On the night of June 5, 1944, as tens of thousands of Allied troops prepared to storm the beaches of Normandy, a handful of British Special Air Service commandos were parachuting into Nazi-occupied France alongside hundreds of straw-stuffed burlap dummies.

This was Operation Titanic, one of the more absurd operations of the war. Yet Titanic, along with other deceptions, tricked the German high command into believing the real invasion of “Fortress Europe” was happening somewhere else or not at all.

To pull it off, the British dropped hundreds of fake paratroopers nicknamed “Rupert” across four locations far from the actual landing zones of the real airborne forces arriving later in the night. These dummies were rigged with pyrotechnics to simulate rifle fire and movement, and SAS teams on

See Full Page