April 30th, 1943 9:30am
Just off the coast of Spain.
A local sardine fisherman, going about his day, spots something strange floating a ways
off in the water.
He takes a few minutes to investigate, as any curious fisherman would, and soon realizes,
to his horror, he’s happened upon a body.
Not just any body, mind you, but the corpse of a British soldier.
A captain of the Royal Marines: the acting Major William Martin.
Looped around the belt of his trench coat is a chained military briefcase.
The local authorities are called, and the body is sent to the city of Huelva, and placed
into the possession of the Spanish military.
Before long, the briefcase is cracked open, and inside, the Spaniards find correspondence
between two British generals which imply that the Allies plan to invade Greece and Sardinia,
using an invasion of Sicily as a diversion.
The Spanish government is neutral in the war, but are known to cooperate with the Germans.
Copies of the briefcase contents are soon shared with the German military, and the Nazi’s,
stunned at their good fortune, shift their forces away from Sicily and direct them to
the two invasion targets, eager to have a solid leg up on the British.
A short time later, a message is sent by Brigadier Leslie Hollis, the secretary to the Chiefs
of Staff Committee to Winston Churchill.
The communique reads, “Mincemeat swallowed rod, line and sinker.”
Churchill reads the message, and smiles.
The Nazi’s had fallen for it.
A year previously, the Allies, pleased with their success in the North African Campaign,
began brainstorming their next target.
While it was quickly determined that an invasion of France by Britain wouldn’t be possible
until 1944, Churchill wanted to reallocate forces from North Africa to attack Europe’s
“soft underbelly”.
At the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, Allied planners selected Sicily as the next
target, with a timetable of no later than July that year.
The problem, from many in the Allied forces point of view, was that Sicily was too obvious
a choice - control of the island would open the Mediterranean Sea to Allied shipping,
and make it possible to invade continental Europe through Italy.
Many believed the build up of resources necessary for the invasion would be quickly detected,
and blunted by the Axis.
With this in mind, the British began quietly working on a secret operation that would confuse
the Germans as to where the invasion would take place.
Time was of the essence.
They had until July to craft, execute, and complete to mission, or the invasion of Sicily
would be short-lived.
The operation would be overseen by the Twenty Committee, which oversaw the Double-Cross
System, a counter-espionage and deception operation of the British Security Service.
From this, two men - Ewan Montagu and Charles Cholmondeley - were chosen to design and carry
out the covert operation.
The men took their inspiration from The Trout Memo, a 1939 wartime document which detailed
a list of ways that enemy forces could be fooled, or, like trout, lured in.
Number 28 on the list was titled: "A Suggestion (not a very nice one)"
The idea: plant misleading documents on a corpse that would be found by the enemy.
Cholmondeley’s spin on the idea was simple: Obtain a body from a hospital in London, fill
its lungs with water, and place fake documents in an inside coat pocket.
The body would then be airdropped near a shoreline, and upon finding it, the enemy would believe
they had stumbled upon important military plans from a downed soldier who had drowned
after crashing into the sea.
The execution of this plan presented several problems - the most obvious of which, was…
how do you procure a body for such a mission?
Montagu and Cholmondeley enlisted the help of Sir Bernard Spilsbury, a famous British
pathologist to determine what kind of body they needed and what factors they would need
to take into account to fool a hypothetical Spanish pathologist into believing the cadaver
to be genuine.
Spilsbury informed the men that air crash victims often died from shock, not drowning,
so the body’s lungs would not necessarily need to be filled with water.
He further supposed that the Spaniard pathologists would be Roman Catholics, and therefore reluctant
to perform a full autopsy.
This meant their options for a suitable corpse were widened, and Spilsbury began searching
London for an unwanted body that could meet the qualifications.
On January 28th, 1943, the body of Glyndwr Michael, a Welsh homeless man, became available.
Michael died in St. Pancras Hospital, seriously ill from ingesting rat poison in an abandoned
warehouse close to King’s Cross.
He had no family, no friends, and, according to Montagu several years later, “a bit of
a ne'er-do-well, whose only worthwhile deed was done after his death.”
It was determined that the small amount of rat poison in his system would not be detectable.
There was one caveat, however: the body only had a shelf life of three months, after which
it would decompose past the point of usefulness.
With the clock ticking, Montagu and Cholmondeley launched “Operation Mincemeat”, and got
to work creating the corpse’s undercover identity.
The name and rank chosen was Captain (Acting Major) William Martin, of the Royal Marines
assigned to Combined Operations Headquarters.
Martin was a common last name among Royal Marines with the rank - the hope was that,
if an inquiry was made about the Captain’s identity by the enemy, they would find several
records from various different men in the division, quelling any suspicion.
