Operation Mincemeat - The Corpse That Fooled The Nazis.
Imagine for a moment, a dead body… floating off the coast of Southern Spain, carrying secrets that could change the fate of a war.
It’s 1943, and World War 2 has been raging for almost half a decade. Generals on both sides watch on as more and more of their men perish in an ever shifting battlefront.
If either side is to make any sort of decisive headway, then a fresh approach to war is needed. But when any wrong move could spell crushing defeat at the hands of your mortal enemy, then you’d better pray that whatever cunning trick you have up your sleeve, actually pays off.
On todays episode we peel back the layers of a truly audacious operation where British Intelligence turned a lifeless corpse into a weapon. This is the story of the cunningly deceptive gambit known as Operation Mincemeat.
Now, lets rewind to the very start of world war 2, still just one month into the conflict to be exact, and we will see the exact moment that the seeds of this operation were sown.
It’s the 29th of september 1939 and The Director of Naval Intelligence, Rear Admiral John Godfrey, circulated a paper amongst his fellow commanders known as the Trout memo. In this document he wrote about the idea of using intentional deception as a military strategy, and compared the concept to fly fishing, casting about and seeing what bites.
Now even at this early stage the thought of british spycraft can only really lead us to one name, a certain mr. James Bond. And then maybe it would surprise you to find out that many historians in fact attribute this Trout memo not to Rear Admiral John Godfrey himself, but rather to his personal assistant writing under the Rear Admirals name, a certain Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming, the man who would go on to author none other than the famous 007 spy series.
The memo outlined a large number of deceptive tactics that could be used to mislead or scupper the enemy wherever and whenever they could. One suggestion put forward was to set an array of underwater mines across a stretch of water, with just one narrow, zig zagging pathway between them that only the british ships would have mapped out, and then, feigning some sort of engine trouble or the like, entice some unsuspecting German submarines and destroyers right into the middle of them.
But it was suggestion number 28 on the list that, many years later, would be one of the crowning achievements of this divisions legacy. On the memo, it was simply listed as “Suggestion 28 - Not a very nice one”. The idea was to plant some intentionally misleading documents on a corpse that could then be staged in the hopes that it would be found by the enemy.
The initial idea was dress a corpse up as an fighter pilot who had been shot down and, unfortunately for him, although he had managed to eject in time, his parachute would have subsequently failed. The corpse would be set up to mimic the injuries of this unfortunate accident, and in his pockets would be a thick wad of important communications.
Now the idea of deliberately planting fake documents in the hopes that it would be found by the enemy was not in fact a novel idea, and had been tried before, to varying degrees of success. and by the time of Operation Mincemeat, had most notably been tried rather recently in the Western Desert Campaign, in an operation known as the Haversack Ruse.
Here, a few miles South of El Alamein, a body was placed inside a blown up car on the edge of a German minefield facing the Nazi’s 90th Light Tank Division. On the corpse they had placed a map, supposedly describing in details the locations of the corresponding British minefields. The Germans, patting themselves on the back for having discovered this information steered well clear of the demarcated zones on this fake map, and drove their tanks into the clear zones, and directly into soft sand where they became stuck, unable to move, and ripe for the picking.
Now we return our focus to the European campaign where, in late 1942, military strategists were trying hard to solve the problem of how to land enough troops somewhere along the European coast so as to mount a credible invasion. Now as we know, France would have been the obvious choice, but by all the best calculations, they would need another 2 years in order to make this invasion force a reality. They needed another place to land, and there were really only two viable options at their disposal.
The first was to take control of Sicily, opening up the Mediterranean Sea to Allied shipping and eventually use it as a launch pad for a proper invasion into continental Europe, using Italy as it’s backdoor. The only problem with this choice is that it was so glaringly obvious that as soon as Hitler caught wind of any sort of preparations for a naval assault, he would simply fortify the island, making any attempt at taking it unviable due to the sheer number of casualties they would expect to face.
The second option was to land in Greece and move swiftly through the Balkans, trapping the German forces in an ever tightening vise grip between the British and Americans forces to the South, and the Soviet forces to the North.
