Operation Mincemeat

History this week. July 10, 1943. I'm Sally Helm. It's a few hours before dawn on Sicily's southern coast. The Italian island sits between the toe of the boot on Italy's mainland and the northeast tip of Africa. There's no moon tonight and on the Mediterranean Sea a storm is raging. In the dark waters there is a fleet of about 2500 allied ships speeding towards Sicily armed to attack. It's World War II. Sicily is Axis territory because Italy is fighting alongside Germany in the war. And this will be the first allied invasion into German controlled Europe. If the American and British troops can pull it off, Sicily will become a vital stepping stone for them to enter mainland Italy and then the rest of the continent. Italian and German troops man the island. But the allies think maybe they won't expect us to attack in the middle of this huge storm. And they're right. The Axis powers are not ready for the assault. When the attack begins, 150,000 men storm the beaches. Paratroopers, round troops, airmen, 600 tanks, hundreds of planes raining down air support. And they meet little resistance. The Italian forces start retreating and everyone's thinking, "Where are the Germans?" By the end of the day, British troops have taken the shoreline and they're pushing inland. Over the next two months, the allies led by US General George Patton and British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery push the Axis forces back and back. Up the island towards the Italian mainland. On August 17th, General Patton and his troops reach Messina in northern Sicily. They're expecting a final showdown. But the Axis troops are gone. They'd evacuated at the last minute. The invasion is officially a success. Sicily, the gateway to Europe, is now firmly in the hands of the Allied forces. For such a pivotal battle in World War II, Sicily went down pretty easy. They expected 10,000 casualties in the first week and 300 of the Allied ships would be sunk in the first two days. In fact, the casualties were just a tenth of that number and they lost 12 troops. All those lives and ships were saved for one simple reason. Most of the Germans had already left just a few weeks before the Allies attacked. And it wasn't luck that drew them away from the island. It was a planned deception pulled off by a small group of British intelligence agents. Including a man who would become best known for creating the most famous British spy in history. Today, Operation Minsmit. How did a deception involving a corpse, a false identity, and a single eyelash save thousands of lives and change the course of World War II? We heard the story of Operation Minsmit from Nicholas Reed. He's a historian and the author of the book Spy Runner, which is about deception during World War II. He said it's a little bit of a departure for him. I'm mainly an art historian and a written ten books now about art history. But he wrote about Operation Minsmit for a very personal reason. Where my father came involved was a bit later. That story starts in 1943, about three years into World War II. Germany controls Poland, Denmark, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, France, Yugoslavia, and Greece. Basically, almost all of Western Europe. And Italy has joined the Axis powers. Great Britain, though, has sided with the Allies. They're essentially surrounded by German occupied Europe, separated from their nearest allies Russia by almost a thousand miles of Nazi occupied territory. German forces are in control just across the English Channel, in France, less than 50 miles away. So the British are thinking. So at some point we'd have to invade Europe. But the Germans have really built up enormous fortresses with guns inside to fight up any possible attack. If we try learning on the beaches, the army is likely to be slaughtered. German forces are making it tough for the British to attack Europe via France. And the Axis powers are using their submarines. They're forming U-boats to take down any help coming across the Atlantic. The so-called "battle of the Atlantic" has been slowly training Allied supplies and forces since 1939. We were doing pretty badly in the Atlantic. German navy was sinking a lot of these ships, which were bringing our supplies troops everything else from America to England. But early in 1943, another option opens up. The Allies successfully defeat Axis forces in Northern Africa, which means. We could have invaded what they call the "soft underbelly of the Mediterranean." The "soft underbelly." That's the term British and American forces are using to describe the islands of the Mediterranean Sea. Those islands are another way to get into Nazi-controlled continental Europe. So, American President Franklin Dalino Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill have a decision to make. They