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00:00Next on Secrets of War, they're the means by which to confuse an enemy, forcing him into making a fatal mistake.
00:10When manipulated with skill and cunning, tools of deception can be the most deadly weapons of all.
00:15From decoy tanks and phony radio broadcasts to the spy whose lies led Hitler to ruin.
00:23Tools of Deception is next on Secrets of War.
00:30Secrets of War
01:00Secrets of War
01:30For as long as man has taken up arms, deception has been a part of warfare.
01:53Deception is only the other side of the coin of strategy.
01:58Military deception is to hide your strengths, but at the same time also hide your weaknesses.
02:05It's to delude the enemy into attacking you where you're strong and to stop them attacking you where you're weak.
02:14Deception is vital because if you can keep the enemy guessing about your intentions, then clearly you have an advantage.
02:21The whole basis of military tactics and military strategy involves deception.
02:28It can be as simple as hiding behind a tree or as complex as creating a false army, but the means and goals of military deception are essentially the same.
02:40Basically what you're trying to do is totally mislead the enemy so that he makes preparations which are going to be a waste of his resources.
02:49The skillful employment of misdirection, stealth and subterfuge in wartime can mean the difference between victory and defeat.
02:57As warfare has become more complex, the role of deception has become more important.
03:04Perhaps the oldest and simplest form of tactical deception is camouflage.
03:09Practiced throughout history, it wasn't until World War I that improved optics and the advent of aerial reconnaissance forced the evolution of the practice into an art.
03:20In the First World War, when the fighting on the Western Front became pretty static, it was very difficult to do anything without being seen by the other side.
03:30And so camouflage came into its own.
03:34In the autumn of 1914, artist Guérin d'Escabola, a private in the French army, first proposed using painted canvas to conceal the guns of his unit.
03:45Until that time only natural materials, shrubbery and mud had been used for that purpose.
03:51The French general staff was so impressed with d'Escabola's work that he was promoted to lieutenant and put in command of the first camouflage unit in modern history.
04:01The British army followed suit, creating its own camouflage corps in 1915.
04:07Camouflage was first tried by the French and then was eventually adopted by the British and it became a task of the Royal Engineers.
04:14We formed specialist units whose task was to devise methods of camouflaging and to produce the materials that were required.
04:22And they were a most interesting group of people.
04:24Artists, sculptors and theatre scenery painters were recruited into the British camouflage service.
04:31Dubbed the Special Works Park, they were similar to their French counterparts.
04:35When the Americans entered the war in 1917, General John Pershing, the US commander in chief in France, demanded that a similar American unit be formed.
04:45Along with producing canvas and later netting screens to conceal armaments and installations, d'Escabola's camoufleurs were charged with making, among other things, observation posts disguised as animals or trees.
05:02As aerial reconnaissance increased, so did the demand for camouflage.
05:09By 1918, d'Escabola's unit employed more than 9,000 military and civilian men and women.
05:16By the Second World War, camouflage was an accepted facet of tactical planning.
05:21Every soldier received training in concealing himself and his equipment.
05:27Camouflage uniforms became standard issue, with infield tailoring done on occasion to accommodate changing conditions, though sometimes circumstances dictated a bit of improvisation.
05:39Heavy equipment, trucks, tanks and artillery were given special treatment.
05:49The aim of camouflage is to break up the lines of a piece of military equipment so that it either looks like something which it's not, more powerful, less powerful or innocent, or else it fades away completely.
06:02Equipment was painted according to terrain, climate and season, greens and browns for the European forests in the summer, white for the Russian winter, and tans and browns for the North African desert.
06:16Netting, woven with appropriately colored strips of burlap, was used to mask the shape and eliminate telltale shadows.
06:23These techniques were often supplemented with natural materials, such as branches or hay.
06:34The Germans skillfully employed the principles of camouflage to hide what was essentially impossible to hide, the massive guns of the Atlantic wall.
