Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory
Ben Macintyre
Language: English
Pages: 416
ISBN: 0307453278
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Ben Macintyre’s Agent Zigzag was hailed as “rollicking, spellbinding” (New York Times), “wildly improbable but entirely true” (Entertainment Weekly), and, quite simply, “the best book ever written” (Boston Globe). In his new book, Operation Mincemeat, he tells an extraordinary story that will delight his legions of fans.
In 1943, from a windowless basement office in London, two brilliant intelligence officers conceived a plan that was both simple and complicated— Operation Mincemeat. The purpose? To deceive the Nazis into thinking that Allied forces were planning to attack southern Europe by way of Greece or Sardinia, rather than Sicily, as the Nazis had assumed, and the Allies ultimately chose.
Charles Cholmondeley of MI5 and the British naval intelligence officer Ewen Montagu could not have been more different. Cholmondeley was a dreamer seeking adventure. Montagu was an aristocratic, detail-oriented barrister. But together they were the perfect team and created an ingenious plan: Get a corpse, equip it with secret (but false and misleading) papers concerning the invasion, then drop it off the coast of Spain where German spies would, they hoped, take the bait. The idea was approved by British intelligence officials, including Ian Fleming (creator of James Bond). Winston Churchill believed it might ring true to the Axis and help bring victory to the Allies.
Filled with spies, double agents, rogues, fearless heroes, and one very important corpse, the story of Operation Mincemeat reads like an international thriller.
Unveiling never-before-released material, Ben Macintyre brings the reader right into the minds of intelligence officers, their moles and spies, and the German Abwehr agents who suffered the “twin frailties of wishfulness and yesmanship.” He weaves together the eccentric personalities of Cholmondeley and Montagu and their near-impossible feats into a riveting adventure that not only saved thousands of lives but paved the way for a pivotal battle in Sicily and, ultimately, Allied success in the war.
apprehensive. If the enemy spotted the Seraph laying the beacon buoy, they would certainly realise that an invasion was imminent, and rush reinforcements to that section of the coast. ‘Discovery,’ Jewell reflected, ‘would throw the whole Husky plan into jeopardy.’ Eisenhower himself had warned that if the Germans were tipped off, the attack on Sicily would fail. The American general told Churchill: ‘If substantial German ground troops should be placed in the region prior to the attack, the
would come. Confusion and hesitation reigned, as the Germans struggled to see through the murk of deception, and their own flawed and limited sources of intelligence. The agenda of possible landing sites included not only Sardinia and Greece, but also Corsica, southern France, and even Spain, while Hitler’s fear for the Balkans coloured his every strategic move. In Sardinia, which the Japanese chargé d’affaires in Rome reported ‘was still regarded as the favourite target’, troop strength was
Robertson, The Ship with Two Captains, p. 129. ‘Ahoy Seraph’ Ibid. ‘a slightly astonished salute’ Ibid. ‘You know, those boys’ Ibid. ‘slide warily back into’ Ibid. ‘tiny, darting flashes marked the progress Ibid. ‘hoped the friendly, ever-joking’ Ibid. ‘Darby is really a great soldier’ Carlo D’Este, Bitter Victory: The Battle for Sicily 1943 (London 1988), p. 275. ‘wished my chaps good luck’ Derrick Leverton, letter, 29 Nov 1943. ‘As there was still a bit of time’ Ibid. ‘quite a bit of
admired Jewell, considering him the ‘epitome of what a submarine captain should be: quite fearless, he was invariably cool and calculating’. Yet however brave and astute his commanding officer, Scott knew that he was quite likely to die before his twenty-third birthday. ‘At that time, the chances of returning home from a Mediterranean-based submarine were 50/50.’ Before joining the Seraph, Scott had spent a week in London. On the last day of his leave, his Uncle Jack and recently widowed mother
that he was quite satisfied, the doctor, not without relief perhaps, agreed to call it a day and issued the necessary certificate.’ The postmortem verdict was straightforward: ‘The young British officer fell in the water while still alive, showed no evidence of bruising, and drowned through asphyxia caused by submersion. The body had been in the water between eight and ten days.’ The body was returned to its plain wooden coffin, and formally transferred into the care of the British vice consul.