Technical considerations; strategic approval
Montagu and Cholmondeley gave consideration to the location
of the corpse's delivery. It had long been assumed by the pair that the western
coast of Spain would be the ideal location. Early in the planning they
investigated the possibility of Portuguese and French coasts, but rejected
those in favor of Huelva on the coast of southern Spain, after advice was taken
from the Hydrographer of the Navy regarding the tides and currents best suited
to ensure the body landed where it was wanted. Montagu later outlined that the
choice of Huelva was also made because "there
was a very active German agent ... who had excellent contacts with certain
Spaniards, both officials and others". The agent – Adolf Clauss, a
member of the Abwehr – was the son of the German consul, and operated under the
cover of an agriculture technician; he was an efficient and effective
operative. Huelva was also chosen because the British vice-consul in the city,
Francis Haselden, was "a reliable
and helpful man" who could be relied upon, according to Montagu.
The body was supposed to be the victim of an aeroplane
crash, and it was decided that to try to simulate the accident at sea using
flares and other devices could be too risky and open to discovery. After
seaplanes and surface ships were dismissed as being problematic, a submarine
was chosen as the method of delivering the corpse to the region. To transport
the body by submarine, it needed to be contained within the body of the boat,
as any externally mounted container would have to be built with a skin so thick
it would alter the level of the waterline. The canister needed to remain airtight
and keep the corpse as fresh as possible through its journey. Spilsbury
provided the medical requirements and Cholmondeley contacted Charles
Fraser-Smith of the Ministry of Supply to produce the container, which was
labelled "Handle with care: optical
instruments".
On 13 April 1943 the committee of the Chiefs of Staff met
and agreed that they thought the plan should proceed. The committee informed
Colonel John Bevan – the head of London Controlling Section, which controlled
the planning and co-ordination of deception operations – which he needed to
obtain final approval from Churchill. Two days later Bevan met the prime
minister – who was in bed, wearing a dressing gown and smoking a cigar – in his
rooms at the Cabinet War offices and explained the plan. He warned Churchill
that there were several aspects that could go wrong, including that the
Spaniards might pass the corpse back to the British, with the papers unread.
Churchill replied that "in that case
we shall have to get the body back and give it another swim". Churchill
gave his approval to the operation, but delegated the final confirmation to
Eisenhower, the overall military commander in the Mediterranean, whose plan to
invade Sicily would be affected. Bevan sent an encrypted telegram to
Eisenhower's headquarters in Algeria requesting final confirmation, which was
received on 17 April.
Execution
In the early hours of 17 April 1943 the corpse of Michael
was dressed as Martin, although there was one last-minute hitch: the feet had
frozen. Purchase, Montagu and Cholmondeley could not put the boots on, so an
electric heater was located and the feet defrosted enough to put the boots on
properly. The pocket litter was placed on the body, and the briefcase attached.
The body was placed in the canister, which was filled with 21 pounds (9.5 kg)
of dry ice and sealed up. When the dry ice sublimated, it filled the canister
with carbon dioxide and drove out any oxygen, thus preserving the body without
refrigeration. The canister was placed in the 1937 Fordson van of an MI5
driver, St John "Jock"
Horsfall, who had been a racing champion before the war. Cholmondeley and
Montagu travelled in the back of the van, which drove through the night to
Greenock, west Scotland, where the canister was taken on board the submarine
HMS Seraph, which was preparing for a deployment to the Mediterranean. Seraph's
commander, Lt. Bill Jewell, and crew had previous special operations
experience. Jewell told his men that the canister contained a top secret
meteorological device to be deployed near Spain.
On 19 April Seraph set sail and arrived just off the coast
of Huelva on 29 April after having been bombed twice en route. After spending
the day reconnoitering the coastline, at 4:15 am on 30 April, Seraph surfaced.
Jewell had the canister brought up on deck, then sent all his crew below except
the officers. They opened the container and lowered the body into the water.
Jewell read Psalm 39 and ordered the engines to full astern; the wash from the
screws pushed the corpse toward the shore. The canister was reloaded and the
submarine travelled 12 miles (19 km) out where it surfaced and the empty
container was pushed into the water. As it floated, it was riddled with machine
gun fire so that it would sink. Because of the air trapped in the insulation,
this effort failed, and the canister was destroyed with plastic explosives.
Jewell afterwards sent a message to the Admiralty to say "Mincemeat completed", and continued on to Gibraltar.
Spanish handling of
the corpse and the ramifications
The body of "Major
Martin" was found at around 9:30 am on 30 April 1943 by a local
fisherman; it was taken to Huelva by Spanish soldiers, where it was handed over
to a naval judge. Haselden, as vice-consul, was officially informed by the
Spaniards; he reported back to the Admiralty that the body and briefcase had
been found. A series of pre-scripted diplomatic cables were sent between
Haselden and his superiors, which continued for several days. The British knew
that these were being intercepted and, although they were encrypted, the
Germans had broken the code; the messages played out the story that it was
imperative that Haselden retrieve the briefcase because it was important.
