greatly to the morale of everyone in the organization.35 While waiting on the answers to the questions regarding the timing of the assault and size of force for OVERLORD, the staff began work on the September feint. This introduced them into the world of deception planning, and while the particular operation that was mounted achieved little by itself, it helped lay the foundation for later successes.
STARKY was the one element of COCKADE that required substantial resources. The other two schemes were notional, using agents and wireless traffic but not requiring assets such as real units or ships. One (TINDALL) was pointed in the direction of Norway from bases in Scotland with British forces, and the other (WADHAM) was supposed to suggest a threat to Brittany and the port of Brest by U.S. forces.
COCKCADE was an attempt at deception and as such required Morgan to work with Col. John Bevan, head of the London Controlling Section, which coordinated all Allied deception efforts in Europe. Bevan and Morgan established a deception planning group within COSSAC with Maj. Roger Hesketh serving as link between COSSAC and the London Controlling Section. Hesketh, an Oxford-educated barrister and amateur architect, served in intelligence throughout the war and wrote an excellent postwar account of the FORTITUDE deception campaign that remained classified until the 1980s and was not published until 1999.36
Deceiving the enemy is a bit of a black art, and Morgan needed to learn at least some of it for STARKY. As he discovered, the goal is not to make your enemy think something: it is to make your enemy do something specific that will help your plans. The more one understands the enemy’s worldview, beliefs, preconceptions, and strategic concerns, the more likely it is that the actions you persuade the enemy to take will be desirable ones. The enemy may or may not “actually believe in the false state of affairs that you want to project. It is enough if you can make him so concerned [about the possibility] that he feels that he must provide for it.”37
The deceiver also has to choose which channels of information that lead to the enemy’s decision makers he or she is going to use. They must be channels that the enemy has established and trusts, that can be manipulated by the deceiver and can be monitored to measure success. As we will see, STARKY did not contribute to the Germans’ belief in an immediate Allied attack across the Channel, nor did it fully use the best communications channels for selling the story to the Germans.
Morgan’s outline plan for STARKY was finished within a week or so of his formal appointment with help from Bevan and the London Controlling Section. It was submitted to the COS on 3 June and approved on 23 June.
This was the first, but not last, instance of Morgan encountering the fundamental problem of his assignment. He was the chief of staff to a supreme commander who did not exist and for operations whose plans were not yet approved. As such, he had authority to plan; his command encompassed Norfolk House. He could not issue orders to combat units or operational commands—often commanded by officers senior to him. Additionally, the British Army at the time did not generally recognize the use of “by direction” authority in the same way as did the U.S. Army. In the U.S. military, a commander could delegate certain responsibilities to subordinate officers—the issuing of routine orders, for example. Additionally, the commander’s chief of staff could, on many occasions, act in the name of the commander, serve as an ambassador or envoy to other senior commanders or political decision makers, and issue orders in the commander’s absence. This is “by direction” authority, as the orders are signed by the subordinate with the notation “by direction.” In 1943 the British Army had no equivalent process; commanders issued orders, and staff officers did not.
Morgan could cajole, request, suggest, and plead, but he couldn’t order. Neither Bomber Command nor the Eighth Air Force diverted squadrons from their missions over Germany for STARKY—although some training missions were flown over France. The Royal Navy declined to provide two old battleships for shore bombardment purposes—their response to Morgan’s request was described as an “explosion that shattered the cloistral calm of the Chiefs of Staff committee room.”38 Courtesy of Combined Operations, there were eight small commando raids carried out on the Channel coast in July and August, out of fourteen planned, that were intended to suggest that information of the sort needed just before an invasion was being sought.39
“D-day” for STARKY included a major British Army exercise, HARLEQUIN, centering on an embarkation rehearsal and using troops from the British XII Corps and Canadian I Corps, a total of four divisions.40 Morgan ordered that the troops be told that they were participating in an exercise, not the invasion. This drew strong protests from those responsible for propaganda directed at the Germans. They argued that telling troops the truth undermined efforts to persuade the Germans that an invasion might be imminent. Morgan “stood firm by his policy of telling the truth to the troops.”41
More than eighty squadrons of Fighter Command and Eighth Air Force fighters were assembled for the anticipated air battle. “The civilian economy of southeastern England was disrupted by pulling together the genuine light shipping needed,” real landing craft being in short supply. The necessary security measures restricting the movement of civilians and shifting troop locations were put in place for parts of the South of England starting in August.42
Wednesday, 8 September 1943, was fine and fair. The troops for the operation gathered in their assembly points and were marched to the embarkation sites, where they were promptly turned around and marched back, as there were not enough assault ships or craft available for the trip across the Channel. The fifty-ship convoy that had been collected, commanded by Hughes-Hallett, formed up and headed toward Boulogne, mine sweepers in front. Squadrons of fighter aircraft roared overhead looking for the enemy. At the appropriate moment everyone turned around and headed back to England. It all worked perfectly. In short, everyone did their job … except the Germans, who were nowhere to be found and who apparently barely noticed the effort. What the Germans had noticed was what Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt’s staff called “somewhat too obvious preparations for attacking the Channel front, which are at the same time conspicuously slow in reaching completion.”43 The fact that the little convoy was sailing at the same time as a series of landings in Italy were occurring, culminating with the amphibious assault at Salerno the next day, meant the Germans were paying much more attention to the Mediterranean.
If the goals of the operation were to create an air battle over the Channel and to hold German divisions in northern France, it must be ranked a failure. The other two components of COCKADE (TINDALL and WADHAM) achieved even less. It seems fair to conclude that the Germans had seen enough of these demonstrations to not be deceived by another convoy sailing in broad daylight in the general direction of the French coast without any of the preliminary “softening-up” attacks by air and naval forces. Additionally, as Hesketh pointed out, on 6 June 1944 the German air force was not committed to the battle until after the first landing had occurred.44
Rundstedt, the German commander in chief in the West, expressed concern about the preparations going on in England in general and viewed STARKY as a very real rehearsal for invasion. However, the German High Command recognized that “the Schwerpunkt [main effort or primary focus] of the enemy attack on the mainland of Europe lies in the Mediterranean and in all probability will remain there.”45 It pulled out ten of Rundstedt’s divisions between May and October. It wasn’t until 3 November that the highest levels of German command changed their mind with the issuing of Fuehrer Directive 51, which attempted to shift the emphasis for defense to the Western Front.
Furthermore, using the Pas-de-Calais as the target for a deception effort at the same time it was being presented as the intended site of the invasion was problematic. As Hesketh points out, “To conduct and publicise a large-scale exercise against an objective that one really intended to attack during the following year would hardly suggest a convincing grasp of the principle of surprise.”46 There were, however, many benefits and lessons that accrued to operations in 1944, some of which did not directly affect COSSAC, as
