Operation Mincemeat

• 1. Introduction

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  Operation Mincemeat required a corpse with no family. Bentley Purchase, a London coroner, found one in early 1943: a homeless man named Glyndwr Michael had died from eating rat poison. Purchase telephoned the Naval Intelligence Division, and Michael would not be buried under his own name.

  The scheme was simple at its core. If a body washed ashore in Spain carrying military documents, and those documents pointed Germany toward the wrong invasion target, Hitler might move his forces away from Sicily. Two intelligence officers, Ewen Montagu and Charles Cholmondeley, were its architects.

  Could a dead tramp pass as a Royal Marines major, complete with a fiancée, an overdraft, and a stack of personal letters? Would the nominally neutral Spanish share the documents with German intelligence? And if they did, would Hitler believe them?

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• 2. Roots of the Ruse

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  On the 29th of September 1939, just weeks after Britain declared war, Rear Admiral John Godfrey circulated a paper comparing the deception of an enemy to fly fishing. The journalist Ben Macintyre writes that though the document bore Godfrey's name, it "bore all the hallmarks of... Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming," Godfrey's personal assistant.

  Number 28 on the list was titled "A Suggestion (not a very nice one)." It proposed planting misleading documents on a corpse the enemy would find. Deliberate deception using a body was already a known practice; in the First World War and the Second, it was called the Haversack Ruse.

  In August 1942, before the Battle of Alam el Halfa, British forces placed a corpse in a blown-up scout car facing the German 90th Light Division. The body carried a fake map of British minefields. German tank crews followed the map and drove into soft sand, where they bogged down.

  A crash off Cádiz in September 1942 gave British planners a fresh lesson about Spain. A plane from Britain to Gibraltar went down, killing a courier named Paymaster-Lieutenant James Hadden Turner. He carried a letter naming Eisenhower's arrival date at Gibraltar ahead of Operation Torch. Turner's body washed up near Tarifa; when the British recovered it, the letter was still sealed. A French agent on the same flight had carried a notebook, however, and it had been copied by the Germans. Spain was passing material to Berlin.

  Charles Cholmondeley, a Royal Air Force flight lieutenant seconded to MI5, drafted his own variation on the Trout memo idea in November 1942. The Twenty Committee, a small inter-service intelligence group overseeing double agents, rejected the plan as unworkable. John Masterman, the committee's chairman, nonetheless saw potential and assigned the naval representative, Ewen Montagu, to work with Cholmondeley. A peacetime King's Counsel, Montagu ran the counter-espionage sub-branch NID 17(M) and oversaw naval deceptions involving double agents.

  At the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, Allied planners set the Sicily invasion for no later than July. Churchill is reputed to have said "Everyone but a bloody fool would know that it's Sicily."

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• 3. Inventing William Martin

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  On the 4th of February 1943 Montagu and Cholmondeley filed the revised Mincemeat plan with the Twenty Committee. The Hydrographer of the Navy had advised that Huelva on Spain's southern coast had tides and currents best suited to carry a body ashore. Adolf Clauss, the son of the German consul in the city, operated there under cover as an agricultural technician; he was an efficient and effective Abwehr agent. The British vice-consul in Huelva, Francis Haselden, was, in Montagu's words, "a reliable and helpful man."

  Sir Bernard Spilsbury, the pathologist, told Montagu that Spanish courts, as Roman Catholics, were unlikely to order a thorough post-mortem for what appeared to be a drowning. Fluids in decomposing lungs would be difficult to identify precisely. Bentley Purchase agreed to store the body in a mortuary refrigerator at 4 degrees Celsius. He warned the body had to be used within three months.

  Captain (Acting Major) William Martin of the Royal Marines was the identity Montagu chose. Martin was a common surname in the corps; an acting major was senior enough to carry sensitive documents but not so prominent that anyone would expect to know him personally. Royal Marines wore standard battledress, making the uniform easy to obtain in the right size.

  Jean Leslie, an MI5 clerk, was photographed to serve as the likeness of Martin's invented fiancée, Pam. Two love letters from Pam were written. A receipt for a diamond engagement ring costing £53 10s 6d from a Bond Street jewellery shop was included, along with a demand from Lloyds Bank for an overdue overdraft of £79 19s 2d. A letter from Martin's father was also included; Macintyre described its tone as "pompous and pedantic as only an Edwardian father could be." MI5 scientists tested ink brands to find which would remain legible after seawater immersion.

