-Firepower, fortifications, troops, and tanks often dominate stories of the Second World War.

What can sometimes go unnoticed is the role of deception in military strategy.

Camouflage, decoys, and disinformation all became tools for the Axis and Allies alike.

-Deception played a major role in the Second World War.

It was practiced on the largest scale it's ever been practiced in the history of warfare.

-Strategies ranged from a simple feint performed in the midst of battle to complex, long-planned campaigns designed to completely alter the enemy's perspective.

-The whole point in military deception and intelligence operations is to try and get the enemy to do what you want them to do, because that means you have a better chance of things going your way.

-There's no doubt that deception helped to save lives and bring a swifter end to World War Two.

-The stories behind some of the most extraordinary feats of espionage and strategic subterfuge the world has ever seen.

-It changes the character of war, and it changes the way that war is waged, and that's not going to change back.

♪♪ ♪♪ -By 1942, Europe was under German occupation from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean.

German armies had advanced deep into the Soviet Union.

In the Far East, Japan controlled territory all the way from India and all of Southeast Asia, right down to the Solomon Islands in the Pacific.

The Allies were on the back foot, but the tide of war was about to turn.

As both sides dug ever deeper in the fight for victory, each wove intricate webs of deception that hoodwinked intelligence services, fooled entire armies, and brought cities tumbling down.

♪♪ [ Telephone rings ] Between 1941 and 1945, US intelligence performed one of history's greatest illusions using camouflage, misdirection, and deception to make the American aircraft manufacturing industry appear to disappear.

♪♪ ♪♪ December 7, 1941.

Japan launched a devastating aerial bombardment on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

2,400 American troops were killed, and the United States Pacific Fleet left in ruins.

-This set off a chain reaction where the Japanese also attacked Wake Island, Guam, and the Philippines.

Americans were fearful.

Before December 7, 1941, most Americans remained isolationist, but with that attack, you have this sudden element of fear, anxiety, and patriotism that grows out of that.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's famous speech captured that mood.

-American President Franklin Roosevelt immediately declared war on Japan.

-December 7, 1941... a date which will live in infamy.

-With nothing but the Pacific Ocean separating the two nations, it seemed only a matter of time before America's West Coast became Japan's next target.

America's defense, as well as the Allied war effort in Europe, depended on the American Air Force.

All five of the country's largest aircraft manufacturers stood just a few minutes' flying time from the Pacific coast.

It would take months to move these vital factories to safer locations.

In response to the crisis, the military came up with a brilliant yet unusual solution.

Everything valuable to the American war effort, from airfields in San Diego to factories in Seattle, had to disappear.

This was Operation California.

Two years earlier, American operatives had spent time in Britain during the Blitz.

As German bombs pounded towns and cities, British military planners had built Starfish sites -- empty decoy towns designed to lure German bombers away from populated areas.

-So if there's something that the Luftwaffe would see and think that's a useful target, it's covered up with camouflage, and they recruit thousands of artists to help with this, people who have these skills.

They know how to paint.

They know how to make things.

They know how to disguise things.

-The US military's plan was to replicate what had happened in Britain with Hollywood film studios, to make factories and airfields vanish by disguising them as suburban neighborhoods.

In early 1942, West Coast America came alive with creative fervor as teams of painters, set designers, engineers, and carpenters worked together.

Air bases could be disguised under paint and camouflage netting.

But huge urban factories required deception on a far greater scale.

Boeing's Plant 2 in Seattle covered 165,000 square meters.

To disguise the factory, the deception team used 91,000 meters of timber to create a vast neighborhood, which became known locally as the Boeing Wonderland.

Carpenters built wooden scaffolding that ran for kilometers along the rooftops of the factory, its terminals and hangars.

Thousands of meters of canvas and chicken wire stretched across the scaffolding, painted to look like farms, fields, and roads.

The sloping roofs of hangars were turned into hillsides.

The factory's tallest chimneys disappeared inside sheds and fire hydrants.

