Historically High - Operation Fortitude: WW2's Greatest Spy Operation

Episode Date: June 1, 2022

Leading up to D-Day, the Allies had one huge problem. How do you launch the largest seaborne invasion in history without the Nazis knowing about it? Well it wasn't easy, and it took an army, well kind of an army. It also took one spy who was so good, he was awarded honors by both Britain and Germany during the war. Spark up and Strap in as we tackle Operation Fortitude and Allied deception during World War 2. Support the show Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

of the time. Do you, you don't have like a Raiders polo you wear to work? I do. God damn it. Yeah. That's a place of business. I know it is, but there are casual Fridays and it's a polo so I can wear it. Okay.

I can wear five days a week actually if I wanted. A polo though. A polo with a Raiders logo on it. It's tiny. It doesn't, it still ceases to be classy at this point. It doesn't know. It doesn't look like a chogo shirt or anything like that. I'm just saying it's a, it's a very fine line.

Like, I don't wear Packers things to work. Well, because, okay, if I'm being completely honest with you, that's because the Packers' colors are not that professional. Oh, my God. No, you're not going to wear a bright fucking cheese, orange, or yellow. Silver's professional? Gray? Gray and black? Silver's professional.

I don't think so. Gray, gray, black, and white. Those are professional colors. It's not together. Those are business colors. What do you? You wear a fucking shield. You wear black slacks and a white shirt.

That's two of the colors. And that's like... And neither one of them. them have a shield or a pirate on it it's tiny it's a pirate it doesn't matter the classiness of the rest of the outfit over overrides the shield i just you know what i'll even give you the shield it's just the fact that you have a pirate like a you have jack sparrow on your shirt that's he's a raider he's not a pirate what was a raider a raider was someone who engaged in raiding places How did they travel?

They could travel over land. Did they ever travel by boat? They had the option of traveling by boat. Adam, you travel by boat, by air and everything. I'm not going to pigeonhole you and make you just one thing. Yeah, but I also don't have an eyepatch. I mean, an eyepatch is kind of a... That's a move that...

Yeah, see? Now we're finding some stuff. I think the iPatch is classy as well. Do you think a Raiders logo, Sands iPatch with two eyes, would look weird, do you? I don't like that. You don't. No, then it's just some creepy guy with the leather helmet.

Just staring right at you. At least with the eye patch, you're like, okay, he's a pirate. Oh, so he's a pirate. Okay, so both of us just getting back from vacation, what was your points on the flight? Dude, down there was okay, but down there is like where the bulk of everything weird, like, happened. and then everything coming back was dog shit.

It's like we were just talking about. Regardless if the flight back goes off without a hitch or your trip back goes off without a hitch, it still almost feels like it's just shitty just because you're coming home. Half the time you probably feel shitty because you fucking have done so much fucking damage your body over the course of the vacation,

but you just realize you're having to go back to normal sea and go back to reality. And so I think there's just... When shitty stuff happens, in addition to that, though, then it just fucking sucks. Well, and it's just little things. Like, why did this have to happen today? Because at one point, we sat out on the runway for like 25, 30 minutes.

The guy's like, yeah, so, or the pilot. Yeah, so on some days, we have one runway for incoming and one runway for outcoming. But for some reason on this Thursday, we're only running one runway for incoming and outcoming at the same time. So now we have to wait an extra at 25. 30 minutes. It's like, well, that's weird. Why, of all days? Why would today be the day?

Can you please provide... Is there something wrong with the other runway? Yeah, what? Which one did we land on when we first got there? Because if we're closing down runways, it's probably a little concerning. Yeah. I thoroughly enjoyed the flight down.

The people that were on the plane. And quite possibly one of the funniest things that I've seen seen on a plane. so we give the Germans a lot of shit obviously because all the stuff that we've read about and we'll get into that today but we're sitting next to this German couple in the aisle and on the way down we had the same like flight crew

and so the Stewart that was sitting we were exit row there was a toilet right over to the left and then say Stewart are you referring to the male version of it? Or are you just bring all of them? Okay. No, aren't they stewards? Yes. If you're a stewardess, you're a steward, right?

Correct, but you know how they just call everyone actors now? Oh, yeah. I just wondered if they just call them all stewards now. I just feel like flight attendant for a woman makes more sense than Stewart for a man's funnier. Wait, is it... It is flight attendant now, isn't it?

Yeah, but men don't need that yet. You can be stewards. Stuart doesn't sound weird. Okay, I got you. So we first get on the plane when we're headed down there. And it's an exit row. So there's like a bunch of room and shit. And you got free booze. You had to upgrade to sit on them.

But you got free booze, the whole flight. You got all the extra leg room. So being a tall guy, he was like, this is perfect. We're like taxing out onto the runway to take off. And the guy leans over and he goes, hey, do you mind kicking your backpacks underneath the seat in front of you? It's like, there's no room. or there's no like need to do this. There's plenty of room.

Nothing's going to move. Everything's okay. Is the stewards saying this? Yeah. Because he was sitting like there's the jump seat where they sit right next to the toilet. Oh, I thought this is the German guy saying it's okay. No, the German people come on the way back. So he's just kind of a dick the whole flight.

Like he's making weird comments and all that stuff. And this comes into one of the other high things that I figured out that I want to talk about too. But so he's just a dick the whole way down. we're on the same flight back realized that it was the same front lady the front flight attendant we get back to our seats and it was the same goddamn Stewart that was working the same

section we sat in the same two seats that we did on the way down. Your flights were like five days apart weren't they? Yeah so they were running I've never had that happen. Really? I mean I haven't I don't think I've flown enough to like consider it like a lot but no I've never had that happen where on the same trip I had the same because you would remember

because you would keep that in your head at least long enough to be like, oh, this person looks familiar, I must have seen him before. Well, and he was a bald gentleman with not a great disposition. Oh, okay. Distinguishable, more memorable. Yeah, and as we were walking back onto the plane, I said, I wonder if it's the same plane.

And the girlfriend says, I wonder if we're going to have the same flight crew. We get in there, see the lady, it's like, yeah, that might be her. And then we hear him, and it's like, that's him. He's back. So we're on our way back, and we know the drill at this point. He was an asshole about everything. So we're sliding things under the chairs in front, doing all that stuff. And then this rather large German couple, they were probably, I don't know, he might have been five, six maybe, very portly gentleman, wife built the same way real strong.

Sturdy. Sturdy, yeah. So they sit in the two seats on the other side, which is right next to where the Stewart's jump seat is to go. And we're getting ready to go out and taxi, which this is before we get the delay and everything. And the guy, the Stewart's still moving around, and he looks at the guy, he goes, sir, let me get you a seatbelt extender. Like, no provocation. The guy didn't ask for it or

anything like that. When I say German, like thick accents. They speak English. They've probably been here. They've probably lived here for a while, but still very into their culture. And the guy goes, I don't need seatbelt. I fit seatbelt on. Everything is good. I need new chair.

And obviously, he's talking about an airline chair being so tight. And the Stewart walks over and like leans down and he goes, do you want a new chair? I'll go talk to somebody else. These seats are very popular and very coveted. I'm sure that there's somebody out there that would switch chairs with you in a second.

Do you want me to go see if anybody else on the plane wants to sit in the exit row? And the guy just kind of looks at it like, okay. He goes, no, I'm fine. So all this happens, like five, ten minutes later, he gets in his little jump seat for the takeoff. and there's this little leather pouch that's sitting down right next to the steward that somebody, one of the Germans, had put over there next to him.

And he goes, yeah, ma'am, you're actually going to have to move your purse. You're going to have to hold your purse. You can't just leave it there for takeoff because it could slide under and go everywhere. And the German guy goes, why do you say that's my wife? That's mine.

You just see the look on the dude's face like, oh shit, that looked like a purse. He's like, I'm already on this guy's. I've already smarted off to this guy and now I've just gone ahead and accused his him, well... Basically of him carrying a purse. Well, no, he didn't.

He assumed that it couldn't have been his. Yeah, okay, yeah. It's also not a purse. The travel bag. His wife reaches down and grabs it and the big German dude slings it over his shoulder like it was his and like you wore it.

So we go through the whole flight and it's like we're right up to the second where we have to get off the plane to go grab our luggage to switch over to go to the next flight because when you come through customs you have to recheck your bag yes so we go through that and drop ours off and i'm seeing them as they're walking through the customs line and the dude wait hold on i think i'm also confused here is this your okay your flight crew oh you're talking about the way back yeah okay okay i gotcha okay yeah so we went to customs like is this the flight from mexico to phoenix yeah

Okay. So we're like, there's an American customs line and then like an international customs line. And we're standing there and I look over and I see them in the international customs line. An old dude takes the satchel off and hands it to his wife and she puts it on. So it was actually her purse, but he wanted to make the guy feel like an asshole for ripping him at the chair. That brings me to one point. before we go over yours, have you noticed that there's more people in public

that always try to be like, hey, be patient with this, we're doing our very best. Are you talking about, like, signs or people just, like, bring it up? Like, if you have, like, if you're in a restaurant or something like that, and there's only so many servers,

like, hey, we only have so many servers on right now. If you could just be patient, it'll take a minute. Oh, yeah, I think that's definitely, ever since, like, COVID stuff like, that's been, that's literally like the third or fourth, thing they say to you. Do you think there's a professional line

where you just shouldn't be able to say, hey, be patient with us, we're doing the best we can? Like, do I think there's a business or service that, like, that statement would not be appropriate to? Yeah. Well, you can't say that. Okay, so any customer service-related

field, you would have to be able to say that because that seems reasonable. I'm trying to think... Like a hospital, I guess? The thing is, is you do, like, you hear a version of that. I can think of any type of, like, emergency type service, fire department. Hey, be patient with us. You know, we're understaffed right now.

Or the cops, like, there's a shooting. Okay, we're going to try to get someone out there. But, hey, as you can see, not a lot of us around. So if you could just be patient with us. Yeah, which I totally understand. But when it's the two pilots of the plane and they say, we're trying to get you to our destination, our flight attendants are working very hard to serve you right now,

which the flight attendants I get, but I saw the dude's attitude and some of the flight attendants that we had, they had a very, very not great demeanor. But the pilots say, try and go easy on us, we're doing the best we can. You're two gentlemen that are locked in a room at the front of the plane, and your only job is to fly this plane and make sure that people don't die. Why are you not doing the best you can all the time?

