WITH NORTH AFRICA CLEARED OF Axis opposition, the Allies planned their next step. At the Casablanca Conference in January 1943 the Allies had agreed that Sicily would be the next target and since then plans for Operation Husky had been underway. At the same time Barclay – a cover plan for Husky – was plotted by A Force within a framework set by the LCS and approved by Eisenhower on 10 April 1943.
On first glance, formulating an effective cover plan was no easy task. From the Allied point of view, Sicily was an obvious target. Convoys passing to the eastern Mediterranean and the Suez Canal came under constant air attack from Axis bases on the island. If they ignored Sicily and attacked elsewhere, for instance Sardinia or the south of France, the presence of Sicily would be like a dagger held to their back. This very same thinking led the German and Italians to come to the same conclusion. As Churchill is alleged to have said: ‘Everyone but a bloody fool would know that it’s Sicily.’1
The Allies knew they had little chance of surprising the Axis as they had done with Torch. The plan called for a combined force of 160,000 American, British and Commonwealth troops to be landed by a fleet of 3,200 ships. With such large numbers involved it was unlikely enemy air reconnaissance would miss the convoy once it put to sea. Their only chance therefore would be to try to indicate an objective other than Sicily, or to indicate that more than one operation would be mounted. Such then were the objectives of Plan Barclay, the cover story for Husky.2
The existing A Force channels would indicate that the main thrust of Allied operations would come through the eastern end of the Mediterranean, through Greece and into the Balkans. A Force had long been feeding information about Crete. To keep German attention focused there, from January 1943 A Force began feeding its agents with Plan Withstand, a notional move against Turkey. The story was that the Allies were so concerned the Germans were preparing to invade Turkey they were contemplating a pre-emptive strike against the Dodecanese via Crete. To support this rumour, British armoured units were moved to Syria, their ranks swelled by the provision of dummy vehicles.
The outline of the plan was as follows: the notional British Twelfth Army in Egypt was planning to invade the Balkans through Greece. Hopefully Turkey would join the war with the Allies and together they would push up through Bulgaria and link up with Soviet forces advancing into southern Russia. The attack on Greece would be preceded by a diversionary attack on western Crete. Moreover, to prevent the Germans from moving reinforcements from western Europe, diversionary assaults would be launched against the south coast of France by General Alexander and a French army gathering in North Africa. At the same time as these assaults, General Patton would attack Corsica and Sardinia with US forces. From these islands the Allies could come down on Sicily from the northern side, or attack Rome, or take a short cut into northern Italy and up into the underbelly of the Reich. In any case, Axis positions in Sicily and Italy would be subjected to heavy air bombardment. The Allies – or so the cover plan said – did not want to get bogged down in a long and arduous slog up the mountainous Italian peninsula in face of a hostile reception by the locals.
Lending credence to these ruses, beach raids were mounted around the Mediterranean and amphibious training was carried out by Greek troops in Egypt and French troops in Algeria. There were appeals for Greek interpreters and French fisherman who knew the south coast of France well. As the operation approached, all leave was cancelled and then suddenly allowed again. Conferences called for senior commanders were put off and then put on again, all to keep the Germans guessing about when the invasion was scheduled. To conceal the date of D-Day for Husky, which was 10 July, local port workers were given a completion date for work two weeks after D-Day, and Tobruk was filled with dummy landing craft.
For the Sicily cover plan the Deuxième Bureau utilized a new ‘intoxication’ agent: Gilbert – a man who would become the cream of French double cross operations. According to Paillole, Gilbert was, from the German point of view, the head of the Abwehr’s best ever agent network in North Africa. The day after the liberation of Tunis, Gilbert unexpectedly presented himself to the French authorities and offered his agent network to the Deuxième Bureau for double cross purposes. Although Paillole was not normally well disposed to ‘walk in’ agents, in Gilbert’s case he made an exception. Paillole had actually met Gilbert in France towards the end of 1941 and was quite sure of his loyalty.