Prop designers made dummy shrubs, houses, and cars to sit on top of the canvas.

Everything down to the last detail was made to look real.

The fake trees had chicken feathers spray-painted green to look like leaves.

Clotheslines hung across fake yards and smoke furled from fake chimneys.

The streets even had signs and names.

Synthetic Street ran perpendicular to Burlap Boulevard.

Many of the rooftop houses were just a few feet high, as they only needed to deceive potential enemy bombers flying high above.

From the skies, Plant 2 perfectly resembled a Seattle suburb, but underneath its camouflage, 30,000 men and women worked, producing two B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bombers each day.

34 American air bases and factories soon disappeared.

So effective was this trickery that US pilots on training flights frequently got lost without these familiar landmarks.

Under this ingenious camouflage, the American aircraft manufacturing industry ramped up and became what President Roosevelt dubbed an arsenal of democracy.

-Manufacturing in the United States was incredibly important to the eventual victory in World War Two.

If you look back at 1941, the United States had a total of 2 or 3,000 airplanes.

By the end of the war, this had grown to 300,000 airplanes.

-The magic trick gave the United States' aircraft production industry what it needed above all -- the gift of time.

Hollywood and the US military vanished America's valuable targets using a combination of camouflage and cunning.

In Germany, a few months later, Nazi rebels used sleight of hand to spirit Jewish people to safety.

♪♪ [ Cheering ] In the summer of 1942, in an act of supreme bravery and defiance, a group of conspirators working from within the heart of Adolf Hitler's intelligence services set out to deceive the Nazi regime.

Their intention -- to rescue 14 Jews from almost certain deportation and death.

By mid 1942, Hitler's troops were persecuting Jewish men, women and children across Europe.

1,000 Jews were murdered in the Nazi's mobile gas chambers each day.

In Germany, Jews were rounded up and sent to concentration camps as part of the Final Solution, the Nazi plan for the annihilation of the Jewish race.

Faced with this seemingly unstoppable massacre, a small pocket of resistance formed within Nazi Germany's own intelligence service.

-The Abwehr, which was military intelligence, the problem with that -- well, the problem from Hitler's point of view -- was it's headed by a man who hated Hitler called Admiral Canaris, who was actually plotting against Hitler.

-Abwehr Chief Admiral Wilhelm Canaris supported the plan of lawyer Hans von Dohnanyi to smuggle a group of Jewish refugees out of the country.

Using Canaris' contacts, Dohnanyi manipulated Nazi bureaucracy, removing the refugees' names from official deportation lists and registering them instead as Abwehr spies.

This was a deception right inside the very heart of German intelligence.

Codenamed "Operation 7," the plan was highly dangerous.

To help or harbor anyone Jewish was tantamount to treason in the Third Reich.

If Canaris was caught, he would be executed.

He had to be very careful that his deception wasn't noticed by the watchful German SS.

On September 5, 1942, the first Jewish refugee disguised as a German agent crossed into neutral Switzerland.

A few weeks later, as night fell in Berlin on the 29th of September, another 13 spies boarded a train heading for the Swiss border.

Covertly, Dohnanyi had traveled ahead.

To ensure that the group would be allowed into Switzerland, he carried $100,000 in cash for the Jews that he had withdrawn from secret military intelligence funds, claiming it was to finance the refugees' supposed espionage activities.

When the train arrived at the border, the Gestapo allowed the group to cross, convinced by Dohnanyi that the Jews were traveling to South America to spy for Germany.

Little did the Gestapo know that the Jewish refugees had no intention of spying.

When the train arrived in Switzerland, the group dispersed across Europe.

They had fooled the Nazis.

They were free.

Although the refugees escaped, soon, the ruthlessly efficient Nazi secret police began to unravel Dohnanyi's deception.

On Hitler's personal orders, Dohnanyi, Canaris, and their fellow plotters were arrested and executed.

The Operation 7 planners had risked everything for their clandestine rescue effort.

In the end, they gave their lives.

Hitler continued to face isolated rebellions from within his own regime throughout the Second World War.

Most he ruthlessly suppressed.

The Russian resistance that he faced on the Eastern Front, however, was fiercer than the German leader had ever expected.

By the autumn of 1942, the German juggernaut had raced through the Soviet Union and stood poised to take Stalingrad.

Named after Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, the city held great symbolic significance for both sides.

♪♪ ♪♪ As winter arrived, 90% of Stalingrad was under Axis control.

Its surrender appeared just days away.

-The Germans, on paper, are actually quite successful in 1942.

Even after Operation Blue, the German summer offensive begins, the cost ratio is something like 6 to 1 in favor of the Germans.

On paper, that makes the Germans look very strong, but we have to remember that cost ratio still takes 200,000 German soldiers, and that's a lot when you are actually extending vertically from north to south.

The German front, there's less troops to plug those gaps.

-On November 19, 1942, at 7:30 AM, Soviet gunfire and shells split the air, marking the start of the opening assault of Operation Uranus, a secret Soviet plan to encircle enemy forces occupying the city.

The Axis troops were taken by complete surprise.

Two months earlier, realizing the peril that Stalingrad was in, Joseph Stalin had met with his Chief of General Staff, Aleksandr Vasilevsky and Georgy Zhukov, one of his most senior generals.

From the two men, Stalin demanded a plan to save the city.

Vasilevsky and Zhukov proposed that Red Army troops should hold the Axis forces inside Stalingrad in a battle of attrition.

-It's also a choice to attack against the Romanian forces north and south of the city which have been arrayed, simply because the Germans are pulling in their own resources in order to continue the attritional combat inside Stalingrad itself, and that leaves the Romanians strung out on long stretches of the front, under-resourced in terms of heavy weapons, under-resourced in terms of mobile units, which is precisely what they're going to need to meet any kind of Soviet breakthrough.

-To ensure the success of Operation Uranus, Soviet planners employed maskirovka .

-Maskirovka is a Soviet conception for warfare that denotes two key purposes.

One is military deception and the second is strict operational security.

In the first instance, the Soviets are trying to disguise their own operations and not reveal them to the German Abwehr, the German intelligence agency.

In the second instance, they are also trying to maneuver undetected large armies across the broad expanses of the Eastern Front and position them in places that are advantageous to their own plans.

-The Soviet 62nd Army held Axis attention on Stalingrad.

Whilst outside the city, Soviet reserve forces moved forward by night and hid in evacuated villages by day.

Throughout October, the Soviets created a vast visual deception, controlling what German reconnaissance planes could and could not see.

Each morning, trains and convoys transporting men and materiel for Operation Uranus came to a halt and were covered with tarpaulins, making them invisible from the air.

To disguise the real theater of operations, along the Eastern Front, the Soviets created decoy airfields, complete with timber models of aircrafts and tanks.

Dummy soldiers were placed around the simulated equipment.

Ammunition supply points were hidden by disguising them as rural buildings.

As the build up around Stalingrad continued, far to the south, Red Army troops not involved in Uranus were ordered to make highly visible battle preparations.

Assault boats were openly displayed on the Don River near Voronezh while false field fortifications were assembled, giving the impression of a forthcoming offensive.

Central to Stalin's Maskirovka plans was a Soviet double agent.

In 1941, NKVD operative Alexander Demyanov crossed into Germany on skis, where he offered himself as a Soviet informant.

Charming, intelligent, and fluent in German, the Abwehr trusted him totally.

After three months' training, they parachuted him from a plane back behind Soviet lines with instructions to report on Stalin's military maneuvers.

Upon his return to Russia, Demyanov was handed a cocktail of disinformation to pass on to the Abwehr.

-He provides the Germans with context of a meeting that apparently takes place on the 4th of November, 1942, where he says Stalin has met with his 12 most senior generals and there is going to be an offensive, but it's going to be launched in the very south around Gorky.

There's going to be another one in the central part of the Eastern Front at Voronezh and Rzhev, and another, smaller one further north in Army Group Centre's area of Lake Ilmen.

Conspicuously, there is no word of an offensive around Stalingrad.

This is the misinformation.

-Acting on this, the Germans focused resources and attention on Rzhev, where the Soviets launched several small attacks against Army Group Centre.

On November 19, the Red Army advance on Stalingrad began.

50 kilometers away, the ground trembled under the force of the attack that the Axis had never expected.

By the time General Paulus, leader of the German 6th Army inside Stalingrad, started to react, it was already too late.

Two Soviet armies moved simultaneously from Stalingrad's north and south, rapidly overwhelming the Axis forces.

Just three days into the operation, they had encircled 290,000 Axis troops.

Hitler ordered his men to stand and fight.

-Hitler had taken charge of the army as the army's Commander in Chief in December 1941, and he took an increasingly micro-managerial approach to running the army.

He was particularly obsessed with stand fast orders, the idea of not giving a millimeter of ground.

-The Soviet net tightened around the city, preventing German aircraft from landing to deliver supplies.

As winter deepened, the stranded German 6th Army disintegrated.

Frozen, famished, out of fuel, they were hammered without respite by the Soviets.

♪♪ On February 2, 1943, Paulus surrendered his remaining 22 generals and 91,000 men.

Total Axis losses numbered more than 800,000.

-Perhaps more critically than the material, perhaps more critically than the economic losses there is the fact that the world was watching Stalingrad, and when the 6th Army surrendered, that had never happened before.

No German field marshal and that number of German generals had ever been taken.

It was public.

It was clear that this Axis force that was dominant in Europe was not only capable of being pushed back hundreds of kilometers, but whole German armies could be swallowed up.

-Soviet Maskirovka had altered the outcome of battle, not only on the Eastern Front, but in the war itself.

Operation Uranus would not be the last time that the German leader was double-crossed by the Allies.

♪♪ ♪♪ Saturday, January 30, 1943.

The people of Hatfield, a town just north of London, woke to a scene of devastation.

The power station of the de Havilland factory that manufactured aircraft essential to the Allied war effort, lay in ruins.

This, it seemed, was a catastrophe for the Allies.

The onlookers had no idea, however, that the devastation was a hoax.

This was an elaborate deception plan designed by the British intelligence services, a conjurer, and a criminal turned double agent on the run from the law.

Six weeks earlier, on December 16, 1942, a German agent code-named Little Fritz had parachuted into the Cambridgeshire countryside.

His real name was Eddie Chapman.

-He was a safe breaker that had ended up incarcerated in Jersey at the time that the Nazis occupied the island.

He volunteered his services to the Germans.

He said, "Look, I'm a wanted criminal in Britain.

You can trust me.

If I go there and I turn myself over to the authorities, I'm looking at a 14-year stretch."

So the Germans thought, "This guy is interesting."

He took very well to the sort of secret training they started giving him and thought, you know, "We've got a winning agent here."

-In occupied France, Chapman received rigorous training in the tricks and techniques of spycraft, taught to parachute, send coded wireless messages, and to make a bomb from sugar and oil.

Little Fritz was molded by the Nazis into both spy and saboteur.

After months of training, Chapman's Abwehr handlers gave him his first foreign assignment -- destroy the power plant of the de Havilland factory in Hatfield, Hertfordshire.

-The de Havilland factory is a target for the Germans because the de Havilland Mosquito, which is being manufactured there, is a real pain.

It's capable of carrying 4,000 pounds of explosives as far as Berlin, so it's definitely a strategic target that they want to remove if they can.

-On a cold December morning, Little Fritz landed in Britain, armed with a pistol and a cyanide capsule in case of capture.

-Now, unbeknownst to the Germans and to Eddie Chapman, the British were listening in on all of this training through Bletchley Park.

And so they actually followed this guy all the way through his training to the point where they actually knew where Eddie Chapman was going to land and what he was going to do.

-Aware of his arrival and his instructions, MI5 were not expecting Chapman's next move.

-Upon arrival in Britain, Chapman hands himself in to MI5, who decides to help him because he's another useful double agent, potentially.

-MI5 offered Little Fritz a choice.

He could feed false information to the Germans, or he could go back to jail.

Chapman chose the first option.

The British gave him a new code name.

Eddie Chapman became Agent Zigzag.

MI5 knew that the Abwehr would only trust Chapman if he succeeded in his sabotage, so the Security service set out to fake the destruction of the de Havilland factory.

To help pull off this grand deceit, the British called on a magician, Jasper Maskelyne.

Recruited at the outbreak of war, Maskelyne was a professional illusionist and a master of misdirection.

-Maskelyne's contribution to camouflage in World War Two has been overstated by many, and it's understandable -- it's more fanciful.

He was a magician, so it provides a very glamorous look at deception.

However, the use of a magician does show how creative the deceptionists were willing to be, and a magician's talents could be quite useful.

-MI5 instructed Maskelyne to make it look as though the de Havilland factory had been blown to kingdom come.

On the night of 29th January, 1943, Maskelyne's team created a veil of camouflage around the factory to make it appear to German reconnaissance planes that a bomb had detonated inside the factory's power plant.

Technicians constructed replicas of sub transformers out of wood and papier maché painted metallic gray.

Two of these were rolled over as if blown sideways by the force of the blast.

The real transformers were covered with netting and iron sheets, painted to look like a vast hole in the ground.

Walls were covered in soot, as if blackened by an explosion.

Rubble and debris were spread across the compound.

-And Chapman goes back to his handlers and says, "I've done it.

It went well.

Sabotaged the de Havilland factory."

The British authorities also managed to get it into the media that there's been an attack on the de Havilland factory.

-That first edition of the paper was always on the aircraft that flew to neutral Lisbon that day, and the Germans would always read the British newspapers there.

And so if they checked up on Chapman, they would A, see the damage, and B, they would also read in the newspapers that the de Havilland factory had been damaged.

It made Chapman's story look perfect.

-The German handlers are so pleased that they actually award Eddie Chapman an Iron Cross, because they think he's done this brilliant job of destroying the de Havilland factory, when in fact, there's no damage to the factory at all.

-The very morning after Chapman's faked sabotage, a trio of Mosquitos streaked across Berlin in the RAF's first daylight bombing attack on the German capital, interrupting nationwide celebrations of Hitler's 10 years in power.

[ Crowd cheering ] De Havilland Mosquitoes would continue to plague Germany until the end of the war.

Chapman's German handlers never suspected his duplicity, and Chapman continued his role as double agent.

In 1944, the Abwehr gave Little Fritz a new job to report on the effectiveness of the V-1 and V-2 flying bombs -- two of Germany's most advanced weapons.

Chapman convinced the Germans that the deadly missiles were overshooting London and missing their targets.

As a result, the Germans gave the rockets less fuel, causing many to fall safely in rural Kent rather than central London.

Through his deception, Agent Zigzag, conman, criminal, crook, saved countless thousands of lives.

MI5's fake sabotage of the de Havilland factory was a stunning success, but just a few months later, they embarked upon a campaign of subterfuge that was even more spectacular.

♪♪ In 1943, as the Allies planned to invade Sicily, British intelligence services concocted a deception plan involving a corpse, a submarine, and a briefcase that would help to bring down Hitler's Fortress Europe.

By the spring of 1943, the Nazi war machine was beginning to misfire.

The British had won in El Alamein.

The Allied invasion of Morocco and Tunisia had fatally weakened Germany's grip on North Africa.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and American President Franklin Roosevelt agreed that their next target would be Sicily.

From there, they could sweep into what Churchill called Europe's soft underbelly -- Italy.

Allied planners were worried that the Germans would expect an invasion in Sicily.

-About 90 miles from the coast of Tunisia, it was very obvious that that's where the British would likely go, no matter what their long-term objectives were.

So whether it was France, whether it was Italy, or whether it was the Balkans, Sicily made the most sense as a jumping off location.

-The Allies had to distract the Axis and prevent Hitler from reinforcing Sicily at all costs.

The invasion was planned for July 1943.

They had just six months.

An overarching deception plan for the invasion was launched, codenamed "Operation Barclay."

-So the deception was designed to try and steer the Germans' focus away from Sicily and convince them that the Allies planned to attack other targets.

Namely, they would play up threats to southern France, to Sardinia, and to the Balkans, and argued that they would simply neutralize Sicily by way of aerial bombardment.

-The Allies used bogus troop movements and radio traffic to suggest an invasion through the Balkans.

Meanwhile, a highly intricate plan was put in place to support Barclay's overall deception -- Operation Mincemeat.

MI5 agents Ewan Montagu and Charles Cholmondeley resurrected an idea that naval officer Ian Fleming, future author of the "James Bond" novels, had helped to design in the early days of the war.

The plan was to plant a corpse disguised as a drowned British serviceman in neutral waters, laden with false documents.

-The challenge -- where do you get a body?

The British conscripted a coroner to help them find a body that would pass as having drowned.

-They actually found, in one of the morgues in London, the body of a homeless person that had died after ingesting rat poison.

There was a lot of water in the lungs and this -- it actually appeared as if this guy had died from drowning.

So they had the medical side of things covered.

The next thing is, they had to give this guy a backstory.

-In MI5's hands, the corpse became William Martin, a captain in the Royal Marines, a rank deemed high enough for him to carry secret documents, but not so high that the Germans would expect to know him.

For authenticity, Cholmondeley and Montagu gave Captain Martin a briefcase filled with identification papers, keys, cigarettes, a photograph of a woman posing as his fiancée, and, most importantly of all, a document marked "most secret."

This letter from Lieutenant Sir Archibald Nye, Vice Chief of the Imperial General Staff, detailed an upcoming invasion in Greece and hinted at another in Sardinia.

Written by MI5, the letter was the linchpin of Mincemeat.

By mid-April, the invasion of Sicily was nearing.

It was time to get Mincemeat underway.

On April 19, Captain Martin was dressed in naval uniform, packed in a container of dry ice, and boarded onto submarine HMS Seraph, docked in Scotland.

Seraph's crew were instructed to deposit the body just off the coast of neutral Spain, where local pro-Nazi authorities would be likely to hand it to the Germans.

The journey took 10 days.

At 4:15 AM, on April 30, Seraph neared the Spanish shore, slipped Captain Martin and his briefcase into the sea, and sent a message to London -- "Mincemeat completed."

Within hours, a local fisherman discovered the body.

Within days, the information was in German hands.

On May 9, it landed on Hitler's desk.

-Then, after his body washed ashore and the Spanish authorities let the British know that they had recovered the body, the British did everything that would be expected of them to do had that been a genuine crash.

They investigated.

They held a funeral.

They announced publicly the death of Major Martin.

Everything that needed to happen happened.

And as a result of it, it made it to where the Germans couldn't ever prove that any of the information was incorrect.

-Alarmed, the Fuhrer ordered German aircraft, artillery, and ships from Sicily to the Aegean to defend Greece against the imaginary invasion.

British codebreakers intercepted these orders, decrypted them, and passed them on to MI5, where they were received with delight.

Hitler had been duped.

A telegram was dispatched to Churchill -- "Mincemeat swallowed rod, line, and sinker."

Before dawn on July 10, the Allies landed on Sicily.

The success of Mincemeat meant the island was poorly defended.

-The Germans kept reinforcements around Greece and Sardinia rather than moving them towards Sicily and Italy.

-Even as 100,000 Allied soldiers streamed ashore on the first day of the attack, German military strategists remained convinced that this was an Allied bluff.

-There were still those in the German high command that are saying, "Yeah, this is probably a -- you know, a bit of a ruse.