06:44The 2,400 mile long complex of concrete barbed wire and machine gun nests that were to defend fortress Europe from an allied invasion.
06:57Of course, none of these techniques, no matter how artfully applied, could hide a speeding tank.
07:03Camouflage was only truly effective when the tank was stationary.
07:07One of the great advantages of camouflage is that if you have a tank holed up somewhere that the enemy hasn't spotted, if that tank can get three or four rounds away before it's spotted, it's going to knock out possibly three or four tanks.
07:22And that is an advantage, but the tank has sacrificed its other great advantage of mobility for that.
07:27Once it's found out, it has got to get the hell out of it, otherwise it's going to get a hammering wherever it is.
07:32Not blessed with the mobility of a tank, pillboxes and bunkers had only a couple of feet of concrete and imaginative camouflage to protect them.
07:46Hidden when possible, attempts were made to make them appear less threatening when invisibility was not feasible.
07:54With a little paint and some imagination, even large gun emplacements could be made to look slightly less conspicuous.
08:02But World War II brought a new threat.
08:06If you look at camouflage historically, it reaches a real full flower in World War II.
08:11And one reason it does is there's a whole new element added, and that is, what does this thing look like from the air?
08:18Because now you're really under surveillance from the air.
08:22Reconnaissance planes are going to fly over, they're going to look at you, they're going to figure out where your bomb factory is or where your troops are.
08:28So you have to camouflage for viewing from the air.
08:36For the first time, large long-range aircraft made the camouflaging of sights far behind the front lines a necessity.
08:44Cities, factories and airfields previously out of the range of the fighting were suddenly glaringly at risk.
08:53As it became more of a threat, the airplane also became a more valuable asset.
08:58To lessen their vulnerability, aircraft were moved away from airfields and spread into residential areas where they were less likely to be attacked.
09:07And if attacked, could only be damaged one at a time.
09:11For further protection, more than 600 operational airfields in Great Britain were camouflaged with paint and artificial hedges.
09:19The emergence of the airplane also dictated that anti-aircraft guns be stationed throughout the country, and these guns in turn needed to be protected.
09:30In rural areas where the lack of heavy vegetation made traditional forms of camouflage impractical, anti-aircraft guns were hidden in some very creative ways.
09:40A fake farmhouse made of lightweight materials could be moved by a few men in a matter of seconds.
09:48The roof on this barn slid away to reveal its deadly charge.
09:53An anti-aircraft gun could also be hidden beneath an imaginatively designed tennis court.
10:00And an innocent-looking haystack was not quite so innocent.
10:03Despite the best efforts of the camoufleurs, the damage on both sides was extensive, with industrial cities being the hardest hit.
10:16Probably the best thing the Germans did in the form of camouflage was camouflaging a section of Hamburg, their most important port and also the headquarters of German intelligence.
10:28It was a very important city to the Germans.
10:31They camouflaged the central business district so that it looked like it was part of the terrain that was coming in from the outskirts of Hamburg.
10:41And this worked for a while.
10:44As the war escalated and the bombing became less discriminate, Hamburg was leveled, a victim of the type of carpet bombing meant to bring a country to its knees.
10:54At this point, the disguising of a city became less important than survival itself.
11:09While camouflage is meant to conceal, decoys are meant to attract attention and draw enemy fire.
11:16Practised in one form or another for centuries, decoys or dummies were reinvented in the First World War.
11:24Dummies were made for a variety of things, from dummy heads, made to draw the fire and reveal the position of snipers, to fake artillery pieces.
11:37Perhaps the most widely and effectively used decoys were fake tanks.
11:42The dummy tanks first appeared during the First World War, and they were simply lightweight canvas on wood replicas, which were used partly for training, but also to give the effect of large masses of tanks being where tanks really were not, to confuse enemy aerial reconnaissance.
12:00Between the wars, the whole subject is dropped, and as usual, it has to be reinvented in the Second World War.
12:04You'll never find anyone carrying over a good idea from one war to the next.
