Dan Snow's History Hit - Operation Mincemeat: The Deception that Changed WWII

Episode Date: April 19, 2022

It’s 1943. The Allies are determined to break Hitler’s grip on occupied Europe and plan an all-out assault on Sicily, but they face an impossible challenge - how to protect a massive invasion force from a potential massacre. It falls to two remarkable intelligence officers, Ewen Montagu and Charles Cholmondeley to dream the most inspired and improbable disinformation strategy of the war - centred on the most unlikely of secret agents: a dead man.In today's episode, Matt Lewis sits in for Dan to discover the behind the scenes history of the new movie Operation Mincemeat with director John Madden and historian Ben McIntyre on whose book the film is based. A fascinating listen whether you've seen the movie or not!Operation Mincemeat is in cinemas across the UK now.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.We need your help! If you would like to tell us what you want to hear as part of Dan Snow's History Hit then complete our podcast survey by clicking here. Once completed you will be entered into a prize draw to win a £100 voucher to spend in the History Hit shop.

Welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. I'm Matt Lewis, filling in for Dan while he's on holiday, here to tell you all about a fantastic new film in cinemas right now. Operation Mincemeat is directed by John Madden, the man behind such wonderful films as Shakespeare in Love, and it stars an incredible cast headed by Colin Firth, Matthew McFadden and Kelly MacDonald. It's based on the book of the same name by celebrated historian Ben McIntyre. It's 1943. The Allies are determined to break Hitler's grip on occupied Europe and plan an all-out assault on Sicily. But they face an impossible challenge. How to protect a massive invasion force from potential massacre.

It falls to two remarkable intelligence officers, Ewan Montague, played by Colin Firth, and Charles Chumley, Matthew McFadden, to dream the most inspired and improbable disinformation strategy of the whole war. In a small subterranean office at the Admiralty, known as Room 13, with the help of a small group of intelligence operatives, the pair put into motion a plan to plant a dead body dressed as a pilot, carrying false information of an Allied attack on Greece. The intention was for German intelligence to find it, believe the information in the letters and redirect Axis defences to Greece, leaving Sicily open to an Allied invasion. With surprising difficulty, they do manage to source a dead body, that of a homeless man

named Glyndu and Michael, whom they rechristen Major William Martin. They build an elaborate and complicated life for this body, a fake family, a job history and a lover called Pam, whose photograph would be found in the breast pocket of his jacket. They used a photograph of MI5 secretary Jean Leslie, played by Kelly MacDonald, who helps Montague and Chumley flesh out their story of a fake soldier. Chemistry develops as Montague and Leslie delve further into building the fake relationship of Officer Martin and his beloved Pam, and the lines of their characters' stories and their real emotions begin to blur.

of their characters' stories and their real emotions begin to blur. In April 1943, the body is conveyed to the coast of Spain in a submarine. Dressed as Major William Martin, it's released to wash up on the shore, carrying sensitive documents that confirmed the invasion was actually to take place in Greece. German spies in neutral Spain are expected to fall for the false intelligence and pass word all the way back to Berlin. Its execution was riddled with fumbles, near misses, twists and reversals, but ultimately it succeeded, allowing the Allies to land their troops in Italy with minimal resistance and saving thousands of lives. Our narrator for the film is none other than Ian Fleming who was central to Operation Mincemeat and a

witness to all that happened in the years before he wrote his famous James Bond novels. Here's a little taster from the film. In five weeks, 100,000 British forces will strike Sicily's southern shore. Unfortunately, the Nazis know of our intentions. So we're going to play a humiliating trick on Hitler. We have to convince Germany that our target is Greece. The plan begins in Spain, where a corpse will wash up on shore bearing classified letters.

A corpse carrying fake documents. Given the fascist network there, we could quite literally float the documents right into enemy hands. Prime Minister, that's too big a risk. The fate of the world is at stake. The plan is highly implausible. So when can it be ready? Prime Minister, that's too big a risk. The fate of the world is at stake. The plan is highly implausible. So when can it be ready?

Well, let's say we start with the easy part and find ourselves a corpse. The thing is, the Germans will scrutinize every detail of our fallen man. Where are his legs? He must be as real as your eye. He would carry a letter from his wife professing her deep love for him. Very good. And he would carry her photograph. My contribution to the mission for a seat at the table.

Although, what if the autopsy reveals he didn't die of drowning? Or if the briefcase is returned to us without the Germans seeing its contents? Charles, why on earth do you keep poking holes in our plans? I'm preemptively poking. I spoke with director John Madden and author Ben McIntyre for the film's release to catch up on the history behind Operation Mincemeat.

