 Chris Mason. Hello and welcome to Remembering the Great Crusade, 80th anniversary D-Day discussion. I'm Dr. Chris Mason at the U.S. Army War College and I will be the moderator for today's program. Before we begin, I would like to thank Army University Press, Army University Films, the U.S. Army War College, the Army Heritage and Education Center, the National Archives in Washington, D.C. and the Imperial War Museum in Great Britain for their generous support in creating today's program. Today's panelists are Dr. Hattie Hearn at the Imperial War Museum, who will be discussing the buildup of American troops in Britain in preparation for D-Day. Dr. Christopher Carey of Army University Films who will be addressing deception operations and the legacy of D-Day. And Mr. Alan Knechtman at the Army Heritage and Education Center in Carlisle who will be presenting Overlord and Ultra, an examination of an operational use of ultra during the invasion of Normandy. I would like to encourage our audience to please use the chat function of this platform at any time to post comments and questions for our panelists. First up today is Dr. Hattie Hearn. Dr. Hearn is curator of the American Air Museum at the Imperial War Museum, Duxford. She is responsible for the museum's substantial collection of aircraft and objects relating to the story of American air power from the First World War to the present day. She also manages the American Air Museum website, which records stories of the men and women of the U.S. Army Air Forces and the memories of the British people who befriended them. Dr. Hearn's PhD explored the material culture of the U.S. Eighth Air Force and its enduring impact on the heritage of the East of England. Dr. Hearn, welcome. And thank you for taking the time to be with us here today. I'll turn the microphone over to you. Thanks for that introduction, Chris. I'm just going to share my screen. Hopefully you can all see the slides. So I'm going to jump straight into the presentation today with a look at one of our Imperial War Museum's most recent acquisitions. And the story behind this parachute really symbolizes the relationships that were formed between British people and Americans in the buildup to D-Day or the Great Crusade. So while conducting rehearsal operations in the spring of 1944, American airborne troops were stationed across counties in the East Midlands of England. And one of these small towns and villages was the market town of Hinkley in Leicestershire. And the town played host to the 376th Parachute Field Artillery Battalion of the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment. When the 376th weren't training, they spent a lot of their downtime in the local pub, the new inn on Castle Street. And over a few months, they got to know the landlords and the landlady of the pub really well, Dina and William. And as D-Day drew closer, the 376th were preparing to move down to the South Coast to join the invasion force. But before their departure, D-Battery gifted the landlords an auxiliary parachute which you can see here, which they decorated with illustrations and dedicated with a message of thanks. And they'd also signed the parachute with their names. The parachute was then hung in the pub as a reminder of that enduring friendship. And one of those to sign the parachute was 24-year-old Private Robert Medfield Scott who's pictured here. And he was from Laramie, Wyoming. So the 376th ultimately didn't end up taking part in D-Day. They'd suffered such heavy casualties at Anzio as felt like they deserved a rest. However, they did take part in Operation Market Garden of September 1944. And a month into that operation, Dina and William, the landlords of the new inn got word that Robert Scott had been killed in action. Heartbroken, they took the parachute off display. And 80 years on, we were lucky enough to have been donated the parachute by their daughter. So in all, close to two million Americans are estimated to have passed through Britain during the Second World War. In a country of a population estimated to be around 48 million in 1944, the presence of so many Americans couldn't have been missed. And this influx of Americans is colloquially referred to as a friendly invasion of Britain. And for most Britons, this would have been their first time encountering an American. And likewise, for many Americans, this would have been the first time leaving home. And wartime England would have been like, unlike anything else they'd, any other place that they visited before. And it was a period of huge cultural and social change for the country. So the biggest enclaves of Yanks were in the east of England. And that was home to the eighth and ninth air forces. You can see on this map, the blue dots represent the eighth air force bases and the ninth air force are represented by the red dots. And these airfields are over 200, overall, that were built and occupied by USAF, could house around 2,500 American men, many times the population, populations of the nearest towns and villages. And in all, almost half a million men served with the USAF in England. And as the invasion drew closer, infantry troops began to gather in the southern triangle of England from Dorset and Devon up into the Midlands. And there was also an important Northwest supply corridor to Liverpool and Manchester. And even though it's not shown in this map, there was also a dense concentration of Americans in Northern Ireland, particularly in 1944 as the invasion drew closer. So as well as air bases, halls and country houses became headquarters for commanders and planners. Other buildings were converted to hospitals or rest homes for war weary airmen. Bonds and outbuildings would house teams of truck drivers whilst even some buildings were requisitioned to cater for specialist bakery units which would have provided fresh bread for the airmen and the soldiers in England. So where did it all begin? So the arrival of the first American troops began shortly after the US entered the war. Operation Balero was the code name of the United States military troop buildup in preparation for a cross-channel invasion. And that invasion plan was Operation Roundup which it was hoped could be implemented in mid 1943. Or the less likely plan which was Operation Sledgehammer which would have been executed in the fall of 1942. So the Balero plan began in April, 1942 and it set in motion a huge movement of men from the US to Britain. And while both Roundup and Sledgehammer were ultimately shelved in favour of Operation Torch which as we know was the Allied invasion of North Africa, these troop movements and the infrastructure that was constructed to support them laid the groundwork for Operation Overlord. And speaking of groundwork, some of the first Americans to arrive in Britain were part of the Black Aviation Engineering Battalions who were tasked with building airfields for the US Army Air Forces. Now in all, around 150,000 of the US troops stationed here were Black. And unlike their White Comrades, Black personnel were largely consigned to service and supply roles. Their work was characterised by long hours of physical labour and uncomfortable accommodation. But their importance in facilitating the American war ethic cannot be overstated. And for the rural population of England, the arrival of Black Americans led to their first encounters not only with an American but also with a Black person. So at this time, the Black population of Britain was relatively small and was mainly concentrated in urban areas. But for the most part Black troops were warmly received by the British people. And in the museum we tell the story of James Waddle who was one of the men who came over and served with an aviation engineering battalion. But as more White Americans arrived, so too did the US military's policy of segregation. And rules were established by US commanders that restricted entry to local pubs and social facilities and even whole towns to certain nights of the week. So in my local town, for instance, certain days of the week would have been left for Black troops and other nights only White troops could visit. So this kind of informal policy of segregation made its way over to the UK. So in September, so skipping ahead there. So the most likely place for Brits to encounter Americans would have been during their free time. Hubs once the domain of local villages welcomed curious Americans who had to grow accustomed to warm, mild and bitter, which so many Americans talk less and fondly about. And photos in our collection show Americans visiting towns and cities across the country. They explored cathedrals and castles, went to the theater and rode bicycles through the countryside of what they described as merry old England. However, it's also worth bearing in mind that the average age of the American soldier participating in D-Day was only 26. And where do young Americans visiting Britain for the first time go? Well, that answer is London. The capital was the largest city in the world. And despite the toll that the Blitz had taken, it still offered much for the visiting American. The first stop for new arrivals was usually Piccadilly Circus in the heart of the city. And Piccadilly Circus and a less favorable reputation as the center of sex trade that catered predominantly to Americans. And these women were nicknamed Piccadilly Commandos. As a result, venereal disease was one of the biggest concerns of the US medical department who worked to introduce special recreation programs in a bid to divert soldiers' attention away from sexual relations and to some tamer recreational pursuits. One of the major ways that they did this was by cooperating with the American Red Cross and in