Operation Fortitude was a military deception operation by the Allied nations as part of Operation Bodyguard, an overall deception strategy during the buildup to the 1944 Normandy landings. Fortitude was divided into two subplans, North and South, and had the aim of misleading the German High Command as to the location of the invasion.
Juan Pujol Garcia, or agent Garbo, was key part of the Fortitude deception
Edinburgh Castle, the headquarters of the fictional British Fourth Army during Operation Fortitude
Operation Bodyguard was the code name for a World War II deception strategy employed by the Allied states before the 1944 invasion of northwest Europe. Bodyguard set out an overall stratagem for misleading the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht as to the time and place of the invasion. Planning for Bodyguard was started in 1943 by the London Controlling Section, a department of the war cabinet. They produced a draft strategy, referred to as Plan Jael, which was presented to leaders at the Tehran Conference in late November and, despite scepticism due to the failure of earlier deception strategy, approved on 6 December 1943.
Allied leaders Joseph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill at the Tehran Conference
German troop dispositions in France, June 1944
Memorandum on Bodyguard prepared for SHAEF in February 1944
Inflatable tanks were used during Operation Fortitude, one of the three major operations making up Bodyguard