Johann had walked home that day with an empty net. Over the weeks he had returned frequently, checking to see if the Germans had abandoned his fishing grounds, and looking for unprotected Opel-Blitzes or Kübelwagens or Borgwards. On the morning he would later learn was S-Day, the saw-horse barricades across his road were untended. The guardhouse was vacant.
He passed by the barricades carefully, looking over his shoulder, wondering why the Germans would suddenly abandon what they had so painstakingly guarded for weeks. He nervously walked along the dirt road, feeling the onus of his one-boy underground war.
He had fished many times from a rickety pier on the river. As he approached it, he saw that buoys now surrounded the structure, set in a pattern that ran perpendicular to the pier. At each float was a strange shallow-bottomed craft.
Johann walked down the gravel approach to the river, then stepped onto the pier. He could recognize the fishing boats that used these waters, and the Kriegsmarine’s patrol launches and mine-sweepers and S-boats. These vessels were nothing he could identify. They were square and flat. He realized they were unfinished, not much more than floating boxes.
The vessels were tied to each other, bow to stern, and anchored to the buoys. Johann lowered his small tackle box to the pier, then braced himself on a pylon, leaned toward the water, and pulled a line. The boat drifted nearer. He was perplexed. It was nothing but a box, with a beam of about five meters and a length of fifteen meters, and crudely constructed. What he had thought at a distance to be the boat’s equipment—bitts and capstans and cleats and lines—was painted on the flat surfaces of the vessels. An AA gun had been drawn in black paint on the nearest craft.
Johann knew instantly what this counterfeit navy portended for the British. With his pole in one hand and his tackle box in the other, he sprinted from the pier and turned toward town. Anderson the barber would know what to do with this news.
Captain Siegfried Neuss prided himself on his position as leader of the only signal company with the XXX Corps, stationed at Bremerhaven, at the mouth of the Weser River in north Germany. He told me he may have been the lowest-ranking Wehrmacht officer to know of the magnificent illusion.
Neuss’ invasion duty ended the day before S-Day, when radio silence had been imposed. By his figuring, he had slept less than four hours a day over the past week. The 120 signalmen in his scattered unit—some in the hut, others in Wilhelmshaven and other posts in Lower Saxony, and still others in Groningen in Holland—had worked just as hard. They had joked about their hoarse voices and cramped sending hands, their bleary eyes and jaws strained from yawning.
On that day, utterly exhausted, he watched the second hand on the wall clock, and when it reached twelve, he called out, “That’s all, men. Congratulations.”
His soldiers applauded and hooted, then rose from their chairs, rubbing their shoulders and working out the kinks in their legs and backs from sitting so long. They left their stations, the banks of radio equipment lining the communications hut’s walls. Neuss rose from his desk at the back of a hut to shake their hands one by one as they filed by. They headed to their bunks in the nearby barracks.
The signalmen in his unit had transmitted, again by Neuss’ figuring, over 210,000 messages in the past week. Every one of them bogus. Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine and Wehrmacht messages. All fraudulent.
Not just random broadcasts. The messages had been drafted one by one to form an intricate pattern showing that an entire Wehrmacht army had formed and was readying for transport by the navy, a growing wave of broadcasts, a crescendo of military communication.
There were times these past few weeks when Captain Neuss almost started to believe his own messages. With this much planning, with this many signals, there had to be Germans units acting on them. There were none, of course. His messages, all 210,000 of them, were ignored by the invasion forces. But not by the British.
Neuss walked to his quarters. He laughed aloud around a yawn. No, certainly not by the British and their partners, the Amies, poor fools.
Luftwaffe Lieutenant Friedreich Rollman was also exhausted. His duties were ending the morning of the invasion, and he had flown all the previous night. He tipped his plane at the runway, jockeying the stick. One more landing, and he could sleep in a cot, a real cot. He blinked away sleep. His eyelids seemed to have weights on them. The runway dipped and rolled in front of him. The plane closed on it.
His plane, a Messerschmitt Bf 109B, was a veteran of the Condor Legion in Spain. It was outdated, with a top speed of less than three hundred miles an hour, but adequate for its duties from the airbase at Aalborg in northern Denmark. Two MG 17 machine guns had been removed, leaving only the gun in the propeller boss. Two supplementary fuel tanks had been added.
Rollman’s assignment had been to stay in the air as long as humanly possible, or for as long as his plane would hold out. He had spent weeks dodging in and out of British radar and being spotted by Royal Navy patrol boats. Sightings of his plane filled the British Observer Corps’ logbooks at their CH stations at Crone Hill, Danby, and West Beckham, and the CHL stations at Easington and Shotten and Cresswell, all in the English eastern counties.
His crew had performed maintenance on the Messerschmitt while the lieutenant slept in the cockpit. He had been rationed caffeine pills. He had flown himself groggy. And, finally, as he approached the runway early S-Day morning, he knew his mission was over.
He touched down on all points, then bounced along the runway as the Messerschmitt slowed. He turned it to the hangar. His crew was jubilantly waving handkerchiefs at him. He flipped off the fuel lines, then pulled to a stop in front of them. He threw the engine switch and unhooked the cockpit latches. He climbed out. The leg bag caught on a clasp, rupturing, spilling urine down the inside of his flight suit. Nothing new there.
The shouting mechanics pulled him off the wing and carried him on their shoulders toward the barracks, patting his back and yelling congratulations. The lieutenant was asleep before they lowered him to his cot. His was the sound sleep of victory, despite the urine. For a week, Rollman had successfully imitated an entire flight of Luftwaffe airplanes.
After the war I spoke with Inspector Charles Bradley of Scotland Yard’s counterespionage department. MI5 insisted on a representative at the questioning of selected prisoners of war, and Oberleutnant zur See (Senior Lieutenant) Gerd Haas was deemed eminently worth the inspector’s time. Haas was the commander of the Kriegsmarine midget submarine caught by the Royal Navy off Benacre Broad. Bradley spoke German.
The interrogation of Haas was conducted in an empty munitions warehouse in Lowestoft, on the North Sea shore in Suffolk. Lieutenant Haas had endured hours of questioning, during which he gave his name and rank and nothing else. His confidence increased when he began to understand the British limited their tools of interrogation to psychological ploys rather than truncheons. Inspector Bradley recalled with some irritation that toward the end of the questioning, Haas appeared rather relaxed.
At the end of the last session with Haas, Bradley said to the German, “Do you know that your countrymen have landed in Kent and Sussex and Dorset?”