Category: War
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What I call a bad day at the office
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General Hans Cramer By Will Dabbs, MD
Operation Overlord was the official title for the D-Day assault. This was the largest amphibious invasion in human history. Public domain.
Operation Overlord, the 1944 Allied invasion of mainland Europe, was one of the most audacious military enterprises in human history. 160,000 Allied troops drawn mostly from the US, Great Britain, and Canada plowed inland against some 50,000 Axis defenders. The end result was a lodgment from which the Allies eventually pressed all the way to Germany.
The Germans knew we were coming. They just didn’t know exactly when or where. Calais was the obvious spot. It is less than twenty miles across the English Channel from Dover to France near Calais. As a result, the Germans staged a great deal of their defensive effort in this area. However, as we all know, that’s not what Ike had in mind.
The invasion forces moved between 80 and 100 miles by sea to reach the actual landing beaches in Normandy. While the landings were a gory mess, particularly at Omaha, they would have been far worse had the Allies not spoofed the Germans into believing that Calais was their primary landing zone.
In addition to a great deal of good old-fashioned subterfuge, a decorated German general named Hans Cramer unwittingly did his part to help the Allies.
This is Hans Cramer, last commanding officer of the
German Afrika Korps. He unwittingly helped dupe Hitler
into believing that the D-Day force was landing in Calais.
Bundesarchiv.
The Guy
Hans Cramer was the last commander of the DAK, the famed German Afrika Korps. He was captured in North Africa in May of 1943 and held in a POW camp in Wales. In 1944, Cramer was 48 years old.
That seems pretty spry by my current standards, but that’s actually fairly antiquated for a soldier. Once established in his POW camp, General Cramer got seriously sick.
On 23 May 1944, General Cramer was transported across England to be repatriated to Germany courtesy of the Swedish Red Cross. Despite the global hemoclysm that engulfed the world, there was still the occasional humanitarian release between the Allies and the Axis. Cramer’s Allied handlers carefully orchestrated his trek across the UK.
First, he processed through London. Then they motored across the English countryside so Cramer could see the massive buildup of troops, tanks, and military equipment being staged for the invasion. However, his driver led him to believe he was in southeastern England, the perfect place to stage an invasion of Calais.
Once he returned safely to Berlin, Cramer was aggressively debriefed. German intelligence officers mined him for information. Everything he reported was consistent with an objective in Calais.
Everyone knew that George Patton was the Allies’ most effective combat general. In the lead-up to D-Day, his job was to command an enormous fake army. Public domain.
Operation Fortitude
This was but a tiny part of the overall deception plan. They called this overarching enterprise Operation Fortitude. The British officer tasked with putting it all together was named, no kidding, LTC David Strangeways.
At the Tehran Conference in November of 1943, Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt met to hammer out the details of the coming invasion. It was there that Winston Churchill coined the phrase, “In wartime, truth is so precious that it should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” LTC Strangeways took that mandate to heart.
FUSAG, the giant fake army designed to mislead the
Germans about D-Day, even had its own unique unit insignia. Public domain.
Details
General Bernard Law Montgomery’s 21st Army Group was the invasion’s major effort. However, the Allies desperately needed to keep the German 15th Army occupied in the Calais region. To do so, they created a 300,000-man army that did not technically exist.
This giant fake army was technically deployed around Kent, Essex, and Suffolk. Great effort was invested in creating radio traffic that mimicked such a gargantuan military organization.
Squadrons of imaginary aircraft and flotillas of nonexistent ships were folded into the tactical organization. Double agents captured and turned by British MI5 fed carefully-screened information back to their handlers in Germany.
This massive diaphanous unit was called the First US Army Group. They were known by the acronym FUSAG, which obviously sounds pretty cool. They even had their own unit patches and insignia.
A big part of Operation Fortitude was manning it with some proper talent. They chose America’s most flamboyant general to lead this theoretical mob. With the largest amphibious invasion in human history staging to the south, General George S. Patton was put in command of FUSAG. Patton clearly would have preferred commanding real troops. However, he absolutely owned the role.
Patton made speeches and inspected imaginary combat units. A bevy of photographers followed the flamboyant general everywhere he went, documenting his sundry inspections and presentations. The Germans rightfully thought Patton to be one of the best generals in the Allied stable. They fully expected him to command the pending invasion of Europe.
Success…
The ruse was fabulously successful. Even after the Normandy landings, Hitler and his generals still suspected it was a feint to draw attention away from Calais.
This misperception of the tactical situation bought the assault troops precious time to create a foothold in Normandy. The Germans eventually figured out that they had been duped and moved their reinforcements to Normandy right sharpish.
However, by then, the Allies had established air supremacy. That made tactical troop movements in daylight tantamount to suicide.
We all know how it ultimately turned out. Less than a year after the D-Day invasion, Hitler debrained himself in his bunker in Berlin while victorious Russian troops slagged the countryside above. However, all of that might have been very different had it not been for LTC Strangeways’ Operation Fortitude and one unwitting German general.