A decision needed to be made and at the Casablanca Conference in 1943, the assembled strategists unanimously agreed on which of the two options they would choose. Much to the chagrin of Churchill, Operation Husky was set in motion. The Allies were invading Sicily.
Due to the fact that, according to Churchill “Everyone but a bloody fool, would know that it’s Sicily” something would have to be done to throw the Germans off their scent.
Hitler was at this point, aware of these two weak points in his lines and had reasons to be concerned about both of them. However, the idea of a Balkan invasion worried him immensely as this particular area was a major source of raw materials for the German war machine, including copper, chrome and oil. Now the Allies were well aware of these particular fears and decided to lean into them, playing upon his concerns as a way of making him believe that the Balkans were their true objective.
By this point the Germans knew that something was up and had detected the Allies preparations for some sort of invasion. All the Allies had to do was reinforce the deception, and this is where a topic for a future episode was set in motion, none other than Operation Barclay.
In short, this operation solely focused on clumsily doing all the things the Germans would expect, if you were planning on invading Greece. They Allied forces set up fake Headquarters in Cairo whereby they began mustering an entirely fictional formation known as the Twelfth Army. They conducted military maneuvers in Syria using dummy tanks and armoured vehicles. They put out advertisements saying that they needed to hire a suspiciously large number of Greek language interpreters, and also began very obviously stockpiling Greek maps and currency.
The Germans were on the hook, but now they needed one final piece of the puzzle in order to truly reel them in.
Into our story come the two men tasked with executing on this audacious plot, Charles Cholmondeley, an ex-flight lieutenant with the RAF, who had been snapped up by MI5, Britains counter intelligence agency. Alongside him was Ewen Montagu, a naval representative, assigned to work alongside Cholmondeley and develop the plan.
The two men started with the most important part of the plan first. They needed to source a body.
Montagu, having been a lawyer before the outbreak of the war, was by nature a more cautious individual when it came to the legalities of this plan. He made it clear at the outset that whichever corpse they eventually used for the plan would only be done on condition that the real man’s identity never be revealed to the public.
They approached a London coroner by the name of Bentley Purchase, and despite the vast numbers of men dying each day during the war the legalities of the plot made it all very difficult. Bentley Purchase is recorded as telling them: “I should think bodies are the only commodites not in short supply at the moment, but even with these bodies all over the place, each one of them has to be accounted for.”
Not long after this proclamation however, Purchase contacted Montagu with the news that he had come across a suitable body, that of a homeless man who had died from eating rat poison, and who had no living relatives to claim him.
The coroner told them he would keep the body in the mortuary freezer at a temperature just cold enough so as not decompose too quickly but not so cold that it would cause freezer burn to the skin, something that would be instantly identified by any Spanish or German coroner, causing the entire ruse to collapse. But the body would not last forever, and Cholmondeley and Montagu were informed that they had just 3 months to make the plan work, and the clock had already started ticking.
6 days later the two men filed their plan with the military committee and operation Mincemeat was underway.
In order for this plan to work they would need to create an entirely fictitious character with a believable backstory.
They started with a name and rank, Captain William Martin of the Royal Marines.
Then the fun began. Into his coat pocket they placed a photograph of the Captains fictional fiancee, a beautiful young woman named Pam. Pam, who agreed to pose for the photograph, was in fact a young MI5 clerk name Jean Leslie. The two men, tapping into their creative sides, penned two love letters from the fictional Pam, gushing with excitement about their upcoming wedding. To really seal the deal they even included a receipt for a diamond engagement ring from a famous Bond Street jeweller.
There were also letters from the Captains father, a supposedly pompous and pedantic man, a note from their families lawyer and a letter from the bank demanding that the fictitious Captain please reply with haste to their request for him to settle his outstanding overdraft debt.
There was a book of stamps, a silver cross, some cigarettes, matches, a pencil stub, keys and a receipt for a new shirt.
To further fool the Germans, and round out the timeline for the dead man's supposed movements, they even included ticket stubs from a London theatre and a bill for 4 nights stay in a room at the Naval Club.