Gilbert was described in his case file as ‘athletic, middle-aged with greying hair and a military moustache’. He was a bachelor from a good family and had been a career soldier. A graduate of the Saint-Cyr academy, he had fought in both World Wars and had been decorated with the Légion d’Honneur. When Paillole first met Gilbert the former soldier was working as the apprentice police commissioner in Lyons. He was forced to resign from this post in 1942 because of ‘ideological differences’ with his superiors. Gilbert was a rabid anti-communist, so much so that he joined the LVF (Légion des Volontaires Français), a French volunteer regiment in the German Army recruited to fight against the Soviet Union. He quickly fell into intelligence work through the French fascist Parti Populaire Français (PPF) and set up a front business cover in Paris for sending PPF members to carry out sabotage, propaganda and secret intelligence missions in North Africa. Receiving financial backing for his activities from the Abwehr, Gilbert volunteered to lead a secret ‘stay behind’ mission into Algeria codenamed Atlas. The idea was that Gilbert and four sub-agents would allow the Allied advance to roll over them after which they would spring up and begin transmitting. Accordingly he reached Tunis with four men on 25 April. He was given a cover story to show he had in fact been living an an address in Tunis since the previous December and that he was a refugee escaping from the Germans after they occupied Vichy France in 1942 to protect the southern coast. After arriving Gilbert quickly established contact with local Muslim officials and PPF sympathizers, all of whom would provide him and his team with intelligence once the Allies took control.
When Gilbert gave himself up, he explained how he had planned the whole mission deliberately to deceive the Germans. He knew the Axis was finished and he saw this mission as a chance to wipe the slate clean with the Free French. Of his four companions, Gilbert could vouch for only one of them: Le Duc, his second in command, whom he had personally recruited. Le Duc was the nom de guerre of Duthey Harispe, an apparently idle man in love with gambling and horseracing. Accepting Gilbert’s decision to work for the Allies, Le Duc was given a posting in French Headquarters.
The Atlas team’s radio operator Albert was an altogether different story. Known by the name Blondeau, Albert had been recruited by the PPF and was assigned by them to Atlas. The Abwehr had made a recording of his Morse style and so it was going to be difficult to mimic him. It was decided that Albert never needed to know that Gilbert had gone over to the Allies; as far as he was concerned his mission was to tap out the messages Gilbert provided. For that reason, Albert was left in a state of ignorant bliss, happily serving the new world order. He found a job working as an electrician for a man in Tunis, never realizing that his employer was a Deuxième Bureau informant who had offered him the job in order to keep tabs on him. The third member of the team, Falcon the radio mechanic, was also left in the dark and found an innocuous job at a repair depot.
The fourth member of the team was a problem. Hired as the team’s expert in sabotage, Duteil was incorruptible from the Allied point of view. The alias of Joseph Delpierre, a 26-year-old former Parisian pimp, Duteil was a fully fledged member of the PPF and had been sent along to keep an eye on Gilbert, with orders to liquidate him if he betrayed the mission. As he was surplus to Gilbert’s requirements in terms of using the radio transmitter, it was decided that a very speedy end should be arranged for him.3 Gilbert introduced Duteil to an officer friend of his who had a deep Gallic dislike of his Anglo-Saxon counterparts. As Gilbert suspected, the two got on like a house on fire. One night after dinner Duteil visited his new friend’s office at the local divisional HQ. While the pair were rifling through a stack of papers they were discovered by some unusually alert sentries, who roughly dragged them, kicking and screaming, off to the cells.
Isolated from his companion, Duteil was confronted with a list of his crimes. The depth of knowledge of his interrogators must have frightened the wits out of him. In the face of such omnipotence, there was no use trying to deny anything so Duteil blabbed ... and blabbed some more. As a direct result of his confession, about a hundred Vichyist collaborators and sympathizers were rounded up along with a number of Abwehr and SIM informants, a police superintendent included. Duteil betrayed Gilbert and the rest of the team, never thinking for a moment that it was his chief who had betrayed him. He also revealed the whereabouts of a frighteningly large stash of sabotage equipment that he had buried without Gilbert’s knowledge. Clearly Duteil was too hot a potato to be allowed to stay in the region. If he escaped it would bring an end to Gilbert and throw suspicion on many other double cross cases that the Deuxième Bureau were running. The last Paillole heard about Duteil was that he had been sent to England. According to Ronald Wingate he was executed. As far as the PPF ever knew, he had fled North Africa trying to find a route home through Spain.4
On the same day that Duteil was arrested, 10 June 1943, Albert established radio contact with the Abwehr. Gilbert claimed to have reacquainted himself with several old colleagues who were now high up in Tunis and were proving excellent sources of information. Gilbert explained that the Allies were collecting a large quantity of invasion barges at the port of Bizerte. A Force backed this up with the usual show of dummies and the Germans obliged them by sending photo-reconnaissance aircraft overhead. With only token flak sent up to prevent the Nazi airplanes accomplishing their mission, it was not long before Bizerte was visited by a large force of bombers. The dummy invasion fleet took a hammering while the real preparations continued at Sousse 90 miles (150km) to the south east.
