STUDYING PAST OPERATIONAL failures has always been one way the military has found future success. In the months before Operation Overlord/Neptune was launched, the top brass at SHAEF looked hard at the American paratroop drops in both Operations Torch (the invasion of North Africa) and Husky (Sicily) to analyze what went wrong—not the least of which was the troops being scattered like dandelion seeds in a stiff breeze. In some cases it took days for the airborne troops, released miles from their intended drop zones, to link up with their units or other friendly forces. Such a disaster could not be allowed to take place during Overlord/Neptune or else the entire airborne plan, and hence the entire invasion itself, would be in jeopardy.
To minimize the possibility of this happening, it was decided that small teams of specially trained men would be delivered by parachute to France before D-Day under the cover of night in order to identify and mark the DZs for the pilots of Troop Carrier Command carrying the main force. These men—all volunteers—became known as “pathfinders,” and wore a flaming winged-torch emblem low on their left sleeves to denote their status as members of an “elite within an elite.”
Perhaps no D-Day assignment, with the possible exception of the U.S. Ranger Force that was detailed to assault up the sheer cliffs at Pointe du Hoc, was more hazardous than that handed to the pathfinders. These men knew that their chances of surviving the operation ranged from slim to none, yet each man was willing to put his life on the line for the overall success of the airborne assault and the invasion.
In order to mark the drop zones and glider landing zones, the pathfinders required special equipment. Foremost among these devices was the British-made transmitter/receiver beacon AN/PPN-1A, commonly called “Eureka.” Pathfinder historian Jeff Moran writes, “It was a seventy-five-pound man-pack radar beacon carried by a single pathfinder on a jump and set up on the drop zone for the transport air-craft to home in on. It was used with a counterpart, Rebecca, located in the C-47 aircraft. [General] Browning chose the name ‘Rebecca’ as his wife was the novelist Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca being the title of her most popular book. The Eureka could transmit on five frequencies and receive on five additional frequencies…. By planned allocations of frequencies, it was possible to identify the correct Eureka for each aircraft’s DZ. On receiving the impulse from the aircraft’s Rebecca, the Eureka on the DZ replied automatically. From Rebecca the aircraft navigator could read off his distance to the DZ and his compass bearing to it.”1
It was planned that each pathfinder team of eighteen men, including paratroopers assigned to provide site security once the team landed, would be equipped with two Eureka sets. To prevent the top-secret device from falling into enemy hands, each Eureka was fitted with a built-in explosive charge that could be activated by pulling a pin.
Another piece of equipment utilized by the pathfinders was the 110-pound AN/UPN-1, which was a radar beacon transponder that sent out an ultra-high-frequency radio wave signal to approaching planes that were equipped with the SCR-717 S-band search radar. This device would be used to mark the center navigational point for each airborne division.2
The pathfinders also carried brightly colored AL-140-B Signal Panels (for use in daylight to mark the locations of troops on the ground), Keeler Lights (pole-mounted flashlights to aid in helping paratroopers find their assembly points), battery powered Kryton Light, M-227 Signal Lamps (for sending messages in Morse Code), Aldis Lights (a high-intensity flashlight with a narrow beam to signal pilots), and Holophane Lights (tripod-mounted lights with interchangeable colored lenses and powered by a car battery to provide an identification marker on a particular drop zone).3 Each battalion was assigned its own pathfinder team, and each regiment had its own identifying color of Holophane lights; the 505th’s color was green, the 507th‘s was red, and the 508th‘s was amber.4
THE MEN WHO volunteered for this duty were trained at the Pathfinder School at RAF North Witham. The American pathfinder teams were organized with two officers—team leader and assistant team leader—two Eureka operators and two assistants, a Light Section leader and seven Light men, and a security team of four to six men. Most of the security men were volunteers from Colonel Reuben Tucker’s 504th PIR; because it was still undergoing refitting after sustaining heavy casualties in Sicily and Italy, the 504th would not be participating as a regiment in Normandy.