are in charge of the Allied front in Western Europe, while Russia is busy fighting the Germans in Eastern Europe. And Churchill and FDR have to decide whether to invade via France across the channel, taking on the full strength of the German army, or if it's better to go through Italy in the south, where a mix of German and Italian troops occupy the Mediterranean. And for the sea, the work of fighting a war goes on, with waiting decisions to be wireless to far-flung fronts. Anchors drop off the North American coast and two nations leaders prepared to shake hands with each other and with history. The decision is pretty fraught. Some of the Allied generals think, "Well, maybe we should just full-on invade France. Face the Germans outright." But Churchill eventually convinces them that the islands of the Mediterranean, the "soft underbelly," are the better way to go. But where exactly? We could have invaded Greece and the East, then the Corsica and Sardinio two islands in the West, then there was Sicily. And the interesting point about Sicily was that it was occupied by the Germans fine, but it was quite close to where our army was in Africa. Sicily is just 60 miles from a British-controlled airbase, so the island becomes the obvious choice. The problem is, it's obvious to the Axis powers too, meaning they're prepared to put up a fight. So, a few members of British intelligence start thinking, "Is there some way in which we can mislead the Germans to get them to think not that we're going to invade Sicily, which seems the obvious point. But to invent a story, saying why we don't really want to invade Sicily, and instead we're going to invade Greece and also Sardinia." British intelligence officers Charles, Chumly, and you and Montague are working on a plan. Chumly has been reading something called the Trout Memo. It's a military document that had circulated a few years back in 1939. It basically lists ways to trick an enemy army, like catching a trout with a worm on a hook. In just a few years, the Memo's co-author will become famous in his own right as a spy novelist. He's a young officer in the Royal Navy named Ian Fleming. In 1953, Hill Wright, his first novel about James Bond. I don't remember 28 in the Trout Memo, but there's this title, "A suggestion, not a very nice one." The suggestion is this. Quote, "A corpse dressed as an airman with dispatches in his pockets could be dropped on the coast." And Chumly thinks, "Yes, we could plant a body in the sea for the Germans to find. Make it look like a British officer who died in a plane crash. And on the body, we could plant false dispatches about the war. The letter detailing a fake plan of attack." "The letter was going to say, 'We felt we should explain what we're actually going to do in the Mediterranean. We are going to invade half in Greece and half in Sardinia. But we've got a cover plan which we want to misleave the Germans with. And so we'll try and make it look as if we're going to invade in Sicily." The Germans are expecting the Allies to invade Sicily. And the idea is to convince them that they're being played, that the real invasion won't be in Sicily after all. Chumly and Montague decide this is worth a shot. And they start putting together one of the most bizarre deception plans in history. Operation, "Minsmeet." First, they need a dead body. Finding the right one is a grim task. They need an unclaimed body that looks like a drowning victim. They start contacting local morgs in London. And they find someone. "The body was actually found in a warehouse, found dead. And in fact, they think he probably leads some bread which he found in the warehouse. And he was sleeping the night, I suppose. And the bread had been poisoned to get rid of rats. And that's thought that that's probably what killed him." This was likely the body of Glendur Michael, a Welsh man who'd been living on the streets. He had no known relations and was in about his early 40s when he died. Montague talks to a pathologist who says, "This could work." The poisoning probably won't show up on an autopsy. It could look like this man drowned. So they've completed grim task number one. Now it is up to Montague and Chumley to create a false identity for the corpse. German intelligence is pretty wily, so the story has to be airtight. They decide the fictional officer will be named Captain William Martin of the Royal Marines. There are a bunch of real William Martins in the British military, so if the Germans go looking, they won't get suspicious. Then British intelligence has to invent the last two weeks of Martins life, all on paper to be stuffed into his pockets. They decided to make him more human. They would invent a girlfriend for him. They would write two letters to him from a fictitious girlfriend. One of the clues she gives in her letters is, "I