World War II Discussion Group - Operation Fortittude

Walter Wolf, a volunteer with the World War II Museum, will give a talk on Operation Fortitude at 7 p.m., Thursday, May 1, at the East Bank Regional Library, 4747 W. Napoleon, Metairie.

This talk is part of the regularly scheduled meeting of the World War II Discussion Group that has met at EBR since the late 1990s. This event is free of charge and open to the public. Registration is not required.

Operation Fortitude was the code name for the plan to deceive and divide the Nazis in the build-up to D-Day, the 1944 invasion of German-occupied France.

Operation Fortitude’s spies were an oddball mix of operatives working for Britain – a convicted safecracker, a Spanish chicken farmer, and a French woman who was so obsessed with her dog Babs that she almost derailed the D-Day Invasion. Added to that was a fake ghost army created to mislead the Germans about Allied troop movement that was led by American General George S. Patton.

Operation Fortitude’s spied had a few equally unlikely handlers at British intelligence agency M15 as well, including Thomas Argyll “Tar” Robertson, known around the office as “Passion Pants” because of his habit for wearing his regimental tartan trousers. Tar was head of B1A, the spy section that ran the British-German double agents. He also helped set up the Twenty Committee in 1941 – known as Double Cross – a inter-agency group to coordinate spied working both for the British secret services and the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service.