In 1964 John Godfrey reminded Ewen Montagu by letter that it was from one of Ian Fleming’s schemes that the basic idea that would kindle into Operation Mincemeat was gleaned: ‘… of the dead airman washed up on a beach.’ Godfrey gave the ideas to Montagu when 17M was formed, after the latter was placed in charge of naval deception. Montagu, however could not recall Godfrey passing it to him.1 He liked Fleming even though he felt that he ‘would sell his own grandmother’.2
After the Torch landings and defeat of the Afrika Korps, there were questions of what the Allies would do next. The obvious move was to invade Sicily and try to knock Italy out of the war. However, this move would be equally obvious to Hitler and his generals with Sicily being the natural next step to take. Thus the deception plan Operation Mincemeat was born, where the body of a dead Royal Marine Major would be washed ashore in Spain from a supposed crashed aircraft. The body was named Major Martin, and he had documents on his person which indicated that the Allies would land not in Sicily but in the Eastern Mediterranean. It was hoped that the Spanish would photograph the papers and hand them to the Germans, while the originals would find their way back to the British.
In 1953, Montagu’s book The Man Who Never Was came out, where he states: ‘It all really started through a wild idea of George’s. He and I were members of a small inter-service and interdepartmental committee which used to meet weekly to deal with questions of the security of intended operations.’3 Montagu in a later work identified George as Flight Lieutenant Charles Christopher Cholmondeley and the committee as the ‘Twenty XX’. The XX Committee was a group formed to exploit double agents. The XX stood for double-cross.4
Cholmondeley’s idea came from the ‘Trout Memo’ which had 51 ideas in it mostly penned by Fleming. ‘Trout’ referred to fishing, because they were trying to lure the enemy to bite. Number twenty-eight on the list was one Fleming had come across in a novel by Basil Thomson, The Milliner’s Hat Mystery published in 1937. In this story a body is found in a barn and every document on its person is found to have been forged. Fleming, influenced by this, came up with Mincemeat: ‘a corpse dressed as an airman with dispatches in his pockets could be dropped on the coast, supposedly from a parachute that had failed.’5
With Fleming’s idea and the fate of the RAF’s Catalina flying boat FP119, Cholmondeley began to form a plan. The incident in September 1942 caused some alarm in Allied intelligence when it looked as if the invasion of French North Africa might have been revealed. The Catalina en route from Plymouth to Gibraltar on 25 September crashed into the sea during a violent electrical storm over the Bay of Cadiz. All ten people on board were killed. One of whom was Lieutenant James Hadden Turner RN, a courier carrying letters for the Governor of Gibraltar, informing him that American General Dwight Eisenhower would arrive on the rock just before the landings set for 4 November, while another letter contained more details of the invasion.
The bodies were washed ashore south of Cadiz near La Barrosa, and were recovered by the Spanish authorities. A day later they were turned over to the British consul. Turner’s corpse still had the letters in his pockets. The consul was informed that the bodies had not been tampered with, which immediately aroused suspicion. Experts were flown out to Gibraltar, and the body and the letters still in his coat pocket were minutely examined. The envelope flaps had been opened by the immersion in salt water, but the writing was ‘quite legible’. The question was whether the Spanish or Germans could have read them in the limited time available. They are unlikely to have done so as the examiners noted while ‘unbuttoning the jacket that sand had fallen from the buttonhole.’ Sand had accumulated there while the body was rolled by the tide on the beach. It was thought that the sand would not have been replaced after reading the letters and buttoning the jacket. This meant that the date of the Torch landings had probably not been compromised.6
Another passenger on the Catalina had been Louis Danielou, an intelligence officer with the Free French forces who was codenamed ‘Clamorgan’, who had been on a mission for SOE. His notebook, written in French, was recovered from the aircraft, and it mentioned the British landings in North Africa. An Italian agent procured a copy from the Spanish authorities which he handed to the Germans. They treated it with little value, even suspecting that it could have ‘been planted as a deception’.7 This affair revealed ‘that the Spanish could be relied on to pass on what they found, and that this unneutral habit might be turned to account.’8
The main problem for the XX Committee was how to convince the Germans that the Allies might strike somewhere other than Sicily. Montagu thought that they ‘had little hope to persuade the Germans that we were not going to attack Sicily’, but that they might convince ‘the professional German High Command to believe that we were going to be rash enough both to try that and begin a Balkan invasion almost simultaneously.’9
The eccentric Cholmondeley had come up with a method to deliver false information that could work. He had read Fleming’s memo which suggested the use of a dead body carrying documents. The crash of the Catalina could also be used to improve the chances of success. On 31 October he submitted his plan codenamed ‘Trojan Horse’ to the committee. A body could easily be found, dressed in a uniform of ‘suitable rank’ and given a background. The body would carry revealing documents including letters between high ranking commanders hinting at targets other than Sicily. The body would be dropped into the sea ‘where the set of the currents’ would carry it ashore. The method had one great advantage over the live courier in that a dead man could not talk.10
Montagu was assigned to work on the plan as it would fall under naval control: ‘Charles and I worked very happily together, always thinking on the same lines and easily resolving any differences of opinion.’ The two men carried out the tasks which they were best suited to.11
The story of Operation Mincemeat has been well covered by several authors but not in the context of keeping Spain out of the war.