Piccadilly, an American Red Cross service club called Rainbow Corner opened to cater for American GIs. It could seat 2,000 people and when it first opened in November 1942, the key was ceremoniously thrown away to symbolize that the club would be open 24 hours a day until the war ended. So by this time, there were Red Cross service clubs opening up in towns and cities across Britain. But these facilities were only available to men on leave. So enter the club mobile. Club mobiles entered service across the country to bring a taste of home to the US personnel. They were converted London buses essentially and they were kitted out with doughnut making machines and coffee making facilities. And they were manned by a team of four club mobiles. The rear of the trucks were also fitted out with a lounge containing a record player, hometown magazines and a map of the USA. And in itself, it was recognized that the appearance of an American woman on a lonely airfield would in itself be a morale boost. And these women underwent a really rigorous process of selection and training in the States, primarily at the American University in Washington DC. And the club mobiles story is just one of thousands, represent kind of one of thousands of American women who served in Britain. And their roles varied from nursing to running recreational programs to even performing in the USO to military roles with the army and navy. And their stories often go unrecognized in this wider picture of the friendly invasion. So in September, 1943, the Red Cross club mobiles were really expanding their service and gearing up for the planned invasion. And one way, one of the ways they did this was to start serving coffee and doughnuts at the Liverpool Docks to the disembarking troops. And it's worth noting too that there was quite a lot of rivalry at this point between the Americans and the British personnel. Even though Americans were very much taught about how to treat their British counterparts, bites still broke out occasionally. And there was a resentment among the British troops against their better paid and better dressed Americans. And the phrase overpaid, oversex and over here was a derogatory way of describing the American's presence. However, there were one group in society who remember the Americans much more fondly. They remember their generosity with chocolate, gum and comics. And the children's cries of Gottsony gumchum were often met by the retort, gottsister, mister. And so we've got one interesting story in our collection and that's this collection of chewing gum wrappers which were collected by a 10 year old boy living in Oxford called Michael Stockton. And he collected them and exchanged them with friends in the playground and then donated to them, donated them to us after the war. And the American troops were also very fondly remembered for a popular tradition that emerged during the war where the Americans hosted Christmas parties on the American bases for young children in the local area. And for many children, this was their first time tasting ice cream, peanut butter and even cranberry sauce. These are foods that we now consider to be staple parts of the British diet. So by early 1944, Britain is just one huge training ground. And as a result of this, of all of the training exercises that are going on, some compromises have to be made in Britain. And one of the most poignant examples of the sacrifices made by both Americans and British comes in late 1943 when 3,000 people were evacuated from slapped in sands and the surrounding villages in South Devon in order to provide a training ground for the American army to prepare for the D-Day landings. And these local people, some of whom had never left their homes and villages before had just six weeks to pack up everything and move away. And many never actually returned to their villages and they were making way for 15,000 US troops who over the following months engaged in a battle exercise often involving live ammunition. And in April, 1944, this training culminated in a dresser hearth for the planned landings on Utah Beach known as Exercise Tiger. However, the exercise would end in disaster when a combination of a German e-boat attack and friendly fire led to enormous casualties. And at the museum, we tell the story of Harry H. Evans who was a combat medic taking part in the exercise aboard LST 289. And he was awarded the bronze star with a Viva Vala for aiding the soldiers and sailors wounded by the torpedo attacks. He wrote the name of his LST and the date of the attack on the belt he wore when landing on Utah Beach on D-Day. However, despite this tragedy, the rigorous training it slapped in helped to reduce the number of casualties on D-Day itself. So while 749 soldiers died in Exercise Tiger, only 175 US soldiers were killed or wounded at Utah Beach on D-Day. So I wanna end my presentation on a slightly more positive note and that is the topic of wartime romance. So in our collections, we have plenty of examples of British women marrying American soldiers. And this is just one example here, the story of Peggy Albertson who joined the Women's Land Army in 1943. And it was during her time serving in the rural East Anglican countryside that she met her husband to be at a dance, a Red Cross dance at Burley Air Force Base. And they later married and she waited until the end of the war like thousands of other British women to get her visa so that she could go over to the States. And she noted that by the time she got over to America and was reunited with her husband, she barely recognized him because he was in civilian clothes and it was the first time she'd ever seen him in civis. So in all more than 60,000 British women married Americans and most of those would immigrate to the United States with their new husbands. And I've also included this photo here which shows a tent with the message, sorry, Jean had to go, Johnny. And for many of British women that was the end of their relationships, during D-Day itself, the men were suddenly left the country often without any warning. And for many British women, their sweethearts would end up being lost in the ensuing battles. So as much as love was certainly on the cards between many of these women up, there was also heartbreak. So just to finish, I wanna quickly talk about the friendly invasion 80 years on. So there are plenty of tangible reminders of D-Day in Britain today. Just one example is this brick wall in Southampton which is where the invasion forces departed from. And the wall is covered by signatures from American soldiers. And I found this one particularly poignant. It's by a man called Delbert W. Smith who was serving with the 424th Regiment as a driver and he wrote his name on the wall. But he also wrote the names of his wife and his newborn daughter. And the photo of the bricks on the bottom right are actually in my hometown. So my local area had a number of US Army Air Force bases and the men in their spare time would often inscribe their names. So that's just a tangible reminder of the American presence so close to my home. So obviously the American presence in Britain, the friendly invasion is commemorated in memorials. It's just scattered across the country and meticulously maintained by armies of volunteers. We also have two cemeteries, Brockwood Cemetery which holds 468 US war dead and Maddingley Cemetery which is the final resting place of 3,811 US servicemen and women. And finally, we have the American Air Museum which is where I work. I'm the curator of this fantastic organization and within the museum we tell the stories of some of these men and women, both British and American who served alongside each other. And most importantly of all, we're a memorial to the 30,000 Americans who died while flying or serving from Britain who will never be forgotten. So I'd like to end my presentation there. Thank you very much for listening. And if you have any questions please drop them in the chat. Thank you, Dr. Hearn. I'm sure there will be a lot of questions and comments from our audience about the friendly invasion but I'll hold onto those until all of our panelists have spoken today. Next up on our panel is Dr. Christopher Carey who will be presenting Why D-Day Matters 80 Years Later. Dr. Carey writes and directs documentaries for Army University films. Trained as a historian, Dr. Carey collaborates with military units, researchers at the National Archives and Library of Congress and enjoys speaking on why the film Predator, released in 1987, is an allegory about the Vietnam War. Dr. Carey's most recent films include D-Day, Planning the Impossible, released in 2023, and Deception at D-Day, released in 2022, both of which are available on YouTube and DVIDS DIVIDS. Thank you for being with us today and over to you, Dr. Carey. Great, thank you, Dr. Mason. Can you see my slides, okay? Yes. Great, thank you. Okay, this photo appropriately comes to us from the National Archives and it's one of the few in color that we had prior to D-Day. You can see kind of down here in the right, they're down by the water and they are preparing to get in the ships. So this probably isn't gonna surprise our audience too much here today but people love World War II. World War II sells, whether it's scholastic or popular histories, they often sell above other wars and I think part of the reason that this occurs is in the mind of the general public, the Revolutionary War is almost like this fantasy different world, different set and the American Civil War of course is sort of in the similar vein, armies lining up, marching at each other with Napoleonic styles and again, I don't think that that necessarily relates to the general public today. Now, World War I of