"Brilliant in its simplicity."
"Quite," Boothby said. "But with one glaring weakness. We don't have enough men to pull it off. By late spring there will be just thirty-seven divisions in Britain--American, British, and Canadian--barely enough to stage one strike against France, let alone two. If Fortitude is to have any chance of succeeding, we must convince Hitler and his generals that we have the divisions necessary to stage two invasions."
"How in heaven's name are we going to do that?"
"Why, we're simply going to create an army of a million men. Conjure it up, I'm afraid, completely out of thin air."
Vicary sipped his drink, staring at Boothby, disbelief on his face. "You can't be serious."
"Yes, we can, Alfred--we're deadly serious. In order for the invasion to have that one-in-two chance of succeeding, we have to convince Hitler, Rommel, and von Rundstedt that we have a massive and powerful force coiled behind the cliffs of Dover, waiting to lash out across the Channel at Calais. We won't, of course. But by the time we're finished, the Germans are going to believe they're confronted with a living, breathing force of some thirty divisions. If they don't believe this force exists--if we fail and they see through our deception--there is a very good chance the return to Europe, as Churchill calls it, will end in a bloody and cataclysmic failure."
"Does this phantom army have a name?" Vicary asked.
"Indeed--the First United States Army Group. FUSAG for short. It even has a commander, Patton himself. The Germans believe General Patton is our finest battlefield commander and think we would be fools to launch any invasion without his playing a major role. At his disposal Patton will have some one million men, made up primarily of nine divisions from the U.S. Third Army and two divisions of the Canadian First Army. FUSAG even has its own London headquarters in Bryanston Square."
Vicary blinked rapidly, trying to digest the extraordinary information he was being given. Imagine creating an army of a million men, completely out of thin air. Boothby was right--it was a ruse de guerre of unimaginable proportions. It made the Trojan horse of Odysseus look like a college escapade.
"Hitler's no fool, and neither are his generals," he said. "They're well schooled in the lessons of Clausewitz, and Clausewitz offered valuable advice about wartime intelligence: 'A great part of the information obtained in war is contradictory, a still greater part is false, and by far the greatest part is doubtful.' The Germans aren't going to believe there's an army of a million men camped in the Kent countryside just because we tell them it's so."
Boothby smiled, reached into the briefcase, and withdrew another folder. "True, Alfred. Which is why we came up with this: Quicksilver. The goal of Quicksilver is to put flesh and bones on our little army of ghosts. In the coming weeks, as the phantom forces of FUSAG begin arriving in Britain, we're going to flood the airwaves with wireless traffic--some of it in codes we know the Germans have already broken, some of it en clair. Everything has to be perfect, just the way it would be if we were putting a real army of a million men in Kent. Quartermasters complaining about the lack of tents. Mess units griping about shortages of food and silver. Radio chatter during exercises. Between now and the invasion, we're going to bombard their listening posts in northern France with close to a million messages. Some of those messages will provide the Germans a small clue, a tidbit of information about the location of the forces or their disposition. Obviously, we want the Germans to find those clues and latch onto them."
"A million wireless messages? How is that possible?"
"The U.S. 3103 Signals Service Battalion. They're bringing quite a crew with them--Broadway actors, radio stars, voice specialists. Men who can imitate the accent of a Jew from Brooklyn one minute and the bloody awful drawl of a Texas farmhand the next. They'll record the false messages in a studio on sixteen-inch records and then broadcast them from trucks circulating through the Kent countryside."
"Unbelievable," Vicary said, beneath his breath.
"Yes, quite. And that's only a small part of it. Quicksilver accounts for what the Germans will hear over the air. But we also have to take into account what they'll see from the air. We have to make it look as though a massive army is staging a slow and methodical buildup in the southeast corner of the country. Enough tents to house a force of a million men, a massive armada of aircraft, tanks, landing craft. We're going to widen the roads. We're even going to build a bloody oil depot in Dover."
Vicary said, "But surely, Sir Basil, we don't have enough planes, tanks, and landing craft to waste on a deception."