A painting by Hugh Charles McBarron, portraying American troops in the American War of Independence (Wikimedia Commons)
As the world prepares to commemorate this coming Saturday’s 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence, new historical and archaeological evidence and analyses are allowing both academics and the public at large to more fully understand how and why the American War of Independence was even more violent than often popularly believed.
Research over the past few years has shed new light on the massacres, ethnic cleansing and extreme maltreatment of prisoners that occurred during the war.
Although most western European conflicts of the 18th century (such as the Wars of Spanish and Austrian Succession) were on much greater scales, they had much lower atrocity rates.
The American War of Independence was particularly atrocity-prone because it had a unique combination of features: it was an anti-government insurrection, a civil war and an ethnic conflict all combined into one particularly brutal war.
Because it was a rebellion, the British regarded American troops as treason-committing rebels and traitors and treated them with unimaginable cruelty.
Because it was also a civil war (the American population was split between pro-independence and pro-British camps), it was a particularly bitter domestic internecine struggle – and because both sides used Native American tribes as allies, indigenous people were subjected to extraordinarily violent racism expressed through appalling massacres, ethnic cleansing and, in one case, what would today be considered a genocide.
A book published in 2023 (Memory Wars: Settlers and Natives Remember Washington’s Sullivan Expedition of 1779) reveals the ways in which indigenous and European-originating Americans have, over the years, remembered George Washington’s invasion of the Haudenosaunee [Iroquois] Confederacy, a military campaign now regarded by numerous historians and others as an act of genocide.
And last year, another US academic (Professor Joshua Catalano of Clemson University, South Carolina) published a study of the mass execution of dozens of Native American men, women and children by American pro-independence forces in the Gnadenhutten Massacre of 1782. The new research evaluates how myth-making and cover-ups were weaponised to enable frontier land grabs. And, over recent years, archaeological and ethnographic investigations have shed important new light on the 18th-century village where the massacre took place.
Other research (including two books: Relieve Us of This Burthen: American Prisoners of War in the Revolutionary South [2012] and The American Revolution on Long Island [2017]) has investigated disturbing new evidence about Britain’s treatment of American prisoners of war.
The disease-ridden prison ships in which the British mistreated American prisoners of war and allowed many to starve to death, have been compared to concentration camps by some historians.
Inside a British prison ship. At least 12,000 American prisoners of war died, while incarcerated in such vessels (Wikimedia Commons)
Indeed almost twice as many Americans died in those virtual death camps as in battle.
Around 30,000 African-Americans served in the war (on both sides), but research has revealed that, largely due to shocking racially discriminatory practices, their death rate was roughly four times greater than that of white troops.
Very recent research by US scholars (in 2022, 2023 and early 2026) has also shed important new light on how the British military almost certainly used or planned to use germ warfare (smallpox) against pro-independence Americans.
Significantly, over very recent years, several museums have been launched or expanded, providing coverage of the atrocities. The Museum of the American Revolution (in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), which opened in 2017, includes material on the more appalling aspects of the conflict.
The American Revolution Museum in Yorktown, Virginia reopened in 2016 with equally objective coverage of the brutality of the war.
And throughout the 2000s, the very moving Prison Ships Martyrs Monument in New York was totally restored and modernised with new and detailed explanatory displays.
And, in London, the British Museum is launching an exhibition of three key artefacts linked to Native American peoples involved in the conflict (Declaring Independence: USA 250 will run from 30 June to 29 November in the Museum’s Room 3). The three Native-American-linked exhibits are:
- The 1777 Washington Peace Medal (presented to a key native American ally of George Washington, but later confiscated by the British)
- A shell-bead wampum belt used in 18th-century diplomacy between two Native American nations, who then suffered civil war, betrayal and destruction at the hands of both the British and the Americans
- A ceremonial pipe-tomahawk, given by a British aristocrat to a pro-British Native American leader (Thayandenagaa [Joseph Brant]), who the British Crown had largely betrayed.
And from mid-September, the exhibition will also include the only known ceremonial copy of the Declaration of Independence itself. It is owned by West Sussex Record Office, which will be loaning it to the museum. It will be the first time that the document has ever gone on general public display.
Research by Professor Danielle Allen of Harvard University suggests that it was given as a present by the American revolutionary Thomas Paine to an aristocratic British sympathiser, the Duke of Richmond in late 1787 or early 1788. Professor Allen has just published a book in the US on the subject, entitled Radical Duke (due out in the UK in August).
Significantly, the full-size ceremonial vellum copy of the declaration, due to go on display at the British Museum in mid-September, is actually much better preserved than the original 1776 Declaration in the National Archives Museum in Washington DC. Sadly, the writing on that original is no longer legible – but the one in Britain still is.
(I myself am just shocked by this. Seeing that both sides fought dirty etc. Bottom line – War means fighting and fighting means killing. Seeing that it’s always been that way and sadly it will always be that way! Grumpy)
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Seized Iranian Weapons for Ukraine
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