Operation Mincemeat

The ruse “swallowed rod, line and sinker”

Battles are not won by courage, equipment and numbers alone; intelligence-gathering, and the deception aimed at foiling that, are just as important as tactics and supplies. One particular ruse that stands out from the web of World War II secret operations is Operation Mincemeat, the British ploy 80 years ago, in April 1943. Mincemeat, immortalized in several books and a 2021 film, used a dead man to mislead the Axis about the target of Operation Husky, the upcoming Allied invasion of Sicily. (Read our earlier article – The rivalry between Montgomery and Patton)

By late 1942, the North African campaign was winding down. Rommel’s Afrika Korps was stopped at the Second Battle of El Alamein, and the Allies were chasing Axis forces out of the continent. The Casablanca Conference (Read our earlier article – Planning World War II – Part 1) had already discussed Operation Husky as the next major step, but it was expected to be a tough fight, and Allied war planners wanted to deceive Germany and Italy about the target of the next major offensive. Hitler was known to be afraid of an Allied landing in the Balkans, since Germany sourced many industrial resources from there. The Allies decided to play on this fear and present a possible invasion of Greece, compounded with one of Sardinia, to distract the Führer from the real target: Sicily. Operation Barclay was launched to reinforce the idea of a Greek invasion: fake units and troop movements, the hiring of Greek interpreters and the stockpiling of Greek currency, and attacks on railways and roads were all calculated to instill the Germans with the notion that the Allies will attack Greece. Operation Mincemeat was a part of this wider web of deception.
 
In 1939, Rear Admiral John Godfrey, Director of British Naval Intelligence, circulated a document nicknamed the Trout Memo. The document likened deception operations to trout fishing: "The Trout Fisher casts patiently all day. He frequently changes his venue and his lures. If he has frightened a fish he may 'give the water a rest for half-an-hour,' but his main endeavour, viz. to attract fish by something he sends out from his boat, is incessant."

Historians generally agree that the memo was not written by Godfrey, but rather his assistant, Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming – the same man who later became a spy novelist and created the character of James Bond. Most of the 54 ideas in the memo were about luring German ships and submarines into minefields, but number 28, titled “A Suggestion (not a very nice one)” read as thus: “The following suggestion is used in a book by Basil Thomson: a corpse dressed as an airman, with despatches in his pockets, could be dropped on the coast, supposedly from a parachute that has failed. I understand there is no difficulty in obtaining corpses at the Naval Hospital, but, of course, it would have to be a fresh one.” (Thomson worked at the Scotland Yard during World War I and was considered to be Britain’s chief spy catcher in that war.)

Operation Mincemeat, originally codenamed Trojan Horse, was concocted by Royal Air Force Flight Lieutenant Charles Cholmondeley, who was the secretary of the Twenty Committee, also known as Double Cross, the organization responsible for catching and turning German spies in Britain. He pitched the dead body ruse to the committee as a way of leaking false documents implying a Greek invasion. The idea was initially rejected, but the committee’s chairman, Sir John Cecil Masterman (who himself was a detective novelist) liked it enough that he assigned naval intelligence officer and lawyer-by-trade Ewen Montagu to help Cholmondeley develop it further.

The two men worked hard to make every detail credible. They decided that the dead man should have the rank of captain, temporarily promoted to major. This made the figure senior enough to be carrying sensitive documents, but also obscure enough that the Germans wouldn’t be suspicious just because they’d never heard of him. He was originally meant to serve in the Royal Navy, but the planners realized that a navy officer of that rank would travel in made-to-measure dress uniform. Rather than have a civilian tailor take the measurements of a corpse, they changed the character to a Royal Marine major, who would wear a uniform made in standard sizes. “William Martin” was settled on as the man’s name, since there were several Martins of a similar rank in the Royal Marines.
 
Cholmondeley and Montagu then created “pocket littler,” a collection of small objects that would be placed inside “Martin’s” pockets to make the figure more believable. These items included two love letters and a photo from a fiancée named “Pam” (actually the photo of a clerk at MI5), a receipt for a diamond engagement ring, a letter from his father, a note from the family solicitor and a message from a bank about an overdraft, which was presumably how he bought the ring. Before the letters were written, different brands of ink were tested to see which would last longest in seawater. Martin was also given a silver cross and a St. Christopher medallion to imply he was Catholic, as the pathologist helping the operation believed that the Catholic Spanish had an aversion to performing post-mortems (and thus were less likely to find anything odd about the body). Additional innocuous items such as theater ticket stubs were also added to allow someone to reconstruct Martin’s fictional week spent in London before his fateful flight.

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