Operation Titanic was the codename for an operation carried out on 5-6 June 1944 by the Royal Air Force and the Special Air Service in support of the Normandy landings during the Second World War. The objective of the operation was to drop 500 dummy parachutists, in areas away from the landing beaches, to persuade the Germans that the invasion was spread over a greater area and thus entice troops away from the actual invasion zone. The episode was depicted in the 1962 film The Longest Day.
Titanic was one of four Royal Air Force deception operations carried out at the time, the others being Operation Glimmer by No. 218 Squadron, Operation Taxable by No. 617 Squadron and Operation Airborne Cigar by No. 101 and No. 214 squadrons.
Read more about Operation Titanic: Background, Mission, Aftermath
Famous quotes containing the words operation and/or titanic:
“An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis. We call intuition here the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in it. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known.”
—Henri Bergson (1859–1941)
“The two-party system has given this country the war of Lyndon Johnson, the Watergate of Nixon, and the incompetence of Carter. Saying we should keep the two-party system simply because it is working is like saying the Titanic voyage was a success because a few people survived on life-rafts.”
—Eugene J. McCarthy (b. 1916)