“CERTAINLY THE BEST KNOWN, and perhaps the most successful deception operation of the entire war.” That is how Sir Michael Howard, the official historian of strategic deception in the Second World War, aptly describes Operation Mincemeat, the story of “the man who never was.” It was a bold and imaginative plan, contrived with scrupulous care and executed with skill and courage. Above all it was, as the Chiefs of Staff gleefully reported to Churchill, then visiting Washington, “swallowed whole” by the German intelligence and operations staff. Its indirect result—for deception, like intelligence, can do no more than help toward success—was not only a military victory but the saving of many Allied lives.
It is important to remember that operations of this kind (opérations d’intoxication in the colorful French version) do not exist in a vacuum. The false idea that the first Allied landings in Europe would be in the eastern Mediterranean, and not in their self-evident target, Sicily, would not have been planted, or might never have taken root, if German intelligence had not been, as we already knew, predisposed to cherish it. We knew that was so largely from Ultra, the systematic British interception and breaking of German high-grade code and cipher signals, of which the number read by Bletchley Park (GCHQ) had passed the impressive total of four thousand a day by early 1943.
It is not surprising that the relatively inefficient Abwehr, the secret intelligence service of the German high command, was ready to swallow it. More importantly the plot hoodwinked the German supreme command itself From early May 1943 they were thus persuaded to rate the defense of Greece, and even of Sardinia, as more urgent than that of Sicily. Moreover, it was known from Ultra that Hitler personally believed that Greece was the likeliest target. Just as it had helped to suggest Mincemeat, Ultra monitored the consequent orders moving German units. Measures for defending Sardinia and the Greek Peloponnese were to have priority over everything else, two areas on the southwest coast of Greece were specified as likely Allied invasion targets, and the 1st Panzer Division began its laborious journey from France to Greece.
Even two weeks after the actual Allied landings in Sicily, Hitler still felt sure that the main assault would be on Greece. The same phenomenon was repeated a year later. His conviction that the Normandy landings were a sideshow, and that the real attack would come through the Pas de Calais—another notion long fostered by the Allied deception planners—kept important forces (including one first-class unit, the 1st SS Panzer Division) out of the real battle during its most critical period.
We now know how widely Mincemeat was appreciated. In late May 1943 General Jodl, head of the German supreme command operations staff, was heard impatiently shouting down the telephone to the German military attaché in Rome: “You can forget about Sicily. We know it’s Greece.” We may set this against Churchill’s remark, made as he approved Mincemeat: “Anyone but a bloody fool would know it was Sicily.” Such are the powers of self-persuasion.
Another factor was that the Germans “knew” also that the British forces available were far larger than they really were. That belief had been encouraged by our deception staff for several years, so that every bogus unit, even up to Army size, which they dreamed up found its way eventually into the German Order of Battle and stayed there. By late 1942 German intelligence had assessed the British army as some 45 percent larger than it actually was. That in turn made it easier to suggest that objectives were within our reach, which we knew to be outside it.
It is important to see Mincemeat not as an isolated episode but as part of a long and methodical policy of strategic deception. “Barclay,” the overall Mediterranean deception plan for 1943, had four main objects:
To weaken the defenses of Sicily;
To pin down enemy troops in the south of France and the Balkans peninsula;
To reduce enemy attacks on our ships as they gathered for the assault on Sicily; and
To secure the greatest possible surprise for that assault.
All this was carried out on Dudley Clarke’s often-quoted principle: “My creed was not ‘What do you want the enemy to think?’ but ‘What do you want him to do?’”
Not all our deception planners met that requirement. In the Far East, Peter Fleming, a man of talent and imagination, sometimes seemed so immersed in the details—the worn briefcase which was soon to be lost with a sheaf of ostensibly secret papers, or the firework display which mimicked the midair explosion of an imaginary aircraft—as to lose sight of his overriding responsibility: to persuade the Japanese to do what we wanted them to do.
Some comments are needed on certain aspects of Mincemeat, which Montagu could not reveal when his book came out in 1953. “George,” the man with the wild idea for the operation, could not be named because he stayed on in the secret service. He was Flight-Lieutenant Charles Cholmondeley of Section B1A in MI5, who appears in the story as George. Montagu’s account also might never have existed if Duff Cooper’s Operation Heartbreak, a novel heavily indebted to Mincemeat, had not appeared in 1950, causing an official furor. That might have been followed by Ian Colvin’s account of the operation, based on his own research; but it in turn was suppressed by the Joint Intelligence Committee, who decided to fill the gap quickly by asking Montagu to write this account, with its imaginative title.
Several details of the operation probably owed their inspiration to a true event which had taken place in September 1942, some seven months earlier, when an RAF Catalina flying-boat en route for Gibraltar crashed in the sea off Cadiz. It appears that one passenger, a naval officer, was carrying a letter from the American general Mark Clark to the governor of Gibraltar, accepting the latter’s invitation to stay at Government House before the Torch landings in North Africa, the proposed date for which was given in the letter. But that letter was later returned by the Spanish authorities “apparently unopened.” Clearly, if Mincemeat were to succeed, it must end differently.