One of the pathfinders, Richard M. Wright, E/506/101st, was anxious to get into combat as soon as possible, regardless of the consequences: “It was probably the quickest way to get into the fight against the evil tyranny of Nazi domination that had overwhelmed and brutalized most of Europe. They explained to us that it was a suicide mission and I just felt that I had to volunteer for it.”5
The British, too, had a force of pathfinders: the 22nd Independent Parachute Company, which would guide the 6th Airborne Division.*
Still, although many of the pathfinders accepted that their chances of living through the invasion were next to nothing, they couldn’t help but dwell on their possible fate. One of the roles to be performed by Sergeant Hugh Nibley, Order of Battle Team, Headquarters, 101st Airborne, was to brief the pathfinders on their mission, a duty that made him uncomfortable. He said, “All these boys I briefed had the same question. It was very sad. They said, ‘Have we got any chance of survival?’ It was sad because they were so eager to know what chances they had, which is fair enough for them to ask, but some of them, like the pathfinders, didn’t have a prayer. They were practically suicide missions, and we knew it was going to be bad business…. We couldn’t reassure them, or anything like that.”6
With all this specialized training and equipment, the Allies were betting that the pathfinders would be able to mark the drop zones and landing zones, ensuring an accurate placement of the paratroops and gliders. But, as events would shortly prove, many of the teams that were about to be dropped in the wrong places or have their sensitive signaling equipment smashed upon landing would discover that they had been sent on a fool’s errand.7
BESIDES THE PATHFINDERS, Overlord/Neptune also implemented a crucial deception plan code-named Operation Fortitude. The Allies learned through their spy network and the breaking of the German code system that the enemy expected the main invasion thrust to be led by Lieutenant General George S. Patton, Jr. Helping to “sell” this idea to the Germans was the fact that Patton had disgraced himself by slapping two soldiers in Sicily whom he thought were cowards and malingerers. He was relieved of his command of Seventh Army and Eisenhower was on the verge of giving in to civilian demands for his ouster and sending him home. The Germans, on the other hand, thought that the slapping incidents were part of a poorly disguised deception operation and were being used to fool them into thinking that he would play no part in the invasion, when they believed all along that he would lead the main thrust—from Dover across the Pas de Calais.
To encourage the Germans to keep thinking that way, SHAEF—through the use of hundreds of empty tents, dummy encampments, fake radio traffic, plywood landing craft, inflatable rubber tanks and trucks, bogus fuel and ammunition dumps (all created by the special-effects people from Shepperton Film Studios), and misinformation planted by double agents—put together a magnificent fraud. There was even a convincing “double” for Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery (a man named M.E. Clifton James). When German spies reported that Monty was seen addressing British troops in some Mediterranean location such as Gibraltar or Cairo, the real Monty was actually in England, helping to prepare for the invasion.
One of the most convincing aspects of Fortitude was the brilliant use of Patton. Alongside Montgomery’s very real 21st Army Group, SHAEF created a fictional force—FUSAG, or First United States Army Group, which comprised the actual First Canadian Army and Third American Army—headed by none other than George Patton himself. If the Germans took the bait and believed that FUSAG was real and that Patton commanded it, they would assume that the main cross-channel thrust would indeed take place at the Pas de Calais and keep the bulk of their defenses on alert at Calais.
As Terry Crowdy writes in Deceiving Hitler, “From the German point of view, Patton was the Allies’ best commander and certainly the one most likely to be chosen to lead an assault into Germany. They viewed the slapping incident with suspicion and believed it was all a hoax to cover up an important assignment, all of which reinforced Fortitude South.”* With the top-secret Fortitude plan in place, the Allies thoroughly hoodwinked the Germans into believing that the intentionally visible and totally bogus build-up of troops and equipment in East Anglia and southeast England was for the main thrust rather than merely for a diversionary attack. The main thrust, or so the enemy believed, would take place right where the Germans always thought it would: at the Pas de Calais, and General Patton would lead it.8
ONE OF THE clever diversionary tactics that would be employed on D-Day was Operation Titanic—the use of Military Paratrooper Decoys, or “paradummies.” The Allies planned to drop hundreds of them over enemy-held territory just prior to the actual parachute drops in hopes that the Germans would “take the bait” and go off chasing artificial soldiers instead of hunting for the real ones.
In the 1962 movie The Longest Day, based on the book by Cornelius Ryan, these dummies are shown to be highly realistic figures that could pass for genuine paras. But, of course, with the drops taking place at night, there was no need to take the time and effort to mold and paint realistic-looking dummies. The actual paradummies were made of either straw-stuffed burlap (designed by Captain Michael R.D. Foot and called “Rupert” by the troops) or plain olive-colored inflatable rubber (known as “Oscar”) that only vaguely resembled a human figure.9 The responsibility for dropping these dummies fell to the SAS (Special Air Service), a British commando organization stationed at RAF Fairford in Gloucheser. The idea was for 500 of these fake soldiers—each rigged with a small explosive charge that would detonate upon contact with the ground—to be dropped by appropriately sized parachutes behind the beachheads.