Thanks so much for joining us john and ben i guess the first question for ben really is how do you come across a story like operation mincemeat a completely secret mission that no one knows anything about how do you even find that story i wish i could claim that i had found it i mean the truth is that this story is sort of part of our historical cultural DNA in some ways. I mean, 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, you know, high minded in keeping this secret safe. He is, 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 Montagu 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. Incredible. John how do you go about preparing to make a film that feels completely absurd and made up but is actually the truth and it's so central as well to the story of World War II, to how that whole war played out. How do you balance all of those elements of a story?

You know, there's no quick or easy answer to that, except, you know, go for the truth of the situation. And in this particular case, because it's animated by such an extraordinary range of characters that you know the difficulty initially is trying to kind of corral everything in such a way that you find the emotional heartbeat of the story as extraordinary and bizarre though the story actually is if you simply told the story in terms of its material facts and how they prepared everything to make it look incredibly real and so on and so forth, you'd end up with quite a dry document.

And Ben has a skill beyond the natural skill of a historian to dig out all kinds of unknown and undiscovered facts and so forth. But he's actually a brilliant, you know, closet novelist. The hidden novel. There's two types of war stories. And actually, you know, the characters come very, very alive when you read that book. And it's funny you say Ben is a closet novelist because the film is narrated effectively by Ian Fleming, who obviously we will all know from the Bond stories. And it must have been a bit of a gift to find him at the centre of events. There you've got a storyteller who is not only narrating the events for us, but is also helping to drive them. But it's also, I think, fairly key to the story that almost everybody in that room seems to have been writing a novel or a story at the time.

Was that a decision, do you think, to bring together people like that? Oh, I think undoubtedly. I mean, the discovery that Ian Fleming had played such a critical role in Operation Mincemeat was an astonishing revelation to me. I had absolutely no idea he had anything to do with it until I started digging through the Admiralty files. But of course, Ian Fleming had got the idea from another novelist, from a novel called The Milliner's Hat Mystery. Nobody reads it now. By Basil Thompson. So it starts with a novelist.

It's picked up by someone who will become the great 20th century espionage novelist. And then, as you say, Matt, everybody involved in this operation was really a kind of frustrated novelist. this operation was really a kind of frustrated novelist. They were all trying to imagine a reality and to invest this particular character with a personality and a life and a background. And they approached it as novelists do. You know, they started to build a backstory. They started to build relatives and friends and a bank manager and an overdraft. And then finally, the sort of central love story that sort of sits at the heart of the deception. And it was an extraordinary act of creativity. It's a very different kind of war.

I mean, John and I were talking about this earlier. The war we are familiar with is one of sort of guns and bombs and bullets and the battlefield and so on, or it is the kind of high political corridors of power story. This is the kind of story that really hasn't been able to be told really because the facts have been kept secret for so long i was actually hoping to ask a question about that very different sort of war that it paints because i feel like the film asks us to think about what is the glory of war what should we be celebrating because we celebrate the bombs and the

guns and the people putting their their lives on the line and we celebrate the the churchills and the political leaders but we sort of have this missing link if you like of all of these people stuck in a basement who are actually delivering the bit in between to make it possible to save the lives and to deliver the political message so i think the film sort of encourages us to think about what is the glory of war? Who should we be celebrating in these things? Yes, well, I think that's a very acute observation and certainly was very much central to our preoccupation with it because we have the heroes of this story who pull off a pretty extraordinary feat, but at great personal cost, as it turns out, is really where we end up with it. And as you know, we don't want to give the game away, but the kind of coda to the film is the two men looking back on this experience that they've had, completely hollowed out by it, actually,

not feeling like heroes at all and not feeling like they belong in a place in the limelight in any way. And it's not about tub thumping and heroics and victory marches and so forth. It's just a kind of exhaustion of what they've been through, I suppose, the emotional toll and to some extent the moral toll that it's taken on them. Because, you know, war classically in cinematic literature of that conflict in particular is always couched in those terms, winners and losers and heroes and villains. And actually this occupies, in this respect too, a very curious place in the annals of that kind of literature.

It's pretty unique in that way. It's a hard question to answer. They feel that the glory should be somebody else's and not theirs, which I think is a very noble sentiment because their lives are not on the line in the same way. And yet their idea is placing an enormous number of lives on the line. And the emotional weight of that is paralyzing and terrifying, I think, at the end of the film for them. is paralysing and terrifying, I think, at the end of the film for them. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit.

