Dan Snow's History Hit - Operation Mincemeat

Episode Date: July 9, 2023

The most audacious deception operation of WWII. On the 30th of April, 1943, the corpse of a 'Major Martin' washed up near the Spanish city of Huelva. On his body, Spanish officials found secret documents detailing an upcoming Allied invasion of Greece. This was the moment that the Axis powers had been waiting for, and the Germans began redirecting much-needed divisions to Greece and the Balkans. They would discover only too late that this was all an elaborate feint, conceived by British Intelligence to obscure the Allies' real target - Sicily. By mid-July, the Allies had landed in southern Italy and the liberation of Nazi-occupied Europe was well underway.So how exactly did its architects create this complex web of misdirection and misinformation? And can it really be true that the success of the Sicily invasion came down to this one act of deception? In this Explainer episode, Dan takes us through the twists and turns of this audacious and unorthodox act of subterfuge.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world-renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW. Download the app or sign up here.We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. This is the story of a deception operation. A very, very covert one. It was an operation so secret that many people intimately involved in it didn't really know much about it. It took place at the height of the Second World War in 1943, but today it's really very famous indeed. Sir Michael Howard, one of the great historians of recent history, wrote in his multi-volume history

of British intelligence in the Second World War that this operation was the best known and perhaps the most successful single deception operation of the entire war. I'm talking, some of you may have guessed already, about Operation Mincemeat. It was a mad, kind of bonkers deception campaign, borrowed from the pages of a cheap thriller. It aimed to deceive the Axis powers about allied plans for an invasion in Southern Europe. Involved creating a fake human being and false documents planted on him to mislead the enemy. You've heard about the book.

You've heard about the film. You've heard about Mincemeat. Well, this is what happened and why it mattered. Enjoy. T-minus 10. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. In this episode, I thought I'd tell the story of Mincemeat. I've had Ben McIntyre, the brilliant historian and writer on the podcast a couple of times,

and he wrote the best-selling smash hit book, Mincemeat, that was then turned into a movie. You'll hear clips from him as well as this podcast goes on. But I want to start back in 1939. War has just broken out and Rear Admiral John Godfrey, the director of the Naval Intelligence Unit, he wrote the Trout Memo. Like all members of the British elite, one of their favourite pastimes was fly fishing for trout and salmon. Now the trout fisherman has to wait patiently on the riverbank, but he doesn't just sit there like, you know, your canal fisherman with a line in the water. He stalks the fish. He moves around. He's always changing the fly depending on what he makes

of the weather, the wind. And he plops that fly into different pools, different places on the river, always moving up and down, fishing various pools, casting it just beyond the fast-moving water into some of the eddies where the glassy water meets the white water. John Godfrey believed that this technique would be the key to winning the intelligence war, against Germany in particular. There are 51 different suggestions in this memo. And I love the fact that number 28, so halfway down, number 28 is, quote, a suggestion, open brackets, not a very nice one, close brackets. That's not a very nice suggestion. They find a corpse, they dress him up as an airman,

they stuff his pockets with secret documents, and then they make sure that he's found by the enemy. That idea was actually stolen from a 1930s paperback spy novel. And indeed, military history is littered with the accidental discovery of enemy plans. In the case of the American Civil War, one was wrapped around a cigar. But as the war progressed, there were examples of staff officers who were accidentally killed. Their briefcases were found to contain lots of secret and important plans. This Trout Memo is the first time in the record that we hear the British were thinking about trying something like this. Churchill liked

it. He liked what he called corkscrew thinkers, people who thought weirdly differently in corkscrew like directions, not straight thinkers like the people he assumed Hitler was surrounded with. There's an interesting postscript to that Trout memo. Rear Admiral John Godfrey's personal assistant was one Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming, who after the war would go on to write the Bond novels. And it seems very likely that he's basically responsible for the authorship of the Trout Memo. So you've got a man who would turn out to be one of the 20th century's best-selling novelists, nicking an idea from another novel, and then pitching it to his seniors as a real world stratagem. The idea eventually landed on the desk of one Charles Chumley. He was a tall RAF officer. He'd been assigned to MI5, which is Britain's counter-espionage service. And then he was made the secretary of the XX Committee, 20 Committee,

