The Double

Montgomery and Clifton James. Would you have been fooled?

This Friday marks the 70^th anniversary of the biggest amphibious invasion in history. It’s easy to forget that the Normandy landings now remembered as ‘D-Day’ were actually part of an operation that ran for a great deal of time on either side of Tuesday the 6^th of June, 1944. Over the coming days, the André Deutsch blog will look back at some of the many operations that prepared the way for the Allied invasion of France. Today, we pay tribute to Operation Copperhead. From Thursday onwards, André Deutsch's Editorial Director, Piers Murray Hill will be acting as our man in Normandy. He'll be reporting on the events unfolding in France over the anniversary weekend.

Operation Copperhead was one of a number of initiatives that fell under the wider umbrella of Operation Bodyguard - a series of deceptions undertaken by the Allies in order to draw attention and forces away from the Normandy coast ahead of the 'D-Day' invasion.

In many ways, the Allied forces’ plan for Operation Copperhead would feel more at home in an American sit-com than the front lines of World War II. A British soldier and semi-professional actor, M. E. Clifton James, was found to have more than a passing resemblance to Field Marshal Montgomery and the decision was made to send James off to Algeria in order that he might convince the Germans of a forthcoming invasion from the south. It was hoped that the supposed ‘presence’ of Montgomery, who in reality was planning for the forthcoming invasion on the Normandy coast, would lead the Axis to focus forces on the south of France.

Ultimately, Copperhead was one of several intelligence plans that didn’t have any significant sort of an impact upon the Normandy invasion. Nevertheless, it likely piled further misdirection upon that which Operation Bodyguard’s more successful confusion missions had already created. Over time, it brought Clifton James some level of celebrity, and his memoir of his time as faux field marshal lead to a British film adaptation, 'I Was Monty's Double', in 1958. Cinematic plotting demanded an extra element of terror – a fictional assassination plot against our hero, but for a real element of truth being stranger than fiction, they might have chosen to point out that the actor playing the joint lead roles was, in fact, M. E. Clifton James himself, fourteen years after the events depicted and turning a spritely sixty years old during filming.