At midday on 1 May an autopsy was undertaken on Michael's
body; Haselden was present and – in order to minimise the possibilities that
the two Spanish doctors would discover that the body was a three-month-old
corpse – asked if, in the heat of the day and smell of the corpse, the doctors
should bring the post mortem to a close and have lunch. They agreed and signed
a death certificate for Major William Martin for "asphyxiation through immersion in the sea"; the body was
released by the Spanish and, as Major Martin, was buried in the San Marco
section of Nuestra Señora cemetery in Huelva, with full military honors on 2
May.
The Spanish navy retained the briefcase and, despite
pressure from Adolf Clauss and some of his Abwehr agents, neither it nor its
contents were handed over to the Germans. On 5 May the briefcase was passed to
the naval headquarters at San Fernando near Cadiz, for forwarding to Madrid.
While at San Fernando the contents were photographed by German sympathizers,
but the letters were not opened. Once the briefcase arrived in Madrid, its
contents became the focus of attention of Karl-Erich Kühlenthal, one of the
most senior Abwehr agents in Spain. He asked Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the head
of the Abwehr, to personally intervene and persuade the Spanish to surrender
the documents. Acceding to the request, the Spanish removed the still-damp
paper by tightly winding it around a probe into a cylindrical shape, and then
pulling it out between the envelope flap – which was still closed by a wax seal
– and the envelope body. The letters were dried and photographed, then soaked
in salt water for 24 hours before being re-inserted into their envelopes,
without the eyelash that had been planted there. The information was passed to
the Germans on 8 May. This was deemed so important by the Abwehr agents in
Spain that Kühlenthal personally took the documents to Germany.
On 11 May the briefcase, complete with the documents, was
returned to Haselden by the Spanish authorities; he forwarded it to London in
the diplomatic bag. On receipt, the documents were forensically examined, and
the absence of the eyelash noted. Further tests showed that the fibers in the
paper had been damaged by folding more than once, which confirmed that the
letters had been extracted and read. An additional test was made as the papers
– still wet by the time they returned to London – were dried out: the folded
paper dried into the rolled form it had when the Spaniards had extracted it
from the envelope. To allay any potential German fears that their activities
had been discovered, another pre-arranged encrypted but breakable cable was
sent to Haselden stating that the envelopes had been examined and that they had
not been opened; Haselden leaked the news to Spaniards known to be sympathetic
to the Germans.
Final proof that the Germans had been passed the information
from the letters came on 14 May when a German communication was decrypted by the
Ultra source of signals intelligence produced by the Government Code and Cypher
School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park. The message, which had been sent two days
previously, warned that the invasion was to be in the Balkans, with a feint to
the Dodecanese. A message was sent by Brigadier Leslie Hollis – the secretary
to the Chiefs of Staff Committee – to Churchill, then in the United States. It
read "Mincemeat swallowed rod, line
and sinker by the right people and from the best information they look like
acting on it."
Montagu continued the deception to reinforce the existence
of Major Martin, and included his details in the published list of British
casualties which appeared in The Times on 4 June. By coincidence, also
published that day were the names of two other officers who had died when their
plane was lost at sea, and opposite the casualty listings was a report that the
film star Leslie Howard had been shot down by the Luftwaffe and died in the Bay
of Biscay; both stories gave credence to the Major Martin story.
German reaction
On 14 May 1943 Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz met Hitler to
discuss Dönitz's recent visit to Italy, his meeting with the Italian leader
Benito Mussolini and the progress of the war. The Admiral, referring to the
Mincemeat documents as the "Anglo-Saxon
order", recorded:
The Führer does not agree with ... [Mussolini] that the most
likely invasion point is Sicily. Furthermore, he believes that the discovered
Anglo-Saxon order confirms the assumption that the planned attacks will be
directed mainly against Sardinia and the Peloponnesus.
Hitler informed Mussolini that Greece, Sardinia and Corsica
must be defended "at all
costs", and that German troops would be best placed to do the job. He
ordered that the experienced 1st Panzer Division be transferred from France to
Salonika, Greece. The order was intercepted by GC&CS on 21 May. By the end
of June, German troop strength on Sardinia had been doubled to 10,000, with
fighter aircraft also based there as support. German torpedo boats were moved
from Sicily to the Greek islands in preparation. Seven German divisions
transferred to Greece, raising the number present to eight, and ten were posted
to the Balkans, raising the number present to eighteen.
On 9 July the Allies invaded Sicily in Operation Husky.
