Late on the night of June 5th, 1944, the German army headquarters in occupied France begin to receive reports of enemy parachutists drifting from the sky and landing east of Caen, across a swath of northwestern France that included Coutances, Valognes, and Saint-Lo.
Assuming that the parachutists signaled the first wave of a more massive push by the Allies, the German brass ordered their 7th Army unit to increase their numbers and be prepared for an all-out invasion.
However, General Hans Speidel then decreased the level of alert once subsequent reports began to trickle with a curious addendum: so far, all of the parachutists that had touched down had turned out to be cloth dummies.
The Allies’ top-secret Operation Fortitude was in full swing, and Germany was belatedly realizing that it had prepared to do battle with the world’s largest phantom army… one that would never show up and one that never really existed at all.