12:11Probably nowhere were these decoys used better in the Second World War than in the North African desert.
12:16Deception is the weapon of the weak, and in the Middle East, facing the Italians in Libya and Ethiopia, we were really very weak indeed.
12:33When Mussolini ordered the invasion of Egypt in June of 1940, there were a quarter of a million Italian troops in all of Africa, as opposed to only 36,000 British.
12:44For the assault on Sidi Barani, the odds weren't quite so daunting, but the British were still outnumbered by more than two to one.
12:53This is December 1940 in Egypt, the beginning of General Wevo's great offensive, which eventually drove the Italians out of North Africa.
13:02And his first battle was to be a big tank battle. To make it look good, he wanted some dummy tanks to make it look as if they're more than there actually were.
13:12Without a formal program for the production of decoys in the desert, the Royal Engineers were called upon for the task.
13:21In a single night, they produced 80 wood and canvas dummies, which were folded up, loaded on trucks and sent to the front.
13:28Placed at the back of the formation behind the real tanks, the decoys were never seen by the enemy from the ground, only from high aerial reconnaissance.
13:40Therefore, they didn't need to be detailed or extremely precise.
13:46There were roughly two parts to it. The body, which was a diagonal shaped thing, well, like an enlarged cake of soup, and then a smaller, squarer frame representing the turret, which rested on top.
13:59Three days after the first assault, the British had taken 39,000 Italian prisoners. What was intended to be only a five-day raid turned into a major offensive.
14:18It was the first of our victories in the war, actually. Our tanks were victorious over the Italians. In fact, this covered the whole Italian army.
14:28And it's fun to say that these dummies contributed to it, although in fact they didn't fire anything.
14:37As the use of decoys expanded, the decoy itself evolved.
14:42And by 1944, the wood and canvas dummies had been replaced in many theaters by lighter, less expensive inflatables.
14:50Produced by both Britain and the United States in a wide variety of designs, covering all of the major weapon systems,
14:58the inflatable decoys were quite convincing. From the air, they looked amazingly like their steel counterparts.
15:06Of similar size and shape, they cast convincing shadows, a primary means of identifying weapons and vehicles in aerial photographs.
15:13Even from the ground, they could be mistaken for the real thing.
15:21The new decoys were preferred in many circumstances because of their light weight and portability.
15:27An inflatable tank decoy could be deployed in minutes and would fit in a package about the size of a sleeping bag.
15:35But the deception went even further.
15:38In addition to the visual effects, sound is important.
15:42And sonic deception was something that both Britain and the United States specialized in at one time.
15:47And this was to have ordinary light armoured vehicles, scout cars, that sort of thing, rigged with enormous speakers
15:52that would go around replaying the sound of battle, the sound of tanks roaring around in areas again where they were not expected.
15:58And that really seems to work quite well at times, especially in the latter fighting in Germany, when the enemy is on edge,
16:06when you can throw him off balance by just making sounds, especially at night, which give the impression of a large force being near.
16:13That seemed to work very well.
16:14The level to which the military had developed such deceptions can be seen in this recently declassified 1943 training film.
16:23Here, used in conjunction with dummy landing craft and inflatable soldiers, sonic deception is used to fake a landing while the real landing is executed nearby.
16:35Operating from behind a smoke screen, sound boats play recordings of landing craft engines through loudspeakers.
16:42The boats make three passes, increasing the volume with each successive pass.
16:47The dummy soldiers are released into the surf. Their bobbing is meant to resemble soldiers waiting ashore.
16:54After the sound boats make their third pass, the dummy landing craft emerge from the smoke, drawing the enemy's attention and fire as the real landing begins some distance away.
17:05Dummy paratroops were also used to simulate assaults, called Ruperts by the British and Dahls by the Germans.
17:13They were about two feet tall, but from a distance against an empty sky, it was impossible to determine their scale.