XX
The most celebrated ruse linked to Husky came not from the LCS or A Force, but from the Twenty Committee. Generally speaking the Twenty Committee kept out of the Mediterranean war and focused on maintaining a threat against northern France and Norway (see Chapter 14). However, the members of the Twenty Committee were men of great imagination and it was one of their number who came up with the idea behind Operation Mincemeat.
The inspiration for Mincemeat came from Twenty Committee’s secretary, Flight Lieutenant Cholmondeley, who proposed the idea. Cholmondeley had earlier come up with the idea of dropping a dead body on a parachute into occupied France. The body would be supplied with a radio transmitter and a full set of codes. The idea was to see how the Germans would run a double cross operation themselves. The idea was immediately shot down in flames because the Germans would quickly establish that the man was already dead before hitting the ground. Undeterred, Cholmondeley suggested a modified version of the plan on 4 February 1943. He said:
Why shouldn’t we get a body, disguise it as a staff officer, and give him really high-level papers which will show clearly that we are going to attack somewhere else. We won’t have to drop him on land, as the aircraft might have come down in the sea on the way round the Med. He would float ashore with the papers either in France or in Spain; it won’t matter which. Probably Spain would be best, as the Germans wouldn’t have as much chance to examine the body there as if they got it into their own hands, while it’s certain that they will get the documents, or at least copies.5
The idea was not as far-fetched as it might appear. In September 1942 an aircraft had come down near Spain and documents found on a recovered corpse were forwarded to the Abwehr by the Spanish authorities. The committee therefore thought it was an excellent idea, but could see many difficulties convincing the authorities to authorize it. Nevertheless, Cholmondeley and Montagu were told to make all the necessary arrangements first, and when the plan was ready to go, then it would be submitted.
Developing the idea, Cholmondeley suggested buying a corpse from a hospital and having its lungs filled with water as if the person had drowned. Finding a suitable body presented the first stumbling block for the operation. True enough, in wartime London there was no end of corpses to choose from (the going rate was £10 per corpse), but they had very specific requests. The corpse had to be of a man of military age, and he had to have died of a cause not out of keeping with someone killed after ditching an aircraft at sea. This limited their choices considerably. Even if a body was found, there was then the problem of the next of kin. How many families would freely give up the mortal remains of their loved one to a shadowy organization who refused to tell them what they were going to do with it?
At the point where they were seriously considering doing ‘a Burke and Hare’ (two famous 19th-century bodysnatchers), Montagu was contacted by Bentley Purchase, a well-known coroner. He had come across the corpse of a man who had died of pneumonia but could be mistaken for someone who had drowned. The identity of the corpse was never revealed by Montagu, except that he was a ne’er-do-well. It was not until 1996 that the identity of the so-called ‘man who never was’ was disclosed, and he was named as Glyndwr Michael. About as far removed from the role of war hero as could be imagined, he was an unemployed Welsh down-and-out, living rough on the streets of London. On 26 January 1943, Michael broke into a warehouse and helped himself to a large portion of phosphorous rat poison. He was admitted to hospital but died two days later aged 34.
