Editing Operation Fortitude (section)

===Strangeways rewrite===
{{blockquote
|quote = I rewrote it entirely. It was too complicated, and the people who made it had not never done it before. Now they did their best – but it didn't suit the operation that Monty was considering.... You see so much depended on the success of that deception plan.
|source = Strangeways, writing in 1996<ref name=Levine208/>}}

Strangeways was still unimpressed with the Fortitude outline, and, according to Ops (B)'s Christopher Harmer, in mid-February, he set out to ride "roughshod over the established deception organization".<ref name=Levine203/> Harmer writes that Strangeways displayed the same arrogance as his commanding officer. Montgomery was famously opinionated and held a low opinion of the London establishment of the "old boys'" of Ops (B) and the LCS. More importantly, however, he had worked under Dudley Clarke in Cairo during the beginning of the war and had extensive experience of deception operations.

In North Africa, he had learned Clarke's maxim that deception relied on getting the enemy to do something, not just to think something, and so his criticism focused on that.<ref name=Levine202/><ref name=Holt50/> He pointed out that convincing the Germans of so many fictional divisions would be difficult, and even more so would be convincing them of Montgomery's ability to manage two entire invasions at the same time.<ref name=Levine205/> Wild's plan outlined ten divisions for the Calais assault, six of them being fictional and the remainder being the real American V Corps and British I Corps. However, the corps would be part of the actual Normandy invasion and so it would be difficult to imply Calais as the main assault after D-Day.<ref name=Holt535/> Strangeways's final concerns related to the effort required for physical deception, as the plan called for large numbers of troop movements and dummy craft.<ref name=Levine205/>

[[File:1st Army Group.svg|thumb|Symbol of the fictional 1st US Army Group, a core element of Strangeway's plan]]

Strangeways's objections were strong, and having responsibility for the plan's implementation, he refused to undertake most of the physical deception. A power struggle ensued throughout February and early March between Ops (B) and Strangeways as to who had authority to implement each part of the deception plan.  Montgomery put his full support behind his head of deception and so Strangeways prevailed.<ref name=Holt536/><ref name=Levine206/> Finally, in a 23 February meeting between R Force and Ops (B), Strangeways tore up a copy of the plan, declared it useless, and announced that he would rewrite it from scratch.<ref name=Levine205/> The established deceivers were dubious about Strangeways's announcement and assumed that he would resubmit the existing plan with some modifications.<ref name=Levine206/> However, he duly submitted a rewritten operation that was met, in Harmer's words, with "astonishment".<ref name=Levine208/>