17:20We dropped hundreds of dummy parachutists, which when they hit the ground burst into firecracker type noise, which made the Germans believe that perhaps we were landing an airborne army in that particular area, when in fact we were landing the airborne army in areas remote from the battle, but for other reasons.
17:41As production increased, the use of decoys changed from primarily tactical deception to strategic deception as well.
17:50The most famous example occurred during preparations for D-Day, when decoys were used to suggest a buildup of troops in Berkshire to convince the Germans that the invasion would come on the northern French coast rather than in Normandy.
18:02I remember, on or about June 10, 1944, I was then living in the Chiltern Hills in England, and I was out mushrooming, you know, at the crack of dawn, when quite suddenly in the next field, I noticed the whole field flowered into tanks.
18:18They just rose out of the grass, like this, until, you know, there were Churchill tanks there, there were Sherman tanks there, all sorts of tanks there.
18:25A couple of hundred, I suppose. And of course, these were the famous rubber tanks. This was Patton getting his army together to make the assault across the English Channel to the part of Calais.
18:37Larger scale decoys were deployed on both sides with varying degrees of success. By 1940, it had become apparent that camouflage was not enough to protect Britain's valuable air force.
18:50So dummy airfields were built to divert attention and bombs. Two types of fake airfields were fabricated.
18:59K-sites were built for daytime raids and observation. From the air, they looked like operational airfields with runways and dummy airplanes.
19:09Fake hangars, however, were deemed too costly for the deception.
19:12Q-sites were built to represent an airfield at night and consisted primarily of stationary and moving lights to simulate the nighttime activity of an airfield.
19:23When bombers were spotted, the real airfield went dark and the Q-site went into action.
19:28It was realized quite soon, though, that the sophistication necessary for this was getting very, very expensive.
19:34And at the same time, it had to be acknowledged, too, that the Germans' aerial reconnaissance had been pretty good in the interwar years.
19:43So, after a certain amount of time, airfield camouflaging or deception would scale down a little bit.
19:49The daytime decoys could boast little success in fooling the Luftwaffe.
19:54Captured maps revealed that the Germans had identified all but three of the sites as decoys.
20:00However, the nighttime sites were attacked more than 350 times during the early part of 1941.
20:08From June through October of 1940, a period of intense Luftwaffe activity,
20:14the Q-sites were attacked more than twice as often as the airfields they were protecting.
20:19Naval deception evolved along the same lines as its land-based counterpart in the first half of the 20th century.
20:28But the sea presents a number of unique problems when it comes to camouflage.
20:37Rapidly changing weather, light and sea conditions make it virtually impossible to effectively hide a ship.
20:45The pale blues or greys that blend in so well at dusk may only make a ship more conspicuous as the light changes.
20:52Dazzle painting was first tried in World War I.
20:59It was proposed that irregular patterns of contrasting colors could break up the familiar shapes of a vessel.
21:07Dazzle painting conceded the impossibility of hiding vessels as large as battleships in an unobstructed ocean,
21:14and instead sought to obscure the ship's course and speed.
21:23Engineers soon learned to distort the area near the stern and forebridge, since they're most vital to calculating a ship's course,
21:30and that a color should not stop at an important structural detail.
21:35Sloping lines, stripes and curves were found to be the most effective shapes in this sort of camouflage.
21:42If you look at some of the quite amazing schemes that were on the major capital ships, it looks quite bizarre.
21:53Dazzle paint, whites and blacks and greys, sometimes greens, sometimes pink and blue being used.
22:00The aim really being to break up the design of the ship, not to make it disappear, because capital ships are really too large to disappear,
22:10but really to break up the design so that when somebody is flying a torpedo bomber towards it,
22:16it can be off-putting for them trying to take a sight on a vulnerable place in the ship
22:20or trying to get their torpedo to run in the position they wanted it to.
22:23There was a bit of resistance to dazzle painting in the admiral team.
22:28Many commanders thought that it made vessels look untidy.
22:32Still, there was a belief among some sailors that the gaudy paintwork bestowed a measure of good luck on a ship.