course is closer time-wise and it's the period where we begin to see the development of the fighting for World War II but again, most people associate that with trench warfare not so much with World War II. So I think another reason why this is such a big thing in the general public is it's seen as a just war. So we often feel as though Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan started the war with their invasions which of course in many ways they do. For the Americans, Pearl Harbor is the rallying call December 7th, 1941, a day that is gonna live an infamy and people remember that date as the day that the United States was attacked, unprovoked, right, whether it rightly or wrongly that's true but that's the day that this whole thing started for the Americans and fighting against the Nazis, it's very easy to vilify given their war atrocities that they were committing against civilian populations throughout your civilian and soldier alike. And all of this I think kind of combines and makes sort of a romanticized notion of World War II and as I chose this picture right here, another one that we got from the National Archives, it wasn't necessarily like that for the soldier sailors and airmen that participated in the war. So today I wanna talk about the deception operations at D-Day so I thought we should start here by showing the overall plan. You can see where everybody starts and where we're gonna be going down here to Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword. And I really like this map in particular because I want us to pay attention and kind of keep this in mind for the rest of the talk about over here in the Straits of Dover. And this is the closest point between England and the continent and yet the Allies are gonna choose to go the longer way and we're gonna talk about why they do that here shortly. Also, the reason I call this slide the D-Day is it's important to remember that all operations have a D-Day. They all do, it's the starting point of the operation but everyone today refers to the Normandy landings, the invasion of France as D-Day. That's, it's just that iconic. So once the Allies are gonna land here on our beaches right up here, there's three things that they really need to do pretty quickly and this is the plan as of February of 1944. So the first thing that they really need to do is they're gonna link up. So you've got the Americans here split over here on Utah and then over here on Omaha, which is gonna be the worst of all of your beaches. And then you've got the Canadians and the British over here. So the first thing they need to do is they need a link up, which means they need to take this full territory right in here and unify it and start their defense, their defense is there. The second thing that they need to do is they need to get to a port because they need to be bringing in larger vehicles and to be bringing in supplies. So they're gonna decide that they wanna do that at shareboard, even though the direction that they really wanna go is this way, they're gonna choose shareboard right here. It's also part of the reason why the airborne units, the 82nd, the 101st are gonna land right here. And then of course we have the six British which are gonna land over here to try and stop the British counterattack, the Nazi counterattack. Then after that, they wanna break out. And so you kinda see here on the D plus the number, that's how many days, how far they wanna be. So by D plus 90, they wanna be all the way up here by the edge of Paris. So they have some concerns. There are these fears surrounding, this is obviously a giant operation and they have particular fears starting with spies. So they are worried that the secret is gonna get out as to where they're going, when they're going, how large their force is gonna be. And so we're gonna talk about that and Alan actually is gonna talk about that as well here I think after I finish. Another thing they're very concerned about is the V-1 rockets. The Germans have been starting to post these up along the coast. They're able to hit London. But what Eisenhower is really concerned about is that they're gonna be able to hit the ports prior to the buildup. He talks about that in his memoirs. It's one of those things that was really concerning and we don't talk about that too much. The histories don't talk about that too terribly much. As you might imagine, the air and the navy, the German air and navy are both concerning. You don't want the German air force, Luftwaffe coming over here and seeing where the buildup was gonna take place because it would indicate the direction in which they were gonna go. You also don't want fighters being able to hit you during the crossing. You don't want the navy coming up, you boats hitting you in the channel as well. So the Allies are gonna really work to try and neutralize those aspects. And then the last thing that they're really concerned about is the German counterattack, the tanks, the panzers. And so you can see here, these red squares represent the German units in France. And the ones that they are most worried about are these ones that have, it's a box and then a little circle in it. My team colloquially calls them the burritos when we have to build these maps out. So they're worried that all of these units are gonna move towards the invasion force and that's what they really want to limit. So deception, deception, everybody's doing it. The Soviets are doing it, the Japanese are doing this. All of the major players in World War II are doing, are using deception operations in one capacity or another. And the British are the ones who really invest the most in this. They're also the ones here, what I'm gonna talk about today, Operation Fortitude that they invest the most upfront for this. And the American counterparts are kind of dubious. They're not too sure that it's a wise investment. Now, Prime Minister Winston Churchill loves these unorthodox concepts and he's been doing this throughout the entire war and he's always pushing for deception operations wherever he can. And he's the one that's gonna give us this quote down here that maybe some of us have heard. In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies. Out of that famous quote, we're gonna get Operation Bodyguard, which is a larger operation, several fall underneath it, series of deception operations that the allies are gonna attempt to convince the Germans of things that are not actually going to happen. And under Operation Bodyguard is where we come, Operation Fortitude falls out, comes underneath Operation Bodyguard. And two of the largest factors that are gonna really play a role in this are double cross, the double cross system, which is the turning of British, the turning of German spies operating in the UK or creating fake spies that they can feed information back to Germany. The second one is Ultra, which I'm gonna leave to Alan because he's gonna be talking about it here in just a few minutes, I believe. And then, so Operation Fortitude has broken up into three components, Fortitude North, Fortitude South Phase One, and then South Phase Two. And Eisenhower approves this on 23 February 1944. So Fortitude North, okay, this plan is not real. This is what they are trying to convince the Germans that they are going to do first. So they're trying to convince them that the allies are going to try to invade Scandinavia. The first spot they're gonna go is into Stavanger right here in Norway. And then a second force is gonna go up here into Narvik. You can see the dates. So the Stavanger is going to be D minus 30. D minus 30 means that it's gonna occur 30 days prior to the cross channel attack, to D-Day. Similarly, the Narvik expedition would occur D minus 17. So they're starting to feed the Germans the plan in the order of what they're gonna do stuff. So Stavanger is first, Narvik is second, and then a Soviet force, they brought in the Soviet allies as well on this deception operation, saying that they are gonna link up here and that they're gonna come with the spring offensive. So they wanna create this sort of domino theory so that the Germans are confused as to the order of what's gonna occur first, so that when they actually do land in Normandy, the Germans are confused as to what's occurring. They also try to convince them that they require 50 divisions to do this and shipping for 12. So that's a very large buildup that they would require in the UK. So Fortitude South, phase one. The allies have decided we cannot hide this buildup. It is just gonna be too large to hide this from German reconnaissance, from German spies, they're gonna figure it out. So how do we resolve this? So they create something called Fortitude South One, which is gonna occur before D-Day and then Fortitude phase two, the second part that's gonna be after D-Day. And the overall goal of both of these is to some degree to North, but is to achieve strategic and tactical surprise at Normandy. So the Germans do not know where they are going to be land. That's in layman's terms what we're trying to do. So South One, again, this is not real, the trick is that they're gonna start feeding the Germans information saying that the real target is Calais. We showed that up on that beginning map over there and crossed the straight to dover the shortest point between England and the continent. Now, earlier in the war, the Germans had actually considered invading England at one point. It was called Operation Sea Lion and they don't end up doing this because the Battle of Britain turns against them. But the point that the Germans had planned to invade from was Calais. So that made sense to the Germans that that would be the point that the Allies would come the other