Schwerpunkt: From D-Day to the Fall of the Third Reich Read Online Free PDF

feint to lure German troops and tanks away from the real site (Norway) where we would be landing even more of our troops ashore any day now. It was also critical to make the Krauts think that we had far more men than we really had and that these extra soldiers were being held back for the real invasion. This would force them to keep troops at the ready near the anticipated future landing sites and keep them away from where we did not want them to be, namely Normandy.
    We had to make Hitler think he needed to keep extra troops up north to fend off the real thing and to this end, we had a fake army “stationed” in Scotland who transmitted radio messages about shortly heading to Norway. We made full use of whatever Scandinavian spies we had to keep the Krauts frantically guessing about when the real invasion would land on the Norwegian coasts. For his part, Hitler helped us out by keeping over 200,000 soldiers in Norway and then did us another big hairy favor by sending over another division to reinforce those troops. Hope they liked Norway.
    While we kept the pressure on Norway with Operation Fortitude (North), we simultaneously concentrated on Calais with Operation Fortitude (South). We knew Hitler’s secret about where he kept numerous infantry and Panzer divisions but he didn’t know our secret that neither Norway nor Calais stood a snowball’s chance in hell of being invaded.
    And speaking of secrecy, we just got a request for permission to violate the Geneva Convention. The Geneva Convention, as everyone knows, is a bunch of rules that warring countries agree to be bound by so that each country knows the other one will take care of its prisoners in at least a sort of humane way. We gave permission for the United States to break these rules at least one time that I know of. There are “Hunter-killer” Task Groups in the Atlantic Ocean charged with hunting German U-boats and then killing them. One of the ships in one of the Task Groups was called the USS Guadalcanal. This ship was nick named the “Can Do” because of a memo their commander wrote to all men aboard his ship. He said that the ship’s motto will be “Can Do” meaning that they would take any tough job and do it. Boy, was he ever right!
    The Can Do, along with all the other ships in that particular Hunter-Killer Group was on patrol on June 5, 1944, the day chosen as DDay. It seems that a certain Captain Gallery’s Task Force hunted as ordered but when his men were just about to put on the finishing touches in order to sink the U Boat they just attacked, word came down that they were NOT to sink the enemy ship, they were to capture it. The Captain therefore uttered a command not heard on the high seas by an American Commander since the War of 1812. He ordered, “Away all Boarders!” His guys boarded the now captured U Boat and found, among a treasure trove of Jerry confidential material, two Enigma Machines complete with companion code books. After initial scares about whether the Krauts had booby trapped the boat as they were all ordered to do before being sunk or captured, the boarding party succeeded in keeping the U Boat intact and actually made it sea worthy enough to be towed across the Ocean.
    I later learned the whole story. They were heading for Dakar, the nearest friendly port but that place was full of Kraut spies and all we needed this close to our DDay landings was for some spy to tell Berlin that not one but two Enigma machines were now in enemy hands. The U505 was therefore ordered to be towed to Casablanca but then, fearing the spies there as well, the USS Guadalcanal was told to tow the submarine to Bermuda if it was sea worthy enough to make the trip. It was and so it was towed 2,500 miles across the open sea. I heard that whenever another ship was sighted, one of the Can Do’s destroyers would intercept it and tell it to change course so no one, not even the Friendlies, would know about this captured U Boat’s existence.