World War II was the deadliest conflict the world has ever seen.
Most of the public’s attention on the Second World War has focused on the battles that were fought on a truly massive scale with advanced weaponry and caused an unprecedented level of devastation.
But the war was also marked by several covert spy missions that went on behind the scenes. Some of these missions succeeded and had an effect on the war’s outcome, while others had no effect at all, but the ones we’re going to focus on today will all seem so crazy at first glance that you might have to blink twice.
Here are the sixteen most insane covert operations that happened during World War II:
1 – Operation Gunnerside
It’s not a well-known fact that the Nazis were actually developing their own atomic bomb early in the war. Specifically, they were using a heavy water plant in Vemork, Norway, to produce plutonium for a nuclear device…the only such plant in existence at the time. The plant was also invulnerable to bombing and accessible only by climbing a near vertical five hundred foot cliff.
The Allies got wind of what the Germans were doing and a nine-man team of Norwegian soldiers, who had been trained by the British, managed to discreetly scale the cliffs before attaching and detonating bombs that destroyed the entire water plant. The destruction of this plant in Vemork completely halted the Nazi effort to develop an atomic bomb. Had the plant not been blown up, chances are good the Germans would have developed an atomic weapon before the Americans did!
2 – Operation Fortitude South
In the spring of 1944, the Allied Powers were preparing to launch an invasion of northern France. Their target were the Normandy beaches, but in an attempt to weaken German strength in the area, they set up Operation Fortitude South. This operation was designed to deceive German intelligence about where the Allies would strike.
The Allies created a fake invasion force called the “1st U.S. Army Group” that was supposed to launch an invasion at Pas de Calais. The entire army was made up of wooden airplanes and inflatable tanks like you see in the photo above. Information about this army group was deliberately fed to the Germans, who then indeed diverted much of their available forces to Pas de Calais. Had Operation Fortitude South failed, the German defenses at Normandy likely would have been much stronger and the D-Day landings could have turned out far bloodier than they did.
3 – Operation Mincemeat
In the spring of 1943, Axis forces had been expelled from North Africa and were anticipating an Allied invasion of southern Europe. The corpse of a British Royal Marine washed up on the shores of southern Spain with a briefcase attached to his wrist. The case had documents inside revealing that the Allies planned to invade Greece in the coming months. The Nazi-sympathetic Spanish alerted the Germans, who promptly began reinforcing their units in Greece to prepare for the Allied invasion.
The Allies, however, invaded Sicily instead. The entire thing had been staged as part of ‘Operation Mincemeat’ to divert German forces away from Sicily and Italy. The Germans fell for it hook line and sinker and the Allies had a much easier time conquering Sicily and invading Italy due to the weakened German presence in both places as a result.
4 – Operation Eiche
As the Allies were invading Sicily and Italy following the success of Operation Mincemeat, the Italian government turned on Benito Mussolini and imprisoned him in the remote Hotel Camp ski resort high up in the Apennine mountain range. A team of highly trained German commandos, led by Otto Skorzeny, were ordered by Adolf Hitler to conduct a rescue operation so Mussolini could not be handed over to the Allies.
In September of 1943, the commandos descended upon the mountaintop of the resort in gliders and then launched a direct assault upon the hotel. The Italian guards were easily overwhelmed before the commandos rescued Mussolini. The team then escaped via a captured plane to Austria, where Mussolini continued to serve as the leader of fascist Italy under Hitler until he was killed by partisans when the Nazis finally collapsed in April of 1945.
5 – Operation Grief
Operation Eiche was not the only high-stakes German commando operation that Otto Skorzeny led. In December of 1944, the German forces were preparing to launch a massive counterattack against the Americans and the British through the Ardennes Forest in Belgium. Skorzeny led a team of English-speaking German commandos disguised as American soldiers with forged documents to go behind enemy lines.
The commandos then changed road signs to mislead American troop movements, destroyed vital American supply dumps, and destroyed telephone lines to hamper communications as the German assault was carried out. When news of the German commando operation got out, the Americans were forced to quiz each other on pop culture and sports to try and identify their friends from foes. However, Skorzeny and most of his men were able to avoid detection and made it back to the German lines.
6 – A Polish Spy Sneaks Past Her Own Wanted Posters
Christine Granville, or Maria Skarbek, was a Polish spy working with the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) throughout the war. She was one of the most highly wanted spies by the Germans because she was regularly providing the British with intel on German operations throughout Europe, and wanted posters for her arrest were a common presence in German military and police offices.
Incredibly enough, after the Allied landings in France, Granville walked right into a prison controlled by the Gestapo and successfully negotiated for the release of three other spies who were scheduled to be executed. This was because she convinced the Gestapo that by releasing the prisoners they would be granted mercy by the advancing British force. The Gestapo didn’t know her identity the whole time.
7 – The ‘First SEAL’ Wrecks Havoc on the Nazis
Lieutenant Jack Taylor is often referred to as America’s ‘first SEAL’ because he was the first American commando who managed to infiltrate enemy-held position via sea, air, and land across his career. In 1943, he and a team of highly-trained commandos infiltrated the German-controlled Balkan Peninsula.
For the last several months, he and his men spied on the Germans, destroyed supply depots, and conducted raids on German military installations. They were nearly captured three times but managed to evade the enemy each time. In 1944, he and a team of OSS operatives were deployed to Austria for a similar task, but this time they were captured and imprisoned in a concentration camp until they were liberated in March of 1945.
8 – Operation Anthropoid
Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich was regarded as one of Hitler’s most brutal henchmen and a primary architect of the Holocaust. Hitler named Heydrich the Reich Protector of Czechoslovakia, and he declared martial law over the region and began regularly imprisoning and executing people who he suspected of working against the German government.
