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advisors believed that the most likely place for the Allied invasion of Europe would be in the Pas de Calais region (see, for example, Ellis (16)). Moreover, the Allies were aware of this belief. According to Cave Brown ( 17), "they knew — from Ultra, and particularly from the intercepts of Baron Oshima' s (the Japanese ambassador at Berlin) traffic — what Hitler expected the Allies to do. He expected them to land at the Pas de Calais which he considered the logical point of attack." Indeed, so strong was this preconception, that for several days after the invasion at Normandy (see, Speer (18)):
| “ | Hitler remained convinced that the invasion was merely a feint whose purpose was to trick him into
deploying his defensive forces wrongly... The Navy, too, considered the terrain unfavorable for large-scale landings, he declared. For the time being he expected the decisive assault to take place in the vicinity of Calais — as though he were determined that the enemy, too, would prove him to have been right. For there, around Calais, he had ever since 1942 been emplacing the heaviest model guns under many feet of concrete to destroy an enemy landing fleet."(Emphasis added) |
” |
This preconception formed the basis for an elaborate deception plan keyed to reinforcement of this belief. If, according to Jervis (hypothesis No. 1