way. And in the Allies or in the Germans defense, the Allies had seriously considered going to Calais. They had looked at six different landing spots and they came down to two finalists, if you will. And the two finalists were at Calais and at Normandy, of course they choose Normandy. For Fortitude South, part two, the real fear here is that the German counterattack, the tanks that we're talking about, are gonna come up and everybody's gonna come in here and they're gonna get pushed back into the sea. And that there's gonna be no ability to build up troops down here on the beaches. So what they need to do is figure out how can we buy time? That's what South two is really all about. So again, this is not real, this is the information that they're feeding to the Germans. They are gonna tell them that Normandy, so the landing is gonna occur, the landing is gonna start at Normandy, the Germans are gonna start reporting this. But what they want the Germans to think is that this is a fake, this is a feint, that the real attack is going to come over here. So it's really a genius way of trying to cover up the initial landing. So the landings would start right here, all of these German forces that can move would move in that direction, then the allies would start crossing right here at Calais, the real invasion. One other point, these boxes that have nothing in it are static units. It's actually a huge problem for the Germans because they can't move. Everybody talks about German mobility and how great it is, Blitzkrieg and all that. And actually they weren't nearly as mobilized as people really think that they were. Okay, so how do you convince the Germans to do this? We have to convince them that the allies are gonna go north up to Scandinavia. Another force is gonna come and start at Normandy. And then another force is gonna go over across to Calais. So how do you do this? You need to convince the Germans that there are a lot of soldiers built up already. Dr. Hearn just talked about Bolero, that that build up is massive. And this right here on the left is one of the things that they're gonna do. They're gonna create an entire fake United States, the first United States Army group. This is not real. And these numbers have been inflated since the start of 1942, not because they're necessarily concerned about D-Day at that particular point, but just because they wanted to keep the Germans on their toes. And so this structure right here, we are talking about a ton of soldiers. The skeleton existed for it, but these units were not prepared to cross the English Channel. And the next piece that they add to that is that they put General Patton in charge of the first United States Army group and start to feed that to the Germans. Similar to the other point of Calais and Operation Sea Line, this made perfect sense to the Germans because they hold General Patton in high esteem. They think that he is one of the best fighting generals. So it makes sense that he would lead the real attack at Calais and not be found there at Normandy. People always wanna know, did the deception work? Did Operation Fortitude work? This is kind of a difficult thing to measure. There's something called the Magruder principle, which says that it's easier to convince somebody of something that they already believe than to convince them of something, a completely new concept. And so the Allied deception plan, particularly Fortitude, really hones in on this concept. We do know that the Germans thought in January of 1944 that there were 55 divisions in the UK when in reality, there were only 37. And then in May of 44, so you're talking about right before June, of course, which is when the Cross Channel attack occurs, that they think that there are 79, which in reality, there are only 52, which really speaks volumes to what the double-cross system was able to do to this whole deception operation. Yodel and Boring to high-ranking decision-makers in the German military both expect a second attack, most likely at Calais after the war. They speak about this with American interviewers. And then Hitler, of course, is the primary decision-maker as the person who controls everything. And he kind of guesses across the board. He's always saying different spots where he thinks that the Allies are gonna come ashore. He does guess, or he mentions to the Japanese Prime Minister on 28 May, so you're talking about just a little over a week before the actual invasion that 80 divisions could invade Norway, Denmark, Southern France, and Normandy. So he doesn't really know, he just sort of says everything, kind of changes his mind whenever he wants. We can also, it's also of note that the Calais reserves are not released until the end of July. Remember the Allies, they need that time. And this gave them a lot of time to build up before the Calais units begin to move towards the Normandy sector. So this is my last slide. Why does D-Day matter 80 years later? Let's bring it back together. Militaries today are very interested in something called large-scale combat operations. And D-Day is a perfect example of a large-scale combat operation, particularly it has airborne units and an amphibious landing, which I think are gonna be important for future, future operations that are large-scale. So there are still valuable lessons from D-Day that militaries can glean what we call lessons learned. This is another one. It was an Allied planned and Allied, it was an Allied success. It was very much built between, the operation was built very much initially led by the British and then the Americans come in as well. But it is very much an Allied success. I think we have so many problems today in an international realm that require, multiple countries coming together. There are certainly some lessons here of how they were able to do this. And then lastly, I think it's important and Dr. Hearn just mentioned this in her talk kind of here as well, is that it's important to remember and honor the veterans of World War II in the United States. There were 16 million who served and today there are less than 1% who are still with us. On a personal side note, my last final vignette here, we, my office has been working with a World War II vet who is 103 and we interviewed him a couple of weeks ago. And then unfortunately, he passed away last week. So I'm dedicating this talk here today, but it's important for us to remember and honor those who served during World War II and on D-Day. And that is the conclusion. I look forward to your questions. Thank you. No, thank you, Dr. Carey for that excellent presentation and your thoughts. I see we already have many questions and comments in the chat area, but I will hold those until our third panelist has presented his paper for today's program. Audience members, please continue to contribute questions and comments in the chat area and we'll get to as many of those as we can. Our third panelist today is Mr. Alan Konekman, the Supervisory Archivist at the Army Heritage and Education Center in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Mr. Konekman has been the chief of the Ridgway Hall branch of the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center since June of 2020. Before that, he was the chief of the Archives branch at the Military History Institute, U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center, from June 2016 to June 2020. Before coming to Carlisle, he served as the deputy branch head of the Archives branch, Histories and Archives Division, Naval History and Heritage Command at the Washington Navy Yard from January 2015 through June 2016, while concurrently serving as the acting branch head from September 2015 to May 2016. The subject of Mr. Konekman's presentation today is Overlord and Ultra, an examination of an operational use of ultra during the invasion of Normandy. Now over to you, Mr. Konekman. Thank you, Dr. Mason, waiting for the slides to come up. There we go. So Overlord and Ultra, it's an examination of an operational use of ultra-intelligence during the invasion of Normandy. This is based on really the story of a document. It was a document that I encountered when I was working for the Navy. It was a letter from General Bradley to Admiral Kirk who commanded the U.S. Naval Forces during the Normandy invasion. And it had a very interesting reference and we'll get to that later in the slideshow. It wasn't until relatively recently, however, that some information that came out of the National Security Agency allowed me to confirm some suppositions I had made about that document. So this presentation will be about that document and surrounding and supplementing information to allow people to understand exactly what the significance of the document. Okay, can we go to the next slide, please? So what was Ultra? Dr. Kerry had mentioned that in his presentation. I mean, at its most basic understanding, it was a signal intelligence effort by the United States and Britain during World War II. It was a very top secret or for the British most secret effort and it was predicated upon the breaking of German radiographic transmissions that were encoded using a system called Enigma. The existence of this system was maintained at a very classified and secret level until the early 1970s when the British government decided that some of the details could be finally released. The most significant early release of information on Ultra was a book called The Ultra Secret written by Frederick Winterbotham. It was published in 1974. Winterbotham was a key player in Ultra from the early days before the United States even had gotten into the war. And he laid out a lot of the framework of how Ultra operated. So next slide, please. So Ultra was reading