In order to check if the corpse would be convincing, Montagu went to the pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury. Over a glass of sherry at the Junior Carlton, Sir Bernard was told only that a body in a Mae West lifejacket was to be floated onto a foreign coast as if it had come from a ditched aircraft. Spilsbury asked what country this would be and was told Spain. His reply to this was somewhat immodest: ‘Oh that’s all right. Although such a man would almost certainly die of exposure rather than drowning, he would swallow a good deal of water. There will be pleural fluid in the lungs of your body and to detect that it wasn’t sea water would take as good and careful a pathologist as I am and they haven’t got one in Spain.’ He advised Montagu to keep the body in a mortuary until needed and then to pack it in an airtight container filled with dry ice. This was not to keep the body frozen, but to exclude air from the container as air would speed up the decomposition process.6
As for the corpse’s notional identity, Montagu and Cholmondeley went into great detail to construct a background for him. This man would have to be provided with a name and a rank, with family, friends, colleagues, a girlfriend or wife, all of whom would miss him dearly once news of his death was announced. For security reasons Montagu initially wanted the man to be a naval officer, but there was a practical consideration here. Naval officers wore tailored uniforms and Montagu could not simply take the body to be fitted out. To alleviate this problem, the corpse would be dressed as an officer from the Royal Marines, in standard-issue battledress. He was given a name: Major William Martin. This was not a name plucked at random. All naval officers had their names recorded on a published list. If Montagu came up with something outlandish, it should not be very difficult for an Axis agent, perhaps a member of one of the neutral delegations, to obtain this list and check Martin’s name. The name was selected because there were a number of W. Martins on the list, all of whom were about the right age and rank to be confused with the fictional character.
With a name chosen, great pains were taken to make Major Martin as real as possible. Firstly he was given a love interest. A female clerk in MI5 took on the role of ‘Pam’, Major Martin’s fiancée, and wrote two love letters to him. In the meantime, the more attractive girls in the office were asked to pose as ‘Pam’ for snapshots and one of the pictures was placed in Martin’s wallet. The scenario Montagu developed was that Martin had only met Pam in April and had proposed to her almost immediately – nothing unusual in wartime. He had a bill for the engagement ring, this time unpaid, and a stern letter from his father disapproving of wartime weddings.
In addition to the letter from his father, there was a warning letter from his bank manager about his overdraft, a bill for a shirt, two theatre ticket stubs for 22 April indicating he could not have left England before 23 April, a letter from his solicitors confirming that they had drawn up his will, a bill for lodgings at the Navy and Military Club where he was made a temporary member, some keys and a packet of cigarettes. Montagu used his own fingerprints on the documents, so that there would be a matching set on each one. He reasoned that Major Martin would be buried before anyone thought of checking fingerprints. He also opened and creased the personal letters, carrying them around in his pockets to give the impression that Major Martin had read them several times.
The only real difficulty they found in creating the identity was in taking a photograph of ‘Martin’ for his identity papers. Montagu mused that although it is often the case that living people can look like corpses in photographs, it is impossible to make a corpse look like a living person – in particular when the corpse has been held in deep freeze for a period of time. A substitute was required and so Montagu took a photograph of someone in Naval Intelligence. He then spotted an absolute ‘dead ringer’ across the table at a meeting and retook the photograph. Thus Zigzag’s case officer and MI5 radio expert Ronnie Reed became the face of Major Martin.
With the body and identity taken care of, a letter was written by General Sir Archibald Nye, the Vice Chief of the Imperial General Staff, to General Alexander in North Africa. The letter was deliberately informal in style, as if Nye was setting out his thoughts to Alexander off the record. In it he said that there were reports ‘the Bosche’ had been strengthening their hand in Greece and Crete and that the Chief of the Imperial General Staff felt that the forces earmarked for the assault there were insufficient. Reinforcements were therefore going to be sent to the groups assaulting the beach south of Cape Araxos and the one going to Kalamata. The letter continued that Sicily had been requested as the cover for this operation, which was codenamed Husky, but this target was already being used as the cover for Operation Brimstone. Instead, the cover for Husky should be the Dodecanese. Clearly, then, if the Germans had heard anything about Husky they were to infer it related to operations in the eastern Mediterranean.
As for Brimstone, the Axis were to interpret this as an assault somewhere in the western Mediterranean other than Sicily. Major Martin was given a second letter, this time written by Lord Louis Mountbatten, Chief of Combined Operations, to Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, Commander in Chief of the Mediterranean. Mountbatten instructed Cunningham to make sure the personal letter Martin was carrying reached General Alexander safely. Fleshing out Martin’s role in all this, Mountbatten explained to Cunningham that the major was an expert in tank landing craft and had been sent to North Africa to sort out several problems. Mountbatten wrote in glowing terms that Major Martin was absolutely indispensable to him and that he had been proved correct over the Dieppe raid. Martin had been right in his appraisal of that mission and the rest of Combined Ops had been terribly wrong. Finally – most importantly – Mountbatten asked that Martin be sent back to him as soon as the assault was over. He then made a joke that when Martin came back to London he should bring him a tin of sardines as they were rationed in Britain.
