The Bridgeville Area Historical Society kicked off its 2022/2023 program season by welcoming back World War II history buff Dana Del Bianco. Her subject was “Operation Mincemeat: Spies, a Sub, a Corpse, and Allied Victory in Sicily”, an interesting tale of counter-espionage.
Late in 1942, after the Allies had successfully driven the Axis forces out of North Africa, there was a major debate regarding the next step in the ultimate invasion of Europe. Stalin insisted that something significant be done to divert some of the Axis troops from the Eastern Front. One possibility was an invasion of Greece and an eventual threat to the Romanian oil fields. Italy, via Sicily, was another alternative, as was Southern France, via Sardinia. Once the Sicily/Italy alternative was selected, at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, a program to keep the enemy convinced of the other two threats was initiated, culminating in “Operation Mincemeat”.
The idea for this specific operation dates back to “The Trout Memo”, a September 1939 discussion of potential counter-espionage projects by the Director of (British) Naval Intelligence, Rear Admiral John Godfrey. By coincidence, Admiral Godfrey’s personal assistant and the apparent author of the document was Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming, whose post-war career included writing twelve James Bond novels. One of the suggestions in the memo was “an idea to plant misleading papers on a corpse that would be found by the enemy”.
As planning for the Sicily invasion continued, British Intelligence initiated a major program of deception. They established a headquarters for a fictitious “Twelfth Army” in Cairo, recruited Greek interpreters, acquired maps of Greece, and conducted maneuvers in Syria. They believed that Hitler was convinced that Greece was the Allies’ target.
At the same time Lieutenant Charles Cholmondeley, an RAF officer assigned to the counter-intelligence service, proposed a low budget operation to complement this effort, based on planting fake documents on a corpse washing ashore in Spain. Naval Lieutenant Commander Ewen Montagu was assigned to help him develop the plan.
The corpse turned out to be Glyndwr Michael, a London homeless man who had committed suicide by ingesting rat poison. His cadaver became available when no one showed up to claim his body. It was refrigerated at thirty-nine degrees Fahrenheit; according to the Coroner that would work for ninety days. The intelligence officers then began to invent a fictitious identity for him.
The identity was that of Major William Martin, of the Royal Marines. There actually were several men in the Marines with that name and rank, and any inquiry regarding him would automatically come to them for authentication. They acquired a new Royal Marines uniform and had Cholmondeley wear it long enough to provide a “used look”. They filled his pockets with appropriate junk – ticket stubs from a London play, a St. Christopher’s medal, keys, a book of stamps, etc. – and a photograph of and letters from a mythical fiancée.
Coming up with a photograph for his ID card was a problem. No matter what they tried, photos of the corpse looked exactly like photos of a corpse. Eventually they found a naval officer who looked enough like Michael to be acceptable, dressed him in a Royal Marines uniform, and took his picture. Montagu then rubbed the brand new cards on his trousers until they too looked appropriately worn.
Martin was carrying several official letters in a briefcase attached a loop on his trench coat. Most significant was one from Lieutenant General Sir Archibald Nye, Imperial General Staff, to General Sir Harold Alexander, commander of the Anglo-American forces in North Africa. After numerous efforts to draft credible letters failed, they contacted General Nye, explained what was needed, and drafted him to produce the necessary letter. The result, judged “quite brilliant”, covered a number of unrelated topics but included enough information that a reader suspecting an invasion of Greece would feel justified in his suspicions.
The corpse was transferred into a capsule filled with dry ice and transported to the drop site on the Spanish coast northwest of Gibraltar by the submarine HMS Seraph. The vessel surfaced on April 30, 1943, and the corpse was dropped into the Sea. The skipper read Psalm 39, then ordered the engines to full astern, pushing the body toward the shore near the fishing village of Huelva, Spain.
Five hours later a fisherman discovered the corpse and took it to a Spanish naval judge in Huelva. As a proper neutral country, the Spanish authorities advised the British authorities that one of their subjects had washed ashore. Francis Haselden, the British vice-consul in the city, immediately notified London, initiating a series of cables emphasizing the importance of recovering the briefcase.
The following day Haselden was permitted to participate in the autopsy of the corpse. Somehow he was able to persuade the Spanish doctors to accept the obvious and to declare death was due to “asphyxiation through immersion in the sea”. Sans briefcase, the body was released to Haselden and buried with military honors on May 2. Years later Glyndwr Michael’s name was added to the headstone.
In the mean-time the Spaniards retained the briefcase. They managed to extract the letters without breaking the seal, photographed them, and gave copies to their Nazi friends. It is generally believed that this information reinforced Hitler’s belief that Greece was the object of the forthcoming invasion, making the Allies’ task in Sicily much easier.
After the War, when information on the operation began to leak out, Montagu was authorized to write a partially censored book, “The Man Who Never Was”, about it. The book generated a film starring Clifton Webb. Although the significance the operation had on the overall war effort is controversial, it certainly is an interesting story.
The next Society program meeting is scheduled for October 25, 2022, at 7:30 pm in the Chartiers Room, Bridgeville Volunteer Fire Department. Dr. Todd DePastino will discuss “Jeopardy History”.