Operation Mincemeat

At a quarter past four in the morning on 30 April 1943 the British submarine HMS Seraph surfaced close inshore near Huelva, on the Atlantic coast of southern Spain. Her commander, Lieutenant Norman “Bill” Jewell, sent the ratings below; only the officers remained on deck. They opened a long steel canister marked “Handle with care – optical instruments”, took out the body of a man in the uniform of a British Royal Marines officer, wearing a life jacket and with a leather briefcase chained to his belt, and lowered it into the water. Jewell read Psalm 39 and then ordered full astern, so that the wash from the propellers would push the body towards the shore. At about half past nine in the morning the body was pulled from the water by a local fisherman.

So ended the sea-borne part of Operation Mincemeat, the most famous deception of the Second World War. The dead “Major William Martin” had never existed. He was in fact a homeless Welshman, and the documents in his briefcase had been written in London to convince the German high command that, once the fighting in Tunisia was over, the Allies would strike at Greece and Sardinia rather than Sicily.

Sicily, the obvious target

In January 1943, at the Casablanca Conference, Winston Churchill and Roosevelt decided that once North Africa had been taken, the Allies’ next objective in the Mediterranean would be Sicily. The invasion, named Operation Husky, was to take place in the summer. The choice was so obvious, however, that the planners feared the Germans and Italians would easily anticipate it. Churchill is credited with remarking that “everybody but a bloody fool would know it’s Sicily”. The island lay between Tunisia and the Italian peninsula, and taking it would open the shipping route through the Mediterranean.

At the same time the British knew that Adolf Hitler was particularly anxious about the Balkans, the source of the Reich’s copper, bauxite, chrome and oil. On this fear they built a wide-ranging deception plan, Operation Barclay, coordinated by the deception planning staff in London (the London Controlling Section) and the command in Cairo. In Egypt a fictitious Twelfth Army, supposedly twelve divisions strong, was “created”; in Syria manoeuvres were held with dummy tanks; Greek interpreters were recruited and Greek maps and money were collected. Mincemeat was to be the most convincing piece of this jigsaw: a document the enemy would obtain by himself and would therefore believe.

An old idea

The idea of planting a corpse carrying false documents on the enemy was not new. As early as September 1939 the Director of Naval Intelligence, Rear Admiral John Godfrey, circulated the so-called Trout Memo, a list of ways of deceiving the enemy, in whose preparation his assistant – the future author of the James Bond novels, Ian Fleming – had a hand. Item 28, described as “a suggestion (not a very nice one)”, proposed dropping the body of an airman with false dispatches in his pockets off a coast. In August 1942, before the Battle of Alam el Halfa, the British planted on the Germans a body in a wrecked car with a fake map of minefields. In September 1942 an aircraft flying to Gibraltar crashed off Cádiz, and the body of a courier was washed ashore carrying a letter giving the date of Eisenhower’s arrival in Gibraltar before the landings in North Africa. The Spanish returned the letter unopened, but other sources indicated that what fell into the hands of the Spanish authorities was sometimes passed on to the Germans.

In the autumn of 1942 an RAF officer, Charles Cholmondeley, seconded to the Security Service (MI5) and serving as secretary of the Twenty Committee (PL) (XX Committee), which ran the network of double agents, proposed his own version of the plan. The committee judged it impracticable in its original form but ordered it to be worked up. Cholmondeley was given the help of the navy’s representative on the committee, Lieutenant Commander Ewen Montagu, a barrister by profession. On 4 February 1943 the two men presented a finished plan for the operation, whose name Montagu had chosen from a list of unused code words.

The man who never was

The hardest part was finding a body. The pathologist Bernard Spilsbury assured Montagu that victims of air crashes at sea often died of shock rather than drowning, and that a Spanish doctor, convinced in advance that he was dealing with a drowned man, would be unlikely to notice the difference. At the end of January 1943 the coroner for north London, Bentley Purchase, found a body suitable for the purpose. It was Glyndwr Michael, a 34-year-old homeless man from Aberbargoed in Wales, who had died in St Pancras Hospital after eating rat poison containing phosphorus. He had no relatives who would claim the body for burial. Montagu refused all his life to reveal the man’s name; it was established only in 1996 by an amateur historian, Roger Morgan, from documents in the national archives.