The two most crucial elements in Mountbatten’s letter were as follows Firstly the joke about sardines clearly linked the forthcoming assault with the island of Sardinia. The second important part of the letter was the mention of how Martin had been right about Dieppe. This was inserted as bait, so that the Germans would gloatingly send this piece of news to Berlin showing that the British had made a mistake in their planning and were inept.
Once the letters were ready and the planning was completed, the Twenty Committee passed the plan over to Major Wingate of the LCS and asked him to show it to Colonel Bevan in order to get higher approval.7 Bevan took the plan to the Chiefs of Staff who, to use Montagu’s expression, ‘passed the buck’ to the Prime Minister’s office. Fortunately Churchill loved this sort of thing and gave the plan his backing. The letter from Nye to Alexander was officially approved by the Chiefs of Staff on 13 April and the green light given.
Soon after, Montagu prepared Major Martin for war. He was taken out of storage and dressed. This proved problematic as the feet had to be thawed by an electric heater before the shoes could be made to fit. The body was then placed in an airtight canister specially designed by Cholmondeley, which was then filled with the dry ice advised by Spilsbury.8
Montagu and Cholmondeley were met by driver Jock Horsfall, who had procured a truck for the mission. With Major Martin safely stowed in the back, the three set out for the Clyde, via Cholmondeley’s flat where they stopped for dinner. On the way to the flat they passed a queue outside a cinema where people were waiting to watch a spy movie. The three men were reduced to hysterics at the thought of showing the cinema-goers what they were carrying in the back of the truck and telling them about the real secret service caper they had planned.
Arriving in Scotland, Montagu had procured the services of the submarine Seraph, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Jewell. This submarine was destined for a number of secret service operations and its departure from the Clyde was delayed in order to take part in Mincemeat. The crew were told that the canister contained a secret weather-reporting buoy, although from the size and weight of it, many joked that it contained ‘John Brown’s body’ and dubbed their new shipmate ‘Charlie’.
Seraph set out at 6pm on 19 April and, in the early hours of 30 April arrived off the coast of Spain. Montagu had selected a point off Huelva, as it was known there was a German agent working there and a south-westerly wind would help Major Martin’s body drift ashore. The British submarine surfaced and Lieutenant Commander Jewell scanned the horizon from Seraph’s conning tower. It was an overcast morning and there were a number of fishing boats active in the bay about a mile away from the submarine. The canister was brought up on deck at 4.15am and then all the ratings were told to go back below. Only when the deck was cleared did Jewell tell the other officers what the mysterious canister contained and something about the nature of Major Martin’s mission to deceive the enemy. One of them is said to have remarked, ‘Isn’t it pretty unlucky carrying dead bodies around?’ Ignoring this quip Jewell opened the canister and unwrapped the body from a blanket. He checked that the briefcase was still secured to Major Martin’s belt by a security chain and that his fingers were clutching the bag. He then inflated the Mae West lifejacket and prepared to send the major on his way.
In an unscripted move, Jewell offered a prayer for the body. As the four young officers removed their caps Jewell murmured words from Psalm 39, traditionally used for burials at sea. This was Jewell’s first sea burial and the words of the psalm must have struck him as extremely apt for such a top secret occasion:
I said, I will take heed to my ways: that I offend not in my tongue.
I will keep my mouth as it were with a bridle: while the ungodly is in my sight.
I held my tongue, and spake nothing: I kept silence, yea, even from good words; but it was pain and grief to me.
With that, Jewell gave the body a gentle push and within moments ‘Major Martin’ was drifting in the direction of the Spanish shore.
In addition to the prevailing wind, the body was given a push in the right direction by the wash of the screws as the submarine began to pull away. After they had gone another half a mile, an overturned rubber dinghy was dropped into the water with a single paddle. The canister that had contained Major Martin was also tossed overboard but would only sink after it was riddled with bullets from a Vickers gun and pistol fire from close range. At 7.15am Jewell signalled that the operation was complete.
