"In wartime truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies."
This from one of the most quotable men of the 20th century, Winston Churchill, describing the massive disinformation and deception plan concocted by the Allies prior to the D-Day invasion of Normandy.
The multi-spoked idea was to stuff the Nazi information pipeline with enough facts, figures and plans to convince the Nazis that a much larger operation was coming, spread out over a greater swath of territory, and they wouldn’t be able to properly defend the real invasion points.
The deception was so elaborate that it must have taken months to develop, as well as the cooperation of hundreds of minds across thousands of miles. It included the creation of completely fictitious military divisions, like “FUSAG,” the First US Army Group, which did not actually exist. But the Germans believed it did, due to fake radio traffic and the use of double agents.
It also included parachuting dummies behind enemy lines and dropping strips of aluminum foil cut to a length that corresponded to German radar waves to create phantom fleets of bombs and troops.
Imagine the precise coordination of the cognitively disparate people necessary to make it successful. If one person betrayed the deception—and there were incidents that came close, resulting in quarantines and demotions—the whole plan might have been blown, and we could be watching Hogan’s Heroes episodes today that end very differently.
65 years later, we’re free to have Memorial Day picnics to remember the heroes and watch amazing stories of D-Day on TV. Military terms are everywhere, even in the world of corporate America, where, ironically enough, we use “war rooms” to figure out how we’re going to capture market share.
The sessions that the Allied leaders conducted in the original War Rooms were filled with amazingly creative thinkers and tremendous creative problem solving. Talk about an impactful ideation. Shows you what truly inspired collaboration can do.
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