German signals intercepted by GC&CS showed that even four hours after the
invasion of Sicily began, twenty-one aircraft left Sicily to reinforce
Sardinia. For a considerable time after the initial invasion, Hitler was still
convinced that an attack on the Balkans was imminent, and in late July he sent
General Erwin Rommel to Salonika to prepare the defence of the region. By the
time the German high command realised the mistake, it was too late to make a difference.
Aftermath
On 25 July 1943, as the battle for Sicily went against the
Axis forces, the Italian Grand Council of Fascism voted to limit the power of
Mussolini, and handed control of the Italian armed forces over to King Victor
Emmanuel III. The following day Mussolini met the King, who dismissed him as
prime minister; the former dictator was then imprisoned. A new Italian
government took power and began secret negotiations with the Allies. Sicily
fell on 17 August[119] after a force of 65,000 Germans held off 400,000
American and British troops long enough to allow many of the Germans to evacuate
to the Italian mainland.
The military historian Jon Latimer observes that the relative
ease with which the Allies captured Sicily was not entirely because of
Mincemeat, or the wider deception of Operation Barclay. Latimer identifies
other factors, including Hitler's distrust of the Italians, and his
unwillingness to risk German troops alongside Italian troops who may have been
on the point of a general surrender. The military historian Michael Howard,
while describing Mincemeat as "perhaps
the most successful single deception operation of the entire war", considered
Mincemeat and Barclay to have less impact on the course of the Sicily campaign
than Hitler's "congenital obsession
with the Balkans". Macintyre writes that the exact impact of Mincemeat
is impossible to calculate. Although the British had expected 10,000 killed or
wounded in the first week of fighting, only a seventh of that number became
casualties; the navy expected 300 ships would be sunk in the action, but they
lost 12. The predicted 90-day campaign was over in 38.
Smyth writes that as a result of Husky, Hitler suspended the
Kursk offensive on 13 July. This was partly because of the performance of the
Soviet army, but partly because he still assumed that the Allied landing on
Sicily was a feint that preceded the invasion in the Balkans, and he wanted to
have troops available for fast deployment to meet them. Smyth observes that
once Hitler gave up the initiative to the Soviets, he never regained it.
Legacy
Montagu was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British
Empire in 1944 for his part in Operation Mincemeat; for masterminding the plan,
Cholmondeley was appointed a Member of the Order in 1948. Duff Cooper, a former
cabinet minister who had been briefed on the operation in March 1943, published
the spy novel Operation Heartbreak (1950), which contained the plot device of a
corpse – with papers naming him as William Maryngton – being floated off the
coast of Spain with false documents to deceive the Germans. The British
security services decided that the best response was to publish the story of
Mincemeat. Over the course of a weekend Montagu wrote The Man Who Never Was
(1953), which sold two million copies and formed the basis for a 1956 film. The
security services did not give Montagu complete freedom to reveal operational
details, and he was careful not to mention the role played by signals
intelligence to confirm that the operation had been successful. He was also
careful to obscure "the idea of an organized
programme of strategic deception ... with Mincemeat being presented as a 'wild'
one-off caper". In 1977 Montagu published Beyond Top Secret U, his
wartime autobiography which gave further details of Mincemeat, among other
operations. In 2010 the journalist Ben Macintyre published Operation Mincemeat,
a history of the events.
A 1956 episode of The Goon Show, titled "The Man Who Never Was", was set during the Second World
War, and referred to a microfilm washed up on a beach inside a German boot. The
play Operation Mincemeat, written by Adrian Jackson and Farhana Sheikh, was
first staged by the Cardboard Citizens theatre company in 2001. The work
focused on Michael's homelessness. In his book The Double Agents, the writer W.
E. B. Griffin depicts Operation Mincemeat as an American operation run by the
Office of Strategic Services. Fictional characters are blended with Ian Fleming
and the actors David Niven and Peter Ustinov.
The story was the basis for the 2014 musical Dead in the
Water, performed at the Camden, Brighton and Guildford Fringe Festivals in
2014. In 2015 the Welsh theatre company Theatr na nÓg produced Y dyn na fu
erioed (The Man Who Never Was), a musical based on the operation and Glyndwr
Michael's upbringing in Aberbargoed. The musical was performed by primary
school children from Caerphilly County Borough during that year's Eisteddfod yr
Urdd. Another musical, Operation Mincemeat, is based on the operation; it was
initially staged in 2019 at the New Diorama Theatre, London, and then moved to
the Fortune Theatre in 2023. In 2014 a BBC television miniseries, Fleming: The
Man Who Would Be Bond dramatized some aspects of Operation Mincemeat, and
Fleming's connection to the operation. In 2022 the film Operation Mincemeat was
released, with 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 the Commission added the
postscript "Glyndwr Michael served
as Major William Martin RM". In November 2021 the Jewish American
Society for Historic Preservation, working with the Association of Jewish
Ex-Servicemen and Women and the London Borough of Hackney, placed a memorial at
the Hackney Mortuary.
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