22:40There was a great debate as to how effective these camouflage schemes were,
22:47and generally speaking, the proponents of the various schemes each thought that their own was the best.
22:52In the kindest sense, you could say it made people feel better and safer, and therefore it was a good thing.
23:00As war approached again in the late 30s, there was an attempt to transform naval camouflage from an art into a science.
23:11Considerable research was conducted on the nature of color and what color or combinations of colors might make a ship less visible in varying light.
23:20But the normally stayed Royal Navy was not above some surprising experimentation.
23:28At the beginning of the Second World War, the British Royal Navy painted all their fast gunboats, their MTBs and MGBs, a shade of pink.
23:37When this was first mooted to the British Admiralty, they thought this was a ridiculous idea,
23:41because obviously, if you see it, it should be gray.
23:46This unconventional color choice was the idea of Admiral Louis Mountbatten,
23:51then in command of Britain's fifth destroyer flotilla, and so forever carries his name.
23:57Under certain conditions of light, this Mountbatten pink worked.
24:01Under certain other conditions, however, the ships stood out as if they were fully illuminated.
24:05They were fully illuminated.
24:08Of course, paint and camouflage weren't the only means of nautical chicanery.
24:12False flags were flown to persuade the enemy that a ship was of a different nationality.
24:17This was a legitimate tactic under the rules of engagement,
24:21as long as ships hoisted their real flags at the outbreak of hostilities.
24:25Other ploys were not so legitimate.
24:32The use of hospital ships is an example.
24:37Under the rules, a hospital ship has to be marked in a certain way.
24:41They're generally painted white overall.
24:43They carry big red crosses on their side with a green stripe along the hull,
24:47and they steam fully illuminated at night.
24:50They're allowed to have no communications equipment on board other than that
24:53which is necessary for the safe navigation of the ship,
24:57and they are not allowed to carry belligerent troops.
25:00The sole people allowed on board the ship are the ship's company,
25:05the medical staff, and the patients.
25:08But all sides have used hospital ships for nefarious purposes.
25:11The unfortunate consequences of such tactics was that real hospital ships
25:16on legitimate missions of mercy were sometimes attacked.
25:19Nautical decoys of many types were employed for a wide range of purposes.
25:30In Africa, Jasper Maskelyne, a British stage magician charged mainly with field camouflage,
25:36was also working in the field of naval decoys.
25:39One of the problems that the British had was that they had no ships at that point,
25:44or very few ships.
25:45So what Maskelyne was able to do is he was able to build warships out of balsa wood, out of canvas.
25:53They were total dummy contraptions.
25:56But from the air, they looked real.
25:59And as long as everything was in perspective, as long as it cast the right shadows,
26:03it was very difficult to tell from the air exactly what was going on.
26:07Because one of the things that helped Maskelyne is the warships themselves were camouflaged.
26:10So what Maskelyne would do is make one of his dummy contraptions and do a very poor camouflage job on it,
26:17to make the German aerial reconnaissance people believe that they had uncovered something the British were trying to hide.
26:23But not all dummies were so benign.
26:29The British Q-ship and the German raiders were examples of armed decoys.
26:34Used primarily during the First World War, both were merchant ships with armaments, guns and occasionally torpedoes hidden behind shotters.
26:43Flags and distress signals to lure and sink commercial shipping.
26:48Though only used sporadically, they enjoyed considerable success.
26:55The Q-ship, however, which was designed to be used as a weapon against U-boats, did not have so auspicious a record.
27:02Q-ships carried two crews.
27:05The first, known as the Panic Crew, would abandon ship when a U-boat surfaced.
27:09When the submarine came closer, either to capture the ship or to sink her at close range with a deck gun, the second crew would drop the shutters and open fire.
27:19There were well over 100 Q-ships deployed during the First World War.
27:28Thirty-one of them were sunk in return for 11 U-boats.
27:32So it wasn't particularly successful in terms of numbers.