Like, we're not beating on the door. Like, hey, you took that turn a little too hard or there's turbulence. I think what they're saying is, like, we, as in, like, the airline we. Like, everyone that's working to get this flight off the ground, because we got the same thing. So our delay was actually going to Vegas. I'm glad we both had delays. Yeah. Yours was better, but.

But, yeah, well, because I took the edible before we went through security and everything. So I was more mellow. I was like, oh, man, we're going to be delayed for a bit. I was like, oh, man. I still know I was on vacation. but so ours was about yeah like a latch or something like that and so the other thing they said is he's like well he's like he made a point to say they're working on a latch keep in mind we can fly without it but they're working to see if they can fix it so in my head all I'm thinking is like

okay they're working to fix it we can fly without it I was willing to sit there five to ten minutes for them to fix it of course of course without knowing what this latch did have no clue. It was on the outside of the plane. And then after about 15 minutes hit, I was like, fuck the latch. If we can fly without it, get rid of the fucking latch and get this thing off the ground. It took that, it literally took that long for me to be like, all right, fix the latch, fix the latch, fuck the latch. Take off. If you can get us from here to where we're going without this, just go. That's, I don't know, maybe I'm just a little bit more worried about that stuff, but I feel like if they're going to stop to fix something,

it may not be key to the structural integrity of the flight. But if we crash and on the news, like, yeah, they forgot to replace this latch, and then it wasn't airtight. Or any turbulence you filled there. That's the latch. Yeah, every single time. This wouldn't be happening if that latch was in place.

I'm cool waiting five, ten minutes for that. But, so did you guys have any regulars on your plane? Like, were there people that would get on the flight? I'm so fucking glad you just said that because I would have, okay, I would have forgotten to tell you this. So I really wanted to text you on the flight back because, so we're sitting in a, one of the flights down, we had a two-seater on each side. And then the flight from Vegas back to Salt Lake, we were in a three-seat row. So Katie's, by the way, no, I'm in the middle. The guy next to me, I swear to God, just came off a Coke vendor, a Vegas Coke vendor.

so like he's wearing like sweatpants like a lightweight like athletic shirt and he's got like a fucking big ass mustard stain like on the sweatpants but like the entire time he's oh he had the sniffles and then you could tell he was kind of like a not like super fidgety but just wiped but almost a little fidgety like the kind of fidgety where he was going through his pockets of pre-security and found a tiny little bit of coke he didn't realize he still had and he's like i'm not wasting this and he ducked into the bathroom real quick and just did a quick bump yeah before he went through security is that not the normal reaction no no i'm just saying that's why that's what i the vibe okay that to me seems like it would make sense why would you throw that away you paid for it you

earned it you found the guy to got it to you well that's true that's what i did with the disposal 10 but yeah so i just and that's what i was thinking the entire time come back i was Like, coming back from Vegas, this makes sense. Well, good for him. He sounds like he had fun, and he probably was a regular. That might be a flydown on a Thursday, come back on a Sunday, Saturday. $5,000 lighter. Yeah.

Well, and he probably wasn't sitting in first class, so obviously he didn't win a lot. You know what was first class, though? Hmm. Operation Fortitude. It was. Boom! Oh, God. I didn't, you got me, too.

the smoothest I'm not gonna yuck your y'am. I have the smoothest lead-ins in the Marijuana Enhanced History Podcasting. We're number one in our genre. Yeah, I know. So, Operation Fortitude, this was, I guess, just to kind of summarize it.

So it was an operation in World War II that its sole goal was deception. So, and it occurred kind of before, D-Day, but the big part of the operation was leading up to the Normandy invasion, or what would be the Normandy invasion, but it was D-Day. And what the operation was designed to do, it came in a couple different phases, or a couple different, I guess, what, departments, segments. Yeah. So their job was to, they determined that Normandy was going to be the spot with the landing, but they needed to divert the attention from the Germans, of course, to make sure that they didn't reinforce.

the suspected landing positions because the Germans knew that they had to land in Europe and they had a general idea it was going to be somewhere between that stretch of the English channel between where Britain and France are so I was going to I never looked it up but had Germany established like their front in France or was that all kind of freshly taken over land no no no so they had completely taken over France and they had the Atlantic wall built along that so that's how they were like and you know at certain points in the atlantic wall it was more heavily defended and then in other points where they maybe didn't suspect an invasion or and you know suspect someone being able to land troops a lot of water or something like that yeah the defense would be sparse because they had at

this point i'm pretty confident they also had like one of their largest submarine bases for the u-boats was in a place called nazaree which was on the west coast of france okay and the reason they did that is because instead of having to go ahead and have the u-boats boats go all the way back to Germany for repairs and refit and everything, they could just get them there on the coast of France and then send them right back out in the Atlantic. So it was just a lot more efficient. Yeah, that makes more sense. So yeah, there's a lot of different. That's kind of, again, this leads into the kind of cool thing about the topics that we've picked is that... This is awesome. I just got to say, I went down a little bit of a different rabbit hole and I feel like

We have covering Operation Fortitude and all that's going to be great. But it opens up so many other kinds of deception that World War II kind of brought on. And this to me, when I heard it, when you brought this up, I really had to look into it. And I didn't know exactly what it was until I started reading it. And I thought, oh, shit, is this how all war is fought now? Because deception is a huge benefit. And especially like you're talking about trying to set these places up to where they're going to be concerned, so they're going to have to send other troops.

There has to be backup coming. The documentary that I watched was it was just, it started off, the one I kept texting about last night, it started off and it was just talking about like the inception of deception. It was about how it started being used more heavily. And World War I, they, you know, deception is something as simple in war as, camouflage. That's like that's deception at its very most simplistic. It's just, it's, you know, leading

someone to believe another thing. Full visual. So, did you know the camouflage was invented by the French? That makes sense. They wanted to hide. That's the joke that I made. But what it actually was, and this even actually makes sense when you think about it, because modern camouflage, what it is

is the strips of canvas that are color a certain way, they had French painters like in the the army that were fighting the war and one of them was like, because they used to just use natural branches and stuff, he was able to kind of look at the coloration of the ground and the land around it

and he was like, I'm going to go ahead and do it. So he took canvas strips woven into netting and he made the strips arranged in a way that it matched the surrounding ground, because World War I was the first time that aircraft were used. So they had to go ahead. Camouflage not only had to be eye level. Now camouflage had to be

from the air, so that's why they developed like the netting because then it could cover artillery guns. And so, yeah, it was like because of a French painter that kind of started designing it. And then all of a sudden, as soon as the other allies saw how successful it was, every single one of them developed a designated, like, camouflage division that would just sit there and manufacture the stuff. We give the soldiers that are on the ground and fight a lot of credit for what they do.

But there's so much behind the scenes stuff like that. imagine how much money the U.S. government or any government with the military for that matter probably invests into looking at camos that work in different ways. Nowadays we see like the digi camo, the blocks and all that which to me doesn't make sense, but I guess depending on how far away you're looking at it, that's going to be how it's picked up.

The research shows them when the average the distance, the look of the digi block, there's no difference in it of the lines, your distinction, but the digi block allows, you to do is if you think about it think of like four different shades of color so like a dark green that goes to a light green that goes to a white like a gradient yeah so you start with the dark grain and then a couple pixels down you would go to a slightly less dark green next down with you know the old camo that you know just in the splotches there's no the the color that splotches just one color it's not like a gradient color it doesn't fade so with the pixels you can make that it's it's a TV if you

look really close at an old tube TV, it's made up of like three colors. But like the pixels themselves, that's how they get shading in because there's so many pixels that you can change colors just very, very gradually. That is so cool. I bet whoever came up with that is, they probably got promoted immediately. It's weird that you just, it's one of those industries. There's an entire industry that's completely supported by the fact that they're like, hey, can you make something so somebody can't see it as well? And then put that and put it on in person. And you're basically trying to build something as well as you can to protect the people that are out there firing the guns and that are out there in the front. Without that first step doing it, you'd just kind of be sitting ducks out there.

You could figure it out, like green shirts or like if you're over in the desert. But like even think of it this way, like this is how much thought goes into it. If someone's like, hey, I need you to develop camouflage for snow. And someone's like, oh, that's easy. Because like in World War II, kind of like we're talking about, the snow camouflage was, For the most part, the ones that you really see were just white, like almost white clothes that went over your normal uniform. I think the Germans had some shading. But then you think about that, and someone goes out and looks at a patch of snow and they're like, oh, like this isn't all the same white.

Like because of shadow here, this is a darker color, and this is a gray. And if someone were to step in the snow, so they started making the snow camouflage to where it had different shades of white in it. Because they realized that how things were, it can't just be how you look at a color of something like green. It's how your eyes perceive it. It's like that's a slightly less dark green. That's a slightly light green. But your eyes just kind of see it one way. I'm also just talking out of my ass right now.

So if this sounds good. I'm right there with you. I'm sitting there thinking like if you're wearing all white and you're trying to hide behind like a black rock or something like that out there, you're going to want a little color variant so it's not white snow, black rock. Yes.

Man in white standing with gun. Yeah. And so yeah, camouflage being kind of the earliest form of deception. but World War I is kind of where that started, but you don't really think about, for me, I don't really think about spies until you really hear about the Cold War, but the spies and some of like the operations for even that type of warfare was crazy during World War II.

So on the Operation Fortitude, so just we'll cover because there is so much more, I think what we do is we go light on actual fortitude itself. Because that stuff, that's definitely, is easy to look up. The fortitude stuff, and it's easy to explain. It's all the little cool things and the stuff that I kind of took down about all the individual type spy deception techniques that I think is actually the more interesting part of this. Okay. Yeah, and we're obviously doing this because we're coming up on the anniversary of D-Day, so this will be out right around there. And I can, I can honestly tell you, like, out of the research I did, D-Day does not happen without this operation.

Uh-uh. It's, I don't know if it doesn't happen. but I don't think it's as really successful, because that was really the linchpin for World War II was once they established the foothold. Well, and it didn't seem like through Normandy, there was a couple days even at that point where things were a little shaky. It wasn't like we showed up

and it was complete domination. It was... No, you had to have time. You can't just storm the beach and then think you're just going to, like, what do you think you're going to do? You're going to hold 100 yards, like, inland of beach. You have to storm the beach

and you have to establish, like, a huge beachhead and a big area out in front of you that you control that you can then land all your reinforcements behind you, all your supplies and protect that area. And I want to do a whole episode later down the road on D-Day because there's so much to it.