The dead man was given a new identity: Captain (Acting Major) William Martin of the Royal Marines, a staff officer of Combined Operations. The name was chosen because several Martins of similar rank were serving in the Marines, and membership of the Royal Marines meant that any enquiries about his death would go to the Admiralty. Montagu and Cholmondeley built him a life out of the trifles an ordinary officer carries in his pockets: a photograph of his fiancée “Pam” (in reality an MI5 clerk), two love letters, a bill for an engagement ring, a letter from a stern father, a bank’s demand for repayment of an overdraft, tickets for a London theatre and a bill from an officers’ club. From these papers the “major’s” stay in London between 18 and 24 April could be reconstructed. An MI5 officer who resembled the dead man was photographed for the identity card, and for several weeks Montagu rubbed the passes against his trousers to make them look used.

The letters in the briefcase

The most important item was a private letter, written “from general to general”. In it the Vice-Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Lieutenant General Archibald Nye, wrote in an informal tone to General Harold Alexander, commander of the 18th Army Group in Tunisia, about staff matters, mentioning in passing preparations for landings by the 5th Division on a beach south of Cape Araxos and by the 56th Division near Kalamata in the Peloponnese. Sicily and the Dodecanese were presented in it as cover targets intended to divert the Germans’ attention. Because several versions of the letter drafted by intelligence officers sounded artificial, Nye eventually wrote it himself.

A second letter, from the Chief of Combined Operations, Lord Louis Mountbatten, to Admiral Andrew Cunningham, commander of the Allied fleet in the Mediterranean, introduced Major Martin as a landing-craft specialist lent “until the assault is over”. It ended with a clumsy joke about sardines, meant to put the idea of Sardinia into German heads. The briefcase was explained by the proofs of a pamphlet on combined operations and a letter from Mountbatten to Eisenhower asking him to write a foreword. An eyelash was hidden in the letter; its absence would reveal whether anyone had opened it.

The location was chosen with the help of a naval hydrographer. Off Huelva the currents and tides should carry a body to the shore, and the town was home to an active Abwehr agent, Adolf Clauss, son of the German consul, who had good contacts among Spanish officials. The British vice-consul, Francis Haselden, was moreover a man London could rely on. The plan was approved by the Chiefs of Staff on 13 April and by Churchill on 15 April, who joked that if the Spanish returned the body with the papers unread, it would have to be sent for another swim. Final approval came from Dwight Eisenhower in Algiers on 17 April.

The voyage of the Seraph and 30 April

During the night of 16–17 April the body was dressed in uniform, the briefcase was attached and it was placed in a sealed canister filled with dry ice, which drove out the oxygen and protected the corpse from decomposition. An MI5 van, driven by a pre-war racing driver, took the canister to Greenock in Scotland, where it was taken aboard the Seraph. Jewell’s submarine had secret missions behind her: in the autumn of 1942 she had landed General Mark Clark on the Algerian coast for talks with French officers and had brought General Henri Giraud out of France. The crew were told that the canister held a secret meteorological instrument.

The Seraph sailed on 19 April, was bombed twice on the way and on 29 April reached the vicinity of Huelva. She watched the coast all day, and before dawn on 30 April the officers lowered the body into the water. The submarine took the empty canister out to the open sea; when it refused to sink despite machine-gun fire, it was blown up with an explosive charge. Jewell signalled “Mincemeat completed” to the Admiralty and sailed for Gibraltar.

The body did not drift for long, nor was it washed up only after some time, as some versions of the story have it: the fisherman José Antonio Rey María pulled it from the water that same morning, at about 9.30. Spanish soldiers took the body to Huelva and handed it over to a naval judge. On 1 May two Spanish doctors carried out a post-mortem in the presence of Haselden, who in the heat suggested finishing before lunch. They found “asphyxia through immersion in the sea”, and on 2 May “Major Martin” was buried with military honours in the cemetery at Huelva. Meanwhile Haselden and the British naval attaché in Madrid exchanged telegrams, prepared in advance, which the Germans could intercept and read and which showed that London was very anxious to recover the briefcase.