hear rumors that you might be sent off somewhere." "I do, but that's not true." "We've only just found each other. We don't want to lose each other now." In addition to that, they then got a photograph of one of the women in the MI5 office. And as they had just got engaged, they then had a bill from the jewelers for the engagement ring, cost several hundred pounds, and details of the inscription on the ring which made it cost even more. In espionage circles, this stuff is called pocket litter, and Captain Martin is loaded with it. Theater ticket stubs, bank statements, a receipt for clothing he supposedly bought, a book of stamps, pencil stubs, cigarettes, keys. They also plant a silver cross and a medallion of St. Christopher on the body to signal that Martin is Roman Catholic, a faith that doesn't believe in tampering with corpses, aka autopsies. And of course, they plant false letters, saying that the Allied attack is coming for Sardinia and Greece, not Sicily. The final piece of the puzzle is an ID card. If the Germans are going to recognize Martin as a high-ranking British officer who would have this information about the attack, they need the ID card to confirm it. This turns out to be very difficult. "I had the body, but there was no known photograph on it. You've got to have a photograph of somebody if you've got into a reduced identity card. So, at some time, one to do was actually stumpy, he really couldn't find anyone who looked in a thing like the body that they got. They tried taking a photograph of the dead man and he really did look very dead." This roadblock is holding up the operation, and there's a clock ticking. After all, they're dealing with a corpse. Wait too long and it'll decompose. They think, "Maybe we can just blur the photo, but that might tip off the Germans that something isn't quite right." And then, something sort of miraculous happens. "Montague was at a meeting to discuss a double agent or an agent zigzag, and my father was in charge of agent zigzag for 18 months." Reed's father worked at MI5 managing German double agents, and so he's in this totally unrelated meeting with Montague. "And as soon as Montague saw my father, well I can quote exactly what he said, as he said, and then we had a stroke of luck sitting opposite me at a meeting to deal with quite a different matter. I saw someone who might have been the twin brother of the corpse. He was readily persuaded to let his photograph him, and that dealt with that difficulty. And that's why my father's photo appears on the identity card, and that's how my father became involved in the whole plot." Reed wouldn't find out his father had been involved until he just randomly stumbled across the ID photo in a book about Operation Minsmine. "So when I was about 20, I'd been reading it, and when I saw that photo, I could easily recognize my father in it, and said that's you, isn't it?" "And he hummed in heart, and wouldn't quite say yes, and wouldn't quite say no. But I may say since then there have been a couple of books published on this, and they all say very clearly that he was a man in the photo." The ID problem is finally solved. The last hurdle is convincing the British military to go forward with the plan. Montague makes the proposal. The high ups were really quite divided on this. Some of them thought of any good idea, and might as well try it out, and the other half ought to know it's far too dangerous to try anything like that. Eventually, the question goes to Churchill. He'll make the final call. "And Churchill is supposed to have said, 'Well, anybody but a downfall would know we're invading Sicily anyway,' in other words, the Germans expected us to invade in Sicily, and we knew there was going to be a bloodbath. But if this is actually plan worked, if we could get the Germans to distract their forces, then we'll have far smaller casualties." It's decided. Operation Minsmite is a go. In the early hours of April 17th, this complicated operation begins. The agents dress the body as Captain William Martin, plant the two weeks worth of pocket litter on him, and chain a briefcase to his wrist. Inside the briefcase are top secret documents about the plans for Sardinia and Greece. As a final touch, the agents place a single eyelash among the documents. So that if they're returned to British authorities, they'll know right away whether the envelope has been opened and the documents read. With that, Captain Martin is ready to go. He's packed in dry ice and. They put it in a large metal container, which they marked medical instruments, and then loaded a board of submarine. The submarine, the HMS Seraph, is bound for Spanish waters. Spain is officially neutral in World War II. But unofficially, a lot of Spanish authorities are Nazi sympathizers. They were just as fascist as the Nazis and the Germans