The body used was that of a Welsh tramp called Glyndwr Michael, who died in London after eating rat poison. He was transformed into Major William Martin of the Royal Marines and given a detailed background. A member of combined operations and an expert in landing craft, he would carry correspondence between high ranking commanders, along with personal letters. The team even invented a fictional fiancée for Martin ‘Pam’, who was based on the image of Jean Leslie, a secretary at MI5. The body would carry a picture of her on a beach in a bathing suit. Letters from ‘Pam’ were penned by Hester Leggett, a senior woman in the department. She was a spinster who ‘poured every ounce of pathos and emotion she could muster’ into the job.12 One dated Sunday 18th ends: ‘Bill darling, do let me know as soon as you get fixed & can make some more plans & don’t please let them send you off into the blue the horrible way they do nowadays–now that we’ve found each other out of the whole world, I don’t think I could bear it. All my love, Pam’.13
There was another letter from his bank, dated 14 April which enquired as to when he was going to clear his overdraft of ‘£79.19s.2d’ signed by ‘E. Whitley Jones Joint General Manager’.14 It was even sent to the wrong address at the Army and Navy Club, Pall Mall. There the hall porter marked the envelope ‘not known at this address. Try Naval and Military Club, 94 Piccadilly’.15 It was such a convincing looking postal ‘cock-up’ that the envelope and letter were included on the body.16
Ian Fleming had little direct involvement with Mincemeat, but Hillgarth did. Lieutenant-Commander Gomez-Beare, or the ‘Don’ as he was referred to, went to London during the spring of 1943 to be brought into the plan to prevent things going wrong in Spain. He returned to Spain via Gibraltar to make sure that the British consuls along the Gulf of Cadiz would contact him straight away if a body was washed ashore. Huelva, a fishing port, was chosen for the drop off, with the body being thrown from a submarine rather than an aircraft. With a busy fishing community it had a good chance of soon being discovered. There was also a strong German presence in the town with close links to the local police which offered another advantage. Huelva was also the home of a particularly ‘active and influential’ German spy Adolf Clauss.17
He was the son of a wealthy industrialist who had moved to Spain in the nineteenth century from Leipzig. Clauss had fought with the Condor Legion on the Nationalist side during the Civil War. When World War II broke out he offered his services to the Abwehr, and by 1943 ran a large spy ring on the Atlantic coast from his farm at La Rabida.
The body of Glyndwr Michael was kept refrigerated until ready for use. The chiefs of staff had given approval in principle, as a change of strategy might have made the operation redundant. In the end, the final approval was given by Churchill who was told there was a risk that it might have the opposite effect and pinpoint Sicily. His reply was: ‘I don’t see that matters. Anybody but a damn fool would know it was Sicily.’18
When the body was dressed, it was provided with all those odds and ends that people carry such as matches, cigarettes, bunch of keys, change, bus tickets etc. The briefcase containing the important documents was attached to the body by a chain similar to those sometimes used by couriers. The body was placed in a canister of dry ice which was then bolted down to make it airtight which would reduce decomposition on the sea journey south. They then set off for the Holy Loch in Scotland where the submarine Seraph was waiting. They had to travel quickly as the body needed to arrive in May. The transport was a souped-up Fordson BBE Van fitted with a V8 engine. It was driven by the racing driver St. John ‘Jock’ Horsfall, well known before the war on the racing circuits, who then worked for MI5.
