Hoodwinking Hitler; The Normandy Deception

Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 1993. Second printing [stated] No price on DJ but appears to be a trade edition. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. x, [4], 263, [9] pages. Some edge soiling. Includes 28 chapters, Notes, Bibliography, and Index. Includes 8 black and white maps, and a Photo Essay following page 108. William B. Breuer (September 17, 1922 - August 18, 2010) was a soldier, journalist and American military historian, who specialized in the World War II epoch. He was the author of more than twenty-six books, ten of which have been main selections of the Military Book Club. Despite the mighty invasion force the Americans and British mustered in England in early 1944, a top Allied general warned: If the Germans have even a 48-hour advance notice of the time and place of the Normandy landings, we could suffer a monstrous catastrophe! Adolf Hitler planned to inflict such a massive bloodbath on the invaders that the Allies would agree to a negotiated peace with Nazi Germany. Hoodwinking Hitler is an action-packed, you-are-there account about a colossal and incredibly intricate deception scheme created and implemented by ingenious and diabolical minds, machinations intended to bamboozle the Germans on true Allied invasion plans. The global chicanery included electronic spoofing, double agents, diplomatic deceit, whispering campaigns, femmes fatales, camouflage, strategic feints, the French underground, murder plots, phony military installations, misleading bombing raids, sabotage, propaganda, traps, fake codes, and kidnap schemes. On D-Day, June 6, 1944, the Allies gained total surprise, mostly because of what Winston Churchill called the greatest hoax in history. Ultimate Allied victory in Europe was assured. Derived from a Kirkus review: Exciting description by Breuer of the vast superstructure of deception erected by the Allies to mislead Hitler about the focus of the D-Day invasion. Churchill called the deception, which succeeded in keeping huge German forces immobilized in Scandinavia and the Balkans, ``the greatest hoax in history'': As late as eight weeks after the Normandy invasion, the German Fifteenth Army was still waiting for a nonexistent attack in the Pas de Calais area from a nonexistent army of 1.5 million men under Patton's command. Meanwhile, an enormous force of more than 5,000 ships, 700 warships, and 150,000 men had been able to approach the Normandy beaches unobserved. No German leader expected the attack on the date it occurred, and Allied D-Day casualties, which had been expected to number more than 60,000, were in fact fewer than 12,000. Much of Breuer's material is familiar, but some of it is less familiar—for example, the covert buying of long-dormant Norwegian stocks and bonds in European financial centers, in order to suggest that Norway would be one focus of the Allied attack; and the extraordinarily thorough means by which, in the final days before D-Day, Britain closed itself down to prevent any last-minute leakage of information, a process that included opening diplomatic pouches and forbidding foreign diplomats to leave England. Breuer brings together the elements of deception in a compelling way, revealing more fully than individual narratives have done just how brilliant the Allied deception actually was.