The exiled Czech government launched a plan to assassinate Heydrich with Operation Anthropoid. Supported by the British, two Czech agents parachuted into the country and coordinated with local resistance fighters. In 1942, they waited for Heydrich to pass by a road in his open convertible that he was known to enjoy driving in. The two men threw a grenade at the vehicle and inflicted mortal injuries upon Heydrich; he later died from his wounds. While the mission was a success, both agents were later caught and tragically killed in a shootout with German troops in Prague.
9 – Virginia Hall: The Spy The Nazis Feared the Most
Virginia Hall was an American agent who worked with the British SOE and American OSS services. In the 1930s, she lost her foot in a hunting accident that had ended her hopes of joining the foreign services, but didn’t end her hopes of taking the fight directly to Nazi Germany after the war broke out. Hall snuck into France in 1941 to help coordinate with the French resistance.
Hall ended up becoming considered the most dangerous out of all the Allied spies by the Nazis. She organized resistance operations against the Germans, destroyed German trains and rail lines, smuggled in weapons and supplies for the resistance, and provided refuge for downed Allied airmen to help them escape German detection. Hall fled from France in late 1942, but returned in the spring of 1944 where she continued to help the French resistance in anticipation of the Normandy landings. It’s estimated that the resistance fighters Hall led killed over 150 German troops.
10 – Operation Vengeance
Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto was the mastermind behind the successful Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In the spring of 1943, the Americans (who had broken the Japanese code) learned through their intelligence operations that Yamamoto was going to visit the Japanese garrisons on the Solomon Islands to help boost their morale. President Franklin Roosevelt himself ordered the upcoming Operation Vengeance to commence…and you can probably guess the objective of this operation based on its name alone.
Eighteen American P-38 Lightning fighter planes intercepted Admiral Yamamoto’s bomber and fighter escort. A dogfight took place that culminated with Yamamoto’s plane being shot down over the jungle of the island of Bougainville and he was killed in the crash. His body was recovered by a Japanese search party the following day.
11 – Operation Jubilee
Did you know the Normandy invasion was not the first time the Allies attempted to land in France? Two years before D-Day ever commenced, the Allies launched a 6,000 man raid on the northern French port of Dieppe. The objective was to destroy the German military garrison and practice amphibious landings in preparation for a future, larger scale landing.
Operation Jubilee, as it was named, was a complete disaster from the beginning. The Germans were aware that the Allies were coming and prepared their defenses accordingly. The Allies suffered a 50% casualty rate, and many questioned why the operation was even commenced in the first place.
12 – Operation Cherry Blossoms
Operation Cherry Blossoms was a planned Japanese attack on American soil that we should be very thankful never got off the ground. Japan had refrained from using biological weapons against the Americans during the war, but they had used them to deadly effect against the Chinese and were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians.
But as Japanese desperation grew, by 1945 the Japanese military decided to reverse its policy and use their weapons against America after all. The planned Operation Cherry Blossoms was to send five submarines equipped with dive bombers across the Pacific to San Diego. Each bomber contained fleas carrying the biological toxins; the plan was for the bombers to fly over southern California and release the fleas over the American public. Thankfully, the Japanese were never able to complete the plan before their surrender later that year.
13 – Operation Chastise
Germany was highly dependent on their Ruhr River dams for generating electricity to much of their country. As a result, they heavily defended these dams with an extensive network of anti-aircraft weapons and torpedo netting. Any attempt to bomb the dams was considered a suicide mission by the Allies, but they proceeded with an attempt to destroy the dams anyway.
In the subsequent Operation Chastise, the British developed a new bomb shaped like a drum that was designed to skip along the surface of the river before striking the dam and exploding. Nearly twenty Lancaster planes took off to destroy the dams, and despite taking a 40% casualty rate, two of the bombs succeeded in breaching the dam, disabling the hydroelectric plants, and flooding the Ruhr region.
14 – The Raid on Cabanatuan
In late 1944, the Americans invaded the Philippines to take it back from the Japanese. As the Japanese retreated, they began executing American prisoners at the POW camps. One of the largest prison camps was at Cabanatuan and held over 500 American prisoners. Fearing that all of these men would be executed as well, American leaders authorized a rescue mission conducted by 100 Army Rangers to march 30 miles behind enemy lines, meet up with Filipino guerilla fighters, and then defeat the Japanese guarding the camp in a surprise attack.
The mission was a success and all of the prisoners being held at the camp were rescued and narrowly avoided execution. The events of the heroic operation were detailed in the 2005 film The Great Raid starring James Franco and Benjamin Bratt.
15 – Operation Frankton
In 1942, the Germans were heavily dependent on the French port of Bordeaux to receive supplies that aided them in occupying the country. An elite 10-man British commando squad was ordered under Operation Frankton to infiltrate France by traveling up the Gironde River in canoes before destroying the port and German cargo ships with explosive devices before escaping to the Spanish border.
Only four men made it to Bordeaux as four of the other men were either captured while two more fell victim to their canoe capsizing and drowned. These four men managed to destroy four cargo ships at the port, but two of them were killed while the other two managed to escape. The other four men who had been captured earlier were tragically later executed.
16 – Operation Pastorius
Operation Pastorius was perhaps the most daring German operation of the war. The operation, which was named after Francis Daniel Pastorius (the man who had organized the first German settlement in America), called for sending eight German men to the United States disguised as American civilians where they could then sabotage American industrial centers.
While brilliant on paper, nothing thankfully went according to plan. Two of the German men defected to the FBI shortly after arriving in America and betrayed the location of the other six men. President Roosevelt ordered the two Germans who had defected, George Dash and Ernest Burger, to be spared while the other six were executed.
Leave a comment