German Command Never Expected American Deception To Hide 12th Army Group Movement скачать в хорошем качестве

German Command Never Expected American Deception To Hide 12th Army Group Movement

August 1st, 1944. 14:37 hours, Fifteenth Army Headquarters, Pas-de-Calais. Major Klaus Reinhardt pressed his forehead against the cool glass of the observation room window, watching the distant white cliffs of Dover through his binoculars. For the seventy-third consecutive day, he was counting Allied landing craft. Forty-two LSTs lined the harbor. Seventeen more than yesterday. The invasion was coming. Here. To Calais. It had to be. Before we jump back in, tell us where you're tuning in from, and if this story touches you, make sure you're subscribed because tomorrow, I've saved something extra special for you! What Reinhardt could not know, what no German intelligence officer from Berlin to the Atlantic coast could possibly comprehend, was that he was staring at plywood and canvas. The landing craft were inflatable rubber. The tanks were scaffolding draped with painted fabric. The entire port bustling with activity visible from twenty-one miles across the English Channel was a stage set, and Major Reinhardt, along with the entire German High Command, was its most captive audience. Twenty-seven miles to the southwest, concealed beneath camouflage netting in the forests of Hampshire, Lieutenant General Omar Bradley's First United States Army Group was dissolving like morning fog. Not retreating. Not defeated. Simply ceasing to exist because it had never existed at all. The twelve divisions, the hundreds of tanks, the endless convoys of supply trucks that German reconnaissance had meticulously catalogued for eight months were ghosts given form through radio transmissions, falsified documents, and the most audacious deception operation in military history. The German Fifteenth Army in August 1944 represented the most powerful defensive force remaining in Western Europe. General der Infanterie Hans von Salmuth commanded nineteen divisions totaling two hundred and thirty thousand men stretched along two hundred and ten miles of French and Belgian coastline. The 344th Infantry Division held the immediate Calais sector with fourteen thousand soldiers.