American Sector. Normandy landings American Sector. 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 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.
Early revisions in January suggested a fictional buildup of troops in southern England with the hope of drawing German attention to the Calais region.
Colonel David Strangeways , head of Montgomery's R Force deception staff, was unimpressed with the approach. He was widely critical of the original plan and eventually rewrote the Fortitude deception with a focus on creating a more realistic threat. The operation was intended to divert Axis attention away from Normandy and, after the invasion on 6 June , to delay reinforcement by convincing the Germans that the landings had been purely a diversionary attack.
Fortitude was one of the major elements of Operation Bodyguard , the overall Allied deception stratagem for the Normandy landings. Bodyguard's main objectives were to ensure that the Germans would not increase troop presence in Normandy and to do so by promoting the appearance that the Allies would attack in other locations. It consisted of a wide range of deceptions ranging across the European front, with Operation Fortitude representing the main effort to misdirect the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht German High Command to believe in specific mainland invasion objectives.
The problem facing the Allies was that France was the most logical choice for an invasion into mainland Europe. Therefore, the Allied high command had only a small geographical area across which to mislead the German defences. Montgomery, commanding the Allied landing forces, knew that the crucial aspect of any invasion was the ability to enlarge a beachhead into a full front.