27:35When the Germans finally adopted unrestricted submarine warfare in January 1917, they began sinking ships on site without bothering to surface and establish the nature of the cargo.
27:50Then the Q-ship concept was finally dead.
27:55The Q-ship was revived in the Second World War with equally disappointing results.
27:59Of the six Q-ships commissioned, two were sunk and the remaining four were retired without a single reported victory.
28:11The essence of deception, military or otherwise, is disinformation.
28:16The deliberate manipulation of truths, half-truths and lies to gain tactical, strategic or psychological advantage over an opponent.
28:24This can be done in many ways, on a mass or individual scale.
28:30But the result of well-crafted and well-placed disinformation is the same.
28:35Confusion, misjudgment and mistakes.
28:39Disinformation in psychological warfare has many uses.
28:43You can either do it to break the morale of troops or enemy populations.
28:47You can do it to convince commanders that you're going to go off in a different tactical scenario.
28:54You can use it strategically, tactically.
28:57Basically, it has no limits.
28:58I don't think anyone's actually thought of how far you can go with disinformation.
29:03Perhaps the most basic technique for spreading disinformation during the Second World War was the use of leaflets.
29:09They could be packed in special artillery shells and fired over enemy lines.
29:15Or when deeper penetration into enemy territory was required, they were dropped from airplanes.
29:22Known as propaganda bombs, leaflets were used extensively by both sides
29:27and were effective in spreading disinformation to both the populace and to enemy troops.
29:32There was one newspaper, which I worked on, as a matter of fact.
29:39It was a newspaper called Nacherten für die Truppe.
29:42Newspaper for the troops.
29:44And it was represented as having been printed in Berlin for the German troops in the field in France.
29:51It was prepared on the presses of the Luton News each day.
29:55Went off to the American bomber squadrons and they were dropped with special bombs onto the Germans every morning.
30:00At 6am for breakfast, in time for breakfast.
30:04With the advent of wireless communications, radio could be used as easily as more traditional forms of propaganda,
30:11with the possibility of reaching a much wider audience.
30:15Both sides used radio to spread propaganda.
30:20Radio Deutschland was a British operation, staged so that it appeared to be the clandestine radio broadcasts of a German resistance group.
30:30Radio Deutschland broadcasts lies to the German troops.
30:35It would talk about troop movements that weren't true.
30:39It would talk about morale back home, which was bad anyway, but they'd make it worse.
30:44They were confusing the average German soldier.
30:46The Allies learned of the success of the deception as the tide of the war turned and German soldiers were captured in greater numbers.
30:55German prisoners would tell their captors to earn points, I was part of clandestine radio Deutschland.
31:06I mean, the Germans thought it was that there really was a German resistance group.
31:10And the interrogators of the POWs thought there was.
31:15And that's another element that has to do with deception.
31:19Sometimes your own people don't know there's a deception plan going on.
31:23In fact, it makes the deception plan that much better if people act as if it's real.
31:29Radio had also become the primary means of military communication in the Second World War.
31:34Every message, no matter how insignificant or mundane, could reveal an important piece of information in the hands of an astute intelligence officer.
31:47In reality, good intelligence can be gleaned from listening into enemy radio traffic.
31:53So, therefore, it was very sensible that as a consequence of the reality of this intelligence, that deception could also be of some use.
32:02If you were listening for a particular type of radio traffic, of tank movements, of troop movements,
32:10well, why don't you start faking those same sort of traffic?
32:15Throughout the war, few deceptive operations were implemented in which radio signals did not play some part.
32:21They even played a small part in one of the best known and most creative examples of disinformation in the Second World War.
32:30Mincemeat was an operation to deceive the German high command about the forthcoming invasion of Sicily in the summer of 1943.
32:40The first piece of the deception puzzle was a body acquired from a London pathologist.
32:45The body of a man who has subsequently been identified as someone who simply died in a hospital in England.
32:55He was given a name, Major William Martin.
