Funny that you should mention WWII, goodman. Ponder this.
(excerpt)
The army General George Patton fielded for the 1944 Normandy D-Day Invasion was unlike any other. It was a complete and unabashed fake.
(snip)
From a distance, an English farmer could see that sometime overnight a column of Sherman tanks had parked on his field. One of his bulls also noticed the American tanks and was eyeing one of them warily. Suddenly, the bull lunged. The farmer braced himself for the sight of one of his prized bovines cracking its skull against armor plating.
The bull struck the tank at top speed, and with a lazy hiss of air, the Sherman deflated into a pile of olive-drab rubber sheeting. The bull and the farmer had stumbled onto one of the most elaborate deceptions in the history of warfare: the creation of a phantom army to divert attention from the real Allied army poised to invade France in the spring of 1944.
(snip)
The Germans took all these possible scenarios seriously and maintained garrisons in all those regions. This helped the Allies in two ways: the garrisons guarding the possible invasion sites were removed from the fighting in the Soviet Union, which helped the Russians—and they were not concentrated in northern France, where the Allies really were going to attack.
Something to think about.
Bagster