> My favorite story of the entire PSYOP campaign concerns this warning leaflet. The time and place of the invasion was top secret. It was probably guarded more than any other D-Day secret. It could mean the life or death of 100,000 men. If this warning leaflet should somehow get out; perhaps from a worker hiding a valued souvenir, the location of the 16 towns on the leaflet would tell the Germans exactly where the invasion fleet was headed. How do you guarantee that this secret is kept? Easy! You lock all the printers up and basically refuse to let them leave. The printers were ordered into the Sun plant on 1 June to prepare the warning leaflet. The place was sealed and the managers, engravers, printers and workers were locked inside for the next five days. On 6 June, the doors were unlocked; the workers streamed out, saw the sun, and heard that France had been invaded.
Was wondering how they had done that without giving away strategy. Never would have thought of such a simple solution
What I learned from the folks over at WW2 in Real Time / TimeGhost History (check them out, they have dedicated D-Day channel with a 24 hour real time coverage coming up on June 6th), is the following: Someone with access to Overlord code words inadvertidly leaked them to authors of cross words. As a result, everything from Neptune over beach names to Overlord were solutions in cross-words. The leaker was arrested and interogated, upon release hebtold his collegue to burn the notebook containing those words. Only years after the death of the arrested, did the other person come clean (details on the WW2 channel). Truely crazy stuff!
I'm curious of their coverage of Operation Bagration, and the Soviet shell games around that. After all, they fooled the Germans to the point of stripping Army Group center of basically all armor! Another fun fact: Gehlen, the guy chosen to create the post-war BND, was a big head in Fremde Heere Ost. And as such directly involved in each and every German intel blunder on the eastern front. Only thing he had going for him: he was a staunch anti-communist.
The "colleague" was one of his students. Apparently the kids had lots of interactions with American GIs who were stationed in the area, and picked up code words from conversations they heard. When their headmaster, who created the crosswords, asked them for words that would fit his skeleton, some of the words they suggested were these top-secret ones. The headmaster had no idea of their provenance.
Was wondering how they had done that without giving away strategy. Never would have thought of such a simple solution