the German Enigma transmission. So what was Enigma? So Enigma was a code system and it was based on a cipher substitution system where characters are replaced in a series of randomized ways by a machine. You can see a photograph of one of the earlier versions of the Enigma machine. If you notice where it says rotors, there are three rotors on that machine. That's an early version. The Germans later introduced a fourth rotor which greatly increased the number of possible permutations. And the allies in order to compensate for that increase in the encryption possibilities had to seriously augment their efforts at Ultra which was headquartered in a place called Bletchley Park in England. To give you sort of an idea of how hectic and how stressful the code breaking effort was on at least a weekly, sometimes on a daily basis, someone would have a nervous breakdown, would have to be relieved, a new person brought in and the other person allowed to recover from the breakdown from the stress. The Germans understood very early on that the system had was vulnerable to permutation analysis. And the polls ironically in 1932 had actually broken the first generation three rotor machine coding. And they've revealed that to the British and French just before the outbreak of World War II. However, the Germans did not think that in an era where there was no such thing as digital computing that any potential enemy would possibly muster the resources needed in order to go through all the permutations. They underestimated the ultra effort in terms of the numbers and quality of people brought in. And they also underestimated the emergence of what would not be called analog computing which greatly aided the allies ability to crack the codes and make intelligence available to commanders in the field. So next slide please. So what was the US Army's role in ultra? So the army had a team of cryptographers. It was under the command of Captain William Putnam Bundy. Bundy was an interesting fellow. His father was a clerk to a Supreme Court Justice. So it was pretty highly placed in the American government and American society. He had a younger brother named Mac George Bundy who was a US Navy officer. And he was assigned as rare admiral Kirk's aid during Operation Overlord. Kirk, as I mentioned earlier, commanded the Western Naval Task Force during the invasion. Next slide please. So here's a picture of Mac George Bundy later in life. He later became a very high level national security advisor under presidents, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. And here's a picture of him being greeted by General William Westmoreland and Saigon in 1965 just before the United States fully committed to intervention in that conflict. So interestingly, this is where the national security agency coming to validate some of my suppositions from earlier in my career come through. So a fellow named David Sherman who works for the NSA and has published on the matter of the US and British signal intelligence efforts from 1940 to 1950, had this interesting statement about Mac George Bundy. It basically states that Mac George Bundy almost certainly had been reading intelligence derived in part from ultra decrypts. This is going to be very important based on additional corroborating documents that I've been able to uncover. Next slide please. So going back to a summary of ultra leading up to the invasion. Dr. Kerry had mentioned the Germans had been anticipating an Allied invasion. They continued, however, to use ultra to transmit operational planning and orders. And the Allies were intercepting these by and large. However, in a few key cases, the Germans did not use radio communications and ultra missed intelligence. For example, at Omaha Beach, the German 352nd Infantry Division, which had been placed farther behind the beach on Allied intelligence in the Allied intelligence picture had actually been moved forward. The Germans did not communicate this except the landline. The French resistance did attempt to warn the Allies that this was happening on two occasions, but they used carrier pigeons and the Germans unfortunately shot them down. The Germans had become aware that the carrier pigeons were being used to transmit information and troops along the coast were given orders to shoot all birds flying out the sea. And so the two pigeons that were carrying the information were intercepted. And because of that, Omaha Beach suffered considerably higher losses than the other beaches did. And this will feed into a serious operational problem in the days immediately after the invasion attempting to link up Omaha and Utah beaches. Next slide, please. So what's known about the operational use of ultra during the securing of the beach heads? So we know from the ultra secret that information from Bletchley Park was forwarded to Omar Bradley's first Army headquarters through a system called Special Liaison Units. These were officers who were cleared to receive and disseminate ultra intelligence. They received their information through special communications units. The special communication units were equipped with specialized equipment which could receive the information which was encrypted in the highest codes that were available to the British. And then trained signals personnel would be able to decrypt them and then hand them over to the special liaison unit personnel. Next slide, please. So here we can see a picture of the USS Augusta. This was General Bradley's command post during the invasion. And if you look closely at the photograph, you can see the communication array that has been installed on both the main mast and the four mast. So this would certainly have supported a special communications unit. And the Augusta had already been used and equipped as a headquarter ship since the time of Operation Torch. So it would have had an experienced signals element on board by the time of Normandy. So next slide, please. So what did the information go after that? The US Army Heritage and Education Center has a collection from Captain Chester Byard Hansen who was Omar Bradley's aide to camp. Hansen kept a very detailed wartime diary. And a couple of the entries from his diary yields some very interesting information. So on D plus one, so on June 7th, he records that none other than McGeorge Bundy is waking him up in order to let him know that General Montgomery is gonna be coming alongside a British destroyer to discuss with Bradley the necessity and the imperative urgency of getting Utah and Omaha beaches linked up. So at this point, we can see that McGeorge Bundy is obviously very well connected with Bradley and his aide. So next slide, please. So in the afternoon of June 7th, Bradley became aware in part through the ultra information that he was receiving on board the Augusta that a major German counterattack that was designed to prevent the connecting to the two US beach heads was gonna take place. He turned to the Navy for support. Now this is the document that I found back in 2007. It's in the Admiral Kirk papers at the time the Naval History and Heritage Command held the material. It has since been transferred to the National Archives. So he hand wrote a letter to Admiral Kirk. The transcription is on the right saying basically, okay, we're expecting a German counterattack. You know, we're very weak where they're going to be attacking. Your guns from your battleships can reach that point. You're planning on pulling them off and sending them home. Please don't do that. Keep them on station until this thing's cleared up. Now on the second page, he says this information comes from Bundy's black market in prisoners. Now it's the Bundy's black market that always had me scratching my head. What was Bundy's black market? And with the NSA's release of information in 2019, it's clear that that was McGeorge Bundy who was receiving information through the Ultra Channels. He very possibly could have been receiving information on the side of him as brother. Don't have any hard confirmation of that but it's one of those things where I'm gonna continue to look because it's the family connection is I think a little too, you know, there's more than coincidence there in that relationship. And Admiral Kirk and his staff had appended a memo which is on the left side of the slide, basically attesting to the importance of the message and saying that, yep, it was received and we will be ready for the German counterattack. So next slide please. So here we have a photograph on June 8th onboard the Augusta, Admiral Kirk and General Bradley. They're visible on the left part of the photograph. They're watching operations on shore. So they're watching, you know, how the naval gunfire is affecting the operations between Carinthon and Insigny. And from a couple of published accounts from the fighting we see that the third battalion of the 175th Infantry of the 29th Infantry Division basically had its path cleared forward by the naval gunfire. And they moved into Insigny on June 8th. The town was in flames from the shelling but they had taken it. And then from the account of the USS Texas from the U.S. Naval History and Heritage Commands dictionary of American naval fighting ships we see that the Texas was firing on the town of Treviers, then on Insigny and then back to Treviers all trying to break up German troop concentrations. So here's the ultra intelligence having been operationalized and achieving effective battlefield results. Next slide please. So by June 12th, we go back to Chester Hansen's diary and we see that the situation has been stabilized so favorably that all three of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Marshall, General Arnold and Admiral King are come ashore to