  Captain Ronnie Reed of MI5 sat for the identity card photograph in a Royal Marines uniform. Photographs of the actual corpse looked too obviously like a cadaver. Montagu spent weeks rubbing all three identity cards against his trousers to give them a worn look. Cholmondeley wore the uniform to give it a lived-in appearance. War rationing had left the military short of underwear, so a pair of woollen underwear owned by Herbert Fisher, the Warden of New College, Oxford, was placed on the body.

  Ticket stubs from a London theatre and a bill for four nights at the Naval and Military Club were also included. Together, the items established a plausible itinerary for Martin in London from the 18th to the 24th of April.

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• 4. The Letters That Reached Berlin

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  Lieutenant General Sir Archibald Nye, the vice chief of the Imperial General Staff, wrote the central deception document himself after several drafts had failed to read naturally. The letter was addressed to General Sir Harold Alexander, commanding the Anglo-American 18th Army Group in North Africa. Montagu called the result "quite brilliant."

  Cape Araxos and Kalamata in Greece were the two beach assaults described in the letter. The 5th Division was to be reinforced for the landing south of Cape Araxos; the 56th Division was to be reinforced at Kalamata. Sicily and the Dodecanese were named as cover targets. A second letter, from Vice-Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten to Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, introduced Martin as an amphibious warfare expert on loan. Montagu inserted a joke about sardines, hoping the Germans would read it as a pointer toward Sardinia. A single black eyelash was placed inside that envelope to reveal if anyone had opened it.

  Two proof copies of a pamphlet on combined operations, written by Hilary Saunders of Mountbatten's staff, were placed with Martin. They gave him a plausible reason for carrying a briefcase. A leather courier's chain secured the case to the body, looped around the belt of Martin's trench coat. Montagu judged that a major on a long flight would not keep the chain attached to his wrist throughout the journey.

  Colonel John Bevan, head of the London Controlling Section, met Churchill on the 15th of April to obtain final approval. The prime minister was in bed at the Cabinet War Rooms, wearing a dressing gown and smoking a cigar. Churchill approved the plan and delegated final confirmation to Eisenhower. The confirmation from Eisenhower's headquarters in Algeria arrived on the 17th of April.

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• 5. Seraph and the Shore

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  In the early hours of the 17th of April 1943, the team dressed Michael's body as Major Martin. The feet had frozen overnight; Purchase, Montagu, and Cholmondeley had to locate an electric heater before the boots would go on. The canister was packed with 21 pounds of dry ice. When the dry ice sublimated, it expelled the oxygen and replaced it with carbon dioxide, preserving the body without refrigeration. Charles Fraser-Smith of the Ministry of Supply had built the container, labelled "Handle with care: optical instruments."

  St John "Jock" Horsfall, an MI5 driver and former racing champion, drove the canister overnight in a 1937 Fordson van to Greenock in west Scotland. HMS Seraph was waiting. Lieutenant Bill Jewell, the commander, told his crew the canister held a top secret meteorological device to be deployed near Spain.

  Seraph sailed on the 19th of April and arrived just off Huelva on the 29th, having been bombed twice en route. At 4:15 am on the 30th of April the submarine surfaced. Jewell sent the crew below. He and the officers opened the canister and lowered the body into the sea. Jewell read Psalm 39 over the water. The engines went to full astern; the propeller wash pushed the corpse toward the shore. The empty canister was eventually destroyed with plastic explosives. Jewell signalled the Admiralty: "Mincemeat completed."

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• 6. Spain, Germany, and the Result

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  At around 9:30 am on the 30th of April 1943, a Spanish fisherman found the body of "Major Martin" near Huelva. Spanish soldiers delivered it to the port, where a naval judge took custody. Francis Haselden, the British vice-consul, was notified. A sequence of pre-written cables between Haselden and Alan Hillgarth, the naval attaché in Madrid, played out over several days. Those cables were deliberately sent in a code the British knew the Germans had broken; they portrayed the briefcase as urgently needed.