And for the final piece of the puzzle they would need to include the fake Captains identity card, complete with his name and photograph. And it was the latter of these two pre-requisites that would prove the most difficult to achieve, as every time they tried to stage the body for a photo, the end result just very clearly looked like a cadaver.
But they would not be deterred and came up with a plan to instead conduct a search for a lookalike for any man who resembled a living version of the unfortunate dead man. Eventually they came across a real life Captain this time named Ronnie Reed who donned a Royal Marine jacket and posed graciously for their photographs. The likeness on the card was astounding.
Of course there was just one more thing they needed to add to the Captain’s briefcase before they were finally ready to go, and those were the crucial deception documents.
In order for these documents to be believable they needed to meet 3 clearly outlined criteria.
The documents needed to casually, but clearly, mention the target and the upcoming plans to land in the Balkans.
It needed to be carried in an unofficial method of correspondence so as to bypass any sort of suspicion as to why this information hadn’t been sent either via diplomatic courier or encoded signal.
And lastly, and I believe most ingeniously, it needed to mention the fact that the Allies were planning on faking an assault on Sicily in order to have the Germans move their forces away from Greece. And for me, this is genius on multiple levels, not only does it clearly just nullify the elephant in the room, that Sicily was the other obvious choice and thereby using it as a double bluff target, but also that when they did in fact end up invading Sicily for real the Germans would do nothing to stop them, believing they already knew that it was a supposed fake assault. Brilliant.
The documents were drawn up with the key part stating the following:
“We have recent information that the Germans have been reinforcing and strengthening their defences in Greece and Crete and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff felt that our forces for the assault were insufficient. It was agreed by the Chiefs of Staff that the 5th Division should be reinforced by one Brigade Group for the assault on the beach south of CAPE ARAXOS and that a similar reinforcement should be made for the 56th Division at KALAMATA.”
The plan was now well and truly underway. All that was left was to determine the location at which they would deposit the corpse. Initially they had thought to leave it somewhere along either the French or Portuguese coastlines but, after consultation with a naval expert on tides and currents, it was determined that the most believable location would be just outside of Huelva in Southern Spain. It helped too that there was a known German agent in the town, despite the fact that Spain had declared itself to be nominally neutral in the conflict.
The agent was a man known as Adolf Clauss, the son of a German consul operating under the cover story of being an agricultural engineer. He had excellent contacts both back in Germany as well as in the upper echelons of Spains political and military officials. They knew that if the body and its documents made it into his hands, then the information would surely make its way to the very highest ranking German commanders.
It was go time, they had everything they needed. The body was secured, the documents were finalised and the location had been decided upon. They had originally planned for the body to be the victim of an air disaster, but trying to simulate the accident at sea using flares and loud speakers just didn’t seem believable. After ruling out seaplanes, battleships and many other modes of transporting the body, it was finally decided that they would do it via submarine.
And so, on the 15th of April 1943, Winston Churchill himself was informed of the plan and officially sanctioned its deployment. When warned that there was a chance that the Spanish authorities might simply hand the body back without investigating the documents, Churchill simply said: “Well then, in that case, we shall have to get the body back and give it another swim.”
Next time, we’ll comb through, in fine detail, the execution of the plan, the Spanish authorities handling of the discovery, the German reaction to the deception, and just how the Allies turned it all to their advantage.
It was very early in the morning on the 17th of April 1943. Today was the day that Operation Mincemeat was officially put into action. The first order of business was the somewhat gruesome task of preparing the corpse to look like the fictional Major Martin.
For years the identity of the man whose corpse would save many others from a similar fate, remained a closely guarded secret, as was the wish of Ewan Montagu when they first set about concocting this scheme. However, in 1996 an amateur historian from London named Roger Morgan uncovered some evidence in the public record office that the identity of the corpse had actually been that of a Welshman named Glyndwr Michael. Michael had been born in Monmouthshire in South Wales and in his adult years had worked part-time as a gardener and a labourer.
