The Army that Never Was – D Day and the Great Deception by Taylor Downing

This event is part of our DDay Commemoration day on 9th June.
Events can be booked individually or a special price day ticket is available via ticketsource.

The Army that Never Was: D-Day and the Great Deception tells the remarkable story of the various Deception campaigns around the D-Day invasion eighty years ago. It is packed with the stories of larger-than-life individuals inventing and carrying out extraordinary ploys to fool the enemy into thinking that Normandy was just a sideshow and the real invasion was coming across the shortest stretch of the English Channel at the Pas de Calais. Central to this Deception was the invention of a completely hoax army led by General Patton in Kent and East Anglia and the creation of hundreds of dummy landing craft, tanks and aircraft to convince the Germans it was real. New research reveals a hidden link with the cinema industry in building these dummies. This is the almost unbelievable story of what went on behind the scenes of the dramatic D-Day landings. Sometimes, fact is more extraordinary than fiction.

Taylor Downing is a historian, broadcaster and best-selling author. Over many years, he produced more than 300 historical documentaries for British and American television. For the last decade, he has been writing popular history books, including Cold War (with Sir Jeremy Isaacs), Spies in the Sky about aerial intelligence in World War Two, Breakdown about shell shock on the Somme, 1983 – The World at the Brink about a Soviet war scare that nearly prompted World War Three, and 1942 – Britain at the Brink about Churchill’s darkest hours in 1942. His latest book is The Army that Never Was, which is about deception and D-Day. He regularly appears on television and radio documentaries and in podcasts. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.