tour Insigny. And this visit was an indication of the confidence that the allies had in the efficacy of ultra and ultra will continue to play an important role in the Normandy Campaign as operations progressed. For example, in July, ultra picked up the movement of the German Panzer Layer Division from the British zone into the American zone. This would affect operational planning for Operation Cobra for the breakout from Normandy because it allowed the allies to locate and fix the German division which was subjected to a carpet bombing on July 20th which led them to the breakout from Normandy. Next slide please. So for conclusion, what do we know? I mean, what can we conclude about over an ultra? So, you know, timely receipt of operational intelligence was crucial in stabilizing the situation at Omaha Beach immediately after the landing. It's very likely that if Bradley had not gotten that information through ultra, the German counterattack may very well have succeeded in preventing the linking up of Utah and Omaha beach heads, possibly even have allowed, you know, even more operational gains by the Germans. It really was the Germans best opportunity for driving the Americans back into the ocean and it did not happen. We can also conclude that the personal connections between the two Bundy's Hansen, Kirk and Bradley facilitated the use of this intelligence in an agile way. I also think it's kind of incongruous that, you know, Bradley alerts Admiral Kirk to the operational problem in the form of handwritten note. It almost seems like it's like a 19th century type thing. You know, Americans are frequently will reference the battle of Antietam where General Robert E. Lee's orders were written around a pack of cigars and the soldier who was carrying them lost them and then the Northern troops found it and understood what General Lee was about to do. And, you know, the Germans, of course, didn't have a chance to intercept that, but just struck me as like, well, in the mid 20th century they're still doing handwritten communications. On the downside, however, the usefulness of ultra and signals intelligence in general led to an overconfidence in that form of intelligence gathering. At the, by the time December 44 had rolled around when the battle of the bulge was starting, the Germans achieved complete operational surprise because they did not use a means of communication that allowed for interception by ultra. So they achieved operational surprise for the battle of the bulge. However, the overall strengths of ultra and signals intelligence in general was proven during World War II. It contributed directly to the establishment of the National Security Agency in 1947, as well as the establishment of current intelligent sharing arrangements between the United States and its allies, the so-called Five Eyes. With that, I conclude my presentation. Thank you very much, Dr. Mason. Thank you, Mr. Connectman, for that fascinating presentation. I would like to open the floor up now to questions and thoughts from our audience. The first question today is, were there differences in the leadership styles of the American and British armies that led to disagreements in the planning for D-Day? Chris, why don't you go ahead and tackle that one first? Happily, yeah. So I'd love to hear from the rest of the panel on this as well. Can you read it to me one more time? Were there differences between the Americans and the British in terms of planning for D-Day? In terms of leadership styles. Yes, absolutely. So one of the things that comes to mind right off the bat is Shafe, which is the Supreme Headquartered Allied Exhibitionary Force. They need to get a leader, which is eventually gonna become Eisenhower. And prior to that, they have something called Cossack, which is building the initial components. And there is a big disagreement between the style of how they wanna break down and how much power should the head of Shafe actually have. So the British wanna be able to lower it down so that the lower commanders are able to take more action. The Americans want more of a rigid structure, which is kind of interesting because that's not the way the Americans necessarily worked today, but they did want at this time. So that's the thing that comes off right off the bat, but there are continuous cultural differences between the US and British militaries at this time that play a problem. And I sort of talked at the end about how there needed to be the coalition victory. It was Allied plan, Allied victory. There was a lot, a lot of argument and discontent between the British side and the American side as they tried to figure out even the most basic thing of how much power does our number one commander have. I'll pass it over. Who would like Hadid? Would you like Dr. Hearn, would you like to go next? Yeah, well, I'm just really gonna echo everything that you said there, Chris. I think, yeah, I think that the cultural differences is quite important. And also just the experience up until 1944. The Allies had obviously worked together up until then but this was a real testing ground for that relationship. And my own kind of experience is in the Allied combined air offensive. And I know it's certainly in the lead up to D-Day with the things like the transportation plan, which was the operation to basically destroy as many German installations in France and in normally in the areas around Normandy as possible. And there were certainly many differences in how that should be approached. And particularly when it came to targets the British favoring civilian targets and the Americans very much trying to keep their sights on strategic and industrial targets. So yeah, I think at every level you see some levels of conflict, but I think it's really testament to their joint mission that they managed to pull it off and put their differences aside and work together. Mr. Keneckman, any thoughts on differences between how the British and the Americans believed ultra information should be used and how it should be secured from compromise? Well, I mean, with regard to ultra, I mean, it was the British had the primacy in it. It was their effort initially, we were the Johnny Cumblates to the effort. The SLUs were, they came out of the British structure about the American structure. Americans got read into it, but it was very much a British effort. So the British had control over how ultra information was disseminated. Now, obviously once a commander who was entitled to receive the ultra information got the information that it was up to that commander as to how it got used. So we saw, for instance, with General Bradley, so that they got information that the expected, there was the German, they were expecting the Germans to counterattack, but this was very specific localized information about where they were going to counterattack. And so at that point, it's an operational matter for the commander in question. So I think because the British controlled ultra, they had the ultimate say in the matter. Thanks. The next question from our audience today concerns code names for the operations. And that question is, how were the code names for the real and fake operations chosen? Was there a bank of names to choose from or did they choose random names? So for Overlord, that was Winston Churchill's choice, but it was not the first choice. And there was actually a fair amount of informal discussion amongst certain key leaders, both American and British, who were more or less read in on the planning for the invasion. And so a number of terms got bandied about and Churchill finally said, no, I want it to be called Overlord. And that's how it came to be called Overlord. I'll let Dr. Kerry talk on how the deception operation came to be codenamed. Yeah, so we, thank you, Alan. Thank you for all these questions. It's fabulous when we have interaction. So thank you to our audience for sharing. Yeah, so one of the things that I find really interesting is why they choose them. And we see a lot of them are kind of like cheeky, the decision of them like picking the name that they did. One of the ones that I think is kind of interesting, and I'm pretty sure I have this right, is Copperhead, which is a component of this. And it was a plan where they were going to bring an actor who looked like General Montgomery and send him to North Africa at the same time as D-Day, before D-Day. And the reason they would do the thought process was if this actor can run around and look like General Montgomery is somewhere in the Mediterranean, it would then signal to the Germans, well, there's no way they're about to invade if Montgomery is down here. He would most certainly be at the forefront of the invasion. So it doesn't appear as though something like that had too much of an impact, but I think it's sort of interesting, like the choice of Copperhead. I also know that, and I talked just very briefly about the double cross system, which is fascinating, kind of a difficult thing for a long time because the information wasn't available because it was so classified to historians until the 1970s. People didn't even know about this. And then it started to come out and a lot of that remains classified. But one of the things that I think is really interesting is the way that they named their, the people who were feeding the information back, the spies themselves. And they have a long list of rather humorous names, and they tie in to, they connect with that individual, whether it's their name, whether it is where they are from, whether it's their occupation. And so they chose, the British chose these names sort of, sort of again, like I said at the very beginning, sort of cheekily, so that I don't know, I don't know why they did