But then that's why you also, for D-Day, it's not just the beach landing. They send in the paratroopers the night before or when it's dark because D-Day lands in the morning. They send them over that night and drop them not way inland, but they drop them at all these strategic locations inland to capture towns.

that the Germans do respond, they run into resistance miles out from the beach while all the soldiers are still landing. I didn't even know that. That's brilliant. Yeah. So, I mean, there's, the strategy to it is, is pretty nuts. So Operation Fortitude is basically created to make sure that the Germans don't, they know the invasions coming to France, but they're trying to design it in a way that they can keep

the strongest German resistance away from where they're actually landing. So Normandy is the spot selected, and if you're not pulling up a map or anything, so Normandy is a little bit further away from the border for France and Germany. There was a spot that was the closest point between France and Great Britain is Calais and Dover, right? Yeah, it's the smallest stretch of the English channel where they could cross over quickly. It's 30 miles. Did you see pictures of it? Uh-uh. It's still that far away?

That seems far away, but there's pictures of people standing on the coast of France, and you can clearly see the white cliffs of Dover. It's very visible, and that raises an entire, as I was looking at that, think of like, they called it the channel run. Think of all like the warships, the German warships would come out, because the only port in Germany where it touched the ocean, it was like an exit to a river. I think it was like the Rhine River or something.

But Germany would then create all and build other warships down this river, steam them up the river and get them into the ocean. These ships either had to go all the way up past Norway and all the way around the top of like Ireland and Scotland and then come into the Atlantic. Or they had to make what they called the Channel Dash. The Channel Dash was they would go ahead and just crank these things at full speed and run this gauntlet between France and Great Britain.

With all these new boats that you just built, And they're just out there. Yes. Or even for their sea trials to get them out there just to go ahead and do the trials. They'd have to test them, I guess, yeah. But then you would imagine that you just have, you know, they're not going to fire on you from the French side because that's German occupied. But for Britain, where it's only 30 miles,

even if you're hugging the French coast, you're in range of, like, artillery guns. So they would do it at night and try to get past. And then you also had the British Royal Navy that was patrolling this area. Well, yeah, they were there holding their own. that's it i didn't 30 miles does sound like a lot but with that much action going on that's sketchy when you see a picture and you can visualize me like oh no i can see the other land so that's where the most so calais also had a port and i feel like i'm going to talk more too far into this so stop

me if i start getting too deep down so calais had a port which the whole reason that germany thought that normandy wasn't quite going to be the ideal spot for the allies is because in order to establish a beachhead you had to go ahead and go ahead and and be able to bring in your supplies via ship. If you're trying to just bring them on, on a beach, you're going to beat your ships, not be able to get them off, or you're going to have to unload all the stuff so far out to sea where they're not, you know, hitting the beach. Well, one of the ways that the Allies got around this was they developed these things

and they called them Mulberry Harbors. They built these large, huge pieces of harbor in England. And what happened is as they followed the D-Day Landing Force. When they established a beachhead, they towed these pieces of harbor and constructed artificial harbors that led out to where they can unload all of this equipment. So like a wooden dock, basically? I think of like that made of probably like, you know, it's weird it sounds they make docks out of like concrete and then seal it and everything. But imagine like, have you ever been on a cruise? No.

Okay. Have you ever seen pictures of where cruises docked like in between cruise ships and you see the huge walkways that go out? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, this has to be like around that size because you have warships that are coming in and loading trucks, tanks. They're bringing... Oh, so they have to be super buoyant too to be able to hold everything. Yes, these things are huge. And so there's still pieces of them buried in the sand at some of the beaches. That's wild.

So they designed these, and what this allowed them to do was avoid... They got to make their own port. Huh. So Calais was suspected, though, because Calais had an established port. it was closer to Germany, allowed them to get into Germany faster. And closer to Britain? No, no, no. What I'm saying is the landing point in Calais was closer to the German border,

so they thought if the Allies landed, they could reach Germany faster. Okay, so they weren't thinking all of France first. They were thinking that... Fastest we can get to Berlin. Okay. Or takeover German territory, when not. And then the other place was called Sherborg. And Sherborg was on the other side of Normandy.

It was on like the Atlantic, closer to the Atlantic coast. and it had a really, like, really well put together, harbor already established, but the Germans had it completely, like, fortified. They had it all mined and everything, and so that was one of the areas because they had to hold that for their U-boats and their ships coming from the Atlantic. That was, like, super, super heavily defended. So those are the two spots, though, the Germans obviously thought that they were going after defending them more heavily.

And what Operation Fortitude, I feel like I'm doing all the talking on it. I'm just, like I say, I looked into it, but I couldn't quite put together. Like, I looked at it on a map. I couldn't quite put together the strategy that was going on as far as, like, I didn't know about the place in the north for the U-Bouts or anything. I knew that it was an area where they thought that it was going to hit and that it kind of sounded like the propaganda that they were putting out, made it sound like those were the areas.

But I didn't realize that Normandy was such a, like, right in the middle of these two. Yeah. So they design Fortitude South is to design to deceive the Germans of when and where D-Day invasion is going to happen. So their goal is to mislead the German high command into believing that it will be at Calais. It makes sense because it's 30 miles and, you know, it's the shortest point closer to Germany. Fortitude North is designed to fool the Germans into the invasion of Norway. So the Germans would have to, at least keep some forces there in order to defend that. That's one thing that I don't think a lot of people realize, you know, about the scope of,

like, World War II is that Norway really isn't thought of in that sense because it's further north. And you don't hear like about like huge battles in Norway. But so Norway, you know how they always talk about the fjords and everything. Norway is basically just like it looks, you have all these little peninsulas come up. That's all it is. And so you have these big fjords. But it was able to be invaded.

And one of these things is the Germans would use Norway as like a storage place or like a port for a lot of their ships. Just to have them closer over there. They were not bringing from Germany. But then they were also able to come out and raid Allied shipping. And it was also because they were in fjords, they could mount any aircraft gun higher up on the mountains. And they made them the ships more defensible. They could put them back in a fjord and put it. a torpedo net in front of it.

Okay. And so I know way too much about this shit. This is my World War II is my fucking champ. It's great. I love that. I love the thought too of it's almost like a perfect ambush area like you're talking about with those fingers of land that stick out where the fjords have carved in. You can load a ship up in every single one of those.

So if you're sitting there watching the first one come up and you're trying to make sure you're good there, there could be a second one advancing from somewhere else. It's strategically, it seems like a really great place to hold. Correct. And so the big thing about Norway was Norway also led kind of, even if they landed there, it would lead a more direct path into Normandy because Norway doesn't even touch France, I don't believe. I believe it borders Germany or very close to it. So basically what they're trying to do is they're trying to spread the Germans, the operation is to spread their defenses as thin as possible or direct stronger segments, the Panzer divisions and everything away from the designated landing area in Normandy. And the cool thing about that, Did you see where Fortitude North was actually stationed? It was Edinburgh Castle. Oh, is that where they were? Yeah, that's where they got to operate out of.

And this was the, this was the U.S. forces that were just finally getting into it, or was it mostly allied? It was, I think it was a, I want to say, no, no, it was a joint venture, but I think maybe like, because it's on British soil, I'm guessing it maybe was more British-led. They took the lead. Yeah, there's a couple guys in here. And if we don't have their names, I'll look them up because some of them were the guys that wrote up the actual plans for it. But the big thing with Fortitude North is their big deception was radio traffic.

And because at this point during the war, the battle of Britain had already occurred. But what the Germans ended up determining was that the losses that their aircraft were suffering over Britain, it not only was the loss of the aircraft, it's that, you know, you were losing the pilot and the flight crew. you were losing all the training that you put into it. So like if a pilot, you know, if they were having a dog fight above Britain or the English Channel or close to Britain and the British pilot got shot down by the German, he could bail out. And if he survived, they had a whole series of boats always patrolling that, small boats to pick up pilots. They would find out where dog fights were happening. And they would have designated people they could radio and be like, it's happening over this section. Be aware of pilots.

Just park underneath and try to catch you can. Exactly. And so, but if a German pilot, even he got out, he's getting taken prisoner. Yeah. So all that knowledge that you gave him is now in the enemy's hanging with. Correct. And because this is, you know, it's in Scotland, German reconnaissance for airplanes was not getting up that far. So that's why they only had to do, like, a lot of radio deception.

They didn't have to do the other stuff. We'll talk about where it's the physical deception of, like, fake troop movements and everything like that. So Fortitude North did its job in the sense of it was able to go. go ahead and keep either whatever forces were in Norway or pull more forces into Norway. So they considered that successful. And then Fortitude South was, of course, designed to make them think of somewhere else in France. And that one was, I mean, the ghost army. And they were ramping up for what looked like a July invasion.

Is that what the timeline was? June. It was in June. So they must have been. thinking that they were ramping up for a July invasion, but then they came a month early. That was the deception and that it was going to happen in July. That's what they were trying to lead to with all the radio traffic is. That's kind of one of the big things is you have to go ahead and provide bits of truth

in order for the story to be believable. So it's like they couldn't just come out and say, no, we're not invading because the Germans would, of course, know they're invading. So the deception had to be, yeah, we're invading. And the date we're going to go and provide you has to make sense with what we know you're going to see. But we have to make it at least different enough to not give you time to prepare. So, of course, you're not going to say, we're going to invade in June.

And then you actually invade in July, because then they've already rushed the reinforcement. They've had a month to prepare. Correct. You want them to almost think that you're always a little bit behind in your scheduling. And one of the things that I looked into and I wrote a ton of stuff down is this double agent, the most famous double agent, they say in the world during World War II, he had a huge hand in both the deception for the timing of the invasion and where it was going to be. I read a few things about it and I didn't know what to separate fact from fishing because I didn't see it everywhere.

But didn't they have like dummy generals out there in different lands? Like they would show that one of the generals of the army, they had somebody who was basically like his twin. and he was walking around a different part of the country talking about it like he was it wasn't McCarthy but it was a general like that Patton it was Patten and someone else were the two big ones with Fortitude and they they were only

I would not be surprised if that's accurate I think that they would definitely do that because it wouldn't be hard from even a distance just to put the same rank and everything on his helmet and Patton had that really unique look because you wore like the riding pants. Remember that? The flares on the wings?

So even if they put a guy, his height, his build in that, and had him wearing his helmet and was being shown around someplace, one person looks and picks it up and is like, I saw this. As a body double that's there. That had to have been something that was done.

