How did the allies try to deceive the Germans of their plans for d-day?

Answer 1

This was actually very tricky of them.

First of all it is important to know that the British had the best intelligence office in the world, and they had knowledge of every single German spy that infiltrated their ranks, but they didnt do anything about them, instead they used those German spies against Hitler and himself.

While planning d-day, they had to make sure the Germans did not know the landing location, otherwise it would have been to heavily defended by German Troops. So the British mislead them by sending out hundreds of messages through the German spies about the location of d-day, in these messages were location like Italy, Turky, South-France and Scandinavia.

Now comes the tricky part, they ON PURPOSE send out 1 message, just 1!!!, that the location would be Normandy, this message was (according to plan of course) intercepted by the Germans, but the wiseguys in command of the German forces did not believe this message, since there was tons of communication about other locations and only one about Normandy. The Germans were foolish enough to not see the trap and forgot about Normandy to reinforce other locations.

The greatest part of the deception plan was probably FUSAG (The first US Army Group) nominally commanded by Patton, this was to cross the Channel from SE England to the Pas de Calais, the shortest, most obvious (& therefore the best defended) crossing point. Apparrently there is little substance of the Germans having any credible spying network in Britain in WW2. And, just to make it clear, FUSAG was entirely ficticious.

The Allies used many different tactics in order to fool the Germans.

First, they set up an entire fake army new Pas de Calais, in order to make the Germans think that that location would be the major landing point. They made inflatable boats, tanks, fake barracks, and also invited journalists to come write about the massive camp that was sent up.

They also sent out fake messages that they knew the Germans would be able to decode, which made them think Pas de Calais was the real attack point.

The night before the invasion, Allies sent out thousands of fake paratroopers all across the French coast, in order to cause chaos and panic in the German defenses. Some of these fake paratroopers even blew up on impact, which caused the Germans to believe they were being bombed as well as being invaded.

Answer 2

They built fake tanks and trucks in East Anglia and further up the English coast. They had Gen. George Patton driving around far from the assembled troops doing speaking engagements and being very obvious far from the massed troops in the south. They even arranged a real courier officers body to be found with very realistic(but fake ) plans for an attack on Calais.