33:00Identification papers were placed on the body along with the minutia of everyday life.
33:06Theatre tickets, a picture of a girlfriend, and a letter from a banker informing Major Martin that his account was overdrawn.
33:13He was carrying a briefcase of the type used for carrying confidential documents, which was chained to his wrist, as was the custom for high level couriers at the time.
33:23In the briefcase were a number of documents, including a letter addressed to the British General Harold Alexander, which stated that the allies would invade Greece and Sardinia, and that the invasion of Sicily was just a cover operation.
33:38Radio reports were made stating that a Royal Air Force plane with a number of passengers had gone down in the Mediterranean.
33:49The body is placed aboard a Royal Navy submarine.
33:53The submarine is taken off the coast of Spain, surfaces, and puts the body overboard.
33:59Spain, though neutral, had close ties with Germany, and the British assumed that the discovery of the body of a British officer would be brought to the attention of the Nazis.
34:12On the morning of April 30th, 1943, the body washed up on shore at Huelva, where it was found by fishermen.
34:20Spanish authorities opened the case and photographed the contents.
34:23The British naval attaché in Madrid was not in on the plan, and when the Spanish authorities at Huelva reported the presence of this body to him, he then made a routing signal to London to say that the body of Major Martin had been washed up.
34:38And virtually by return wire came this panic-stricken signal from London.
34:43Where's the briefcase? Who's got the briefcase? Get it. The briefcase contains vital documents.
34:47The body was then turned over to British authorities and given a Christian burial, but the disinformation had a much longer life.
34:58The photocopies were given to German intelligence in Spain.
35:02Who sent them on to the German high command in Berlin?
35:07On the 12th of May, orders were issued to withdraw German troops from Sicily and to reinforce Greece and the Balkans.
35:14By the time Allied forces landed on the 10th of July, only two German divisions remained to help the Italians defend Sicily.
35:24While it's not believed that mincemeat alone was responsible for the change in the displacement of German forces in the Mediterranean,
35:33most historians agree that it was a contributing factor.
35:37Still, not everyone is convinced of the operation's success.
35:41This is a story of mincemeat, and whoever was involved, and the authors who wrote about it, made a big success story out of it.
35:55So this had only been a deceiving maneuver, and the Germans would expect the Allies in the Baltic States, and didn't know that the attack would start in Sicily.
36:09In the lower ranks of the defense, one believed this, but the decisions that were made took place at a much higher level,
36:20and the mincemeat case never played a role in it at all.
36:25The second world war saw each of the major powers either building or expanding organizations to gather and analyze intelligence.
36:43Good intelligence is vital for any plan of deception.
36:50First of all, put it this way, simplest terms, it's good to know what it is the enemy fears.
36:59But the gathering of intelligence doesn't end when the deception begins.
37:04Secondly, of course, unless you've got good intelligence, you won't find out whether the plan's working.
37:11You want to make sure from his reactions what he thinks of your deception.
37:17If he doesn't appear to move at all, well, you may as well start again and try something quite different.
37:24There were countless ways of gathering intelligence during the war.
37:30Aerial photography, intercepted communications, captured documents, prisoners of war, and of course, espionage.
37:39It was the Germans' reliance on espionage and the British talent for the interception and decoding of radio communications
37:46that led to what is perhaps the best example of good intelligence contributing to successful deception in World War II.
37:56The double-cross plan was the British program of feeding disinformation to German intelligence through turned and double agents.
38:06By early 1942, the British were intercepting and decoding more than 39,000 secret German radio transmissions a month.
38:16Among the information gathered were the identities and situation of nearly every German agent being sent into England.
38:24So they were sitting there on the ground waiting for the guy to land.
38:28And they gave the agent a very simple choice.
38:34You get hanged as a spy or you work for us.
38:38The next step in the creation of a double agent was to build his credibility in the eyes of his German controllers.
38:46They would feed them what's called chicken feed in the trade, in other words, information which has some value, but at very limited value.
