28 Aug Operation Mincemeat
(2011) Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured An Allied Victory by Ben Macintyre is the story of World War II’s most successful espionage deception.
In 1943, the Allies were desperate to find a way to convince the Germans that instead of invading Sicily, the invasion would take place in Greece and Sardinia. British Intelligence officers came up with the idea that a corpse with highly sensitive documents would wash up on the coast of neutral-but-highly-pro-German Spain.
The author had access to documents which were not available in previous accounts, and he has pulled together a fascinating timeline of events. Even Ian Fleming had a hand in it.
This operation was the basis for the movie starring Clifton Webb, The Man Who Never Was. At that time, in 1956, enough was known to make a good movie, but most of the actual details were still classified and buried.
Ben Macintyre also wrote A Spy Among Friends about Kim Philby, the notorious member of Britain’s MI6 who spied for the Soviets. I liked the book about Philby better, partly because the man worked in the same building in London as my mother did. She knew exactly who he was.
Thanks in large part to Operation Mincemeat, the invasion of Sicily was a far more successful operation, with fewer casualties, than it would have been if the Germans hadn’t concentrated their troops in the wrong area. The Italian soldiers in Sicily were so unprepared to defend themselves that many of them welcomed the Allies as liberators.
The most interesting part of the saga is how easily the Germans fell for the ruse, “hook, line, and sinker.”
Once Hitler decided that the documents found on the body were authentic, no one, even if he had doubts, was foolish enough to offer a dissenting opinion.
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