Yeah, that wouldn't surprise me in the least. But you had, so basically the deception plan for Fortitude South was they needed to make the Germans believe that it was being launched from Dover, while at the same time literally having everybody in your army mass at an earlier time just further down the coast.

Showing up for the Normandy store. Correct. So you have this division that's created for the Ghost Army, and what they were basically created to do was make it look like there was an army buildup of resource, manpower around the Dover area, that the Germans would have all their attention on that and think that that's where the invasion was coming. And then the northern part up in Norway where they were making it look like the invasion was happening, they were building that up at the same time to try to draw the troops that were

going to be stationed centrally up north? Yeah, and because they were so far up north, they didn't have to rely on, you know, The South operation, that had, that had to have the visual element to it because they had to build the, that's where like the inflatable tanks came in. That's where the fake barges that they had to build come in. The fake, like barracks houses and everything, they basically had to construct like a military base and all this other stuff out of wood and canvas. So when surveillance flights came over from Germany, that was what they saw. there's a big mass of troops here.

Well, not only that, but without having all those troops there, they had to make it look like there was 10,000 people there when there was only a thousand people there. So it was not only so much the construction of these. Basically, they had to make a ghost town first, and then they had to make the ghost town look like it was a 10,000

person occupation. Like a functional, yeah, a functional, like, military base. So how'd they do it? They did it. in some of the most brilliant ways that I've ever seen. I think this was a little after Operation Fortitude. They saw how well that it went, that they made this Ghost Army, this 23rd headquarters.

And there were a special group of troops that all they had to do, it was the only deception unit that the U.S. ever officially authorized. So this came down from... Not used, authorized. Exactly. That's on the books of being authorized. Yep, something that they strictly set out to do. And they wanted to try to approach the warfare in a different way

because if you're sending 50,000 troops out there against 50,000 troops, your casualties are just going to start mounting like crazy. So if you can figure out a way to deceive and say, hey, we have 20,000 troops here, while 60 miles north, there's an extra 20,000 troops that are coming that way, your numbers are going to be greatly better to try to defend that area. and to try to take it over. And hopefully along the way,

the deception that you gave doesn't have a massive loss of life too, which to me, looking at World War II, I respect everybody that went out there. But at the same time, when I hear it, their minds just had to be so different

because there wasn't a great chance that you were coming back. No, and it's not just like, it wasn't just like, am I going to get over there and get shot? Like, you've got to think of all of the people that got killed on shipping convoys to like the U-boats. So it wasn't, the danger started from the moment you literally stepped on board the boat

to even get over there, you know, the entire ocean away. Well, then you had to survive all of that. Then you had to survive the boat ride back. If you came back while the war was still going, you could get torpedoed. And then if you came back after the war ended, there would just maybe be, hey, has this ship made this trip like 40 different times like is this thing going to hold together and as it is it traveling the same route that the germs have seen 40 different times and are they going to try to attack or is there are you know i know the germans have surrendered but are there rogue you boat

captains out there are they still is the fight still going for yeah that they haven't got you know they haven't heard because there were there were certain examples of wars being over country surrendering and then people that either didn't receive that message or didn't accept that message and we're still almost carrying on a guerrilla war themselves. This is, it wasn't a sober fact, it's more of a ha-ha fact, but it was something that I could be completely wrong about and I just heard and forgot to write it down or just kept it. But I think they said that the average life expectancy during some parts of the war

would be from your feet on the soil over there you had about two weeks, which to know that you're going to land somewhere and if you're, you basically have like two weeks to survive, and if you do that, your chances are going to be better. But those first two weeks, every single day is a fight for your life from every angle, like you say,

from getting there, from setting up everything, to somehow not drowning when you're doing things, to not accidentally blowing yourself up, to not catching friendly fire, not catching yourself in a firefight. It was, everything was dangerous.

And so this detachment, enter this 23rd headquarters these special troops. So they were like compiled of like art students, graduates, people that had kind of a the mind that would help them in. Because the whole thing was is this wasn't just about like, hey, we're going to build an inflatable tank, put it here, you know, make something look good. It got so detailed and nuanced is what they would do is the Germans figured out and you know, British and everyone figured out how to spot decoy.

armies because you wouldn't get shading, you wouldn't get shadows, the way that it would be put together. From a reconnaissance standpoint, they'd be like, so where was the sun? And they're like, it was over here, like, this thing doesn't have a shadow. This is a false air base. We're not going to bomb this or something. Everything had to be on point. You had to have all the details to the point where there were, like, tents outside of some of these places that the ghost army had set up, that the 23rd would set up, where they would go to the point to where they were tying fake laundry up on fake laundry lines to make it look. exactly like an encampment that's lived in.

Yeah, like the inflatable tanks were the same size as like a Sherman tank and then you watch a guy walk under it and he just lifts it up and you see it moving. Yeah. So it's like it's the same size of the shadowing looks. So you had to get people that were talented in the arts for this. Well, and when America saw basically what made them want to

push this plan in this operation was there was something called Operation Bertram that was led by the Allied forces down in Egypt. and it was led by Bernard Montgomery in the months before the Second Battle of Alameen in 1942. Bertram was devised by Dudley Clark to deceive Irwin Rommel about the timing and location of the Allied attack. The operation consisted of physical deceptions using dummies and camouflage designed and made by British Middle East Command Camouflage Director at Jeffrey Barkas. These were accompanied by electromagnetic deceptions code named Operation Canwell using false radio traffic.

All these were planned to make the axis believe that the attack would take place to the south, far from the coast road and railway about two days later than the real attack. So this was a lot like what kind of spurred Operation Fortitude in. They wanted to send all these messages saying, yo, this is where we're going to attack. We're going to attack on this day. they better be ready, knowing full well that everything that they're saying is going to get picked up and translated and they're going to the germs are going to be sitting like, oh fuck,

we have 10 times as many troops as they're going to, we're going to jump them, we're going to kick their ass here, this isn't even going to be a battle, this is just going to be a blood bad, and pop up a few miles north, you'd just catch them with their pants down. So they'd seen it work, they'd seen the plan happen, and they saw that there was a lot of validity to it. I think we're going to start moving

just a little bit away from, like the specific stuff in fortitude but before we do because this what I had down is like so specific to fortitude yeah I just want to cover that first so there was a before the world war two started there was the Spanish civil war and there was it was like the nationalists and who were like with general Franco and then the Republicans who had been the established government in Spain so it was a Civil War, the Russians backed the Republicans, and the Germans and Italians actually backed Franco. And each side of that, it was almost like the warm up to World War II because the Russians

sent troops over and, like, resources to help the Republican side. And then the Germans and Italians sent troops over to help Franco's side. And that's actually kind of on a tangent. That's actually how the German army actually became as successful early on in World War II as possible is because with aircraft technology, tank technology, and troop movements, they got to do trial runs during the Spanish Civil War, tailored dogfight tactics, improved their planes beforehand, find out where they were deficient, got to put them up against Russian equipment to kind of see how it compared. So that's one of the reasons why the Blitzkrieg and the German War Machine was so

successful. So they basically had a dry run with somebody else's casualties to kind of work the kinks out. Yeah, they had a preseason. Interesting. So during the Spanish Civil War, there's this guy his name is Juan Pu. Is it Pujol? I'm going to say Pujol. I think it's Pujol. Pugol.

Okay, he's born in 1912. During the Spanish Civil War, he deserts the Republican side, becomes a chicken farmer. Then at some point, shortly later, he then joins Franco's nationalist side. So he's not actually really picking a side in here. He's not really a pacifist, but he's against, um, certain things that Franco's done. I think he just joins the nationalist because that's where he's kind of

located in the country. That's what the chicken farm is? I think so. So he finds a wife and in 1941 his wife actually goes to the British Embassy and they come up with the plan and the plan is we're going to go ahead and be spies. These are just independent

people. We're going to be spies. We want to go ahead and spy on the Germans for you. And the British Embassy there in Spain is like no, no thanks. So they shot him down just that quick because they were. Well, the Spanish Civil War just happened. They knew that the nationalists on Franco's side were supported by Germans in Italy. They knew he had a military record with the Nationalists.

So they were like, oh, bullshit, you were with Germany and Italy during the Civil War. They thought it was a double cross from the jump start. They thought he was already trying to double cross them by asking to do this. So then in January, 1941, they go to the German embassy in Spain. She presents an offer from him to move to Lisbon, then move to London to spy for the Nazis. They make it sound like because, and he's able to then tweak that and say, I was in the nationalist army. I supported, you know, Nazis when you guys came in.

So they look up the records, it checks out. They train him to use Invisible Ink and Ciphers to be able to communicate through letters. They provide him some supplies. And his actual job, he's not supposed to be the spy, per se. he's almost supposed to be like the spy master, like the handler, and establish a spy network in London. Oh, so he's the handler for a bunch of others.

Correct, because, I mean, it makes sense. They're not going to, like, spend money and send one guy there to spy, trusting he's going to get into a position where he's able to provide some useful information. And then if he gets caught, lose their one source. They're going to want him to do this. So I wonder if he mentioned that he ran this plan by Britain first.

No, no, because his plan, I think his plan was to go to the British first, And his plan was to go to the German embassy. He was just going to let the Brits know this is what he was doing and how he was going to do it. So he ends up convincing the Nazis. Because if you're going to have spy contacts and everything like that, you're going to have to have money for bribes, money to take them out. And these people aren't always going to be knowing spies. They're just going to be people in high positions that can maybe share some information while they're drinking.

He needs a per diem. Correct. So he ends up moving to Lisbon, like, they want him to, and then instead of going to London, he just stays in Lisbon. Fuck yeah. So how he ends up compiling this information to make it seem like he's in London is he uses all publicly available information. He uses a map of London.

He uses news reports coming out of London. He uses London. He gets, you know, because Lisbon is a larger city. It's going to get stuff from London magazine's literature. He uses all this to craft this story that's so rich in detail about. places in London. He gets troop movements and stuff through news, just regular news, but he then phrases in a way to make it seem like he's the one witnessing it. He starts crafting characters with full backstories. He's recruited this guy that's the leader of the Aryan superiority underground

in London. He has these two Venezuelan brothers that work at the docks. Like, believable. And this is just him and his wife like coming up with this. Just Mark Twaining it, just making their own story. So he's communicating in a manner that's both via radio back to his handlers in Spain, and he's also writing the letters with the Invisible Ink. So MI6 starts picking up, oh, and he chooses for his German code name. He's Agent Arabelle, and it's like the three letters of his wife's first name, the first three letters, and then the like three letters of her last,

her name was like Ariana Bella something. So he was Agent Arabele. MI6, because at this point they have the ultra program, which is like their intercept, my program, they have cracked enough of the Enigma code to be able to start deciphering the stuff, and they're hearing,

they're basically getting reports of a German agent based in Lisbon, but saying he's in London. So they're able to determine by the intercepts that he is in Lisbon, but that he's saying he's London, they're like, what the fuck is going on? Like, what is this?

