This half hour documentary about the preparations for the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944 shouldn't be at all funny, in view of the carnage involved in the event. Yet, if the troops storming the beach through its formidable obstacles has little time for wit, the planners evidently did.
The Brits were always far more loose-limbed and colorful about using code names for their operations. "Operation Mincemeat" for dumping a dead body carrying fraudulent information to the Germans about the landings in Sicily? Here, we see two huge rocket-powered wheels rolling this way and that in a cloud of smoke, a dog scooting quickly out of its way. The device was designed to clear the Normandy beaches of mines. It was named "The Great Panjandrum Mine Clearer" and, as narrator Robert Powell observes, "they proved more dangerous to their inventors." The Brits were also inventive in more useful ways. They modified many of their tanks so that they had dedicated tasks. The flail tank whacked the road ahead of it with heavy chains to detonate mines. The fascene carrier were loaded with bundles of cord wood to fill tank traps. The bobbin was used to lay a smooth canvas path across sand, pebbles, or barbed wire. The bridging tank carried a steel span on a crane. Collectively they were called "funnies" (ie., comic strip creations). The American planners held them in disdain.
The Brits also laid a one-hundred mile pipeline under the channel for carrying fuel. It was called "Pluto." I don't know whether it was named after the god of the underworld or the Walt Disney character.
There isn't space to describe all the techniques of deception. There was, of course, the fake US First Army that was based in southern England and consisted of little more than its general, George S. Patton, and hundreds of inflated rubber tanks and trucks, and many wooden airplanes. A handful of soldiers drove around noisily broadcasting from one fake unit to another, indicating a lot of activity.
Perhaps the most elaborate deception was Garbo, a Nazi agent who had been turned. He was persuaded to set up a non-existent system of seven subordinate agents dispersed through England and transmit fabricated information to the Germans. The subordinate would send their data to Garbo who would then relay it. One of the agents, in Liverpool, became somehow troublesome and had to be gotten rid of, so he died a natural death. His timely obituary appeared in the newspapers, although of course he was never alive in the first place.
The landings were bitterly contested on Omaha Beach but were ultimately successful.