His father was a coal miner, but he tragically killed himself when Glyndwr was just 15 years old, and this had a resounding impact on the boy who felt utterly lost in the world. When his mother died 16 years later, everything came crashing down. Homeless and without any friends he fell into a deep depression, and needing some money to get by he made his way to London where he began living on the streets.
A few years later Michael was found in an abandoned warehouse nearby to Kings Cross, and was incredibly ill and in a considerable amount of pain after eating rat poison that contained phosphorous. He was rushed to St. Pancras hospital but just two days later he was pronounced dead. It has been speculated that he too had taken his own life, but it might simply have been a truly unfortunate accident after it was discovered that the rat poison had been mixed into a paste-like substance and smeared onto some bread crusts in order to attract the rats.
A hungry man, down on his luck, might not have stopped to ask any questions when he found some bread just lying on the ground.
And while all of this was a truly tragic end to a man who had suffered for a large part of his life, the manner of his death lent itself to the necessary narrative that the men were trying to portray. Because of the way the rat poison eventually kills you, it causes what is known as a pulmonary edema, essentially an accumulation of large amounts of liquid in the lungs, which, to an unsuspecting spanish or german coroner, would present the exact same manner of death as a drowning victim.
When Purchase, Montagu and Chomondeley arrived at the morgue that fateful morning ready to prepare the body, they immediately encountered a snag. The corpses feet had frozen solid. Try as they might they could not get the boots onto the icy feet and so brought in an electric heater and placed it nearby, just enough to defrost the feet, making them malleable enough to slide the boots in place.
The documents, extra papers, love letters and all other manner of so called “pocket litter” was placed in the jacket pockets and finally the briefcase was attached to his arm.
Once everything was ready to go, the body was placed in a specially designed canister, filled with 20 pounds of dry ice and then sealed up tightly. They placed the canister in the back of a van and had their driver, an ex-motor racing champion by the name of St John Horsfall, drive them through the night to west scotland. Once it arrived, it was swiftly unloaded and taken on board a submarine named the HMS Seraph.
They submarines captain Lieutenant Bill Jewell was the only man who was allowed to know the contents of the canister. The other men on board were simply informed that it was nothing more than some highly specialized meteorological device that the Allies were deploying near Spain.
They stealthily made their way to the Spanish coastline, but all of their hard work was almost undone, when on two separate occasions they were targeted with bombs, both times narrowly escaping being blown up. But on the 29th of April they arrived just off the coast of Huelva. They spent a day surveilling the surrounding area, and at 4:15am the next morning they were ready to go.
The HMS Seraph surfaced and captain Jewell had the canister brought up on deck. The only men he allowed to accompany him were his most trusted officers, while all other men aboard had been ordered to stay below deck. Together with his officers he opened the container and slowly lowered the body into the water. They hurriedly gathered up the canister and took it with them back below deck whereupon capt Jewell ordered the engines be turned on full power so that as they left the area the wash from the engines screw blades would push the water, and consequently the floating corpse, towards the shoreline.
It took almost a day before the body of the fictitious Major Martin was discovered by a local fisherman around 9:30am on the morning of the 30th of April, 1943. It was brought aboard his small fishing boat and delivered to a regiment of Spanish soldiers in the town of Huelva, before being handed over to a naval judge.
The Spanish authorities, true to their proclaimed neutral status, alerted the local British vice-consul that a body with an attached briefcase had been found.
Two days later, The vice-consul, Francis Haselden attended the official autopsy. He was entirely up to speed with the plot, and played his part to perfection. In order minimise any risk of the two Spanish doctors discovering anything amiss, let alone that the corpse was in fact 3 months old, Haselden made a great show of finding the whole procedure overwhelming and stifling. He soon asked the doctors if, in the heat of the day and with the frankly terrible smell of the corpse, if the doctors shouldn’t hurry up and bring the post mortem to a close, and rather join him for lunch somewhere out in the fresh air. Being that it was midday already, the doctors hastily agreed and signed the death certificate stating that Major William Martin had died from drowning in the sea. In an unexpected turn of events, both the body and the briefcase were offered to the British vice-consul to take into his own possession, and thanks to some quick thinking, and continuing his play acting from earlier, he said that he couldn’t possibly stand to take possession of such a thing, and that they should rather keep it, and he would arrange for it to be sent back to England via the official channels, quick thinking which bought the plot the time it needed to work.