So they intercept this. His wife goes to the British embassy and then offers the services and the story checks out. He's like, no, no, no. He's like, I'm Arabelle. They've had inters, but, you know, passing up the chain, it all comes back. He just admits that he's feeding him basic bad information. It's not even bad information because what it is is they're taking the information and because the information has validity to it.

Like, they're believing it. Regardless of the information is helping them, you have to give them what's called the term they used was chicken feed. It has to be tactical information, but it can't be tactfully useful. Because then what that says is basically, I'm giving you the information, you're just not finding a way to use it.

The information is still coming in. So it's almost like you can't blame the spy. You've got to blame the person getting the information. Yeah, at the same time, they could sit like two German dudes down in front of a TV and two guys with a bunch of newspapers and still get the same kind of information. But then he's added his little Geneseecois to it.

He's spoon feeding him the fake areas of the underground. How he's able, and the other thing, too, is you've got to understand his German handlers are at the embassy in Spain. So he might be getting access because if Spain is kind of more cut off and insulated where they're at, he might be getting a flow of information that's a little bit more timely than they are. So the British accept his offer, and in 42, they actually bring him and his wife through Gibraltar and then bring them to England. and he gets a handler that works for like MI5, his name is Thomas Harris, and between 42 and 44, they draft 315 letters to the Germans and build up a network of 27 fictional agents.

Nice. Okay. Again, these agents aren't free. Technically they are because they don't exist, but to all these German guys, they're having to send him money de grease the wheels, take these people out, pay them and everything. So it doesn't sound like a lot when you hear it, but he convinces the Nazis to send him money for a spy contacts.

They end up sending him around $20,000 at the time, which equates out to $1.2 million today. Yeah, that's a pretty penny just to run a bunch of fictional characters. That's all coming to him, though. He's just pocketing the money and just... Hopefully England didn't try to take a cut of him. I think they were paying him, too. Yeah, but they let him cook over there and collect his money.

So to establish trust with the Germans and everything, what he does is Operation Torch was the ally invasion of, I want to say it was Africa. Pretty sure it was Africa. So what he does is he gathers all this information through the lead up to Operation Torch, gives them details that would allow them to stop Operation Torch, gives them the location that's going to happen, gives them the time that's going to happen,

not the time, but like the days, maybe the week, gives them all the pertinent information. They postmark the letter before the invasion, and they ensure the mail delivers it two days after. Hell yeah. Two days after the invasion. So the Germans open this. Operation Torch is either occurring or just occurred.

It's a success because the allies. The timing. Yeah, they get the foothold in Africa. But they get this, and they're like, there's no way he could have known, you know, it establishes the fact that a civilian could not have found out about Operation Torch and all the details and known all that. He had to have known about it beforehand. They blamed the Post Office and deliveries because...

Always. You always blame the Post Office. Yep. But this establishes, like, their deep trust in him as a completely reliable, like, had it not been for the mail delaying this, he could stop Operation Torch. That is brilliant. So, for Operation Overlord, which was D-Day, it, you know, it... know, with the Navy and the Air Force dropping the pipes, the whole thing. His job was convinced the German high command that the landing was at Calais and not at Normandy. So he's giving pieces and bits of information to the Germans on this.

Leaving them know it's going to be at Calais, his contacts have been sending him back information about troop movements. His fake contacts. His fake contacts. But what it is is it's tying into this ghost army, creating these false things. so what the Germans are seeing is information coming from Pujol who is assigned the British agent name of Garbo because Greta Garbo was a Swiss actress that was like the best actress of the day so they were like you're such a good actor that your agent name is going to be Garbo

so Pujol all of his information that he's providing via his spies is all corroborated by these surveillance and all of this stuff so they're like oh he's obviously got to know something so he's able to deceive them up until D-Day even after the landings occur at Normandy and the Germans are getting ready

because like I think what maybe gets kind of lost is that the Germans because they did have a lot of like armored divisions and mechanized divisions they could get places pretty quickly D-D-D-D-D-D we didn't just land on the beach and then like in that day like we established a huge like foothold

it was like weeks that you had to push forward a little bit at a time conquer you know not conquer but like clear out a city of you know the germans and everything so had armored divisions made their way to normandy during d-day even if it you know oh my god they're landing reroute these guys even if they got there a day or two later they could have done serious damage because you're still landing supplies you you know you don't have a strong foothold so when d-day occurs he's getting all this traffic from his handlers like what's going on he's ready going back to them he's like um it's a diversionary landing at normandy they're doing it to draw everyone out of calais the main force is getting ready to land calais in two days two or three days so they can cut off that head basically yep

cut off that flow they held a bunch of armored divisions and a bunch of soldiers in calais didn't reinforce normandy oh man i didn't know anything about this this is awesome yeah gave them more time to land a foothold and then still kept his credibility when they asked him why they never invaded Calais? He's like, the Normandy invasion diversion was so successful, they canceled the Calais invasion. So he had the benefit of a few days after it to be like, look, this is what happened.

Yeah, and the Germans bought it. Huh. The Germans bought it enough that Hitler awards in the Iron Cross. I love that. That's... For as strong as the Nazis were and for what they did and just as strong as Germany was, because obviously you can't say too strong.

They lost World War I, but they were a very formidable force. I mean, it took allied forces to knock them out, and they had guys backing them too. But they were so fooled by so many things. They were just so simply just taken aback by the littlest deals. Well, it all boils down to it if you're having, you know, who gets to make the final decision?

Because you could have, you know, if Hitler's making the final decision and he's not too bright, about this kind of stuff. And he has all of his generals saying, hey, it's this, it's this, it's this. But the final reason comes to him, he's like, nah, it's not that. Well, and if everybody's trying to SSC

and get in his ear and try to be his second guy or try to be the guy that brings him the information, everybody is going to be sending everything his direction. And if, like you say, if it is him or if these under-generals are making these decisions, if it's bad, they just probably don't mention it. Like, hey, we knew that this could have been happening or we gave you some bad intel.

people get beat for disagreeing with it or something like that one a couple last things about this guy is i forgot to mention so um when he gets moved to london him and his wife they have two kids at the time she enjoys it for a little while but she starts to get bored and miss his home so she wants to get return back to spain he's like you can't go back to spain like not right now and she's like no i'm going back to spain and she goes to his handler and is like i'm going back to spain i'm taking the kids you guys try to stop me or do anything to me, I'm going to go to the Spanish embassy, tell him everything that's going on.

So, Garbo, Pujol, how do I keep pronouncing it? Pujol. Pujol. Pujol. What they do is him and his handler, fake his arrest, rough him up. They bring her to this place that was an MI6 detention facility, and he looks like he's been beat up and all disheveled and everything.

And he's like, he got this, we had him arrested because he came in my office trying to defend you and everything like that so she's like please just let my husband go i'll do anything everything he's like you're gonna just stay in london then and it's not like they had they were being put up and paid for like they had a nice like it wasn't like they were living in a shack they had a very nice place because she plays yeah yes so she's like okay so she just wrote it out for the rest of the war but it's just he was just like listen he's like she's she's getting unreasonable you guys were gonna need to fucking trick her so you guys are know, meaning it looked like you guys are beating me up,

and then that'll shut her up. It's not only you guys here. Somebody is going to have to punch me in the face. I'm going to have to take a little bit of abuse, but it's better than listening to her talk about wanting to go home every five minutes. So because of his service, so not only is he get the Iron Cross, he also gets the British War and the Order of the British Empire. He's the only person to ever get, like, that high honor from like two different countries.

Two warring countries? Yes. So after the war, he moves to Venezuela. He actually fakes his death. He can't give up the grift. So I think he gets divorced first. She moves back to Madrid, and then I think he fakes his death. And his death was faked.

He got, like, malaria somewhere. So, fakes his death. Then in 1984, goes back to Britain and gets his award. Yes. And, like, one of, because she had the two kids when she moved back to Madrid, that's how one of his kids finds out he's still alive. And then he dies four years later. But can you imagine he, like, and during the time,

his death was fake he was living in like south america doing something he was around like a gift shop he probably he probably had a chicken farm down there too probably but that's so crazy he's just like yeah he's like i actually just came back to let everyone know i'm probably getting old i'm gonna die soon i want that award you have to at that point because you've gotten so deep into deception that you're even deceiving your own family which it sounds like if he was willing to get beat up to fool his wife it probably wasn't a great situation anyway but then to fake your own death death to get out of that too. Like he just keeps taking it further and further and further and get away.

He said it was because he's like, yeah, he's like, I'm scared of, like, Nazis that have escaped that might find out about me having reprisals. No, man, it's because your wife, your ex-wife. It's because she asked me what I wanted for dinner every single night for five years straight and never helped. But, yeah, I mean, that's a huge reason why Operation Overlord ended up being a success and why, I'm not saying that's a huge reason. That's the reason that the war was won, but that's the landing at D-Day is what they consider the beginning of the end for Germany.

