. Patton. He was a convenient choice because the Germans considered him a formidable offensive commander, and he was temporarily unemployed, his punishment for slapping a battle fatigued soldier in Sicily. Flamboyant and controversial, Patton was the linchpin of FUSAG, attracting the attention that the deceptionists wanted. Montgomery made a visit to the FUSAG area that was conspicuously covered in the press, "for our friends to see me," he wrote to a colleague. Brutus got a fictitious assignment in FUSAG headquarters whence he reported on Patton's movements as well as the presence of both real and nonexistent units, their locations, and status of training. After the invasion, when a real division went to Normandy, it was usually replaced by a fictitious division. The Canadian 2nd and the U.S. 35th Divisions were real FUSAG units that went to Normandy. When the Germans saw them on the battlefield, they concluded logically that FUSAG divisions still in England were also real-and, progressively they were not, but the Germans did not know the difference. After D-Day, it did not seem plausible for the Germans to believe the Allies still had the forces necessary to invade both Norway and the Pas de Calais as well as Normandy. The deceptionists solved this problem by moving the nonexistent British Fourth Army in Scotland to southeast England to become part of the continuing FUSAG charade. To study the decrypts of the enemy's reactions to Fortitude is to see a completely false image form in German minds, an image with all the elegance and beauty of a coral island rising piece by piece from the ocean floor. A German map captured in Italy showed that the Allied divisions as of May 15, 1944, conformed to the Fortitude fiction projected on the Germans by the double agents. A German recognition booklet of Allied divisional insignias captured in France included colored drawings of fictitious divisional insignia concocted by the Fortitude deceptionists. Following a lengthy conversation with Hitler on May 27, 1944, Oshima quoted him verbatim in a message to Tokyo: "After [the Allies] have established bridgeheads on the Norman and Brittany Peninsulas and [have] seen how the prospect appears, they will come forward with the establishment of an all-out Second Front in the area of the Straits of Dover." By D-Day German intelligence attributed to the Allies a strength of approximately eighty divisions in Britain when the true figure was thirty-eight. In the spring of 1944, the Germans had about 280,000 military personnel stationed in Norway. Not until ten days after D-Day was a German division withdrawn, and it did not go to Normandy-but to the Pas de Calais! Anticipating the importance of Fortitude after D-Day in persuading the Germans to keep their reserves in the Pas de Calais, Eisenhower approved a Garbo transmission to the Abwehr in the early hours of D-Day morning. At 3:00 a.m. on June 6, Garbo began transmitting a warning to his Abwehr controller in Madrid that the invasion was underway. He even named some of the units that would be involved in the landing. However, his controller missed the message. Scolding the controller for dereliction of duty, Garbo got the message through at 6 a.m. Valueless though the message was, its accuracy was impressive and German confidence in Garbo soared. Later in the day on June 6, his Abwehr controller radioed apologetically: "I wish to stress in clearest terms that your work over the last few weeks has made it possible for our command to be completely forewarned and prepared. . . ." Brutus, from his imaginary position in FUSAG headquarters, signaled the Abwehr on D-Day, "Received this morning news of the beginning of the invasion. Extremely surprising because our FUSAG remains unmoved. It is clear that the landing was made only by units of the 21 Army Group. FUSAG [is capable of] an attack at any moment, but it is evident that it will be an independent action." The German high command's evening situation report on June 6 seemed to rely on their reports. "The enemy landing on the Normandy coast represents a large scale undertaking but the forces engaged represent a small part of the total available... The conclusion therefore is that the enemy command plans a further large-scale undertaking in the Channel area which may well be directed against a coastal sector in the central Channel area." Before D-Day Allied intelligence specialists had estimated that about two days after the landing the Germans would be tempted to commit major reinforcements to Normandy to gain a favorable decision there before the second landing could be made in the Pas de Calais. They estimated also that the Germans could move eleven divisions to Normandy within a few days. To forestall this development, on June 8 and 9, the deceptionists mounted a major effort to indicate that an attack was imminent on the Pas de Calais and nearby Belgium. Bogus radio traffic with resistance groups and aerial bombing in the Pas de Calais were intensified. It was the moment of truth for the double-cross system, the test for which it had been nurtured and developed since the evacuation from Dunkirk four years before. Garbo informed his controller that he was calling a meeting of the three fictitious sub-agents he had deployed to cover FUSAG, after which he would have an important message