You’ve probably had a staple filled with mincemeat, did it meet your expectations? Or were you disappointed to realize it wasn’t completely filled with meat?
Mincemeat is a mixture of chopped dried fruit, distilled spirits, spices, and often beef suet, usually used as a pie or pastry filling. But we aren’t talking about the actual dish which would be usually served in a pie crust of some kind, we are in fact talking about an operation carried out by British intelligence, that may well have been one of the prime movers in swinging the tide of World War Two.
They came up with the name because British intelligence at the time had an approved list of common names that they would pull from. We are going to delve a little bit into the real-life events that informed the film you can see on Netflix today. This operation was a result of intelligence agencies always trying to fake each other out. The British invented a ghoulishly creative way of delivering fake Intel in Spain, which was neutral at this time in 1943, and they wanted it to end up with the German forces.
Weirdly enough, the entire idea starts with fly fishing. It was used as a metaphor for a document called the trout memo that was then presented to a committee called the 20 committee. This just shows how deep some of these clever British quips go with some of these project names and code names. 20 was not referring to the number of members in the council, it was referring to the Roman numeral for 20 which is XX, meaning double crosses. So, it was an organization that was specifically designed to fake out other intelligence agencies and governments through elaborate ruses, and ultimately, deception.
This article is not about the entirety of the trout memo that Churchill seemed to love in the movie, which is a list of elaborate methods of deception, it’s about the 28th suggestion in that paper. The idea of getting a dead body, planting fake intel on that dead body, and then dropping it somewhere where German intelligence would find it. They didn’t make up this idea, they got it from a pre-war detective story called The Milliner’s Hat Mystery
A man named Admiral Godfrey is pretty hot to try out this trout memo suggestion because he needs a solution and fast. He is aware of an upcoming plan for a different operation called Operation husky. The allied forces are planning to invade the island of Sicily, off of Italy and they were worried that it would be tough to pull this off if the Germans could see them coming.
The issue with Sicily was that it was a no-duh kind of move. They were going to be expected which was the problem. They needed to figure out a way to make the Germans believe they weren’t going to do the thing the Germans knew they definitely were going to do. How do you do that?
This story hinges on three people. I’ll introduce two of them now, military officers, Charles Cholmondeley, and Ewen Montagu.
So, here we are the 28th suggestion, Cholmondeley and Montagu run with it. The lore in this case is a corpse. Not too fresh, not too stale, and it has to be dressed as your kind of average everyday soldier with fake Intel. The whole idea is that German intelligence in Spain finds this intel and takes it as gospel. They act on that secret info and move their forces away from Sicily. This all takes time, so they can’t just pop back over which would ultimately expose the soft underbelly of Europe to a successful invasion.
They knew the German military would do an autopsy to make sure the body was in fact genuine because there was this paranoia at the time which would not allow them to accept anything at face value. So, they had to go about this in the most meticulous way you could imagine which involved creating a backstory for this person.
Faking bad intel was not an original idea. It happened so often in the world of intelligence that by this point, it had a street name known as, the haversack ruse.
Thanks to Denis Smyth’s, Deathly Deception: The Real Story of Operation Mincemeat, we have Cholmondeley’s real-life description of the trout memo;
A bowtie is obtained from one of the London hospitals. The lungs are filled with water and documents are disposed of in an inside pocket. The body is then dropped by coastal command aircraft. On being found, the supposition in the enemy’s mind may well be that one of our aircraft has either been shot or forced down and that this is one of their passengers
Cholmondeley pitches this idea to his buds in MI 5 and the 20 committee. They consider it and essentially build on his idea. And that’s when Montagu comes in. He’s naval intelligence. He’s in charge of counter espionage. And he works with Chumley. They go through the details, and they get a due date. The top brass says the invasion of Sicily, Operation Husky, has to happen by July of 1943.
Adolf Hitler was never a particularly talented strategist. And he was really focused not so much on Sicily but on the Balkans. If the war machine that was running through Europe was to continue, then they needed copper, oil, and all sorts of resources from the Balkans. Without it, their war effort would collapse. So, the Allies go through this whole dog and pony show. They invented another fake operation called Operation Barclays, meant to convince Germany that the allies were going toward the Balkans.
The whole time, Cholmondeley and Montagu were searching for a body, and they get help from two people. One is a pathologist named Sir Bernard Spilsbury and the other is a coroner. Spilsbury points out that when people die in plane crashes over water, they are often going to die of shock instead of drowning.
That meant it couldn’t be a grisly death where there was mangling or mutilation of any kind. It needed to be a body with very few marks on it and a body in which the cause of death couldn’t easily be determined.
This leads them to hook up with a coroner called Bentley Purchase on January 28, 1943. The body they got was a guy named Glyndwr Michael who had recently been discovered dead from ingesting rat poison in a warehouse- presumably a suicide.
Now they have a body, but they still needed to do the hard work of creating a rich back story if their plan was going to work. They had to find someone that somewhat resembled the corpse so they could get a photo for his military ID.
Montagu happened to a man named Ronnie Reed, a BBC radio engineer moonlighting for MI5 who could have passed for Michael in real life. He consented to be photographed for the ID card.
On the corpse, they planted a St. Christopher’s medal and a cross necklace, a stamp booklet, an invitation to the Cabaret Club, a pack of cigarettes, and a letter from his stiff-upper-lipped father, among other effects. There were also emblems of his relationship with Pam(a made-up lover), and a bill for an engagement ring. These documents were sealed in a briefcase to make sure the fake intel reached the Germans in good condition.
They dubbed this character Major William Martin.
Earlier I mentioned there are three main characters in this story. Glyndwr Michael, known as ‘Major William Martin’ is our third man. On April 30, 1943, they take action because Bentley gave them three months to carry out their plan before the body decayed too far to be useful.
The captain of a submarine called HMS Saref has his crew push this body into the sea. And they push it in the direction of the tide. And they actually use the submarine’s propellers to help move the body and what they hope is the right direction. The captain of that sub, Lieutenant Norman Jewell, had the decency to stage something like a funeral service and read the 39th Psalm, which talks about the power of silence. And that’s the only funeral that Michael actually gets. The body washes ashore on the Spanish coast near a city called Huelva and this is exactly where they wanted it to go.
If you were a German spy there in Spain, and you saw these papers, they would look legit. It was a very clever counterfeiting move. The people who made the fake papers are the same people who make the real papers and you would not be able to tell the difference without more information.
A fisherman finds and retrieves ‘Martin’s’ body. And then, of course, it makes it to German intelligence in the city. They continued the ruse by using unsecured lines they knew were being monitored by German intelligence saying how worried they were that their man had been found and of the sensitive nature of the papers that he was carrying.
I would argue that the communications that were being monitored were probably the clincher for German forces because if this guy was carrying secret papers this important, then, of course, British intelligence would worry about it. If they hadn’t done that little part of the song and dance, then Germany may have figured out the ruse, but it worked.
It seems the successful invasion of Sicily began on July 9. It went on until August 17. The German military had already moved a big part of their forces to Greece. This would prove to be the first foray in the Italian campaign, also known as the liberation of Italy, continuing till 1945, leading to the death of Benito Mussolini, which is still kind of a mystery.
Mincemeat played a role in the ultimate Allied victory of World War Two but it’s also important to remember that even though the invasion of Sicily happened successfully, Allied forces were committing war crimes against innocent Sicilian citizens, and that’s a story that doesn’t often get told.
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