two Roman numeral Xs. It was established right at the beginning of 1941. And there were various people from MI5, what would become MI6, and other military intelligence agencies. Their job was basically to run the double agents, the ever-growing number of double agents that were in the UK. By not very long after the outbreak of war, Britain had broken open all the Nazi spy rings in Britain and turned the useful ones into double agents. Hence the joke in the name of the committee. It's the 20 Committee XX, the Double Cross Committee. He rather liked this idea, and he took it to the chairman of the committee, who was, you may be surprised to learn, another novelist. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX at work in this plan. Masterman tickled him. He rather liked this idea. And he told Chumley to work with a man called Ewan Montague. Ewan was a naval intelligence officer. He was an intelligent man. He'd been to Cambridge. He'd been to Harvard. He served as a very celebrated lawyer in London.

Interesting family. His brother had helped establish the sport of ping pong and codified the rules before the Second World War. Perhaps another corkscrew thinker. Montague and Cholmondeley, two perfect names for British intelligence officers, now set to work developing the plan still further. And there was one glaring opportunity, a bold deception plan that would confuse the enemies as the Allies actually made a very, very predictable move. By late 1942, it was clear that the Allies were winning in North Africa. Following the Battle of El Alamein in Egypt, British and Imperial troops were sweeping east through Libya towards the Italian and German bases. But also Allied troops, including Americans, had landed right across French Northwest Africa, in Morocco, in Algeria, and they were now pushing east. The Axis powers

looked certain to be caught in the jaws of this double advance. Indeed, they were in Tunisia by early 1943. Therefore, when the Allied leaders met in Casablanca in very early 1943, they needed to think about the next steps. They knew that they had thousands of aircraft, lots of ships, and no less than two armies in North Africa. And they came up with a plan about what to do with them next. It wasn't practicable to take them all the way back to Britain and launch the invasion of Northwest France that year in 1943. So why not invade Italy? Knock one of the Axis powers out of the war. That would cause nightmare for Hitler, it would open a second

front in Europe, and it would be great practice for the eventual D-Day, the eventual operation in Northwest Europe. Winston Churchill always wanted to attack what he called Europe's soft underbelly. It turned out to be not very soft, but he believed that the Mediterranean strategy was a good one. Now, there were several targets the Allies could attack in the Mediterranean. The first and most obvious option was Sicily, very, very close indeed to Tunisia. And once you controlled that island, it would sort of open up the Mediterranean, Allied shipping could flow, and then you could advance up the Italian peninsula and even press into Central Europe. The other option was to go to Greece and the Balkans.

You could push north through there and meet up with the Soviets, perhaps somewhere in Southeast Europe. And then there was a last option where you could go to Sardinia, Corsica, and even Southern France. Now, at the Casablanca conference in January 1943, the Allied planners agreed on Sicily. It was the obvious choice. It was so close. It was just a small hop across the southern Mediterranean. They codenamed it Operation Husky and they said the invasion will take place in July. Now if you look at a map of the Mediterranean, you see the Allies there having defeated the Germans in Tunis, two great armies in Tunisia. Sicily is incredibly close. Churchill apparently said everyone but a bloody fool would know it's Sicily. It was such an obvious choice. The build-up of

resources for that invasion in Tunisia would be pretty easy to detect. So planners turned to their intelligence comrades. Could they come up with some kind of deception? It would have to be pretty audacious because that's convince the Axis that the target was not Sicily. And the answer from Chumley and Montague was yes, we do think we've got a workable plan, but it's bold. Chumley and Montague were told to do something that would convince the Germans that the main assault would be through the Balkans, perhaps with a secondary thrust towards Sardinia. People knew that Hitler was worried about the Balkans. British and French troops

had landed in Salonika, Thessaloniki, the big city in Greece. In the First World War, they experienced stalemate there for some time, but towards the end of that war, they had made important advances which had destabilized the whole central powers position in Central Europe. And so Hitler was nervous that perhaps the Balkans, Greece, Yugoslavia would be the soft underbelly of his European empire. Now, the aim of any deception campaign is to allow the enemy to believe that his assumptions are correct, to flatter the enemy. So because Hitler had some nerves around the Balkans, the British were ostentatious in their attention on the Balkans. They set up a headquarters in Cairo for a fictitious army, a made-up army called the 12th Army.