38:55So it could be checked out and found to be absolutely correct.
38:58Then the next piece of information would be a complete disinformation package, which they would believe because the initial chicken feed had been correct.
39:05It was this careful balance between real information and false that kept the double-cross system secret and functioning throughout the war.
39:16In addition to German agents who'd been turned, a number of independent agents also passed disinformation to the Germans on behalf of the British.
39:25It was one of these double agents who perpetrated what was one of the most significant deceptions of the war.
39:34His real name was Pujol and his code name was Garbo.
39:38And he had been feeding the Germans some good information, with the help of the British of course, and some false information.
39:47But the Germans came to believe completely in this man Garbo.
39:51In particular because just on the morning of the invasion, but too late to have any action taken on it, he stated that the attack was coming now.
40:01Garbo continued to transmit in the crucial days following the landing.
40:08What he did was wait until Hitler had given the order to commit the Panzer reserves and they were moving towards Normandy.
40:17At that moment Garbo sent perhaps one of the most significant messages of the war, in which he communicated that he had confirmed Normandy was a deception.
40:29That the real invasion would occur very soon at Pas de Calais under Patten.
40:36And to do not commit all of the units to Normandy.
40:42The receipt of Garbo's message gave him pause. He didn't know quite what to do.
40:48And then he cancelled his order and kept the army up in the Pas de Calais, useless, pinned down.
40:53And thus he divided his forces into two halves, which was a fatal mistake from his point of view, because he lost the war at that moment.
41:00Since the Second World War, the tools of military deception have continued to evolve as technology dictates they must.
41:13Camouflage, which in World War II needed only to fool the human eye or the camera, must now fool radar, as well as infrared and thermal imaging systems.
41:23In terms of modern warfare, camouflage can also mean measures like emission control, the careful use of radio and radar, so as not to give the position of your ship away to another ship with electronic monitoring equipment.
41:40Advances in reconnaissance have made the use of decoys extremely difficult and nearly obsolete.
41:47Though sometimes the old tricks still work, as the British learned in Operation Desert Storm.
41:53One of the infamous retorts that came back from one of the anti-tank helicopter squadrons in the British Army, which had managed to knock out 14 targets that they thought were BMP personnel carriers and T-72 main battle tanks.
42:12One of the gunners said, this is just like using a training aid, and suddenly it twigged on the, suddenly it became apparent to the commander that in fact this was a training aid.
42:23And they only used 14 missiles on these decoys. This goes to show that even in modern days you can decoy one of the best armies in the world.
42:31Aerial surveillance went higher and faster and gave way to satellite reconnaissance.
42:45Disinformation, the primary tool of a small cadre of World War II deception masters, has been honed to a razor's edge by decades of Cold War.
42:55It is disseminated by the mass media to a world watching eagerly on television.
43:03To give you an example, during the Gulf War, a major command center in Baghdad had an air raid shelter built on top of it.
43:10Allied intelligence had identified the command center and it was one of the targets that was bombed.
43:16In that bombing, dozens of people were killed in the air raid shelter.
43:19The Iraqis immediately put out newsreel of the casualties at the scene and the international media picked up the disinformation because the allies were unable to prove until after the war that this had been a major communication center.
43:37Intelligence organizations which were born or matured in the Second World War have grown and prospered.
43:43They gather and analyze massive amounts of intelligence on their enemies as well as on their allies and guard their own secrets all the more rigorously.
43:56Data on social, economic, political and industrial factors is amassed and scrutinized in addition to military information.
44:04Because what was confirmed on the beaches, on the battlefields and in the planning rooms of World War II was that war is not just about weapons and men.
44:16Winning can be as much a matter of surprise as preparation.
44:20And ultimately nothing is more important than the secrets you keep and the lies you tell.
44:34For the next event, the
44:48You're using the same effort as a matter of now.
44:52You're gonna have to wait.
44:54You're going to have to wait.
44:57You're going to be.
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