But Montagu and Cholmondeley went even further, crafting an entire background for William
Martin, and filling his pockets with items meant to support the legend, including a letter
from his fictitious father, an overdraft notice from Lloyd's Bank, a receipt for a diamond
engagement ring, and two letters from a fictitious fiancee named Pam, accompanied by a photograph
in which an Mi5 desk clerk name Jean Leslie posed as a stand-in.
Also included on the Captain’s person were cigarettes, a pencil stub, some keys, theatre
tickets, a hotel receipt, a book of stamps, and a silver cross and medallion of St. Christopher,
meant to convince the Spanish Pathologists that he was a fellow Roman Catholic, and thus
further discourage them from performing a complete autopsy.
Along with the pocket litter, the operation crafted a thorough a timeline of Captain William
Martin’s activity in London from April 18th to the 24th.
All these details combined illustrate a substantial effort to establish as much evidence of authenticity
as possible.
But most important of all was the document meant to mislead the Germans:
A personal letter from Lieutenant General Sir Archibald Nye, vice chief of the Imperial
General Staff, to General Sir Harold Alexander, commander of the Anglo-American 18th Army
Group in Algeria and Tunisia under General Eisenhower.
This letter would make reference to an impending attack on the Balkans.
In the event the Spanish returned the Captain’s body and the attached documents to the British,
a single black eyelash was placed inside the letter as a way to know whether it had been
opened.
Cholmondeley’s plan originally called for the body to be air-dropped into the sea, but
seaplanes were quickly determined to be too loud and open to discovery.
Simulating the air crash with an actual plane was logistically impossible.
The team eventually settled upon delivering the body via covert submarine.
On April 13th, with the plan finally in place, the Chiefs of Staff met and agreed to give
the go-ahead for the operation, pending Churchill’s approval.
Two days later, Colonel John Bevan, the head of London Controlling Section, met with the
prime minister to explain the plan.
Taking great care to explain the drawbacks, Bevan warned Churchill that any number of
things could go wrong - including that the Spanish might return the corpse to the British
without even opening the letter.
Laying in his bed, clothed in a dressing gown and smoking a cigar, Churchill responded by
quipping, "In that case, we shall have to get the body back and give it another swim."
In the early hours of April 17th, the body of Captain (Acting Major) William Martin,
of the Royal Marines, was outfitted and placed in a canister.
The canister was loaded into a 1937 Fordson van, driven by British Secret Service agent
St. John “Jock” Horsfall, who, before the war, had been a motor racing champion.
Cholmondeley and Montagu travelled with the canister in the back of the van.
Agent Horsfall drove through the night to Greenock, west Scotland, and, once there,
the canister was taken on board the HMS Seraph, an S-class submarine of the British Royal
Navy.
Seraph's commander, Lt. Bill Jewell, who was clued in on the op, told his men that the
canister contained a top secret meteorological device that was to be deployed near Span.
On April 19th, Seraph set sail.
During the ten day voyage, the vessel endured two separate bombings, and after much uncertainty,
finally arrived just off the coast of Huelva.
At 4:15 the next morning, Seraph finally surfaced.
Jewell had the canister brought up to the deck, and then sent all men except the officers
back inside the sub.
The officers were quickly informed of the actual purpose of the mission, and together,
they opened the canister.
As the body was lowered into the water, Lt. Jewell read the 39th Psalm - A psalm of David
- a Prayer for Wisdom and Forgiveness.
As Seraph’s engines were fired up, the ship’s propellers pushed the corpse toward the direction
of the shore.
A few minutes later, Seraph dove, and all was quiet.
The body of Captain (Acting Major) William Martin, of the Royal Marines, drifted aimlessly
for a few hours, until finally catching the attention of a local sardine fisherman.
After a quick examination by the Spanish, the body was buried on May 2 in the San Marco
section of Nuestra Señora cemetery in Huelva, with full military honors.
The grave remains there, to this day.
On May 11, The Captain (Acting Major)’s affects were finally returned to London.
British secret service opened the briefcase, and examined the letter.
The eyelash was massing.
Toward the end of June, the Nazis shifted their forces to the Balkans, leaving Sicily
wide open.
In July, the Allies invaded.
By mid-August, Sicily fell.
10 years to the day after Operation Mincemeat was given the go ahead by the Chiefs of Staff,
the author of the Trout Memo, which inspired the operation, wrote another document - this
time, a novel.
The author was Ian Fleming, and the book was Casino Royale - an espionage thriller which
introduced the world to the fictional British secret agent James Bond.
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