Via Madrid to Berlin

The Spanish navy did not hand the briefcase over to Clauss, but news of it quickly reached the head of the Abwehr station in Madrid, Karl-Erich Kühlenthal. At his request the head of the Abwehr, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, intervened with the Spanish. In the regime of Francisco Franco – formally neutral but still well disposed towards Germany – there was no shortage of people willing to help. Spanish officers removed the damp letters from their envelopes without breaking the seals by winding them round a thin rod, dried them, photographed them, soaked them again and put them back. On 8 May the copies were handed to the Germans, and Kühlenthal took them to Germany in person. On 11 May the Spanish returned the briefcase to the British. Examination in London showed that the letters had been taken out: the eyelash was missing, and the paper had been folded more times than it should have been.

On 14 May the cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park read a German signal warning that the Allies would strike at the Balkans and that the Dodecanese would be a cover target. The secretary of the Chiefs of Staff Committee cabled Churchill, who was in Washington, that “Mincemeat swallowed rod, line and sinker”. On the same day Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz noted after a conversation with Hitler that the Führer did not agree with Mussolini that the most likely target of the invasion was Sicily, and considered that the captured “Anglo-Saxon order” confirmed the expectation of an attack on Sardinia and the Peloponnese.

Consequences

Hitler ordered Greece, Sardinia and Corsica to be defended “at all costs”. The experienced 1st Panzer Division was moved from France to Greece, German forces in Sardinia were doubled by the end of June, and torpedo boats were transferred from Sicily to the Greek islands. The number of German divisions in Greece and the Balkans rose markedly. Even on the day of the invasion of Sicily some aircraft were flying out from the island to Sardinia, and at the end of July Hitler sent Erwin Rommel to Salonika to prepare the defence of Greece.

The scale of this effect cannot, however, be measured precisely. The British historian Michael Howard called Mincemeat “perhaps the most successful single deception operation of the entire war”, but he also concluded that Hitler’s innate obsession with the Balkans had a greater influence on the course of the fighting for Sicily than either Mincemeat or Operation Barclay as a whole. Jon Latimer pointed to other factors, such as Hitler’s distrust of the Italians. Field Marshal Albert Kesselring and the Italian high command regarded Sicily as threatened to the very end and strengthened its defences. Ben Macintyre, author of the most comprehensive modern book on the operation, stresses that its exact effect cannot be calculated, although Allied losses in the first week of fighting proved several times lower than expected.

The operation’s influence on German expectations about the timing of the invasion is also doubtful. The letters in “Major Martin’s” briefcase gave no date; they merely suggested that preparations were under way. Misleading the Germans about timing was the task of other elements of Operation Barclay, and the Germans expected an Allied blow in the summer in any case.

Its place in the war

On the night of 9–10 July 1943 the Allies landed in Sicily. The island fell after 38 days, sooner than the planners had expected, although a large part of the German forces managed to escape to the mainland. Defeat in Sicily contributed to the overthrow of Benito Mussolini on 25 July and to Italy’s capitulation in September. The historian Denis Smyth argues that fear of a landing in the Balkans was one of the reasons why Hitler called off the offensive at Kursk on 13 July, but this remains a matter of interpretation.

Mincemeat became the model for later Allied deceptions, above all Operation Fortitude, which in 1944 was to convince the Germans that the main landing in Western Europe would come in the Calais area rather than in Normandy. The public learned the story from a 1950 novel by Duff Cooper, and then from Montagu’s own book The Man Who Never Was (1953), filmed in 1956. In it Montagu could not mention the role of codebreaking, nor the fact that Mincemeat was part of an organised deception programme. Since 1977 the grave of “Major William Martin” in Huelva has been in the care of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, and in 1997 an inscription was added to it: “Glyndwr Michael served as Major William Martin RM”.