Patton's phantom army never held a rifle, yet for roughly seven weeks after D-Day it kept about twenty German divisions staring at the wrong coast. Its tanks were rubber and canvas, its landing craft were wood frames, and its divisions existed only on paper and on the radio. The Germans would never see a single soldier of it.
This documentary follows Operation Fortitude South, the deception that built the First United States Army Group in south-east England and pointed it at the Pas-de-Calais. It covers the Double Cross system and the Twenty Committee, the double agent Garbo and his 27 invented sub-agents, the failed Operation Starkey of 1943, the phantom fleets of Operations Taxable and Glimmer on the night of June 5 and 6, the German Fifteenth Army that stayed in place, Hitler's conference at Margival, Operation Cobra, and the fall of Boulogne and Calais.
Built from intelligence histories, Ultra decrypts, German war diaries and Allied command records, not from the legends. Every date, unit and number is drawn from the record.
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