Operation Bodyguard - Plan Jael

Plan Jael

Planning for Bodyguard began even before Operation Cockade was fully under way, following the decision that Normandy would be the site of the coming invasion. The departments responsible for deception, 'A' Force, COSSAC's Ops. B and the London Controlling Section, began to address the problem of achieving tactical surprise for Overlord. They produced a paper, entitled "First Thoughts", on July 14, 1943 outlining many of the concepts that would later form the Bodyguard plan. However, as Cockade concluded, with limited success, most of the Allied high command were sceptical that any new deception would work.

In August Colonel John Henry Bevan, head of the London Controlling Section, presented a draft plan. Code named Jael (a reference to the Old Testament heroine who killed an enemy commander by deception) it would have attempted to deceive the Germans into thinking that the Allies had delayed the invasion for a further year, instead concentrating on the Balkan theatre and air bombardment of Germany through 1944. The plan had a mixed reception in the Allied High command and in October a decision on the draft was deferred until after the Tehran conference, a month later.

Meanwhile COSSAC had been working on its own deception strategy; "Appendix Y" of Operation Overlord plan. The plan, also known as Torrent, had originated in early September at COSSAC – it started life as a feint invasion of the Calais region shortly before D-Day and eventually (after the failure of a similar scheme during Cockade) transformed into a plan to divert attention from troop build up in the south-west of England. These early ideas, that later became Operation Bodyguard, recognised that the Germans would expect an invasion. Instead the core of the plan suggested misleading the enemy as to the exact time and location of the invasion and to keep them on the back foot once it had landed.

During November and December 1943 the Allied leaders met twice, firstly in Cairo (23 – 27 November) and then in Tehran (28 November – 1 December), to decide on strategy for the following year. Bevan attended the conference and received his final orders on December 6. Furnished with the final details of Overlord, Bevan returned to London to complete the draft. The deception strategy, now named Bodyguard, was approved on Christmas Day 1943. The new name had been chosen based on a comment by Winston Churchill to Joseph Stalin at the Tehran conference; "In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies."