10 WWII Missions So Secret They Were Erased From the Records

[00:00:00]Number 10, Operation Postmaster, the heist in neutral waters. On the night of January 14th, 1942, a raiding force approached the harbor of Santa Isabel on the Spanish island of Fernando Poe, now Bo, off the west coast of modern Equatorial Guinea and committed international piracy in neutral waters.

[00:00:22]Spain was not a belligerent. The harbor was Spanish sovereign territory. The operation had no legal standing. Winston Churchill approved it anyway. The force was number 62 commando, the small-scale raiding force under Major Gus March Phillips with Captain Jeffrey Appleard as second in command, 32 men comprising 11 SSRF commandos, four SOE agents, and 17 Nigerian volunteers crewing two tugboats. The targets were the Duchessa Dosta, a 7,872 ton Italian cargo liner, and two smaller axis vessels, the Lomba and the Bibundi, sheltering in the harbor since Italy entered the war. SOE agents posing as diplomats had arranged a dinner party for the ship's Italian and German officers that same night, keeping them ashore. At 2315 hours, the boarding parties entered under darkness, overwhelmed the skeleton watches, attached towe lines, blew the anchor chains, and moved all three ships to sea without firing a shot. Spain lodged protests. Britain denied all knowledge.

[00:01:35]March Phillips was awarded the Distinguished Service Order. Eight months later, he was killed during Operation Aquatent, a raid on the German occupied Normandy coast at San Lauron Sur, which would become part of Omaha Beach on September 12th, 1942.

[00:01:54]He was 34 years old. Number nine, Operation Burnhard, the bank notes built by prisoners. In 1942, SS Sturm Banfura Bernhard Krueger presented the Reich Security main office with a proposal that read less like a military operation than an economic assassination.

[00:02:16]He would destroy the British economy, not with bombs, but with money.

[00:02:21]Operation Burnhard, initially cenamed Operation Andreas, was Germany's plan to flood Britain with counterfeit Bank of England notes in denominations of 5, 10, 20, and £50, so convincing the bank itself could not detect them. Krueger transferred approximately 140 Jewish prisoners to block 19 of Zuxenhausen concentration camp, selecting for engravers, printers, former bank employees, and paper specialists. They were given marginally better conditions than the rest of the camp and no illusions about what would happen when the work was done. Over 3 years, Block 19 produced notes totaling approximately 134 million. The Bank of England has confirmed this represented more than 10% of all genuine notes than in circulation. Analysts shown samples without context, authenticated them as genuine. The plan to drop notes over Britain was never executed. They entered circulation through Axis networks in neutral Switzerland, Sweden, and Turkey, funding espionage across Europe. At the war's end, Krueger had the materials dumped in Lake Toplelets in Austria.

[00:03:37]Divers recovered bundles of counterfeit notes in 1959.

[00:03:41]The prisoners who survived testified at Nuremberg. The operation they were forced to build had funded the regime that imprisoned them. Number eight, Operation Grafe. the Germans who became Americans. In October 1944, Hitler personally summoned SS Oashurum Banura Otto Scordzini, famous for extracting Bonito Mussolini from captivity at Campo Imperator on the Grand Saso Massie in 1943 to his Wolf's lair headquarters with a new mission. recruit English-speaking German soldiers, dress them in American uniforms, equip them with captured American vehicles, and infiltrate Allied lines during the coming Arden offensive to seow chaos in the Allied rear. What followed was an exercise in the gap between planning and reality. Scorzeni had been promised hundreds of fluent English speakers.

[00:04:36]When Panza Brigade 150 assembled at Graphenvver, he had approximately 10 men who spoke genuinely fluent American English, 30 to 40 who spoke it adequately and a majority who barely spoke it at all. He consolidated the best into a 150man subunit called Einheight Stelau. Of these, roughly 44 men were dispatched behind Allied lines in American jeeps and uniforms when the Ardan offensive began on December 16th, 1944.

[00:05:10]The operation's greatest impact was not what it achieved, but what it caused the Allies to believe. Captured infiltrators talked quickly. Within 48 hours, American intelligence learned the mission included assassinating Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower, an element Scorzeni admitted was never serious, but which he had encouraged as rumor. Eisenhower was confined to Versailles under armed guard. Every checkpoint in France and Belgium became a choke point. Three infiltrators captured in American uniforms were executed by firing squad at Henri Chappelle, Belgium on December 23rd, 1944.

[00:05:51]Scorzani was acquitted of war crimes charges in 1947 and died in Madrid in 1975.

[00:05:59]Number seven, Operation Foxley, the assassination that never happened. In 1944, the British Special Operations Executive completed a classified dossier of more than a 100 pages that its leadership debated, shelved, retrieved, debated again, and locked away without acting on. The dossier described how to kill Adolf Hitler. Its crucial intelligence came from a German soldier captured at Normandy who had served in Hitler's personal guard at the Burghoff, his mountain residence on the Ober Saltsburg in Bavaria, and described his routines under interrogation with unwitting precision. Each morning, Hitler walked alone through surrounding woods to a nearby tea house, a roughly 20inut walk at a consistent hour with minimal protection through the wooded sections. S SOE planners identified this stretch as optimal for a trained sniper.

[00:06:56]A secondary option involved poisoning his food or water supply through a compromised staff member. The plan was submitted in November 1944. It was never authorized. The reasoning preserved in files declassified by the National Archives in 1998 was clinical. Hitler's strategic judgment had deteriorated so severely that senior SOE officers concluded he was an asset to the Allied cause. His refusal to permit tactical retreats, his diversion of armored reserves from Normandy on June 6th, his systematic overruling of professional commanders, these errors were accelerating Germany's defeat faster than any assassination could. Killing him risked a more competent successor or a martyr. Operation Foxley was never carried out. Hitler died by his own hand on April 30th, 1945 in a bunker beneath the ruins of Berlin. Number six, Operation Anthropoid. The assassination that did happen. On the night of December 28th, 1941, a Royal Air Force Halifax bomber released two men in parachutes over occupied Bohemia. Ysef Gabchic, a Slovak and Yan Kubish, a Czech trained by the British SOE after escaping their homeland, had one mission. Kill SS Oberg Group Infiner Reinhard Hedrich, Reich's protector of Bohemia and Moravia and one of the principal architects of the Holocaust.

[00:08:29]Historian Robert Gerworth of University College Dublin in his 2011 biography called Hydrich the most dangerous man in the Nazi Empire. On the morning of May 27th, 1942, Hydrick's open topped Mercedes slowed at a hairpin bend near the Bulovka hospital in Prague's Leeben district. Gapchic stepped into the road and raised his Sten submachine gun. It jammed.

[00:08:57]Hydrickch rose from his seat and drew his pistol. Kubish hurled a modified anti-tank grenade at the rear of the vehicle. shrapnel and horsehair from the upholstery drove deep into Hydrick's body. He died on June 4th, 1942.

[00:09:14]Fellow paratrooper Carol Chura walked into Gestapo headquarters on June 16th, 1942 and accepted 1 million Reichs marks for the names of contacts who had sheltered the assassins. The village of Liche was erased, its 173 men shot, its 184 women deported to Ravensbrook, and 82 of its 105 children sent to Chelno extermination camp where they were killed in gas vans on July 2nd, 1942.

[00:09:47]Gapchic, Kubish, and five fellow paratroopers made their last stand in the crypt of the Cathedral of St. Sirill and Methodius on June 18th, 1942 as German troops flooded the crypt with fire hoses. None surrendered. Chura was hanged at Pankrat's prison on April 29th, 1947. Operation Anthropoid remains the only successful Allied assassination of a senior Nazi leader in the entire war. Number five, Operation Sunrise, the Secret Peace. In February 1945, a series of clandestine meetings began in Switzerland that neither the Soviet Union nor most of the Allied high command knew about. SS Oberenfura Carl Wolf, the highest ranking SS officer in Italy, contacted Alan Dulles, the OSS station chief in burn and proposed surrendering German forces in Italy quietly and without Hitler's knowledge.

[00:10:50]The negotiations were known to the Americans as Operation Sunrise and in Allied communications as crossword. They ran for three months through Zurich and Escona. Wolf faced execution if Hitler discovered the contacts. Dulles could not formally commit the United States to any terms, could not include Soviet representatives as the alliance required, and could not let the process surface publicly. Stalin found out anyway. Soviet intelligence intercepted signals suggesting a separate peace was being arranged. Stalin sent President Roosevelt a letter of extraordinary bitterness accusing the Americans of allowing Germany to shift divisions to the Eastern Front. Roosevelt in one of his last diplomatic acts before his death on April 12th, 1945, denied any bad faith. The surrender document was signed at the Royal Palace of Cassera on April 29th, 1945 and came into effect at 2 p.m. on May 2, 6 days before Germany's general capitulation on May 8th.

[00:11:55]Approximately 1 million German and Axis soldiers laid down their arms. Wol was convicted of war crimes in 1964, sentenced to 15 years, and released from Strabing Prison in August 1969.

[00:12:10]Dulles became the first civilian director of central intelligence. Number four, Operation Gunnersside, nine men against the bomb. In the winter of 1943, what may be the most consequential act of sabotage in modern history was carried out by nine men on skis. The target was the Norsk hydrovorc electrolysis plant in Telmar, Norway.

[00:12:34]The only facility in the world producing heavy water in quantities sufficient to sustain a nuclear weapons program.

[00:12:42]Without dutyium oxide from Veor, Germany's atomic program could not proceed. A previous Allied attempt, Operation Freshman in November 1942, had ended in catastrophe. Two Horser gliders carrying Royal Engineers crashlanded in the Norwegian mountains and every survivor was executed by the Gestapo under Hitler's commando order. The nine men of operation Gunnerside were Norwegians led by Yohim Runner trained by the SOE in Scotland. Students, farmers, tradesmen, and engineers who had escaped occupied Norway and returned for this specific mission. They skied more than 50 km across the Hardang Vida Plateau in temperatures belowus20 C, descended a ravine the German garrison assessed as impossible, and entered the plant through a cable tunnel left unmonitored. Inside, they placed charges on 18 electrolysis cells, set a 30-second fuse, and withdrew. The charges detonated in the early hours of February 28th, 1943.

[00:13:52]Approximately 500 kilograms of heavy water was destroyed. Not a single German or Norwegian was killed or wounded.

[00:14:01]Eight men skied to Sweden. Runberg remained in Norway for another year.

[00:14:07]When Allied scientists assessed the German nuclear program after the war, it was far further from a viable weapon than feared. The nine men had bought time that turned out never to be needed.

[00:14:19]the most invisible kind of success existing only in things that did not happen. Renberg lived to 99 and died in October 2018. Number three, the ghost army. 1,100 artists who fooled a vermach. On January 20th, 1944, the United States Army activated a unit with no functional weapons, no operable artillery, and no mission that could be discussed outside a classified room. The 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, known publicly only after declassification in 1996 as the Ghost Army, was built on one concept. manufacture the appearance of military forces large enough to deceive an enemy into committing to the wrong position. To do this, the army recruited artists. Abstract painter Ellsworth Kelly served in the 23rd. Fashion designer Bill Blas served in the 23rd.

[00:15:19]The unit operated through three systems.

[00:15:22]Inflatable rubber decoys, life-size replicas of Sherman tanks, artillery pieces, and halftracks were indistinguishable from actual equipment to aerial photography or distant observation. Sound halftracks broadcast recordings of tank movements and construction audible for miles. Radio operators duplicated the individual Morse code rhythm, the operator's fist, of the real units they were impersonating, so no substitution registered on German intercepts. Between Normandy and the Rine from 1944 through March 1945, the 23rd conducted approximately 21 deception operations and impersonated more than 30 different Allied units. Historian Rick Byer, who co-authored the first comprehensive account with Elizabeth Sales in 2015, estimates the Ghost Army saved approximately 30,000 American lives. For more than 50 years after the war ended, the men of the 23rd told no one. Some died before the declassification in 1996.

[00:16:28]Their families learned the truth from a government document. Number two, Operation Mincemeat, the corpse that changed the Mediterranean. In the spring of 1943, the Allies were preparing to invade Sicily, the obvious stepping stone from North Africa into Europe and already anticipated by German commanders who had positioned their defenses accordingly. British Naval Intelligence Officer Euan Montigue and MI5 Flight Lieutenant Charles Cholanderly proposed a solution that would be difficult to believe had it not worked precisely as designed. Take the body of a dead man, dress him as a Royal Marines officer, furnish him with a convincing identity, attach a briefcase of correspondence between senior British officers pointing to Greece and Sardinia, not Sicily, as the real invasion targets and release him off the Spanish coast, where German intelligence contacts would photograph the documents. The body was that of Glendor Michael, a Welsh vagrant who had died in London after ingesting rat poison. He was given the identity of Major William Martin of the Royal Marines. His pockets were filled with carefully constructed personal effects.

[00:17:43]Love letters from a fictional fiance named Pam. The photograph was actually MI5 secretary Jean Leslie, a letter from a worried father, an overdraft notice from Lloyd's bank, a receipt from a London jeweler for an engagement ring, and theater ticket stubs. On April 30th, 1943, the submarine HMS Seraf surfaced off Helva in southern Spain and released the body into the current. Spanish authorities recovered Major Martin. The next day, German Abvare contacts photographed the documents before their return. Panza units moved toward Greece.

[00:18:23]Sardinia's coastal defenses were reinforced. Allied forces landed in Sicily on July 10th, 1943 and encountered resistance significantly lighter than full German troop dispositions would have produced.

[00:18:39]Intercepted German signals later confirmed the documents had been accepted as genuine. Glendor Michael is buried in Hwella under a headstone reading Major William Martin, Royal Marines. The man buried there never existed. Number one, Operation Ultra, the secret that won the war. In September 1974, a retired Royal Air Force Group captain named Frederick William Winterbotham published a book that forced historians to rewrite the entire strategic record of the Second World War. The book was The Ultra Secret. It was the first public confirmation of what approximately 10,000 people at a country house called Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire had been doing from 1939 to 1945.

[00:19:28]For nearly 30 years, every one of them had kept silence, not only because the law required it, but because they had been asked to protect a secret of extraordinary consequence. And they had the secret. British intelligence had broken the German Enigma cipher. the machine the German military used for virtually all strategic communications and had been reading that traffic throughout most of the war. The foundations were laid before the war.

[00:19:57]Polish mathematicians Marian Rajeski, Jezi Rajitski and Henrik Zagielski had broken Enigma in the 1930s and passed their methods and reconstructed machine designs to British and French intelligence at a secret meeting in the Piri forest near Warsaw on July 25th, 1939, 5 weeks before the German invasion ended Polish independence. At Bletchley Park, mathematician Alan Turing and engineer Gordon Welchman developed electromechanical bombs capable of working through Enigma's daily settings fast enough for the intelligence to reach commanders while still operationally useful. The product was codenamed Ultra. When Churchill visited Bletchley Park in September 1941, he called the codereers the geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled. Sir Harry Hinsley, who worked at Bletchley during the war and became the official historian of British wartime intelligence, estimated ultra shortened the war in Europe by 2 to four years.

[00:21:03]The Battle of the Atlantic turned in large part because convoy routting officers could read Yubot positions from decrypted German naval signals. The North African campaign was shaped by fornowledge of RML's supply convoys. The D-Day landings in June 1944 were protected partly because Ultra confirmed Allied deceptions had persuaded Hitler that Normandy was a faint and the main invasion would come at the Part Cala.

[00:21:31]10,000 people processed thousands of intercepts daily, watching German commanders describe their positions and fears in real time, never knowing their encryption had been broken. None talked about it for nearly 30 years. Husbands did not tell wives. Veterans fought in battles shaped by Bletchley intelligence and died without knowing why certain positions had been abandoned before they were attacked or why convoys that should have arrived didn't come. When the archives opened, the war had to be rewritten. Decisions that appeared to be inspired guesswork were revealed as precision operations informed by the enemy's own words. 10,000 ordinary people sustained that secret. Their silence saved more lives than any single battle of the entire war. If this kept you watching, there's more where that came from. Click the like button and subscribe so you never miss what we uncover next.