Fool the Germans with a feared general
Considered proud and arrogant, American General George Patton was especially feared by the leaders of the German army, who recognized his military talents following his successes in North Africa and during the invasion of Sicily in 1943. .
As part of the preparation for the landing, the Allies therefore decided to involve Patton in Operation Fortitude, which aimed to make the Germans believe that the assault would take place not in Normandy, but in Pas-de-Calais. , a region located closer to England. They thus created from scratch, on paper, a fictitious army which was led by Patton to attack the German troops.
Fake equipment, including inflatable assault tanks and fake planes, had been installed on land in Britain, with vehicles tasked with leaving tracks in the area to make it appear that major movements were taking place.
The Allies had also generated fictitious radio communications to make believe the maneuver, which also involved a supposed British landing in Norway, a possible assault in the Mediterranean and a landing in Brittany.
All of these diversionary maneuvers had the effect of encouraging the Germans to leave significant armed forces outside Normandy, which helped the Allies establish their beachhead in the region. An entire army even remained until August in the Pas-de-Calais region, still waiting for an attack. In the meantime, General Patton had arrived in Normandy, commanding an army in July as part of the battle which was to lead, a month later, to the liberation of Paris.
Who was the real Private Ryan?
Almost everyone knows the film. Saving Private Ryan. After surviving the deadly landing on Omaha Beach, the bloodiest of the landing beaches, an American unit is sent to the front to find the last survivor of the Ryan brothers so that he can be repatriated to the United States.
What is less known is that the main line of Steven Spielberg’s feature film is inspired by the story of the Niland brothers, an American family comprising four brothers. Shortly after the landing, American authorities learned that two of the Niland brothers had been killed, on June 6 and 7 respectively. And a third brother, a pilot in the US Air Force, has already been presumed dead for several weeks in the Pacific, where the Americans are facing Japan.
The American government then decided to repatriate to the United States the fourth brother, who had been parachuted into Normandy with the 101e airborne division. This will be done, but we will discover in 1945 that the one who served in the Pacific had in fact survived, that he had been taken prisoner by the Japanese army, very often without pity for the prisoners.