it for fun or why, just to be clever, but as a historian today, when you uncover those and you start realizing, oh wow, that's pretty ironic that that was not a mistake. So, yeah, roundabout their answer. Dr. Hearn, would you like to add anything on that? Not particularly, I'm absolutely fascinated by where all of these names originated from. It does remind me of a funny story I heard recently from a D-Day veteran, and his name was Derek Day. And just the night before he was due to board his ship at Southampton, he wrote his initials D-Day on his half a sack. And then as he was walking up the gangplank onto the ship the next day, military policemen stopped him and looked very, very concerned and said, why did you write that on your bag? Where did you hear that word? And he was like, there's my name. And yeah, they had to call his mum to kind of verify that that was his name because they thought somehow the term D-Day had got out. And obviously, yeah, I guess that story just sort of emphasizes the secrecy around all these code ends, even D-Day, which is now so synonymous with that event. Can I have one more piece to add? Dr. Mesa, can I have one more thing there? Yes, please. I was going to also ask you to elaborate a little bit on how this, in addition to the double agents, how all this fake information was transmitted to the Germans without them becoming suspicious that they were being fed fake information. Absolutely, so I'll start with that and then I'll come to your question. It's a great question. So the thing I was going to add too to that, and I should have maybe started with this, since we're talking about naming conventions, one of the things that I found really interesting in this research is that, and we see this today too, but it did not start as fortitude, the name. The name changed over time and then the final name that they had was fortitude. So it was also a mixture of different plans. So they have all these different groups, like the London controlling section, ops B, all these different groups are kind of like coming up with these plans and then they eventually meld them together and end up with bodyguard and then the components of fortitude. Fortitude prior to being titled that was actually, I believe called mess pot. And prior to that, I think it was a piece of something that was innoculously called appendix Y. And so all of these names, it's also partially to protect because the Germans may have found out what one thing meant, but not know what the next iteration of that same plan meant. So that was also a component. We saw that it with the North African invasion as well. Okay, your second question was, how do they feed the information? Is that correct, Dr. Mason? Yeah, in addition to double agents, how did they manage to feed all of this deception over to the Germans without them getting suspicious? So the Germans were suspicious. We should certainly add that the Germans were not completely lost. One of the big problems for the Germans during this period is that they have too many intelligence agencies that are not communicating. It's a problem that interagency coordination continues with all large bureaucracies our military continues to have that problem today. They write a lot about it in the 9-11 commission where one entity isn't talking to the other. And the Germans have this problem. So with the double agents, some of the double agents, the Germans didn't trust hardly at all. They almost knew for sure that they were feeding them false information, but they were just continuing to get it because they thought that this might give them some sort of insight and it could lead to something that they might know. Certain other ones, the one that was particularly good for fortitude was Brutus was the title, was the code name for Brutus was one of the ones that they believed heavily. And one of the things that they would do is they would allow Brutus to tell certain things that were true. So for, we talked about fortitude, south part two, the part where they're trying to convince them that Calais is going to be the second point. They allowed Brutus to share with the Germans after the invasion of Normandy had started a few of the actual units that were there. So that the Germans could check it and say, Brutus isn't lying. These are the units that we're being reported. We're seeing the 29th ID is here. The first ID is here. He must be telling us the truth. So they would allow some colonels in there to, so it wasn't a complete fabrication in order to maintain that kind of trust between the Germans and the double agents. But other ways that they would do this is they would, you saw the picture that I showed of the tank that had been flipped over, the dummy tank. So that would be another way they would use dummy vehicles. There are these great pictures in Puyall War Museum. Dr. Hearn has these, the Imperial War Museum has a great collection of photos of this and it's dummy tanks, dummy soldiers, dummy planes. One of the things that they did is they dropped dummy parachutists. So dummy parachutists were coming down in France during the D-Day invasion so that certain German units were reporting, this isn't really an invasion. It's just a straw man that landed with a parachute. I don't know what's going on in order to cause further confusion for the Germans. So, but with the dummy tanks, they wanted the Luftwaffe to see them, right? So they wanted them to see these fake camps and they would go out and they'd have to move the dummy tanks around or the tents, they would move the tents around or make fires so it looked like there were people in the tanks. Also, and I'll stop talking because I've gone for way too long, signals, the signal core was another way is they would have fake radio transmissions that they wanted the Germans to pick up. And that's what they do with the First United States Army Group is while there was no First United States Army Group, they were transmitting stuff as though there was a First United States Army Group. So anything that the Germans were picking up, they would think, wow, this is a real unit. They're talking to each other the same way that any other Army Group would. With that, I'll stop talking because nobody wants to hear anymore. Allen, please. Yes, so with regard to deception, on the German side, with regard to their counterintelligence capabilities, the one of the main German counterintelligence groups, the Abwehr was run by a German admiral, Wilhelm Canaris. Canaris by the summer of 1944 had turned traitor and he was working with the Allies. Likewise, the chief of staff of Army Group B, Hans Spidel, had turned traitor and was working with Allied agents. And Spidel fed false intelligence to Hitler's headquarters and up his chain of command, which greatly helped in keeping the German panzer reserve tied down at the Podekalai until it was too late to operationally stop the breakout. Thank you, Mr. Neckman. The next question from the audience concerns the legacy and the heritage of Americans in England during World War II. Dr. Hearn, to what extent did that American culture remain in England? What was the lasting effect of that, do you think? Yeah, that's a great question. So I think in the short term, there's just in the short period that the Americans were based in Britain, probably a period of about a hundred days. Sorry, a hundred days. Yeah, it was huge. So they bought new dance moves, their jitterbug. They bought food, as I mentioned, we never really had chewing gum before. Ice cream was pretty much unheard of. They also bought popular brands like Coca-Cola. And yeah, all of these food stuffs that we'd never really had, especially in a wartime economy. So the colorful chewing gum wrappers, for example, it was a real culture shock for a lot of these British people. So in the short term, these relationships that formed between Brits and Americans led to some change in habits, some cultural change. I think long-term, because a lot of the people who really were influenced by the arrival of Americans were children. So as they grew up, they would share their memories of the Americans and they would adopt a lot of things that they had picked up during the war. So for example, even had an influence on our language and some of the slang that we say today. So I think that the biggest impact was just kind of opening the eyes of that young generation to a world beyond Britain, because most of these kids at the time, they wouldn't have left their villages and they were living in quite a gray or steer environment of wartime Britain. And suddenly they had their eyes opened to these kind of Hollywood characters brought to life. So I think that was really important. Yeah, and obviously the American presence did continue throughout the Cold War as well, and we still have a couple of really large American installations here, most notably at RAF Lakinheath and RAF Mildenhall. So Americans are still very much a part of our society, even though on a much smaller scale. And I think that that kind of friendly relationship has continued to this day, really. Fascinating, thank you, Dr. Hearn. A question here for Mr. Knechtmann regarding the use of intelligence information derived from ultra. There's always a risk if you use intelligence information that the enemy will realize that you used it and figure out how you got it. The use of ultra led to very high German U-boat losses, for example, were there concerns that using this information might compromise the whole ultra operation? Yes, there very much were concerns by Allied commanders that the consistency with which they were able to be there at the right time with the right amount of forces to thwart German plans would be perceived. This is beyond