SWANSONG

Having built up his organization for more than three years,

It was inconceivable that Dudley Clarke would allow A Force to miss out on the biggest show of them all. As conceived in the Bodyguard plan, deceptions in the Middle East, Mediterranean, Adriatic and Italy would play a key role in supporting the Neptune landings by deterring the Germans from moving reserves to Normandy. They also had an important part in paving the way for the Anvil landings in the south of France scheduled for mid-August.

The part of Bodyguard covering the eastern Mediterranean was codenamed Zeppelin. It was drawn up by Dudley Clarke and authorized in February 1944. The operation was, Clarke ordered, to be A Force’s swansong. With every mission A Force had thus far attempted, there had always been a note of caution to preserve the organization for a future date and therefore not to do anything that would seriously compromise its special means agents. With Zeppelin, every stop was to be pulled out to keep the deception rolling for as long as possible, no matter what the cost in terms of agents blown and so on. This was the big one they had been waiting for and, as the self-styled guru on deception, Clarke did not want to disappoint.

Zeppelin’s aim was to retain as many German troops in the Balkans and Greece before Neptune as possible, and for as long as possible afterwards. The first stage was set for 23 March 1944, when the British would attack Crete and western Greece or the Dalmatian coast. It would be supported by a Russian attack on 21 April somewhere in the Black Sea.

The British attack would be carried out by the Twelfth Army, which was in large part notional, the fruit of the long-running Cascade deception. This army consisted of only five real divisions, but was swollen by three factual brigades posing as full divisions, and four entirely notional divisions that existed only in terms of the double agent reports, collections of dummy vehicles, camps and the requisite amount of radio chatter provided by small teams of specialist radio operators driving round the theatre in trucks.1

Tobruk became the base from which a notional attack on Crete was planned. The harbours in Cyrenaica were filled with dummy landing craft,

The airfields were packed with decoy aircraft and radio transmitters worked overtime, simulating a hive of military endeavour. An appeal went out for local guides and maps of the target area were churned out by printers known for their lax security and anti-British sympathies. In terms of providing ‘special means’, the star performers in Zeppelin were the A Force agents Lambert (still operating the Cheese transmitter), the Lemons, Pessimist C and, in particular, the Greek double agent, Quicksilver.

Greek troops were given extensive assault training and their zeal to liberate the homeland was freely reported in the local press. Bombing missions were carried out in the Balkans and beach reconnaissance patrols were sent to spy out potential landing grounds in Crete. Meanwhile the British sabotage organization, SOE, and its American counterpart, the OSS, contacted local resistance groups and tried, with occasional success, to arm them in preparation for the Allied attack, although unfortunately this led to a state of virtual civil war between various resistance groups in Greece. To lend credence to the idea that the attack would be coordinated with a Russian assault in the Black Sea, exchange visits were noisily arranged between British and Soviet officers. As the target dates for Zeppelin approached, the double agents suddenly reported a delay, which they put down to the stalling of the Allied advance in Italy. A new target date was set for the British attack of 14 April, with the Russian assault postponed to 21 May. However, due to Russian insistence that the attacks ought to be synchronized, the British attack was again postponed in April and set back to 21 May. This change of strategy was blamed on the mutiny of Greek troops in early April. Apparently Greek politicians had been arguing about the exact nature of government and whether or not there should be a plebiscite to determine the return of the exiled King George II. This had unsettled the troops and when they learned that the invasion had been postponed tensions spilled over, forcing the British to surround the Greeks with tanks. The insubordination was so bad that some of the Greek units, it was said, had had to be disbanded completely.

On 8 April Quicksilver reported ‘great trouble’, saying that the army and part of the navy had mutinied and the Provost Marshal had been shot dead in Cairo. On 16 April he speculated that the British were so upset with the Greeks that they were considering offering the Turks a free hand in northeastern Greece if they joined the Allied cause. Quicksilver was particularly worried by this development because his family lived in Thrace, the area most threatened by a Turkish invasion. Time and time again, Quicksilver implored his German case officer to make sure his family were evacuated in the event of an invasion. All of this, of course, was a figment of Dudley

Clarke’s imagination. To support Quicksilver he had Pessimist C report that the British were sending tanks and guns to Turkey.2

As the 21 May deadline approached, a new plan was fed to the double agents. Following the nonsense with the Greeks, it was said that the original plans were cancelled and that the Americans and British now planned to land in Istria on 19 June. On the same day, the Russians would assault Varna on the Black Sea and the Seventh United States Army would attack the Gulf of Lyons. This took the deception past the crucial Overlord D-Day and successfully helped pin German forces in south-eastern Europe as planned.

Zeppelin can be considered a genuine success, and probably the high point of everything A Force had worked towards. At the end of the mission Dudley Clarke could report that no German divisions had been sent north before Neptune and that those sent afterwards arrived too late to be of decisive help.

The reason it was successful can be explained by real German fears for the Balkans and Greece. The Germans feared that their supporters in south-east Europe might defect at the sight of the first Allied tank, and one of the outcomes of Zeppelin was the German occupation of their supposed ally, Hungary, on 19 March 1944. It was also clear that the Germans had taken in the long-running order of battle deception, which had proved the keystone for all A Force’s successes. In February 1944 Operation Cascade had been replaced by Plan Wantage, an even more obvious hoax calling for 26 bogus divisions in the run-up to Neptune.3 Of these 21 were found in German reports as genuine. In fact, across the whole Mediterranean theatre, the Germans had been led to overestimate Allied strength by something like a quarter of a million men.