Officially he reported the discovery to the relevant parties back home in Englad, and this set into motion a series of supposedly encrypted diplomatic communications from the British, which had in fact all been pre-scripted for just this very purpose. Everything, so far, was going exactly to plan. The communications had intentionally been weakly encrypted and so the Germans cracked them fairly easily, reading with delight the messages supposedly urging the vice consul to go back and retrieve the body as soon as possible as it contained very important information that would be devastating should it fall into the hands of the Germans. I can just imagine the frenetic hustle as the Germans scrambled to make sure that the body was secured.
It did not take long for word of this discovery to be passed along to German intelligence agents already stationed in Spain. In the meantime the briefcase and it’s contents had been sent to Madrid for safekeeping. Officially the Spanish authorities denied the German requests to view the documents, but behind closed doors, Spanish officers, sympathetic to the cause of the Nazi’s, covertly photographed the contents of the briefcase and sent them to the head of German military intelligence in the region. Eventually all that was left unread was a wax sealed envelope. By inserting a thin metal rod into the envelope the documents, still slighty wet from the sea water, were wound around the rod and pulled carefully through a small gap in the corner of the envelope so as not to disturb the seal. They were not aware that regardless of their effort, they had disturbed the single eyelash placed at a strategic spot within the letter which would tell the British definitively whether or not the letter had been accessed.
All the German agents knew was that whatever they were about to read, was something very important to the British, but what they found truly astonished them. The corpse that had washed up, was evidently a courier carrying some deeply personal and important documents from one high-ranking British commander to another. What a stroke of luck, they thought!
As mentioned in the last episode, the letter spelled out, in no uncertain terms, that the Allies intended to launch an invasion force across the mediterranean from their military positions in North Africa, culminating in an all out attack on the German held territories of Greece and Sardinia.
It wouldn’t take long before the British intercepted a German communication urgently warning the German high command that the Allies intended to invade the Balkans, with a planned fake attack on Sicily as nothing more than feint to draw away German defenders. Once this message was cracked by the code breakers at Bletchley Park, a message was sent to Winston Churchill that simply read:
“Mincemeat swallowed, rod, line and sinker by the right people, and from the best information, they look like acting on it.”
The ruse was not fully over yet, and Montagu, having thought through every possible angle, even went a step further by adding the fake Major Martin’s name to the published list of British casualties which appeared in the June 4th edition of the Times. Rather fortuitously for the operation as a whole, the same day as this was published the names of two other officers were also recorded as having met their end when their plane was tragically lost at sea, as well as another report of film star turned fighter pilot having been shot down by the luftwaffe in the Bay of Biscay. These coincidental stories added credence to the theory that Major Martin could have been involved in one of these incidents himself, or at the very least something very similar.
As meticulous and prepared as they had been, neither Montagu nor Cholmondely could quite believe just how smoothly the operation was running. But would there be an unexpected sting in the tail? We’re going to take a short break, and when we return we’ll find out just how Hitler himself reacted to this remarkable discovery.
Two weeks after the body was found by a local Spanish fisherman, the content of the secrete documents had already made their way to the ears of none other than Adolf Hitler himself.
The Grand Admiral, Karl Donitz was meeting with Hitler to discuss his recent visit to Italy, having been sent there to discuss a few important matters with the Italian leader Benito Mussolini. Mussolini firmly, and rightly, believed that Sicily was where any Allied attack would be focused, but Hitler, having been informed of the Operation mincemeat documents thoroughly disagreed. The Grand Admiral was even recorded as saying:
“The Führer does not agree with Mussolini that the most likely invasion point is Sicily. Furthermore, he believes that the discovered Anglo-Saxon order confirms the assumption that the planned attacks will be directed mainly against Sardinia and the Peloponnesus.”
