List of British deception formations in World War II
During the Second World War, the British Army made extensive use of fictional formations as part of various military deception efforts to inflate their order of battle.
The use of such formations was pioneered by Lieutenant-Colonel Dudley Clarke, based within the Mediterranean and Middle East theatre, and later joined by colleagues located in the UK.
This notional formation was aimed to take advantage of Axis fears of British paratrooper forces being based in Egypt, from where they could potentially land behind the front line.
In 1942, these efforts grew into Operation Cascade, which again sought to hide the weakness of British forces and deter potential Axis aggression.
Allied staff based in the UK worked on Operation Fortitude, which aimed to create new fake formations and an entire notional order of battle.
It aimed to elaborate on the work undertaken by Operation Cascade and use the notional formations to feign the threat of attacks throughout the Mediterranean area.
This included fake insignia and documents, inflatable tanks, wireless communications, and the deliberate leaking of information, especially via double agents.
Lieutenant-Colonel Dudley Clarke, who had previously been engaged in various intelligence work and had helped form the Commandos, was assigned to Middle East Command on 19 December 1940.
[2] After assisting with Operation Camilla, the deception plan for the reoccupation of British Somaliland, Clarke undertook his first effort to create an entirely fictitious formation.
[3] This was followed by a scaled-up version, in efforts to fool Italian intelligence into believing that a notional 10th Armoured Division was arriving piecemeal in Egypt, where British forces were based.
A deception plan was formed to suggest the real target was Scarpanto and that the 1st Special Air Service Brigade would raid Rhodes to distract Axis forces.
The Cyprus Defense Plan aimed to deter any attack and to buy time to allow actual reinforcements to arrive to bolster the 4,000-man garrison.
[11] The efforts conducted by Cascade and Wantage allowed for Operation Foynes, which aimed to conceal the withdrawal of Allied formations from Italy.
[12] The northern Europe counterpart to Zeppelin was initially codenamed Operation Torrent and then referred to as Appendix Y, based on the section name of the planning documents.
These double agents were used to feed German military intelligence information about real and fake formations, their insignia, movements, and provided entire fictitious orders of battle.
[17] The notional arrival of Canadian troops in Egypt, as part of the deception effort to increase the British-led presence in the area, provides a case example.
In Palestine, British intelligence created an influx of Canadian dollars at various money exchanges, and also requested that Vichy French (pro-Axis) forces in the Middle East remain on the look-out and return (notional) French-Canadian deserters.
[28] However, efforts to operate Bodyguard-like deception were thwarted by the lack of a defined Allied strategy as the British, Americans, and Chinese all held different agendas and goals.
Despite the belief in the deception efforts that had created the inflated order of battle, the attempt to use these formations to influence Japanese planning and actions had little impact.