They're actually going to invade through Greece or they're going to attack Sardinia."

-The Germans were wrong.

After 38 days, Sicily had fallen to the Allies.

This was a turning point in the war.

The impact of the Sicilian invasion was felt 1,500 miles away on the Eastern Front.

In the middle of a pivotal battle at Kursk, Hitler canceled his offensive against the Soviets to move troops to fight in Italy.

The Allied Sicilian invasion was a triumph based on the Allies overwhelming strength, but it also depended upon deception, that of Operation Mincemeat, which helped to give the invasion its key ingredient -- the element of surprise.

The Allies stormed through Sicily and set their eyes on mainland Italy.

On July 19, Allied bombers targeted Rome.

Boeing's B-17 Flying Fortresses reduced parts of the Italian capital to rubble.

Italy was on the brink of defeat, its role within the Axis weakened.

-By summer 1943, Italy was very much the junior partner in the Axis, if indeed you could talk about it being a partner at all by this stage in the war.

Three years of ruinous war had brought it to this level.

And whereas in the mid to late 1930s, Hitler and Mussolini had very much been equals on the international stage, this was no longer the case by 1943.

Mussolini, an ill, diminished figure, a metaphor for his country by this stage.

-On July 25, Mussolini was summoned by Italian King Victor Emmanuel III who ordered his immediate imprisonment.

After two decades in power, Mussolini had been overthrown.

[ Crowd shouting ] ♪♪ Upon Mussolini's arrest, Hitler dispatched a team of German soldiers to find and free his closest European ally.

-He still felt a degree of sentiment toward Mussolini for old times' sake, if you like.

Also, the idea of a fellow fascist dictator falling into Allied hands affronted his ideological sensibilities.

But the most pressing, practical reason why Hitler wanted Mussolini rescued was that he wanted Mussolini installed as head of a puppet fascist Italian regime in German service.

-On new Prime Minister Pietro Badoglio's orders, Mussolini was moved from jail to jail across Italy, each time in absolute secrecy.

Planning to open surrender negotiations with the Allies, what Badoglio feared most was that the Germans would break Mussolini out of prison, reinstate him as prime minister, and rally fascist support to keep Italy in the war.

Mussolini became Italy's most closely guarded prisoner.

The Italians moved Mussolini to various locations to throw the Germans off the scent.

He was first kept on the remote island of Ponza in the Tyrrhenian Sea.

The Italians even planted false information to deceive the Germans, pretending that Mussolini was on an island called Ventotene, also in the Tyrrhenian Sea.

It was an elaborate game of hide and seek as the Italians moved Mussolini around the country, all the while feeding the Germans fake intelligence.

-Hitler actually employed astrologers, psychics, and fortune tellers to try and help him locate Mussolini, so there was some really weird goings on when it came to the German effort to find Mussolini.

But actually, the single most effective effort to find Mussolini were carried out by SS intelligence.

-Hitler ordered Major Harald Mors, head of an elite airborne battalion based in Rome, and General Kurt Student, a hero in Germany for his 1941 capture of Crete, to oversee a task force to locate the Italian dictator.

Assisting Mors and Student was Austrian SS Captain Otto Skorzeny.

Standing almost two meters tall with a dueling scar on his left cheek, Skorzeny was an imposing figure.

-When war came, his star rose quite quickly, not necessarily because of any particularly innate military organization abilities that he had, although he was not without some talents in those areas.

But he mainly was able to get on because of his cocksure attitude and his ability to make friends in high places.

-On July 26, the Mussolini manhunt, codenamed "Operation Oak," began.

Skorzeny and Student flew to Rome.

With them, they had £5,000 in forged British currency to entice details related to Mussolini's location out of likely-informants.

For years, the Nazi regime had stationed spies in the city who had infiltrated Roman society.

On the night of July 27, Skorzeny met with one of these agents, a German police attaché assigned to spy on the Italian police.