Hitler sent a message to Mussolini stating, in no uncertain terms, to forget about Sicily and that Greece, Sardinia and Corsica must now be defended “at all costs”. Hitler even ordered the German First Panzer Division to be transferred away from their current position to defend Salonika in Greece. More and more troops were sent to the region, doubling the numbers there to over 10 000 troops, along with scores of fighter planes sent to provide cover and support for the ground troops when inevitably the invasion force landed. Crucially for Allied plans, all of the devastatingly effective German torpedo boats were moved away from Sicily to positions amongst the Greek islands. Along with them, seven full German divisions were transferred to Greece, with another 10 divisions being added to those already in the Balkans.
Hitler had gone all in on the ruse, still believing that any intelligence coming in that warned of Allied troop movements on Sicily, was nothing more than the already discovered feint, one which the Germans were determined not to fall for.
And so, on the 9th of July, the Allies launched Operation Husky, sailing across the Mediterranean and landing almost unopposed all along the shores of Sicily. Even four hours after their invasion had begun, the German luftwaffe had a message intercepted calling 21 aircraft AWAY from Sicily to rather go and re-inforce Salonika, still believing that this was all part of the bigger plan to attack the Balkans.
They were so convinced, that even weeks later, after Sicily was in the hands of the Allies, Hitler was sending none other than Erwin Rommel to Salonika in Greece to bolster their defences in the region, somehow oblivious to the fact that the Allies had already achieved their objective. And so, by the time the German high command realised they’d been duped, the Allies had established a firm foothold in the region, to not only the detriment of the war effort, but also to the massive embarrasment of all involved.
The entire saga is perhaps summed up perfectly by military historian Michael Howard, who described operation Mincemeat as “perhaps the single most successful deception operation of the entire war.”
And to be honest, the statistics back him up. Before the invasion of Sicily, military strategists had calculated that the attack would most likely result 10 000 killed or wounded soldiers in just the first week of fighting, there ended up being less than one and a half thousand. The Navy expected that roughly 300 ships would be sunk during the battle, they lost just 12. And the campaign as a whole, which was predicted to last more than 90 days, was over in just 38.
The legacy of Operation Mincemeat lives on, and in the end, it wasn’t just a mission, it was a lesson for all of us about the power of a well-crafted deception.
SOURCES
Books:
"The Man Who Never Was" by Ewen Montagu
Written by one of the masterminds behind the operation, this book is considered the definitive account of the mission. It provides firsthand insights into the planning and execution of Operation Mincemeat.
Available at most libraries or through online retailers.
"Mincemeat: The True Story of the Most Daring British Deception of the Second World War" by Ben Macintyre
This book provides an incredibly detailed account of the operation, mixing narrative with historical analysis. It includes previously classified documents and interviews, shedding light on the many figures involved.
Available in both digital and physical formats.
"Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis" by David Boyle
A more recent take on the story, this book offers a fresh perspective and explores the wider implications of the operation on the course of the war.
Available in various formats.
Web Resources:
National Archives (UK) - Operation Mincemeat
A collection of official documents related to the operation, including declassified material that can provide further context.
The Imperial War Museums - Operation Mincemeat
The IWM offers numerous articles, images, and related resources on Operation Mincemeat, giving you access to primary sources and scholarly commentary.
BBC History - The Great Deception: Operation Mincemeat
An article from the BBC History website that outlines the key events and strategic significance of the operation.
URL: https://www.bbc.co.uk/history
Documentaries and Videos:
"The Spy Who Fooled the Nazis" (BBC Documentary)
A documentary that tells the story of Operation Mincemeat, including interviews with historians and experts. This visual medium provides a strong overview of the operation.
Available on platforms like YouTube or the BBC iPlayer.
"The Man Who Never Was" (1956 Film)
A dramatized version of the operation, this film, based on Montagu’s book, offers a cinematic take on the events surrounding Mincemeat.
Available for rent or purchase through various streaming services.
Additional Resources:
The National WWII Museum - Operation Mincemeat
Articles, exhibitions, and archives related to Operation Mincemeat and its impact on the war effort.