for the Abwehr. His message, begun at seven minutes after midnight on June 8-9, capped the whole deception effort. "After personal consultation on June 8 in London with my agents, Donny, Dick and Dorick, I am of the opinion, in view of the strong troop concentration in southeast and eastern England, which are not taking part in present operations, that these operations are a diversionary maneuver designed to draw off enemy reserves in order to make an attack at another place. In view of the continued air attacks on the concentration area mentioned, which is a strategically favorable position for this, it may very probably take place in the Pas de Calais, particularly since in such an attack the proximity of air bases will facilitate the operation by providing continued strong air support." (italics added) The message was received in Hitler's headquarters at 10:30 p.m. on June 9. His chief intelligence officer underlined the passage italicized above and added the notation, "confirms the view already held by us that a further attack is expected in another place (Belgium?)." Jodl underlined the words "in southeast and eastern England." This message, found in the headquarters after the war, was marked as having been shown to Hitler. By stroke of luck, a few hours earlier a similar message had been received from an Abwehr agent in Stockholm who cited unnamed "authoritative military circles" in London that "a second attack across the Channel directed against the Pas de Calais is to be expected." At 7:30 the next morning, Wilhelm Keitel, nominal head of the German army who took orders directly from Hitler, issued an order: "As a consequence of certain information, a state of alarm has been declared for the 15th Army in Belgium and North France." Later on the same day, the German daily intelligence summary reported, "The fact that not one of the formations still standing by in the southeast and east of England has been identified in the present operation strengthens the supposition that the strong Anglo-American forces which are still available are being held back for further plans." The movement of the 1st SS Panzer Division toward Normandy was stopped until June 16 when Hitler ordered his commander-in-chief in the West, Gerd von Rundstedt, to take the risk of sending forces to Normandy from all his fronts except those of the 15th Army in the Pas de Calais. On June 11, the Abwehr instructed Garbo about the continuation of his work. "The reports received in the last week," he was told, "have been confirmed almost without exception and are to be described as especially valuable. The main line of investigation in the future is to be the enemy group of forces in the southeastern and eastern England." On June 22 the Japanese ambassador reported to Tokyo that the German high command had rejected proposals for a quick counter-attack in Normandy in the belief that "the main task was to meet the main body which the Allies [have] not yet landed." Four weeks after the Normandy landings, the Germans still had twenty-two divisions thrashing the wind round Calais waiting for the attack that never came. As was seen at the outset, on September 10, the high command's own intelligence evaluation projected FUSAG having 100,000 troops in southeast England when there were virtually none. The deceptionists had proven their practical ingenuity, but they had not foreseen a message that came through for Garbo from the Abwehr on July 29: "With great happiness and satisfaction I am able to advise you today that the Fuhrer has conceded the Iron Cross to you for your extraordinary merits." Garbo replied, "I cannot at this moment, when emotion overwhelms me, express in words my gratitude... This prize has been won not only by me but also by Carlos and my other comrades." In the nature of things, a British decoration for Garbo was duly considered. In a secret ceremony shortly before Christmas 1944, Garbo was awarded honorary Membership of the Order of the British Empire. "Connoisseurs of double cross," wrote Sir John Masterman, "have always regarded the Garbo case as the most highly developed example of their art." Interviews with German generals after the war bear out both the wisdom and the success of the Fortitude deception. When von Rundstedt was asked why he had believed the invasion would come in the Pas de Calais, his reply was rote, like a man who had repeated it so many times that he did not have to think about his answer. "Narrowest part of the Channel." "Closest to Germany." "Quickest route to the Rhine." "The location of the V-weapons." Rundstedt claimed that about two weeks after the invasion he decided "a second landing was not coming but Hitler's headquarters were still convinced it was, and were reluctant to let [us] move forces westward to Normandy." What did Eisenhower, the Allies' supreme commander, think of the deception efforts? Exactly one month after D-Day, he wrote to the British chiefs of staff, "I cannot overemphasize the great importance of maintaining as long as humanly possible the Allied threat to the Pas de Calais area, which has already paid enormous dividends and, with care, will continue to do so." Recalling the story of the crucial deception for an interviewer twenty-two years later, Eisenhower gave a deep gutsy laugh and exclaimed, "By God, we fooled them, didn't we?"