Why Did The Collapse Of D-Day

A sea wall most thought unbreakable, an undefeatable army, the Third Reich. The Nazis were unbeatable during the first years of WWII, but the Nazis fell thanks to the largest amphibious invasion of a country, D-Day. The Allies sent one million troops into France and another 50,000 into Africa and Southern Italy. Their trickery, double agents, and deception were the only reason the Nazis fell. The Allies’ use of deception allowed them to win the beaches and critical military positions on D-Day. D-Day - June 6, 1944 - was a well-planned operation to gain control over a small strip of beaches in Normandy. Its main goal was to get a foothold in France which had been occupied by the Nazis. The Allies used deception to misdirect German troops.
To cloak the details of the true invasion site, the Allies employed a complex web of deception to convince the Nazis that an attack could come at any point along their Atlantic Wall—the 1,500-mile system of coastal defenses that the Germans had constructed from the Arctic Circle to Spain’s northern border.(History.com, “Planning for Operation Overlord”) For instance, a pair of double agents nicknamed Mutt and Jeff relayed detailed reports about the fictitious British Fourth Army that was amassing in Scotland with plans to join with the Soviet Union in an invasion of Norway. Vital to Operation Bodyguard’s success was more than a dozen German spies in Britain who had been discovered, arrested and turned double agents by British intelligence officers. ( “How D-Day was Planned,” Popular Mechanics) To further the illusion, the Allies fabricated radio chatter about cold-weather issues such as ski bindings, and the operation of tank engines in subzero temperatures. The Allies spoon-fed endless quantities of faulty information to these Nazi double agents to pass along to Berlin. The deception used by the Allies was so well planned out that they could deceive the Germans easily. The ruse worked, and Hitler sent one of his fighting divisions to Scandinavia just weeks before D-Day. Also, they knew their deception had worked because they had cracked the German code, and could see German
But also they kept using a web of lies to keep pushing through France. Three days after D-Day, Spanish businessman Juan Pujol Garcia, who was one of Britain’s most valuable double agents, fed information to Berlin that the Normandy landing was merely a “red herring” and that the most critical attack was yet to come with the First Army poised to strike at Pas de Calais. “So trusted was Garcia that Hitler delayed releasing reinforcements from Pas de Calais to Normandy for seven weeks after D-Day as the Allies gained the toehold they needed to achieve victory in Europe, a result that may not have been possible without the audacious scheme to fool the Nazis” (History.com, “The Elaborate Ruse to fool Hitler”). As well as using mis-information, the Allies also used more engineering tricks. For example, they had their aircraft fly over Pas de Calais and drop aluminum strips. This gave the Nazis false radar readings that made it appear as if a large fleet was on its way. Instead, forces from British Special Operations landed and used phonographs (a recording device) to play the sounds of soldiers’ voices and to simulate combat fire. In spite of the success of the initial landing, Operation Bodyguard did not end on June 6, 1944. The use of double agents allowed the Allies to keep feeding false information to the Germans, and it also allowed them to keep putting more and more