Over a candlelit dinner, Skorzeny requested any information related to El Duce's whereabouts.

Whispers and rumors from all corners of Rome soon reached the Germans.

From some sources, they heard that Mussolini had been taken to Switzerland.

Others reported he was dead.

The Germans had little choice but to follow each and every lead, some of which were reportedly planted by Italian agents desperate to deceive the Nazi searchers.

All the while, the Oak planners monitored Italian military radio transmissions, listening for unusual messages.

For weeks, nothing was forthcoming.

But finally, at the end of August, the Germans made the crucial breakthrough.

-And the biggest single breakthrough was the work of Herbert Kappler, who was the SS and police attaché in the German embassy in Rome, who was able to intercept a call to the police chief in the Italian Interior Ministry confirming that security preparations at the Gran Sasso Hotel were complete.

-On August 28, he had been taken to the Hotel Campo Imperatore, atop the highest peak in the Apennine mountain range -- the Gran Sasso.

Tipped off by the intercepted message, Skorzeny, Student, and Mors focused all their attention on the mountain.

On September 8, Skorzeny flew over the Gran Sasso and was convinced by his aerial reconnaissance that Mussolini was held at the hotel.

A German medical officer who could speak fluent Italian was sent to the hotel to spy and make notes.

He had a fake cover story, assessing if the hotel would be suitable as a malaria clinic.

Locals told him that there were several hundred armed men guarding the mountaintop.

The Germans had found their prey.

-As a result of the aerial reconnaissance flight, that it was established that the best means of getting Mussolini out of the Grand Sasso Hotel was through a glider-borne operation using German airborne troops.

-That same day, Badoglio's government announced an armistice with the Allies, which included an agreement that Mussolini would be handed over to the British and Americans.

Time for Mussolini's liberation was running out.

September 12.

In the afternoon, 10 German gliders, each carrying nine SS commandos, landed next to the Hotel Campo.

Simultaneously, in the valley below, 50 German armored cars, 10 tanks, and 40 trucks full of soldiers captured the funicular railway and severed telephone lines, cutting the hotel off from the outside world.

On the mountaintop, Major Mors, Skorzeny, and their troops stormed the hotel, which was guarded by 200 heavily-armed Carabinieri, the Italian police.

The commandos had brought with them an Italian general -- Fernando Soleti.

As the Italians raised their guns in defense, General Soleti ordered them to stand down.

The Carabinieri dared not disobey.

They laid down their guns.

Unopposed, Skorzeny escorted Mussolini out of the hotel and on to a tiny plane which circled the mountain once before setting off for Vienna as the Germans below cheered.

[ Cheering ] -And the entire operation was filmed by cameramen from a propaganda company.

And Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief, plastered it all over the weekly "Deutsche Wochenschau" newsreel shown all over Germany, and this at a time when the German public needed some good news in the wake of serial defeats at the front and the increasingly dire bombing of German cities by the British and Americans.

-For his part in the operation, Skorzeny was awarded with the Iron Cross, Mussolini's personal wristwatch, and a reputation as the most dangerous man in Europe.

In the aftermath of Operation Oak, Germany seized control of northern Italy and established Mussolini as head of the newly-created puppet state -- the Italian Social Republic.

-[ Speaking German ] -Despite Goebbels best efforts to dissemble the truth, however, no deception could hide the fact that it was now the Germans on the back foot, the Allies on the advance.

-There's no doubt that deception helped to save lives and bring a swifter end to World War Two.

There's no way to scientifically prove this.

But when deception helped to achieve surprise, when it helped to break stalemates, when it resulted in victories that saved lives on both sides of the battlefield, and ultimately, when those victories were achieved, it brought the Allies one step closer to the conclusion of the war.

-The deception and misdirection practiced on both sides of the Second World War was of such creativity and originality that it is unlikely ever to be replicated again.

These acts of cunning, guile, and trickery, often conceived of and carried out far from the battlefield, changed not just the course of war.

They changed the course of history itself.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