It apparently had 12 divisions in it. They carried out manoeuvres, as they would do before D-Day, with dummy tanks and armoured vehicles made of balsa wood and rubber to deceive observers. And alongside that, an astonishing deception campaign began in London. The idea hadn't changed much from that detective novel in the 1930s. Get a body, pretend he's an officer, put some secret plans on him, and make sure he falls into the hands of the enemy. Montague and Chumley had just three months to put this plan into execution, otherwise it wouldn't

give the Germans the time to move troops, move vehicles, move those resources to the wrong place. Quite quickly, Chumley and Montague decided that Spain was the place. Spain was technically neutral, but everyone knew it leaned towards the Germans. The Germans had famously helped the Spanish fascists win the civil war. Franco had won the civil war thanks to German equipment, and particularly bombers, aircraft. Guernica, the terrible aerial attack on the Republican Spanish troops at Guernica was carried out by German aircraft. So the Spanish were known to share intelligence and turn a blind eye to some German activity on Spanish soil. So having identified where the body should land, all Montague and Chumley needed was a body. And that wasn't as

easy as it sounded, even in wartime. They didn't need any old body. They needed a body of someone whose relatives would not kick up a fuss, would either not shout about it or just wouldn't care, perhaps wouldn't notice that he was missing. The body had to be a man of military age, but with no bullet holes in it, no trauma. They wanted to appear that he drowned in an air crash and then washed ashore if the Spanish had an autopsy the British wanted to believe this man had died of drowning now pneumonia leaves water on the lungs but this proved very difficult to get exactly the right body they went back to the pathologists and he agreed that actually a lot of time when you die in an air crash into the water you actually die from shock and not from drowning so the lungs wouldn't necessarily be filled with water and the the pathologist said, Spaniards are Roman Catholics.

They're averse to post-mortems typically, unless the cause of death is hugely important. So Chumley and Montague decided to compromise on the pneumonia bit. And as they did so, a body became available. They were called up by the coroner for the Northern District of London, Sir Bentley Purchase. He'd found a guy. His name was Glyndwr Michael, although in fact this didn't become known until 1996 when an amateur historian called Roger Morgan uncovered his true identity in the public record office. It's thought he'd taken his own life. He'd eaten rat poison. It would have been an agonising death.

He was discovered on a cold January night in an abandoned warehouse in Kings Cross, London. He took two days to die. He died in St Pancras Hospital. Now, it's possible that he didn't commit suicide. It's possible that he was so destitute, so hungry, he found some bread with some rat poison smeared on it that was actually laid down to catch vermin. But Glyndwr Michael, in his extremity, gobbled it down himself. His death certificate listed his death as phosphorus poisoning. And then you get a strange clue on the record. The coroner noted that the corpse would be removed out of England

for internment, and Glendore Michael, in death, was about to play a pivotal role in turning the tide of the Second World War. We don't know too much about the life of Glendore Michael. I actually went to his place of birth with Ben McIntyre when Ben's book came out, we went on a bit of a detective mission. He was the son of a coal miner in Wales. His father had committed suicide by stabbing himself in the throat. His mother died when he was 31. He'd gravitated towards London. He had no money. He was homeless and he was friendless. It was a sad, tragic life. But it did mean that there was no one that would really notice that he was gone. His destitution meant that he was very skinny, and they were concerned, looking at this corpse, that someone who served on the front line would be more muscular and robust.

So they made the decision to make him a staff officer, which is throwing a bit of shade, really. A staff officer is someone who perhaps sits behind a desk, more often the machine gun, doing the paperwork. A critical cog in the gigantic machine of modern industrial warfare, but not someone who was super ripped. They decided that his corpse would do the job. They need to keep him just the right temperature. If they froze him, then your body shows signs of having been defrosted. So he was put in a fridge. Around four degrees centigrade was advised, and they kept him