Also dropping with them would be two four-man teams armed with Very pistols,** a record player, and sound-effects records. When the SAS soldiers hit the ground, they would play the sound effects that consisted of gunfire and the shouts of soldiers, and fire off a few rounds of real ammunition to add to the overall effect. One of these SAS teams was to land between Rouen and Le Havre, while the other would touch down near Isigny.10
Credit for the idea of dummy parachutists goes to the British, who came up with it in 1938, when war seemed on the horizon. A British agent, who claimed to be with the British Trade Commission, visited the United States clandestinely to find American manufacturers for war goods and asked George Freedman, head of Interstate Manufacturing Company, to design a dummy paratrooper for a top-secret military project. The company submitted several designs and one of them, a three-foot-tall crude simulation of a man, made of burlap and stuffed with straw, was accepted; the company received an order for 3,800 dummies, which were secretly shipped to Canada and then on to Britain.
Freedman and Interstate Manufacturing also claimed to have designed “Oscar,” the four-foot-tall inflatable rubber paradummy (also called the “PD Pack”). The dummies were then shipped to Switlik Parachute and Equipment Company of Trenton, New Jersey, America’s largest parachute manufacturer, which attached scaled-down parachutes and CO2 inflation bottles provided by the Walter Kidde Company.11
At this time, the Germans, too, were working on their own version of a paratrooper decoy, and were the first to employ it in a military operation. During the May 1940 invasion of Germany’s western neighbors, the Luftwaffe dropped straw-filled dummies on Belgium. In addition, decoys were also reportedly used by the Germans over Scotland in August 1940. In both cases, they had the desired effect of causing initial confusion among troops and commanders on the ground.
The British first used their paradummies in 1940 against Italian troops at Siwa, North Africa,12 and then again on 1 June 1944 over Italy in Operation Hasty.13 They were employed again against the Vichy French during Operation Ironclad, the May 1942 British invasion of Madagascar, designed to deceive the enemy while an amphibious assault was taking place elsewhere.
Information about Operation Fortitude is still sketchy, but it is believed that on D-Day, 6 June, the inflatable rubber “Oscars” did not see action; only the straw-filled burlap “Ruperts” made their combat jump.14 For Overlord/Neptune, four separate dummy parachute drops were scheduled. The first, known as Titanic I, would employ 200 dummies dropped over Yvelot, thirty miles southwest of Dieppe, late on the evening of 5 June, and would have a touch of realism not found in the other three. Two parties of SAS men would go in ahead of the paradummies, hide out until the drop, and then attack any Germans who came to investigate the reports of a mass drop in the area. The SAS men would allow some of the Germans to escape in order for them to report the incident to their headquarters, thereby beginning to spread the tale of large numbers of parachutists descending on Normandy. Charles Cruickshank notes in Deception in World War II, “The object of this diversion was to retain enemy forces north of the Seine and, with luck, draw reserves from south of the Seine.”
The second part of the operation, Titanic II, would use fifty dummies dropped to the east of the British and Canadian DZs along the Dives River in hopes that German troops there would remain stationary to counter the “threat,” rather than moving westward toward the amphibious landing areas. Titanic III comprised another fifty dummies that would be dropped southwest of Caen to draw enemy troops away from that city and—it was hoped—make it easier for Montgomery’s seaborne forces to capture it. The 200 paradummies slated to be used in Titanic IV would be dropped at Marigny at the base of the Cotentin peninsula in order to entice German troops away from Saint Lô.
Scheduled to carry the paradummies on their missions were forty Stirlings, Halifaxes, and Hudsons from 90, 138, 149, and 161 Squadrons based at RAF Stations Tempsford and Methwold.15
Of course, diversionary operations are only effective if the side against whom they are directed is convinced that they are the “real McCoy” and not a hoax designed to distract or deceive. In spite of all the time, money, and effort that had gone into the Fortitude plan, the thought in everyone’s mind was: would the Germans be fooled?
They would have their answer soon.