coincidence. There's something else going on here. Now, as I mentioned earlier in my talk, the Germans were aware that Enigma was vulnerable to permutation analysis. But they did not believe that anybody could have amassed the resources necessary in order to crack the code because there were so many possible permutations. And like I said, they greatly underestimated the willingness of the Allies to marshal the number of people with records that analytical skills to do the work. And they also greatly underestimated the emergence of analog computing and its ability to speed up mathematical calculations. One of the British analysts at Bletchley Park, a fellow named Alan Turing developed the thing which was called the Turing bomb. It was an analog computer and it was used to basically crank through the permutations at a rate that was sufficient to provide information in a more or less timely way. Earlier in the war, Ultra tended to be more of the strategic level. By 1944, it's becoming much more operationalized. Information is getting down to the commanders fast enough that they're able to affect the outcome of battlefield operations as opposed to, well, we know the Germans are gonna move an army from here to there in the next three months. So we'll take countermeasures of that. It's like, no, we know this division is in the process of moving from here to there and we understand the significance of that will have countermeasures available. Going back to the Battle of the Atlantic, co-breaking sort of reached its peak in 1943, May of 1943 is when the Battle of the Atlantic is generally acknowledged to have been one quote unquote because the German U-boat losses became so severe that they basically had to break off the main effort in trying to interdict convoys. But at the same time, the Germans were breaking allied codes and interestingly, when I worked with the Naval History and Heritage Command, I highlighted one particular convoy battle in March of 1943 where both the British and the Germans were breaking each other's codes almost in real time. And so the British were adjusting the convoy away, the Germans were breaking the British code, realizing the convoy had been moved, adjusting the U-boats. This kept going on back and forth and it was a very bloody and awful convoy battle. That's fascinating. Question here about Operation Mincemeat, one of the most macabre intelligence operations of the war involved British intelligence actually using a dead body and floating it ashore with information planted on it. Was that information concerning D-Day and Operation Overlord and did the Germans fall for it? Dr. Carey? I'll take a shot, not my area of expertise on that, but I don't know if I want to weigh in because I don't know the answer, but I will because that's what we do. I'm pretty sure that that had to do with the Mediterranean campaign. If I'm not mistaken, Allen, do you know? I think that that one had to do more with the Mediterranean than it did with D-Day. Right, the body was off the coast of Spain. So I don't believe it had anything to do directly with Overlord planning. I think it probably had more to do with allied of operational planning in the Mediterranean in 1993. I think it was the invasion of Sicily. It was, yeah. All right, another question here from our audience is maybe a great way to begin wrapping up our presentations for today. And that is, why is it that D-Day has such a reputation in military history? The legacy of D-Day. So I'll ask each of you perhaps to take that in turn, maybe in the order that the presentations were given at the top of the program. So Dr. Hearn, your thoughts on why D-Day has such a reputation in military history? Yeah, it's a great question. I think it's because of a number of reasons. You've got the military significance, but you've also got the social and cultural significance. So certainly interest in D-Day has been there since the war, but particularly in the late 90s, early 2000s, films like Save and Private Ryan and Band of Brothers has really kind of solidified our kind of cultural memory of D-Day. And it's now as kind of well-known as any other battle in history. But I think really it's kind of significance as not necessarily military turning point in the war, but as the turning point where it was so visible that the shift of the war had changed and that we were suddenly start beginning that great crusade and all of the kind of symbolism that went with that, we were returning to the continent of Europe. We were beginning the kind of final stages of the war. So I think it's placed in the timeline and the chronology of the war is important, but Dr. Kerry was saying the allied cooperation, I think that's really important as well. It wasn't just a British operation. It wasn't an American-led operation. It was an allied offensive. Right, thank you. Dr. Kerry, your thoughts on why the legacy of D-Day looms so large in history? A great question. All of these have been fabulous questions. I wish we were all in a big room so we could just talk about this all day. I think the first thing that comes to mind is that it's a massive operation. It's very complicated. And so I think when you're talking about something that's that large, the allies by the end of D-Day by midnight and again, I don't love using numbers because the Americans were particularly not great about keeping their numbers on D-Day. The British and Canadians more organized than the American side was, but it generally recognizes 156,000 allied troops are now in France. So if you think about 156,000 people that have landed, it's just a massive operation. I talked to the beginning about that again, I think this is again a very romantic, it's a romanticized point in the war in a lot of ways. You can still visit the beaches today, right? You can go and see the beaches and you can visit it. And it can be celebrated by so many different countries. Dr. Hearn was just kind of alluding to this as well, but like it doesn't, it's just not a big thing for the British and the Americans. It's liberated France. It's liberated all of these other countries throughout Europe that can continue to celebrate D-Day as this thing. And that's my last point. I was talking with the veteran that I had mentioned earlier, the 103-year-old veteran a couple of weeks ago, and I said, what were you thinking? Like, what are you thinking before you're getting ready to go over there? And he said, he thought about it for a minute and he said, we knew we were going. He's like, we knew we were going to France. And he said, he goes, we knew that if we won there, we would win the war. And so I think that kind of sentiment continues with like D-Day that it's like, this is that turning point where it's the end of Nazi Germany. Of course, Imperial Japan continues to survive past, but that's a different talk for a different day. Next year, when they bring us back to do that talk, yeah, and it would be, I guess, in August. Okay, that's the end of my answer, Alan. So continuing on with what Dr. Kerry had just said, I mean, largest amphibious invasion in history. So the sheer size is definitely going to have a culture shaping memory to it. So many people were involved in it. And it was recognized at the time, the importance. As soon as the lodgement was secured, people were celebrating in the United States and in Britain, they understood that the war was going to end favorably for the Allies. Also, I would posit that the person of Dwight D. Eisenhower had a lot to do with the longevity of the memory. When he became president, of course, that kept the memory alive in American politics. Lesser known, however, is the fact that Eisenhower worked deciduously throughout the remainder of his life to ensure that there was a curated public image of the Allies during World War II. He would not allow the frictions, which most certainly were there, to be publicized in any way. And interestingly, at the, working for the Old Military History Institute, I have encountered bits and pieces of that legacy in terms of restrictions that previous generations had placed on the use of materials. So, and because it survived through the end of Eisenhower's life, because he died in the 1960s, and popular culture by the 1960s that started to pick up on the theme. Cornelius Ryan had published his book, The Longest Day, which was almost simultaneously produced into a movie with a lot of famous people there like John Wayne. So that's certainly gonna keep D-Day in the minds of the common person. And the longevity of the World War II generation, I think also contributed a great deal. They passed on a lot to their children. I mean, I'm a grandson of the World War II generation. I certainly knew all about World War II when I was growing up. It was never a cultural novel to me at all. And most of my classmates, it was the same way. Everybody knew what D-Day was. Everybody knew the significance of it. It was just part of American culture. And with that, I'll stop. Well, thank you. This has been a fascinating program today, but I think I'm afraid that's about all we have time for today. We've come to the end of the program. I'd like to thank you all, thank all of our panelists for being with us today. Thank you again to Army University Press and Army University Films, the National Archives, the Army Heritage and Education Center, the U.S. Army War College and the Imperial War Museum for this program. And to everyone in our audience for being with us today, a reminder that a complete recording of this program will be available on the U.S. National Archives YouTube channel shortly after the conclusion of today's discussion. I look forward to the next program and to seeing you all again soon. Goodbye for now.