  At midday on the 1st of May an autopsy took place. Haselden attended, and citing the heat and the smell, he suggested the two Spanish doctors break for lunch and close the proceedings. They agreed and signed a certificate listing the cause of death as "asphyxiation through immersion in the sea." On the 2nd of May, Major William Martin was buried with full military honours in the San Marco section of Nuestra Señora cemetery in Huelva.

  The briefcase reached San Fernando near Cádiz on the 5th of May. German sympathisers there photographed its contents without opening the envelopes. In Madrid, Karl-Erich Kühlenthal, one of the Abwehr's most senior agents in Spain, sought Admiral Wilhelm Canaris's help. Canaris, head of the Abwehr, intervened personally with the Spanish authorities. The Spanish extracted the letters by winding the damp paper around a probe. They pulled it out between the wax-sealed flap and the body of each envelope. The letters were photographed, soaked in salt water for twenty-four hours, and returned to their envelopes. The planted eyelash was not replaced. Kühlenthal judged the intelligence so important that he carried the documents to Germany himself. The information reached German hands on the 8th of May.

  On the 11th of May the briefcase was returned to Hillgarth in Madrid, who forwarded it to London in the diplomatic bag. Forensic examination found the eyelash missing and the paper fibres damaged by folding more than once. As the still-wet documents dried, they curled back into the rolled shape the Spanish probe had formed.

  An Ultra decrypt on the 14th of May confirmed the ruse had worked. A German message sent two days earlier had warned that the Allied invasion was aimed at the Balkans, with a feint toward the Dodecanese. Brigadier Leslie Hollis forwarded the news to Churchill, then in the United States: "Mincemeat swallowed rod, line and sinker by the right people."

  Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz had met Hitler that same day. Dönitz recorded Hitler's view that the "Anglo-Saxon order" confirmed the main Allied thrusts would target Sardinia and the Peloponnesus. Hitler ordered the experienced 1st Panzer Division transferred from France to Salonika, Greece. By the end of June, German strength on Sardinia had doubled to 10,000 troops. Seven divisions moved to Greece, raising the number there to eight. Ten additional divisions were sent to the Balkans, raising that count to eighteen.

  On the 9th of July 1943, the Allies invaded Sicily under Operation Husky. German signals intercepted by GC&CS showed that four hours after the invasion began, twenty-one German aircraft left Sicily to reinforce Sardinia. The predicted 90-day campaign ended in 38 days. British casualties in the first week were roughly one-seventh of the 10,000 expected. Twelve ships were lost against a predicted loss of 300. Denis Smyth writes that Hitler suspended the Kursk offensive on the 13th of July, still convinced Sicily was a feint for the Balkans. Once Hitler ceded the initiative to the Soviets at Kursk, Smyth observes, he never regained it.

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• 7. The Long Afterlife

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  Montagu was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1944 for his role in the operation. Cholmondeley was made a member of the same order in 1948 for masterminding the plan.

  Duff Cooper, a former cabinet minister briefed on Mincemeat in March 1943, published the novel Operation Heartbreak in 1950. Its central character, William Maryngton, was a fictitious officer whose body had been floated off Spain with false documents. The British security services decided to counter the novel by publishing the real account. Montagu wrote The Man Who Never Was over a single weekend in 1953; it sold two million copies and was the basis for a 1956 film of the same name. Montagu was careful to obscure the signals intelligence that confirmed the deception. He also presented Mincemeat as a spontaneous "wild" one-off rather than a coordinated programme of strategic deception. In 1977 he returned to the subject in his wartime memoir Beyond Top Secret U.

  Ben Macintyre published his own history of the operation in 2010. A musical titled Operation Mincemeat opened in London's West End in 2019. A 2022 film of the same name cast Colin Firth as Montagu and Matthew Macfadyen as Cholmondeley.

  The Commonwealth War Graves Commission took responsibility for Major Martin's grave in Huelva in 1977. In 1997 it added the postscript: "Glyndwr Michael served as Major William Martin RM." A memorial to Michael was placed at the Hackney Mortuary in November 2021. The Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation organized it, working with the Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women and the London Borough of Hackney. The inscription added in 1997 was the first time Michael's real name appeared on the grave. Roger Morgan, an amateur historian from London, had uncovered the evidence of his identity in the Public Record Office the year before.

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