And everything helps. Even if it seems little on the surface, any of that bad intel, if you can get enough feet on the ground to take over a place that was occupied, you're one step closer to being in the right direction. All right, so what are the other kinds of deception that just took place during the entire war? So the 23rd headquarters, like you were talking about earlier, they were going into colleges and they were getting these art school grad students, these ad agency workers, and these people who were basically, you know how we talked about a few episodes ago about there's things that the government has and technology that the people of the public don't? Oh yeah, how like if you, if something gets released, assume that the government has had it

already for like 10 or 15 years. Yeah. So this is almost the opposite, the inverse of it, is they're going out to get these people to bring into the military that are so good at fooling average everyday Americans into buying things or that were so artistically inclined that they would make things that people that would move people. They were getting people that were building sets for TV shows, different things like that to come over there because they needed that bit of deception. So they gathered up a thousand young men that they had recruited. and they trained him for a little while in America, I believe it was somewhere in the South, and then they shipped him over to Europe,

and they also trained them in Stratford-upon-Avon, which do you know why that's kind of cool and culturally significant? The name sounds familiar, but you're going to have to explain it. It was allegedly, because we don't know Shakespeare was real, it's allegedly his birthplace and where he's buried. Okay. So one of the greatest playwrights of all time was, the town where he was from is where they're training all these artists and all these people

and these ways of deception which if it's going to be a place that you're going to train in you probably want to train them in a playwright's backyard that got people to feel things emotionally that would be so cool to be able to you know everyone like talks to like World War II veterans and they'll some of them will be pilots or some of them like sailors or like soldiers and they'll you know have a few if they want to tell them they'll have a few stories and everything it'd be cool to hear the story of like no man like I was going to art school and then the military came in and what did you do

man we got to go ahead and build like stuff to like fake tanks and everything that would just sound cool you'd be like what like explain that well and before you brought this up I had no idea that this happened this was a whole new world to me and this is why I latched onto these ghost

army places because it's such a different kind of warfare that it wasn't it's minute on the grand scale of war but it's something that was so important to what they were doing. And so all these people that they trained to basically be artists, actors, deceptors, double agents, they all came out of this one group that came from Stratford upon Avon over there. And they would do radio counterintelligence, they would do sonic deception, they would do construction and security,

and they had their own camouflage battalion that would be in charge. of how they would cover up these fake bases. And they used something called magnetic wiring recorders, which like before, it was kind of like before tapes and cassette tapes came out, this was how they would do it. And they thought ahead so much to where they would be in sound studios, in these little towns,

and they would be recording noises like trucks pulling out. They would be recording noises as far as like people walking over different terrains. So when they got over there and they would have these fake, bases, they would have these super big it would be you can't just go ahead and have it be a visual representation. It has to sound like a

living, breathing bass. Yeah. So you have to hear trucks pulling it. Yeah. They were recording every little bit that they could. So these big speakers that they would point directly towards the forces that they were fighting and they would play it so it would sound like instead of there was 50 people sitting there sitting there sitting there was a thousand people sitting there was 2,000

yeah, you're sitting there you know, the enemy is, what, a half a mile away, you're behind a tree line and there's 50 of you. But you've got two huge speakers behind you that are making sounds of tanks driving back and forth behind your lines. Exactly. That's going to go ahead and make that, be like, we don't have any armor. Well, it's like, how are we going to... Yeah, they're recording conversations. They're recording people hammering things.

They're recording every little bit that they can. Every day life. It has to sound like a real, yeah, like a real place. Like, oh yeah, of course there's hammering. They're building a base. And they know at this point that the journey. that the Germans are going to be looking at every single thing that they're doing and trying to get into these places. So they would have something that they called Spoof Radio, which

they would put out on the airwaves and they would make these false messages just back and forth about troop movements, kind of like you were talking about earlier with Garbo. Were these the guys that spoke German? There were multiple different ones. That was a little bit more of what the British did in their propaganda, which we'll get into that. But they were basically laying these messages out in a way where it was kind of a code, but it was like up is A, down, is B. It's, it's, it's, um, I'm trying to think of the way to say this. So it's deception meant to deceive someone by thinking that they could figure out the deception. Deception for dummies. Correct. It's like,

you know, that message doesn't make any sense. Well, maybe it's coded. And then you figure out the code. And you're like, oh my God. You're like, oh, yeah, we made the code so easy that you had to have figured it out but because we coded it, you're going to think that you were smart to figure it out. Yeah, they're patting themselves on the back thinking that they got all this taken care of and that they're on it. So when they would broadcast these recordings, they would do it in such a way where if they were in an area where there was like heavy weather, they would blast the ones that had rain in it more so you could hear like raindrops hitting off of tin roofs and off of tanks. Just every single thing that they could get into, they were recording.

which is brilliant because if you want to make something look like it's going the way that it's going, you're going to want to make it sound like the way it's going and everything else. And the inflatable tanks that you were talking about, they went through multiple different kind of ways of how that they could build these fake props. They found that wood was always tough because it was hard to move and it didn't get like the right shine off of it. Well, yeah, and even if you think about a tank made with wood, like that's a, like, I don't know how many people have stood next to a Sherman tank.

Have you ever stood next one? Yeah, it's huge. Well, I mean, not compared to like an M1. My tank knowledge is not that of yours. Okay, do you know that the park with the plane in it? Mm-hmm. Okay. Right across from the plane is an old Sherman tank.

Is that what it is? Yes. Okay. That's a big tank. It's, I mean, for a, yes, it's not like an M-1, but like the new M-1 tanks are literally like as long as a bus. Like, this was probably as big. I think a Sherman was, think of like a medium-sized mail delivery vehicle. That's about the size of a Sherman take.

The crew was like four guys. And that was all that it would take to run them. Yeah. So you had like your gunner, your commander, your driver, and like your machine gunner. But anyway, but even if you just make that frame out of wood, that's a lot of wood and that's heavy. And it doesn't quite look right because you're not getting the right turns where things should be bent. Yeah, you're taking fabric and stretching it at an angle and not a curve. or like a contour like an actual tank has like on the turret or anything or you look

of a picture of it yeah yeah Sherman tank was 19 feet long it was between 19 and 20 feet um and it was eight feet wide so it's a big piece of metal but it's not as big as what we would have today yeah and they figured out that the best thing that they could use to mimic the skin and the size of these big sherman's was rubber and part of health figuring out the sound issues, they're running these big air compressors to fill up these big tanks. And they were doing a lot of this at night, so it would be hard to see under cover of what's going on. And then you wake up the next day, and the Germans, like, oh, shit, there's like 15, 20 tanks that we heard rolling in. Well, there's like 25, 30 tanks that are all set up.

We just had an aerocrine since flyover, and they just confirmed what the pilot just said they had, you know, 25 tanks. They inflate everything up and gets bigger and bigger, and they just make these towns look. not towns, but these installations just look huge. Pop-up armies. Mm-hmm. And they would build jeeps and different kind of smaller items out of wood and different types of things.

But the kind of camo netting that they would use to lay over these different installations for like tents and things like that, they were advanced far before they actually got out on the field. They would go through and test different kinds of netting to see what would look the most natural and what they were used. using. And they did have a few, there were bulldozers and things that they had. So there were like a couple tanks and a couple things that they did have that were actually like military vehicles. But it was nothing compared to the amount of inflatables. Oh no, definitely not. So one of

the cool things I saw about, and I don't know how common this rubber tank was, they said that they had designed eventually inflatable tanks that were as big as a sleeping bag. Now, sleeping bags nowadays are the compression. So it's not that size. But if you think about like, if you're born any time in the 70s or 80s, think of like a Coleman sleeping bag, like a Coleman fabric sleeping bag. That big could then be inflated into a freaking inflatable tank. A 19 foot long tank. Yes.

They said the only issues that they ran into with them were on like hot days and things like that. You would get a little bit of the rubber that would droop. So it would look a little bit silly if you had a tank that had a droop down gun. The turret was limp? but they you have to be close enough to see that though yeah and that was it was a lot of the things that they would be setting up would be so far away that you'd be able to see it at the same time it would look a little bit distorted yeah and behind all these tanks they would take um like some of their big bulldozers and things and drive them around in certain random areas or

where they were going to put the tanks so when they inflated the tanks and you were looking over it from the air trying to spot everything well it's going to look funny if you have all these tanks, but there's no cat tracks on the ground from the tanks being moved there. Or if the tanks are throughout three different passes, the tanks are still in the exact same position. Every single tank is in the same position, yeah. Yeah, so you're laying down from the air. They're seeing it from across the terrain.

They would set up these big fake airfields, which was hilarious because they did them so well that at one point, an Allied troop plane ended up landing on one of their fake air strips. And he got down there. and all the people ran up to him like, hey, this isn't a real station, you're not going to get any help here. We're just doing this as a decoy. You need to fly out of here immediately and make it look like you didn't just show up and this was a fake situation. This dude's confused as shit because he's like, you're all friends. I see your all friends.

That hangar and all those sheds back there? There's nothing in this. There's nothing in this. This place is specifically designed to get bombed. Yeah, you did exactly what we wanted this place to do. Kind of going off that. So they would design the fake air strips to go ahead and try to draw some of like the bombs away. So the Germans during the daytime raids, they said that they weren't fooled very often because they were able to determine, I'm trying to think,

they were able to determine something about the fake air strips. Probably like the distance that they're laid and something like that. But they found out, you know, going back and looking at the German information that out of like 20 fake air strips, the Germans identified like all but three. of them as fake. Really? But at nighttime they had this other thing what they would do is they would have a, it wasn't even an air strip. It was lights laid out in a

pattern in a grid at night to light it up and look like a functional airport and so what they would do the coast would go ahead and report an air raid because that would be the early warning system on the radar. Lights would go off at the real airport. Lights would go on at the fake airport and it would absorb all of the bomb damage. And all of it was

just like a fucking big open field. It could have been a little bit of rolling close, but because the lights were all position to make it look like runways at night. Just building decoy targets out there. Damn. Well, let's keep getting into this. I feel like we need a piss break though. Am I right? Time to go,

Pippie. All right, was that an acceptable volume? I liked it, yeah. So do you think any of these guys, and we'll talk about it later, just kind of how deeply they had to be undercover for as long as they did afterwards, because they didn't know this is going to be something we're going to use moving forward.

But you always see like the guys that, like the movie depictions and things, when people go into like the VA bars or like the outposts where they can go get drinks and talk over wars and all that kind of stuff. VFWs. Yeah, that's what I was looking for. You think that you have all these guys that are like missing eyes and missing limbs and all that. And then one of these fellas who is in the Ghost Army walks in,

like, hey, what did you do during the war? I built rubber tanks and we basically tried to draw all the fire away from you gentlemen that were going to be attacked and we tried to basically fool everybody else so you guys would have an easier time. You think the guys that saw all the war and that were in the firefights are like, cool, man, I appreciate that. That's great.

I'm glad you did that for us. Or do you think they're kind of laughed at? I think it depends on maybe when you, did this if this was during the war like let's say like there's guys heading back to England you know wounded guy or on lead because you know they did ship them

they got shipped back to England at certain points during the war so it wasn't just like all the troops that landed on D-Day they weren't all in France and Germany until up until the end of the war because units would take losses you would have to go ahead and then ship units back for updates and training

because you would lose guys out of like squads you can just replace them with random people. You would have to go ahead and send them back to either places in occupied France that were safe to train at, or they would send them back to Britain, and they would bring in new recruits or people that had come over, replace their losses, and then after some rest, they would then send them back, or they would go out on, like here's a good example. I'll probably talk about these guys later, but so easy company from Banna Brothers. They were the parachute company, one of them, that they landed in Normandy on D-Day. They fought through, I think, I want to say it was maybe a couple weeks or maybe a couple months.