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So now Chumley and Montague had a body. What they needed next was a legend, an identity, an entirely fake one. First of all, they needed an identity card. They tried to take a picture, but the body just looked like a corpse. And so they found an intel officer in the office who looked similar, and they used his picture. Then they created a fictitious officer, Royal Marine Captain, in fact an acting major, William Martin. They were not unused to creating legends, they'd done it many times before, they'd created an entire fake spy network, in fact fictitious people who just fed nonsense to the Germans. But this William Martin worked at the Combined Operations Headquarters. That was effectively a group that oversaw the amphibious part of war. That's army and navy working together to carry troops across the sea,

disembarking them on enemy beach, and then storming ashore. Martin was selected because it was a very common name. There were quite a few men of around that rank in the Royal Marines. They dressed him up. They found a uniform for him, a major's uniform. It was a battle dress, so the less formal uniform the Brits would have worn. One slight fly in the ointment was that a major would be expected to travel in his dress uniform, look nice and smart.

They were actually made to measure. And Montague did write later in a book that we had a horrid picture of a tailor coming down from London being forced to fit and measure the corpse for a uniform, but we thought we wouldn't do that. So in fact, that's why they chose to make him a Royal Marine. The Royal Marines are more likely to wear a kind of looser battle dress uniform, something that could be expected to wear in combat. And they chose the rank of major because that was senior enough for someone to be entrusted with documents of that level of secrecy, but he wasn't famous. He was not yet someone who foreign intelligence services would be expected to have on their radar. So acting major William Martin had a name, an ID card, a uniform.

Next, they needed pocket litter. They'd created a career man, a marine, but now they needed to create a human. He needed a fiancé. They gave him a receipt for an engagement ring. They gave him a strange letter from a fictitious dad. They experimented with different kinds of ink to make sure that the ink on these receipts and on these letters would survive immersion in the Mediterranean. Apparently all the women in the office wanted to be his fiancée. They picked one Jean Leslie and she gave them a picture of her on a beach which they could put in Major Martin's pocket. Another secretary, Hester Leggett, wrote some rather racy love letters that were stashed in his uniform. And speaking of uniform, Chumley wore it in. He didn't want it to look too new, so he went around

the office kind of wearing it in. There were cigarettes in there, of course, everyone smoked in those days. And then Chumley also rubbed the ID card on his trousers for weeks to give it that sort of used sheen. Things got a little bit weird. It does seem like Montague did have an affair with the secretary who provided the photo, and they actually called each other Bill and Pam. Bill being short for William, Major Martin, and Pam his fictitious girlfriend. This, I think, is what people call cosplay these days, and that is taking it to another level. Ben McIntyre, who wrote up the story, says that the affair has a decent chance of being true. He did interview her, Leslie, before her death in 2012. She refused to

acknowledge it. She said, I'm not talking about that anymore. That was a long time ago. But he thinks they probably did have an affair. Talk about getting into the role. No stone was left unturned. They gave him ticket stubs. They also gave him a medal, a kind of Catholic medal, so that they hoped that the Spanish would recognise him as a fellow Catholic and be even less likely to do an autopsy on him. So they got him dressed, they stuffed his pockets. Lastly, of of course they had to give him the secret plans they had to give him the letter now he was carrying a few with him there was a main document in a briefcase it was a personal letter from lieutenant general sir archibald nye he was the

vice chief of the imperial general staff very very senior general indeed in the british forces he wrote an actual letter to general sir har Alexander. He was commanding the Anglo-American army group in Algerian Tunisia under General Eisenhower. And General Nye really did write this letter. There was a mixture of chat, news from home, and then there was the key part here. We have received information that the Boschosh meaning the germans have been reinforcing strengthening their defenses in greece and crete and the chief of the imperial general staff felt that our forces for the assault were insufficient it was agreed by the chiefs of staff that the fifth division should be reinforced by one brigade group for the assault on the beach south of cape

araxos and that a similar reinforcement should be made for the 56th Division at Kalamata. There you go. That's telling the Germans, or whoever's going to read this letter, that there was an assault planned on the beaches of Greece. There was also another letter, a letter of introduction actually, for Martin. It was written by the man who was technically his commanding officer, Lord Louis Mountbatten. He was the chief of combined operations, cousin of the Queen, a man who would go on to become Viceroy of India, a hugely important figure in the British military in this period. And he was writing a letter of introduction for Martin to the legendary Sir Andrew Cunningham, commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean fleet.