Several hours later, at around 9.30am, a Spanish fisherman retrieved the body from the sea just off shore. The body was handed over to an infantry detachment exercising in the area and was then passed to a naval judicial officer who took charge of the documents and personal effects. The corpse was then taken to the mortuary at Huelva and examined by a doctor, who certified that the man had fallen into the sea and that death had come by asphyxiation through immersion in the sea for five to eight days.
Nothing more was heard about Major Martin in London until 3 May, when a signal from the naval attaché in Madrid revealed that his body had been picked up by the Spanish authorities. The naval attaché was then instructed to go to Huelva and told that a wreath from ‘Pam’ should be placed on the grave and a tombstone erected as soon as possible. The naval attaché was then instructed to take photographs of it to send to Martin’s parents and fiancée.
With no mention of any papers being discovered, the Admiralty informed the naval attaché that Martin had been carrying vital documents and that these should be retrieved at all costs. After frantic enquiries these were returned via the Spanish Chief of Naval Staff on 13 May. When the letters arrived back in London from Spain they were sent for scientific analysis and this left little doubt that the letters had been opened by the Spanish.
Sure enough, the letters had been opened, photographed and sent on to Berlin. The first German appraisal was that the letters appeared genuine. It was reported that Major Martin had been in the water for five to eight days and had died from swallowing seawater. German planners already believed that the British were planning a limited operation in Crete, the Dodecanese or southern Greece and the Major Martin documents appeared to confirm this. Between 9 and 12 May, during which further supporting evidence for the document was found, the Germans became more convinced of its genuine nature. On 12 May they acted, making the defence of Sardinia and the Peloponnese the priority over everything else.9 On 14 May Bletchley Park intercepted a signal reporting ‘absolutely reliable’ information that Allied landings would be mounted in the eastern and western Mediterranean, with the landings in the east in the Peloponnese codenamed Husky.10 As an indication of how far the Mincemeat letters were discussed, on 25 May 1943 Information Minister Joseph Goebbels recorded a discussion about them in his diary:
I had a long discussion with Admiral Canaris about the data available for forecasting English intentions. Canaris has gained possession of a letter written by the English general staff to General Alexander. This letter is extremely informative and reveals English plans almost to the dotting of an ‘i’. I don’t know whether the letter is merely camouflage – Canaris denies this energetically – or whether it actually corresponds to the facts. In any case the general outline of English plans for this summer revealed here seems on the whole to tally. According to it, the English and Americans are planning several sham attacks during the coming months – one in the west, one on Sicily, and one on the Dodecanese islands. These attacks are to immobilize our troops stationed there, thus enabling English forces to undertake other and more serious operations. These operations are to involve Sardinia and the Peloponnese. On the whole this line of reasoning seems to be right. Hence, if the letter to General Alexander is the real thing, we shall have to prepare to repel a number of attacks which are partly serious and partly sham.11
Although such inclusions indicate that Cholmondeley’s plan succeeded in getting the letters delivered to the German High Command, there has been a lot of speculation about how far Mincemeat succeeded in deceiving the Germans. True enough, because of Cascade the Germans believed there were 40 divisions capable of participating in the offensive (almost double the real figure) and that the Allies were capable of mounting two attacks, as the Major Martin letters described. It has also been shown that 1st Panzer Division was moved from France to Greece and that it arrived a fortnight late due to attacks on the transport network by the Greek Resistance, which had been called out by the Allies as if in preparation for an assault.
However, one should introduce a note of caution. Whatever Berlin may have initially believed about Allied intentions in the western Mediterranean it soon became clear that Sicily was the most likely target. On 11 June the Allies captured the island of Pantellaria just 62 miles (100km) off the southwest tip of Sicily. From that point on, German communications intercepted by Bletchley Park pointed strongly towards a landing in Sicily, despite agent Gilbert telling his controllers not to be alarmed as the attack on Pantellaria was a feint. The fact that Hitler did not reinforce the two depleted German divisions on the island was more because the Germans feared that a general Italian collapse would leave their troops there vulnerable and cut off than because they did not suspect an invasion.
Whatever the reality, the real achievement of Mincemeat was the way it kept the Germans focused on Greece even after Husky went ahead. When the Allies began making plans to invade Italy, German interceptions showed that Greece was more likely to be a target than the Italian peninsula. In that sense A Force and the Twenty Committee had scored a resounding success.