Yeah. And then what happened is then they got pulled off the front line and they got sent back either someplace in occupied or ally occupied France at that point or they got sent back to Britain for a chance to replenish because they had taken losses. They needed to retrain or regroup. the next time they went out they went out on I want to say it was like Operation Market Garden which was this huge air drop in Holland

I think it was Holland so they were only reintroduced back into the European War from Britain during another operation so you would have people coming in and out I'm trying to think of how where I was even going with this hang on

I like it though I like where we're headed okay hold on I was looking at something on the what were you talking about before I got on to this if the fellas that built the sets got as much respect as like the people that saw the war that was attention sorry it was good info so what i'm saying is if that guy and a guy that was on the front lines were back in britain having to drink at like the base bar and he's like man shit's been rough we were you know and we did normandy and everything like that and the other guy's like yeah how did that go like um i'm with a unit that we were designed to go ahead and try to

tell the enemy it was going over here instead of there. I think depending on what that guy that came off the line saw, he'd be like, oh, that was nice, you were nice and safe or anything like that. But then as time went on, I think maybe he would look at that and be like, man, I wonder I wonder how effective that was. And then later on, maybe this stuff was reported and there's like a news reporter, a documentary about it. He looks that and he's like, oh shit, I didn't realize how much of an impact that had.

He's like, what if they wouldn't have done that? what if all those tanks would have been there? I would have been dead. Like, I think time lens perspective to it. I think maybe if, like, that guy, you know, coming into the bar is meeting with, like, an officer or what was, like, their special intelligence group? They tell them what they do.

They're like, that's all. Tell me more about that. Like, I think it just depends on who you talk to, but I think normal foot soldier, normal like foot soldier or guy on the ground might have a different perspective.

And they say that this was pretty hard to estimate as far as like how many lives were saved because it was a diversionary tactic. But they said at the very least they could probably contribute about I think it was

20,000 lives saved which in the grand scheme of how many people that were lost isn't ginormous. But 20,000 lives is a pretty... Just for like this operation and everything like that.

If you think yes. Which you would have to say that it was worth it. And granted, who's giving you that number? Was it something that they pumped up? This is underselling it, though. Like, you're literally... For every gun that they had diverted to somewhere to try to battle against a fake army.

That's the thing, too, is like, you had to... It's not just, you know, even if you said one gun for one guy, the amount of, like, tanks that it kept from, you know, what's... How many soldiers equal... a tank. A tank can take out an army if you don't have anything to fight against.

I think 20,000 would be conservative because if all of these operations, Ghost Army, Garbo, all of that stuff doesn't work out the way it does, that landing goes very differently. Absolutely. That landing could have been repelled at the... Because, you know, they didn't send 100,000 people onto the beach at one time

that could have just piled over dead bodies. You could only send as many troops as troop carriers as you had. They came in waves. That's why, like, you know, in saving Private Ryan, as soon as those gates get down, you see just the guys getting pegged right in the, before you get off the boat. It's because, you know, there was only certain targets that all these machine gun nests could shoot at. Just sitting ducks coming out of these big drops. But, I mean, think of how much damage was already done.

Now think what happens if there was reinforcements there. Well, these guys, they didn't directly see a lot of fire, but if something were to go. go, like if they did their job basically too well and the Germans were going to attack this area where they had that set up, there were times when they said where they would have to radio back say, hey, they're advancing on our position, we don't have the guns to protect this, you need to send them now. And they were talking about missing firefights by like two and three hours to try to get everything down to pull out. They thought they had tanks. They're sending in dive bombers to go at this area. That's, you know, not even thinking about it in that sense, but

These guys, this special of the Ghost Army, once D-Day occurred, their job, it just wasn't like, okay, guys, you know, we're a good job, we're good. These guys were also sent into occupied France. The deception occurred throughout the entire war. It just, to me, it's so you're not saving lives necessarily by defending, you're saving lives by playing a completely different offense that you're not taking them, you're just, you're kind of a net positive on what you're saving as opposed to what you're

losing. Yeah, there's footage that shows these guys driving around in like army trucks. On the back of army trucks, you know those huge ass stadium speakers that you always see? Uh-huh. They had these huge ass stadium speakers on the backs of these trucks and all these speakers were pumping out as these trucks drove by were like

tank tread noises and they would just drive these things in a circle behind like a tree line and it would just make it sound like there was like a large column of tanks back there moving. Well, and they, when they would have like the big service trucks that would be stacked with all the soldiers in them, there would only be two people in them and it would be the last two rows where you could see the people in them. Because of the awning or whatever. Yeah, so you're seeing all these big carriers coming in bringing all these troops and each one of them has one driver and has two people in the back of them. But how are they supposed to know?

You can't see through the canvas. you don't know what else is in there. And how often did those two people in the back even have to be actual people and couldn't be dummies depending on the distance and everything? It really, everything was just such a deception that even there were times, there were stories that were told about,

like you would obviously have to set up in a city or something like that in case you were being seen and then you'd have to pull down to move to your next area. So there was a spot in France where there were two people on a bike, that were just biking down the lane. And as they were biking down the lane,

they looked over at the American troops, or the Allied forces. And there were four people that had lifted up a Sherman tank by themselves four Americans. There was two on each side, and they had planks of wood underneath it, and they'd lift it.

And this general was standing over there watching them, and he looks over and he sees the two French people on the bikes just wide-eyed, like what is going on, how is this possible? And he said that he went over and was talking to him. there immediately like what is going on what is that he said the only thing you tell me he goes you like you guys have super soldiers the only reasoning that he gave him before he walked away was

he goes yeah the americans are just really strong and then just walked away so left these two people on the bicycle like what the fuck those four guys just lifted up a tank and all we got is that americans are just really strong with the odds that like a french person that lives in the countryside let alone has actually physically seen a tank at this one in life this isn't there's no TV or movies or anything like that? They might have seen one in a picture, but let alone have the thought that someone would then make a fake tank.

Something doesn't fire, there's no good reason for it besides deception. What was the, so the, now this was all the American side of the deception. So the British though, they had some like, their

stuff that I heard about was it's like James Bond shit. Well, and it's funny that you say that because one of the guys that was a part of it and that was involved in the Department of Propaganda was Surrey and Fleming, the guy that wrote James Bond. So this was like, I'm sure once he did this

that he got out of being in the military, he inspired his, this is what inspired it. Yeah, he already had the idea for these books. He was given like the greatest handoff ever. Oh yeah. So they were a little bit beforehand and they came through before the American Ghost Army really happened. And just to wrap them up before we jump into the Brits,

they were kept secret as an organization to the point to where I think it was the 80s where they finally did the debriefing and said that this mission had happened because after World War II was over, they knew that the Cold War was coming. They knew that spies, espionage, all this different stuff was going to be very important

to the things that they did going forward with the USSR. So they kept them under complete top secret lock and key, told everybody that they couldn't say anything, couldn't mention what they had done. They basically had to stay covered for like another 40 years before they could actually come out and tell their families, no, I wasn't on these missions.

No, I didn't do this. My whole mission was deception. So America kept this card in their pocket for a long time to see. And I'm sure they probably used it. these people were all probably brought in and used to say, what worked for you guys? Is there anything that we can glean from this to be able to happen? So, and there's, I think they finally received the Medal of Honor, but I think it was like 2016.

It would have been like what, like a presidential like citation for that specific group. Yeah. Whatever. Like I think groups can get citation, presidential citations or something. It's gone through Congress multiple times, which to me I don't understand why this wouldn't be just like a slam dunk. just give them their flowers. But I think the last time they tried to do it was 2016, and I didn't look in to see if it was

passed. But at this point, I feel like these guys don't need the metal. They know what they did. They know how they did it and how great it was. So moving to kind of what predated the American Ghost Army, the British propaganda operation was hilarious. This was, what they were doing out there was saving lives as far as the Americans. what the Brits were doing was just nothing but screwing with the Germans' heads.

It was so funny the things that they would do. They would use fake Nazi radio stations to spread the false information that they would get through like stolen letters or anything like that. So these German forces were listening to British radio stations that were like very pro-Germany, pro-Nazi war. and then they would just sprinkle in these weird little details and misinformation about different things that were going on. So all these German soldiers would be like, yeah, this is great. Things are going real good.

And they're like, well, this happened, but everything's going to be okay. Or they lost this land, something like this, but everything's going to be okay, to just plant those seeds of doubt in all these radio listeners' heads. Yeah. So you're... Because if you think about it too, like, if you're an occupied France and they're transmitting from the coast of England there's radio transmissions

and the other transmissions your legitimate German radio transmissions for like your entertainment like your radio is coming from further away in Germany the stations are going to be picking up more so are going to be the ones closer closer yeah

they had a they had a lady who did a variety hour and it was a call-in show and mind you all this was fake all the call-ins that they were getting everything like that all the request for songs that they were getting completely 100% made up. And it was this lady named Vicky. And she was this German radio star.

And her real name was Agnes Bernal. And she was a German refugee. And she was like a dancer and an actor in Germany before they had to be moved out. And so she obviously had an axe to grind. And her sign off would always be three kisses just a quick, is like out to the troops that you're doing good things. And she would take these radio requests from all these random soldiers and all these different fake areas.

And they were actually using real names for some of them. Because like if they would deceive and steal mail or if they would have a war criminal, somebody that was in a prison camp, they would pump this information out of them. They would find out who these generals are. And they would come on. She would read, this one goes out to Gustav. who's in company X, X, X, X, X, whatever, your wife misses you at home.

This was your song. This is the song that she did. So mentally in these dudes' heads, they're hearing this stuff and thinking, well, there's people that so care about us at home, all while sewing the seeds of doubt by saying kind of vaguely negative things about how the war is going

to kind of be like, is this really worth it? I have all this at home. And they were also involved in leaflet drops. they used double agents and they would spread rumors to they would go into these different areas that were being occupied and they would send them into bars they would start drinking they would start talking loudly about different things as far as like either if they were from the other side they would be saying well this is what we know that the allied forces are going to be doing or they would send them in and much like something that we glossed over for the ghost army which i am said

that I forgot to put in there. But these guys were sewing all these different patches from all these different installations that they were supposed to be on all these different uniforms. So you add on building these big areas, you add on pumping in the noise, putting up all these different inflatables and different things to make it look like it.