And he was the Allied naval commander in the Mediterranean as well. Now he's one of the great commanders. I should do another podcast about him one of these days. But Mountbatten was introducing Martin to Cunningham, saying he was a good chap and he's on loan to you, he's an amphibious warfare expert, until the assault is over, quote. And then Mountbatten's letter had a clumsy joke about sardines, which Montague put in there because he wanted the Germans to think it was a cheeky reference to a military assault on Sardinia. Sardines? Sardinia? Get it? So they wanted the Germans to believe that the Allies were going to attack through Greece, but make it look like we're going

to go through Sicily. It appears that we're going to attack Sicily, but don't be fooled, we're not going to attack Sicily. That's what they wanted the Germans to think. Now, this is the clever bit. They put a single eyelash in the fold of the letter to find out if it opened when it was returned to them. And that's what I love about the Second World War. So much of it's so high-tech, so many modern systems coming in, the forebears of the computer, the radar being invented, the Manhattan Project obviously, and yet for operations like this they're still using the childlike techniques of an eyelash in the folded letter. a kind of leather covered chain, like a jewellery courier might use. And that ran down his sleeve to the briefcase. So they had their body. They had their man. They had a life story and they had secret plans. All they need to do now was deliver it to the Germans, which is not as easy as it sounds. They chose Huelva, a port in Southern Spain. They took advice from the chief

hydrographer of the navy, the man who knew more than anybody about the tides and the depths and the currents in that part of the Mediterranean. And he believed that if you'd drop the body to a certain place, it would be certain to wash ashore. There was also a very active German agent they knew about there, and he was the son of the German consul. And he was thought to be very efficient, very effective, but not hugely imaginative. So, if an important British military briefcase ended up with the Spanish authorities there, they knew this guy, Adolf Klaus, was bound to try and get hold of it.

That was the plan. Now, the execution. In the early hours of the 17th of April 1943, the corpse was dressed. But there was a small problem. Perhaps his feet had been a little bit too near the refrigeration unit because they were frozen. They had to get an electric heater, they had to defrost his feet, and they had to wedge his boots on. Then they put the uniform on, they put the pocket litter in his pockets, they stashed the briefcase, they did everything. But the clock was now ticking.

A canister with some chemical agent I don't fully understand was placed in there to try and use up all the oxygen so the body would not decompose as quickly. That canister was placed in the back of a van. There was a special MI5 driver. I love this guy. St. John, obviously spelt St. John, Horsefall, known as Jock. I don't think anybody in MI5 had names that were actually spelt as they're pronounced. Anyway, he'd been a racing champion before the war, and so he absolutely caned it from the south of England to the west of Scotland, Chumley and Montague travelling in the back of the van, all night to Greenock at the mouth of the Clyde. The canister containing the body was then lowered onto HMS Seraph, which was a submarine that was preparing for a deployment to the Mediterranean. The commander

of Seraph told his men it's just a bit of meteorological equipment to be deployed near Spain. They probably raised an eyebrow. They were used to sneaky beaky activity by this point of the war. On the 19th, just under 48 hours later, it cast off its mooring lines and headed off into the Irish Sea. Ten days later, having been bombed twice en route, because remember submarines spent most of their time cruising on the surface, they were off the coast of Huelva. Seraph did dive, he went to have a look at the coastline through the periscope, they went offshore, and then they surfaced at 4.15 on the 30th of April. The canister was carried up on deck. The crew were all sent below.

Only the officers were allowed to be present on deck. They opened the container, and there was Glendore Michael, or rather, Major Martin. They lowered his body carefully into the water. The captain read out a verse from the Bible. As Martin began his slow journey on the currents towards the shore. research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.

just as the naval hydrographer had said the body was found by a fisherman at 9am perfect and exactly around that time the british started sending crazy messages to the british consul in spain an aircraft has been down we've lost a very important package please please get the body and get the briefcase. These diplomatic cables were sent between the British consul in Spain his superiors for days on end because the British knew that these were being intercepted and the Germans had broken the code on this particular encryption. So the British consul was told make it your business to get that briefcase back and the Germans knew that he was being told to do that. The following day, May the 1st, the autopsy was planned. Now the British consul, Michael Hazelden, was present.