were, and therefore we knew that if a body with secret British plans landed in Spain, there was a very good chance. The Spaniards in charge would let the Germans have found all those details as soon as they could. They're fellow fascists at work. On April 30, the HMS Seraph surfaces just off the southwest coast of Spain. The commander opens the canister and pushes the top secret cargo into the waves. Almost two weeks later, British intelligence hears that a Spanish fishing boat has picked up the body and delivered it to the authorities. They hoaked and waited and then eventually within a couple of weeks or that's of three weeks, they got the briefcase and the letters back. Spain is maintaining its official neutrality. And so, under the unwritten rules of sportsmen like warfare, be expected to turn something like this over to the British. And they do. But the eyelash is missing. Six days after the briefcase is returned, a German communication is decrypted by ally codebreakers. It's a warning that the Allied invasion is coming for Greece. That is the confirmation they've been waiting for. British Brigadier Leslie Hollis sends a message to Churchill. "Minsniet swallowed book, line and sinker." The cryptic message is a reference to the trout memo. That list of deceptions co-authored by Ian Fleming. Germany thinks they have this secret communication, the real ally plan. And so they start quietly moving troops off of Sicily, clearing the way for an invasion that comes just a few weeks later. When the Allied troops land on Sicily, the Italian forces surrender pretty quickly. Though Prime Minister Benito Mussolini is a strong Nazi ally, many regular Italian soldiers have reservations. So they don't put up a super strong fight. That leaves just two German divisions to try and fend off 150,000 advancing men. The Allied invasion of Sicily is the largest invasion in the war to date. It will be eclipsed only by the invasion of Normandy a year later. Even before Sicily is securely in the hands of the Allies, Mussolini is voted out and arrested by his own Grand Council. Many of the German troops manage to evacuate before they can be captured. Still, the victory in Sicily opens up Italy and the rest of Nazi occupied Europe to later invasions. From Sicily, it then meant we could cross the mile wide channel between Sicily and Italy. And then there was a whole series of landings in Italy and the Allied army moved up on the coast. The Allied invasion of Italy won't be easy. It's a long struggle. But it does in the end knock Italy out of World War II, losing Italy is a huge hit to Axis Moral and to Axis Military Might. One year later, the invasion of Normandy on D-Day is a success, ushering in the end of the war and the Allied victory. D-Day itself is a success in part because the Allies deceived the Germans again, convincing them to send tanks to a dummy location north of Normandy. Re-told us, the importance of Operation Minsmite is in part the lives and resources that it saved. Those troops, ships, planes and tanks. They went on to fight in Italy and beyond. But another part of the operations legacy is how we think about deception in warfare. A hundred years ago, if you tried to deceive the enemy, the enemy would say, "Well, that's not cricket, you know, we're an army, we're here to fight. We want to fight, it's the only way to win." Spying has been around forever. But even that was supposed to be sort of sportsman-like, gentlemanly. Deception is really rather sneaky. If you're going to deceive, you're going to be telling lies to people. That's not a very good example to set to anyone. But Operation Minsmite and dozens of other World War II deception plans proved that deception could save thousands of lives in battle. And deception can work in deceiving the enemy and defeating a much bigger enemy. It might not have been sportsman-like, but it worked. So well that trickery is now a regular part of military operations. Operation Minsmite changed geopolitical history, and heralded a major change in warfare. The most important soldier in the operation was already dead. A man from Wales who had accidentally eaten a poisoned piece of bread. It's a surreal turn of events. One you'd only expect from, well, a James Bond movie. Thanks for listening to History this week. For more moments throughout history that are also worth watching, check your local TV listings to find out what's on History today. This episode was produced by McCamey Lynn. History this week is also produced by Julie McGrooter, Ben Dixstein, and me, Sally Helm. Our researcher is Emma Fredricks, our editor and sound designer is Chris Bonnello. Our executive producers are Jesse Katz and Ted Butler. Don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review History this week, wherever you get your podcasts, and we will see you next week.