To mislead the enemy about the spot chosen by the Allies for the next landing, British secret agents of the Royal Navy elaborated a fantastic hoax worthy of the cheapest dime novel. The amazing thing is that it worked.
The British dressed the corpse of a man who had died of pneumonia in the uniform of a major in the Royal Marines. They stuffed his pockets with forged credentials as a Major William Martin, and they planted forged letters on the body to make him look like a courier between the highest Allied commands. The letters “revealed” that the Allies would next land in Sardinia and Greece. The body was pushed overboard from a submarine off the coast of Spain. It washed up on the beach as an apparent victim of a plane crash and was frisked by an Axis agent, just as the British had hoped.
Hitler was taken in by the hoax and gave priority to reinforcing Sardinia and Greece, widely separated, not only from each other, but also from Sicily, where the Allies were actually going to land.
To help along the confusion of Axis officers (most of whom were of a less romantic nature than their Fuehrer and were not taken in by the Major William Martin fraud), the Allies mounted another hoax almost as childishly imaginative as the planted cadaver trick.
On D-Day, July 10, 1943, Commander Hunter R. Robinson in PT 213 led a flotilla of ten Air Force crash boats to Cape Granitola, at the far western tip of Sicily, as far as it could get from the true landing beaches around both sides of the southeastern horn of the triangular island.
The crash boats and the PT were supposed to charge about offshore during the early hours of D-Day, sending out phony radio messages, firing rockets, playing phonograph records of rattling anchor chains and the clanking and chuffing of landing-craft engines. The demonstration didn’t seem to fool anybody ashore, but the little craft tried.
Most of Squadron Fifteen was busy elsewhere on the morning of D-Day and narrowly missed being butchered in one of those ghastly attacks from friendly forces that were so dangerous to PT boats.
One force of American soldiers was going ashore at Licata. Twenty-four miles west, at Port Empedocle, was a flotilla of Italian torpedo boats which so worried the high command that Empedocle had been ruled out as a possible landing beach. To keep the Italian boats off the back of the main naval force, a special screen was thrown between Port Empedocle and the transport fleet, a screen of seventeen of Lieut. Commander Barnes’ PTs and the destroyer Ordronaux. After the war, historians discovered that the much-feared Italian torpedo boats at Empedocle had accidentally bumped into the invasion fleet the night before the landings, and had fled in panic to a new base at Trapani at the farthest western tip of the island.
Another one of those terrible blind battles between friendly forces was prepared when nobody told the westernmost destroyers of the main landing force that PTs would be operating nearby. The skippers of the destroyers Swanson and Roe, nervous anyway because of the Italian torpedo-boat nest at Empedocle, charged into the PT patrol area when they saw radar pips on their screens. Lieut. Commander Barnes flashed a recognition signal, but the destroyer signal crews ignored it.