He was in on the story by the way. His role was a to look panicked and desperately try and get hold of the briefcase but B to sort of try and avoid, if he could, the Spanish carrying out a very detailed autopsy. He didn't really want the Spanish to find out this was a three months old corpse with defrosted feet. And so he convinced these two Spanish doctors it was hot, the corpse was going to decompose, it wasn't very pleasant, he was Catholic. The British government do not particularly wish there to be an autopsy. Don't go to any trouble boys, don't go out of your way. You know what, why don't we bring it all to a close, let's go and have some lunch. The Spanish doctors agreed, and they signed a

death certificate for Major William Martin, who died, quote, of asphyxiation through immersion in the sea. Boom. The British had cleared the first hurdle. There was an unexpected second hurdle. The Spanish, strangely, seemed to hold out on the Germans. They didn't hand the briefcase over. The Germans were desperate for it, and in the end, the head of one of the German intelligence services, the Abwehr, had to intervene himself. He made a direct, personal plea to Spanish authorities, and luckily, they agreed. The Spanish did remove the paper from the envelope. Now, they wound it around a probe, a kind of chopstick if you like. They wound it round and round and then they pulled it out between the envelope flaps. They didn't have to open the envelope itself.

It was closed by a wax seal. The letters were left to dry, then they were photographed. And then they were soaked in water before being reinserted to the envelopes. It all was so clever. but guess what was missing? The eyelash. The information was passed to the Germans, I think it was a week later on the 8th of May. It was so important, it was seen as such a coup that an Abwehr agent personally took it with him to Germany to hand it to his masters. He must have been absolutely thrilled with himself. Three days after that,

the briefcase, complete with those documents, was returned to Hazelden, the British consul in Spain, and he forwarded it to London. In London, they were thrilled to discover the eyelash was missing. There was jubilation in the office. Now, the photographs of the documents ended up on every senior Nazi's desk. Apparently, Himmler was unsure about it. Hitler, though, bought it. We have wonderful evidence from Karl Dönitz, who's the Grand Admiral of the German fleet. He met Hitler to discuss Hitler's recent visit to Italy.

And Hitler refers to mincemeat, the mincemeat letter in this meeting. Donitz records, the Führer does not agree with Mussolini that the most likely invasion point is Sicily. Furthermore, he believes that the discovered Anglo-Saxon order confirms the assumption the planned attacks will be directed mainly against Sardinia and the Peloponnese. The Peloponnese is obviously southern Greece. So from Donitz's own words, we know that Adolf

Hitler himself was taken in by this scam. And troops were moved. The 1st Panzer Division was transferred from France to Thessaloniki in Greece. By the end of June, the Germans had surged more troops into Sardinia, they'd move fighter aircraft there. The Germans moved some naval assets, actually moved them from Sicily to the Greek islands. Seven other infantry divisions were moved to Greece. Ten were moved to the Balkans. A huge, huge allocation of men and machines. And the best thing is, the Brits were watching it all happen. Because of Bletchley Park's work in deciphering the German Enigma Code, the order to move the 1st Panzer Division from France was intercepted at Bletchley Park on the 21st of May. That and other orders that were intercepted caused a message to be sent

out to Winston Churchill, who was then in the USA. And it read, mincemeat swallowed, rod, line and sinker, by the right people. And from the best information, they looked like acting on it. Can you imagine how pleased and excited the team were that they'd altered the balance of power in the Mediterranean, not through massive air attacks, naval bombardments, a landing of tens of hundreds of thousands of men, but by planting these fake orders on a corpse. They'd caused the Wehrmacht to deploy troops away from where they were most needed, to change their whole defensive posture across southern Europe, all thanks to Glyndor Michael. Well, on the 9th of July, Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily, was launched. There is some

evidence that even after it was launched, Hitler still believed that this was a feint. Hitler sent one of his best generals, Erwin Rommel, who would eventually meet the Allies on the beaches of Normandy the following year, he sent him to Salonika to prepare the defences of the region. And given that the most important part of any invasion is just the first few hours and days, well, by the time the Germans realised they'd been had, it was over. The Allies were ashore, the Allies were advancing, Italy was teetering. The invasion went well. The large amphibious assault troops hopped across by aircraft and boats from Tunisia. They landed on the southern coast of Sicily. They were able to establish a bridgehead and they moved reasonably quickly