They're constantly changing patches on uniforms to make it look like they're with these different companies. So whoever they were supposed to be shadowing or being basically like the body doubles for, they were creating all these different uniforms to make everything look like it. Yeah. So they were doing literally every down to the minute detail

of sewing patches for these other companies that they were a part of. So when they would do it, they would go into these pubs. Like I say, they would drink too much. They would start spilling secrets. All the secrets were just garbage. It was just bullshit that they were trying to get out to the people that way.

saying hey this is what germany's telling you this is actually what's going on believe me i'm a high-ranking german and just getting into everybody's heads they had a station um called gs1 and the guy that ran it it was basically like a pirate radio almost his the DJ's name was the chief and it was supposed to be like a station that would do like top secret german like some something that only the top secret German ranks would be able to listen to. So they would talk in different cadences as far as messages that the top German brass would be setting back and forth. But they were fucking stuff up left and right intentionally, like talking about different names of people that they knew. So all the SS generals that all this information would come back to and all the army generals and everything were hearing these things about these other generals.

and trying to make Hitler happy, trying to find... Oh, it was nothing... That's one of the reasons that it failed was it was just literally a constant competition for Hitler's inner circle. I was just trying to want up... There was no unity. Like, it was the Air Force,

trying to one up the propaganda department, trying to one up the Navy, trying to one up the tank corps and everything like that just to go ahead and curry favor. It got to the point where all of these generals were tuning in and not knowing who... the chief was, kind of like the whole QAnon bullshit,

they don't know who Q is, that they were arresting each other and trying to take them all into the regades. Like one of them would be crossing over another one in the street, and like I remember hearing about this on that top secret radio station, he did this, I'm going to arrest him, I'm going to turn him in. So they didn't know left from right at that point. They were so confused about what was going on.

And one of the things that apparently, I imagine the British people were probably I don't know I put it proper they didn't take to like dirty things very well and the chief had told this story on air

about a captain of a department over there that had had an orgy in his company and that he had used a helmet that had the stakes on top to jam it another dude's ass during the orgy.

Like the old like Ottoman Kaiser helmet. Yeah. Yeah. And just all this just this terribly funny pornographic story that he was telling

and the Brits were like hey, I get what you're doing here. The higher ups like I get what you're doing here I know what you're trying to do. Maybe let's tone it down on the porno stuff which I'm sure the germs are like oh shit that happened no way. But the Brits were like even we are going to go

a little too far with this. Let's not do that. There was another operation just to kind of show you like the depths that they would go just on the off chance that someone would find some information. So I'm going to get some of the details of this wrong, but I'll get the gist of it right, I think. There was an operation where the Brits were trying to disguise

the terms or time of a landing. This seems to be a common theme throughout this, of like one of their invasions. They took a, they found a dead body in Britain, dressed him in a military uniform did the, you remember how we've seen the movie, he's a handcuff attached to the wrist attached to the case, like the attache case.

Yeah. Did that, and inside it, it had information about details about the invasion. Stuff that was harder to pick out that you couldn't just read it and say, oh, I know what this is. It had to be believably coded, but able to be discerned what it was. They put him on a submarine, took him to, I want to say,

say it was the coast of, it was off the coast of Spain, where they knew the tide would be able to take them to shore and had a report come out at the same time about a admiral, I don't know if it was an admiral, someone high up that would have access that information. Someone's plane went down off this area. Submarine comes up, unloads the body with the stuff in the case, and he's in his uniform, He's got some identification on him The body finds its way over to the coast It's discovered in Spain

Just by normal people But then they see it's You know a white guy Everything they call the Spanish embassy or someone like that It works its way to the Spanish embassy Spanish embassy is like Sees all this information contacts German embassy German embassy gets it

Gets all this information And they're saying It might not be the sole creation of that But they're saying that they were able to notice noticeable absence of troop movement in this area when they had noticed it happening before and part of the information that was gleaned out of this document

that they put in there was that this is where an invasion was going to happen and they noticed that a build-up state in that area but that was think of all the things that could have just like a shark could have got the body yep it couldn't afloat it the people that found it could have just burned everything they would do that stuff just on the little chance that that succeeded Just literally, that man was a message in a bottle. And it just had to end up in the right hand.

A meat bottle. It dressed up a meat bottle and said about there. So, yeah, and that's just the depths that they went to is so, so funny that, and they were doing a great job of it. This GS1 channel was actually picked up by American forces before they entered the war. And they were deciphering these things. and they were sending them to Roosevelt and Roosevelt was hearing them and being like oh shit the Germans are trying some stuff

like this is we ended up picking off their high command and finally the British had to go to the Americans and go to Roosevelt but hey that's actually us sorry I know that your guys are working real hard because they picked it up but we did that that's not real that's the thing that I think kind of gets lost to

is that if you really think about it America's introduction into the European theater of war there was stuff in Italy and Africa but America's a real big introduction into the European war was Normandy. And I mean, we were over there and there were people, you know, American troops over there beforehand and so

we were still in the war because, you know, we declared war with Pearl Harbor. But we forget sometimes that Britain was doing this by themselves for a long time. We were in a completely different theater. We were in the South Pacific. So if it sounds like that they've got their ship figured out more than we did, it's because they did. They had more practice at it.

And they, this was one of the things where they knew that it was a really low cost for any sort of danger. It was something that they could set off from really far away and be able to be protected from it. Well, how do you think they felt about that Garbo guy? They're like, oh, the Germans are paying you. So we don't need to. Perfect. One of the last stories that came from this that I find just absolutely hilarious.

And I don't remember if it was the chief or if it was Vicky, but one of them played a, request from a German U-boat captain's wife. And this guy, they had found out, hadn't been home for two years to see his wife. And so they played the request, and it was like, you are my baby or something like that. And then they congratulated him on the birth of his new son.

And this dude's been stuck on a U-boat for two years. And he hears this. Oh, my God. And is so distraught and just so torn. up about it that the next time the U-boat comes up, he just gets off the U-boat and walks over and gets captured

and taken into prison camp because like everything that he thought he was fighting for at home they just lied to him about and he gets congratulations on a new child when he hasn't been home to do here. He just like surfaced the boat. They're like the fucking, the Navy's out there. Please just surfaced the boat.

You got two choices. Either I'm opening that hatch and I'm swimming out of here or you're going to drop me off because I'm done with this. Well, just kind of, as an example of how successful they were. So, you know, you don't think about this aspect, I think, is that after the war, the winning site will go in, and I think they'll do as much research as possible into, like, in this situation, the Allies would have gone into, like, the Germans, like, war records,

everything, and people were just pouring over documents. A little, a little bit of that intellectual reparations we were talking about. Exactly, because you have to find out what's been, you got to find out who's going to be charged for war crimes. What was on record? who was reporting to who. You try to find that kind of stuff out. So they're able to find out also through records of who Germany sent as spies to, like, Great Britain.

They find record of that. And I'm sure this record is not 100% either the whole record or anything. There were probably German spies in Britain. Absolutely. But out of this information that they were able to determine out of all the spies they know about, Britain was able to, I think, turn all but three of them. Really? into double agents.

Wow. They would know where they were landing because they had broken that enigma code. So they would have people waiting for when they came in on their little inflatable boat that got dropped up by a battleship or something like that. And they would be waiting to arrest these people and they're like, all right, you got two options.

One, we kill you because you are, there's something about, it doesn't fall under like prisoner of war. Spies don't fall under a prisoner of war thing. It's like an espionage rule. It's espionage. So you're able to execute people for espionage. So they're like, we can either execute you for espionage or you can work for us.

And these people would be like, okay, that seems pretty easy. And the simple fact that if you really look at it, like troops on our side, although, you know, captured troops, they were probably mistreated on an individual maybe basis. Yeah. I think for the most part, compared to like the Russians and the Germans, I think POWs probably had it pretty freaking good. I mean, as comparatively and everything, if you're going to be taken as a prisoner of war in World War II, British and American are going to be your best bets for being taken prisoner by them. Well, and especially if you're coming from a destitute country that you're fighting for.

Your standards are already going to be much lower. Oh, I know I said that the U-boat guy was the last story, but this just goes to the fuckery that Britain was playing on the Germans, which is, to me, it's one of those things where I'm, I guess it probably was something that helped them at some point because it kind of clogged up their airwaves. But they got on one of the German stations and they said that the German Ministry of Health was conducting an experiment. And they wanted all the German listeners to send a sample of urine to the German Ministry of Health. So they clogged up the German mail stream for like three weeks with people sending them.

bottles of piss to the German Ministry of Health to the point to where they had to shut down the postal service in Germany because they couldn't do anything because everybody just kept sending vials of urine for no reason. Can you imagine that different containers people would bring it in to try to it's not just like a Gatorade bottle

no it's not a vial and it's not sealed they're like it's just a plastic twist top bag or something and was there even plastic back then because everything probably not readily available so you're delivering these just vials of piss to these people. Half of them are probably shattering. And the germs are like, why the fuck is everybody sending this urine?

What is going on? We didn't ask for this. This is a leader of urine. I didn't have a smaller container. It's just so funny how it's war-driven for a lot of it. But you got to think a lot of these things are like, are these people dumb enough to do this? Do you think we have a hold?

Or was that like a test? Like how many people are listening to our station? Because someone could tell somebody something nowadays in our country. And regardless of the percentage of people, how minuscule you want to see the percentage of, we have enough people here to where if someone was just like, send in bottles of urine, you would get enough people doing that, that it would get the news and be an issue. Yeah, we haven't gotten smarter. It was just, I'm sure it was hyper aware because they were in the middle of a war.

But if we did that casually, if we, bought like a five minute commercial in like Mobile Alabama said hey they're testing for this or hey go ahead and send everybody in a sample of your urine anybody that got vaccinated we believe that there could be something in your urine that will tell us

something bad's going on half that town is sending their pissing or find out if you've been vaccinated against your will through aerosol or something like that send a sample of your urine we swim it and piss all right man well

I wouldn't mind going out on the P-thing. Yeah, the P-thing's a solid one to go out on it. It fits the show a little bit. All right. Well, I'm glad we did this, man. I hope you guys all learn something, and tune in next week. Got anything? I'm good. All right.

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