This country is at war with Germany.

We shall go on to the end.

I remember the sheets of flame which came up and almost blinded us from our guns. As the Allied forces prepared for the monumental invasion of Normandy, concealing the massive

buildup of troops in Britain from the Germans became increasingly challenging, to

mislead German intelligence about the timing and location of the invasion, the Allies devised a series of elaborate deception plans. The most audacious of these schemes aimed to convince the Germans that the Normandy landings were merely a diversion.

This ruse featured a fictitious army led by General Patton,

complete with hundreds of realistic dummy landing craft, tanks, and aircraft.

I'm Angus Wallace and joining me to delve into the intricate web of D-Day Deception is Taylor Downing, author of The Army

that never was, D-Day and the Great Deception.

So Taylor, we're going to be discussing Allied deception plans surrounding D-Day, but deception was not a new idea in

1944. The British had been running various schemes since the outbreak of war with dummy structures such as airfields but are these a

pre-war idea I think it's interesting how quickly the British develop these

ideas once the war starts it is very interesting how quickly it all happens

when when the war. I'm not aware of pre-war deception planning in terms of sort of air bases or dummy decoy airfields or anything like that. And you've got to remember that when that started, when the idea of producing decoy airfields and dummy aircraft started in 1940, doubting the head of Vida Command was really opposed to it. He said I don't

want resources wasted into decoy airfields and dummy aircraft. I want real

airfields and real aircraft. That's where the that's where the resources should be going. So as far as I know there was no sort of detail planning before before the war, but as you say it starts very quickly. And I think I think it's one of the many signs in the whole deception story of how creative the

country became in the Second World War, how quickly things developed.

You know, today it takes a year to repair an escalator or a train station

you know whereas you look at some of these extraordinary projects in the Second World War

that started and ended within a few months of each other and the

deception planning and how some very very brilliant people were brought into

deception planning and came up with schemes that frankly you know when you read it reads more like a fiction than

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