18-Inch Paratroopers: Tactical & Strategic Deception

UPDATED with film link, below.

Operation Husky was the codename for the Allied Invasion of Sicily during the Second World War.

Tactical Deception and Psychological Warfare operations were exceptionally useful in the ramp up to the invasion. My father was one of the so-called Beach Jumpers, a special unit that did nothing but tactical deception in furtherance of psychological warfare. They also did limited incursions against various outposts. These were almost exclusively feints used to draw Axis troops (mostly German but some Italian as well) away from actual targets.

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One of the classic operations was that of the "18-inch paratroopers". My dad helped with this.

Click here to view archival film!

Half-sized dummies with half-sized parachutes were dropped from extreme altitude to points near the major strongholds and their observation posts. The Germans had a fairly primitive RADAR system which they calibrated by means of direct visual observation.

Half-sized dummies appeared to the calibrators to be twice as far away as the radar said they were. The Germans re-calibrated their equipment, with the effect that things were actually half of the distance from them than they were estimated to be. This tended to cause the Germans to far overshoot their targets when real raids came.

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The "Beach Jumpers" used other tactics as well. One of the most successful of these was to flood the German technical observation systems with technical noise. For example, a few small boats with extremely large and powerful speakers, operating fairly close to shore, could simulate the sound of distant operations of a large fleet, and by radiating significant fake communications emissions from a small platform on a long cable near the position that the sounds seemed to come from, the Germans were again misdirected to re-deploy and re-allocate their resources.

Units operating in close association with the Beach Jumpers, and sometimes the Beach Jumpers themselves, would engage in systematic skirmishing actions which were, to the degree practicable, meant to look to area commanders and widespread false reporting, or "jitters" by officers at remote outposts such as beach highland observation posts. Such lightly-manned outposts might be hit hard by Navy commandos, generally as silently as possible, and being sure to leave a survivor or three to report a scene carefully constructed to appear as if very large numbers of infantry had already passed by, but were no longer in the area, presumably headed inland. If reports were believed, it would cause the Germans to re-deploy. If reports were discounted as "jitters", that means that the German commanders were learning to dismiss the information from their outposts and observers. If the German commanders began to disregard all information from those outposts, all the better.

One story dad told was that when an element of his outfit had taken one such outpost, they reported to the German command post that all was quiet, pretty much giving the punchline of the old joke: "Nobody here but us chickens". The German commanders felt confident that this area was secure, when in fact it was already in the hands of the enemy and had been converted to the use of directing incoming landings. Concurrently, feints and technical deceptions were used to give the impression of landings where there were none, drawing resources away from areas where actual attacks on a main scale would soon begin.