inland. There was tough, tough fighting ahead. But the Allies were now comfortably ashore, on the home ground of an Axis power for the first time. I've got podcasts coming up this summer for some of the 80th anniversaries of the battles in Sicily and the subsequent collapse of Mussolini's Italy, so make sure you listen out for those. But suffice to say on this one that Sicily was hugely effective. It rocked confidence in the Italian elite for Mussolini. He was deposed from office and actually imprisoned in the weeks that followed. And the Allies were able to invade mainland Italy and force the Germans to annex northern and central Italy for themselves, sending even more men and tanks that they could ill afford to spare from the Eastern Front or the defences of France. Despite its almost fantasy beginnings, mincemeat had been really an

astonishing success. Operation Mincemeat, when it became public, when it became public knowledge, immediately captured our imaginations. People became obsessed with this somewhat implausible story that seemed to have really a pretty sizable impact on the course of the war. I talked to Ben McIntyre and he told me all about his experience of discovering the story in the noughties. The bare bones of the story emerged quite soon after the war when Ewan Montague, who was one of the main protagonists, wrote a memoir, a sort of memoir about it. But the problem with the book that he wrote, which was called The Man Who Never Was, was that first of all, it was written under official secrecy. And second, large

chunks of it were deliberately deceptive in the sense that he covered up the identity of the body used in the operation and made it sound as if he'd been extremely high-minded in keeping this secret safe. In fact, he was just covering up the fact they'd stolen the body. So that then became a film, The Man Who Never Was. But that mythological version of the story is the one that held sway, really, for the next, well, really, the next 50 years. Because it wasn't until 1996, when the MI5 archives were finally declassified, that the full story could be told. And so I was incredibly lucky. It was just timing, really, that I happened to be becoming very interested in this story, which I kind of knew about and had known about since I was very young. And that then led down all sorts of other avenues, including this astonishing trunk full of papers

that Ewan Montague had left behind and his son kept under a bed in his house in Oxfordshire. And also, at that point, the still living witnesses to what had happened. There was still a handful of people who had been operative in room 13. So that's really how I came to it. So clever of Ben to be able to get hold of that handful of people just in time to record their stories. And I think the reason for the enduring fascination we have for Operation Mincemeat is because the Second World War is so big in so many ways.

It's a war of millions of men and machines and aircraft, submarines, gigantic amounts of money and effort and bloodshed. But here is a very human story. Here's a very particular story, a small story, which is attractive to us. It seems like a few free-thinking individuals can tip the balance. It's not just a brutal case of spreadsheets. How many Panzers, how many tanks have you got? How many men can we hurl against the Dnieper,

hurl against the Atlantic wall? It's not smashing the enemy with a sledgehammer. It's puncturing the enemy with a needle. It's a sort of victory of brains over brawn. And in some ways, it's a sort of bloodless triumph, which saves more lives by hastening the end of a terrible war. But I think we ought to say at the end of this podcast that sometimes these spy stories can swell to too great a size. It's now remembered, I think it's more famous than the blood and the guts and the determination of those

thousands of men who subsequently had to land on those beaches in Sicily, who actually had to do the hard work of driving those Axis forces back from the beaches, then the mountain villages, ridge after ridge on that rocky island. Their story has become overlooked. And perhaps that's inevitable. Perhaps every generation, as it always has done, chooses which stories it wants to remember. I think we talk about the past as another way of talking about ourselves. And I think today we have more of an affinity, or we think we do, with these dashing, rather loose, intellectual, free-thinking characters on the XX committee. But to tell that other story, to make sure that we are remembering the real story

of what then happened in Sicily and beyond, I've got a bonus pod for subscribers coming out this month, for subscribers to History Hit TV and subscribers on Apple to mark the anniversary of Operation Husky. I just want to finish off by finishing off the story of the man who lies at the heart of this, unknowingly, Glendore Michael.

The British and the Spanish buried Major Martin, or Glendore Michael, with military honours. On his tombstone was written, William Martin. And it was not until the late 1990s that Major Martin's real identity was revealed, and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission added Glendore Michael's name to the grave in Huelva, a man whose greatest service to his country came after his own death. Thanks for listening. you