It did: choosing the Spanish coast near Huelva, a mere fifty miles away, met all the conditions, as Montagu points out. Not only would the prevailing onshore wind help to drift the body, supported in its Mae West inflatable jacket, toward the beach; an active German agent there, known to be on good terms with local Spanish officials, would be likely to secure copies of the papers himself, or ensure that they quickly reached the Abwehr. Without that, the whole operation would be pointless. His rival in the area, Lieutenant-Commander Gomez-Beare, in the event also succeeded in persuading them that the papers were so important that they must go straight to Berlin—an unusual alliance.
Mincemeat was approved at a meeting of the Twenty (xx or Double-Cross) Committee on 4 February 1943, when it was apparently still proposed to drop the body by parachute from an aircraft.
The actual body was dressed in Royal Marines uniform not primarily for the reasons given in chapter five, but because the Germans were believed to have fairly recent copies of the Army list yet were known to have, at most, only the A–L volume of the Navy list, which included the Marines. That information probably derived from our breaking not only of the Abwehr Enigma but also of the ISOS traffic which they also used. ISOS stood for Intelligence Section Oliver Strachey, another group at Bletchley Park.
There was a compelling reason also for taking all possible precautions against a Spanish postmortem examination, and it had nothing to do with pneumonia. The body used was that of an anonymous tramp found in a London warehouse, who had died from mistakenly eating phosphorous rat-poison. If the body were closely examined, that fact would become clear and would virtually eliminate the likelihood of his being a serving officer—thus exposing the deception.
It was to lessen that risk that his wartime identity disc was marked “R/C,” he wore a silver cross on a neck-chain, and a St. Christopher plaque was in his wallet: all this in the hope that, when noticed by the Spanish, it would strengthen their traditional religious objection to postmortem examination.
We must remember that a deception operation that goes wrong is not simply a flop; its wider effects can be disastrous. It focuses enemy attention on precisely what it has tried, but failed, to conceal. If, as Montagu points out, the Germans had discovered that any detail of Mincemeat had been faked, the conclusion would have been clear: the Allies’ next target could not be in the Eastern Mediterranean, nor even Sardinia—all subtly indicated in our deception plan. It must be Sicily.
A simple example with a happy ending may demonstrate that point. The Germans painstakingly built a dummy airfield, with dummy aircraft, fuel bowsers, hangars, and control tower all beautifully made of wood, to distract attention from the real airfield not far away. On the day it was completed, the RAF, who had been keeping a quiet eye on it, showed their appreciation by dropping one wooden bomb on it.
I must add a comment on the well-known film version of The Man Who Never Was. This is an excellent piece of work in its own right, deservedly popular, dealing with the story imaginatively yet responsibly, and conjuring up the feeling of London in those distant wartime days—and nights. It is therefore important to note where fact ends and fancy begins, not least because it is good fiction, dovetailing imperceptibly into fact.
In brief: Canaris, who appears in Berlin in the film, was really in the Balkans. He had no suspicions, then or later. He made no attempt to check the London end of the story, and so did not send so engaging an Irish agent there, nor anyone else. As far as we know, the “girl in the office,” and even her probably imaginary American flat-mate, had no such worrying encounters as the film describes. It is a tribute to the scriptwriter, Nigel Balchin, that an audience can accept the whole combined operation of suspense and entertainment so uncritically. Nor do they need to know that the real Montagu appears in the film as one of the critical senior officers at the meeting of the Double-Cross Committee.
Mincemeat itself differs from most deception schemes in depending not on bogus orders, charts, or statistics, but on subtle and apparently irrelevant remarks in three informal letters from and to very senior officers: the principal letter from Nye to Alexander, and the obliquely supporting letters from Mountbatten to Cunningham and Eisenhower. The detailed wording of these splendidly misleading documents hits precisely the right note for their one purpose: the deception of the German intelligence and operations staff at their highest level, about a matter of supreme importance. Their apparently artless plausibility is satisfying in itself. That side of the operation can never be repeated in any recognizable form.
Similarly, the deft personal touches such as Martin’s engagement and overdraft, and the letters from his alleged father, bank manager, and—of course—fiancée: these too are more than prosaic window-dressing. Their sheer irrelevance is in itself convincing. They offer the reader some satisfaction through their literary aptness as well as their power to deceive.
It is a privilege to be invited to commend this book. I am grateful to Ralph Erskine, Sir David Hunt, and Edward Thomas, who have given me very useful details. Ralph Bennett helped me by drawing my attention to articles by Roger Morgan and others in After the Battle (nos. 54 and 64) which its editor, Winston G. Ramsey, kindly sent me. Three books contain good information and comment on Mincemeat, its purpose, and its consequences: Ralph Bennett, Ultra and Mediterranean Strategy (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1989), 222–27; Ralph Bennett, Behind the Battle (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994), 202–5; and Michael Howard, Strategic Deception (London: HMSO, 1990), 88–93.
Alan Stripp