With Martin, Montagu and Cholmondeley on board, they raced north setting off at 2am. It was a hair-raising experience with Horsfall doing most of the driving reduced to using masked headlights in the blackout. They arrived early in the morning of 18 April at Greenock. There were some scares getting the 400lb container onto a launch to take it out to the submarine depot ship HMS Forth. It was then lowered by crane onto the Seraph and stowed below through the torpedo hatch. The submarine sailed ‘at 1800 British double summer time 19 April from the Holy Loch.’19
At 4am on 30 April, the Seraph surfaced a mile off the Spanish coast in the eerie light of dawn. The canister was moved out onto the casing. The crewmen were then sent below having been told it contained ‘secret’ instruments. Four officers and Lieutenant Bill Jewell, the submarine commander, were left to deal with the body. Two kept watch while the bolts were released and Martin was lifted out: ‘The body was placed in the water at 0430 in a position 148o Portil Pillar 1.3 miles approximately eight cables from the beach and started to drift ashore. This was aided by the wash of the screws going full speed astern.’20 At 0733 Seraph signalled: ‘Operation Mincemeat completed. Request onward route.’21
Madrid and London both waited anxiously for news. Not until 0500 on 2 May was Hillgarth able to signal to DNI that the consul at Huelva had reported a body washed up. Jose Antonio Rey Maria, a local fisherman out after sardines, spotted the body and brought it in after dragging it aboard his boat. Later that day, Francis Haselden, the Vice-Consul, sent a further message which he knew the Germans would read – the body was that of Major Martin RM. Haselden suggested that he had died of drowning and that the: ‘Spanish naval authorities have possession of papers found. Consul at Huelva have arranged funeral today.’22
At one point a Spanish lieutenant asked Haselden to take the briefcase. Thinking quickly, Haselden told him that it would be better if the Spanish Authorities examined the contents first as he might be reprimanded. This action saved the whole operation. By this time ‘Don’ Gomez-Beare was hurrying to Huelva. He had already telephoned Haselden to ask if anything had been washed ashore with the body, obviously referring to important documents, because he knew the lines at the Madrid Embassy were bugged. The communications were being passed onto Karl-Erich Kuhlenthal, the head of the Abwehr in Madrid. At the same time Hillgarth was keeping London informed by a secure cipher.
The Spanish postmortem found that the British officer had entered the water still alive, but had then drowned and had remained in the water for eight to ten days. On 2 May, in blistering heat, Major Martin was buried in Huelva’s Nuestra Senora de la Soledad Cemetery with full military honours. Adolf Clauss watched the ceremony. He did not sign the mourner’s book, but rather slipped away when it was over. From the shade of a Cyprus tree ‘Don’ Gomez-Beare watched him walk off toward the town and followed at a discreet distance.
Several messages went back and forth between Montagu and Hillgarth. The Germans would have read some of the messages in which the NID gave the impression of increasing alarm. Alan was urged to get the ‘documents back at all costs’ but he was not to show ‘undue anxiety’ and alert the ‘Spaniards to the importance of the documents and encourage them to open or “lose” them.’23
The Spanish opened the documents with great skill and then took them to Wilhelm Leissner of the Abwehr who had them photographed. They were then replaced in the envelopes and returned to the British. On 12 May Hillgarth reported to the DNI that he had the documents and briefcase. That same day, an Enigma intercept at Bletchley Park brought confirmation that the Germans had produced copies of the documents, which told of a ‘source’ which was ‘absolutely reliable’ indicating an attack on Greece.24 Keeping the deception going, Alan returned the documents to London in the Embassy’s diplomatic bags on 14 May. While London harangued him with messages over the whereabouts of the Martin papers, the documents arrived back at the Admiralty on 21 May and were quickly examined by experts. They knew instantly that the letters had been opened as eye lashes left inside were missing and it was clear that the letters had been unfolded. Alan was told to spread rumours that the British were confident that the letters had not been tampered with.25
Alan Hillgarth put the final touch to the deception by writing a letter to John G. Martin Esq, care of the Admiralty, which he hoped the Germans would read:
Sir, In accordance with instructions from the Admiralty I have now arranged for a gravestone for your son’s grave. It will be a simple white marble slab with the inscription which you sent me through the Admiralty, and the cost will be 900 pesetas. The grave itself cost 500 pesetas, and, as I think you know, it is in a Roman Catholic cemetery.
A wreath with a card on it, with the message you asked for, has been laid on the grave. The flowers came from the garden of an English mining company in Huelva.
I have taken the liberty of thanking the Vice Consul Huelva on your behalf for all he has done.
May I express my deep sympathy with you and your son’s fiancée in your great sorrow.
I am, Sir, your obedient servant. Alan Hillgarth.26
Hitler at first doubted the documents, but came around to think of them as genuine. Subsequently, units were moved from Sicily to Crete, mainland Greece and Sardinia. Operation Mincemeat was a clear success and in more ways than one. The loss of Sicily led to the invasion of Italy and the fall of Mussolini which meant that there was no chance of the Spanish ever joining the Axis. Alan Hillgarth’s skilful role in Spain had been widely recognised, and in October he left Madrid to take up a new post in the intelligence department under Admiral Sir James Somerville, Commander-in-Chief Eastern Fleet.27