The Importance Of The Battle Of Operation Fortitude North

By June of 1944, Nazi Germany had conquered a vast part of Europe and made it into an impenetrable fortress. This fortress was soon to be invaded however when on June 6, 1944 Allied forces landed on the beaches of Normandy, France and started Nazi Germany on its road to defeat. While the bravery of the men fighting on the beaches during the Normandy invasion no doubt played a part in the success of the mission, military deception helped those men face far less resistance from the Germans. With Allied strength reaching 1.3 million by the end of the battle going against German strength of almost 400,000, the Battle of Normandy seems like it should have been an easy Allied victory. The opposite was almost true though and it is thanks to Allied
John Bevan, who was head of the London Controlling Section and in charge of the organization of Operation Bodyguard believed that the radio transmissions of Fortitude North would not be enough to convince the Germans of a planned invasion of Norway. It was this belief that led to the planning of Operation Graffham to help reinforce Fortitude North. Operation Graffham’s main goal was to convince the German High Command that Sweden was planning to join the Allies in the fight against the Axis powers. This was important to the Germans because Sweden had maintained a neutral stance in the war and was supplying the Axis and Allied powers with supplies and information. The Allies believed that if they were able to convince Sweden to join the Allies that it would help sell the idea that an invasion of Norway was imminent since Norway shares a border with Sweden. Even if the Allies were unable to convince Sweden to join the Allies, they felt that the information of a planned invasion of Norway would pass from Swedish officials to German officials. Although a part of Operation Bodyguard, Operation Graffham was mainly a British operation with little or no input from the
Although the agents were able to pass the information, the Twenty Committee, who was in charge of giving the information to their agents to pass onto the Germans felt that an invasion of the Bordeaux region would be implausible and feared that the Germans would think the same. As a result, the Twenty Committee failed to send a lot of information to their agents for the fear that they would become compromised. This would have proved a very big problem because one of the agents used in Operation Ironside, Agent Garbo, was also being used to transmit information regarding Operation Fortitude. If Garbo was compromised and Ironside was found out to be a fake, it could have meant a failure for Operation Fortitude, and therefore Operation Bodyguard. Because of these limitations on the information sent, the German High Command felt that an invasion of the Bordeaux region was a cover operation for a much larger operation aimed at invading the Pas de Calais region in France. Although the Germans believed an invasion of Bordeaux was unlikely, anti-invasion operations were still taking place in the area by German forces which delayed them reinforcing Normandy, but not as long as the Allies would have