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Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. Ben, when you managed to find your way into these files, did you find that they were more revealing than you would have expected because they were supposed to be secret forever? No one was supposed to see this. There's no political agenda behind it. It's just all of the detail that a historian would love to see. Well, that's the wonderful thing about these intelligence files. They're very voluminous now. I mean, we often underestimate this, but there was a sea change in British attitudes towards official secrecy starting in the mid-90s. I mean, before that date, it was illegal to report the colour of the carpets in MI5. Now, MI5 routinely releases its files

on a 50-year rule and will do so unless there is a national security reason not to, which basically means everything. And you're absolutely right, you allude to it. These files have a very particular quality, which is that they were written by and for people who would never expected them to be made public. So they're written, if you like, for a kind of internal club, which means that they are honest in a way that most government files, frankly, are not. Most people who write agendas of what's going on and accounts of what is happening know that at some point they will be held up to public scrutiny and so they have a particular tone to them these are very very different so when the operation mincemeat program was going wrong which it did at times there is literally marginalia in these files written by hand of people saying we are going and this is a paraphrase we are going to hell in a handcart here. This is a disaster. You know, so you get the human element in those files in a way that you don't in many official

documents. And John was kind enough to say that the characters in this story are very vivid. Well, that's in a way partly because this kind of operation attracts a particular kind of corkscrew mind. But it's also because those files do reveal the humanity. They reveal the personalities behind this. And they're all, oddly enough, frustrated novelists or not, they're all rather good writers. So the files themselves are written in a rather an attractive prose. It's fascinating. And listen, working in that kind of material for a historian

is just catnip, really. I couldn't ask for more, really. It saves that whole job of trying to decipher the political agenda and whatever else is going on behind the writing doesn't it it's just laid out there for you you mentioned the word club there and one of the striking things I think about the film is the role of the gargoyle club where we see quite a lot of the events happenings and I was quite struck by how often the film walks through silent pitch, blackout London streets through a doorway into a blare of colour and light and noise and music and dancing. Was that a conscious effort to make that contrast? Because I guess, you know, people were four years into the war here. People are still living their

lives. Yes, it was very much a conscious choice. You know, this is an underground story in many ways. And, you know, the world outside was covered under a blanket of darkness. It's not that familiar, actually, from cinematic literature, because the aspects of the war that are dealt with, of course, walk past that. In 1943, no bombs fell on London at all. And so it was kind of very interesting, three, no bombs fell on London at all. And so it was kind of very interesting, I thought, to get a glimpse of the way in which people kind of clawed back aspects of their life they'd been robbed of for a long time. The everyday mayhem and destruction and mortality had receded somewhat into a sort of distant relationship. Fleming's character says at one point,

it's self an act of canny deception because life was anything but normal, actually, but people were struggling to make it normal. So that was appealing to me. And as you say, it's largely a monochrome world, but suddenly the film erupts into colour and noise and music, which provides a very interesting contrast as to what's going on. It's often forgotten, but actually parts of war are strangely enjoyable.

There's a sort of dark irony there too, but there was pleasure being had here. They were alive to the absurdity of what they were doing. We're going to play a humiliating trick on Hitler, says Colin Firth as Ewan Montague, and that's exactly the spirit in which they approached it it started as a game it gets much darker as it goes on and the jeopardy becomes weightier and the tension and the stress but nonetheless at the core of it they are playing a trick and they are it's a jake and they're really enjoying it until of course there comes the moment when they realise that actually the stakes are fantastically high, and instead of launching a brilliant operation,

they may have just launched the worst moment of the war. Some of the comic moments and some of the comic timing in the film are absolutely spot on, and as you say, it stands again as another juxtaposition to the seriousness of the situation and the heightened emotion to have a moment of humour in there. And all of that works fantastically. So how close did Operation Mincemeat actually come to failing? Well, I mean, in many ways it did. You know, the sort of simple idea of taking a body which they then had to preserve for longer than would have been advisable in order to get the various aspects of the thing nailed down, approved, and so on and so forth, put them in a very vulnerable position. And actually, never mind whether or not the body

was going to float up in the right place, they chose Guuelva precisely because there would not be any significant medical expertise available, you know, in a coroner's sense, to analyze how that body had actually died. That went wrong almost immediately. I mean, from the get-go, they were in trouble on that front. They also built the entire edifice on the basis of one excellent spy and one useless spy who together would somehow contrive to make sure that the documents got as close to the center of operations as they wanted. But that went wrong. Adolf Klaus never got anywhere near the papers, and they got swept up very quickly and locked in a safe in Madrid. So there are any number of ways, really. And this is where, of course, it starts to become

so difficult for the people who've built this structure, you know, with incredible sort of meticulousness and admirable attention to detail. But of course, they couldn't control it. Of course they couldn't. I mean, it's about as fragile as it gets, doesn't it? A body that didn't die from what it looks as if it's supposed to have died of, floats up, you know, is found by a fisherman. And immediately, there is a post mortem that looks as if it's going to blow the whole thing out of the water before it even starts. So there are any number of ways really, where it could have gone wrong. And even now, as Ben knows, from a historical standpoint, it's much disputed exactly what fed into the decision to relocate German defence forces to Greece. That's still argued even now, isn't it? Absolutely. I mean, I think the balance of historical opinion is that there was an important strategic decision was taken in German high command, and that that was partly

oblique stroke, largely informed by Operation Midsmeet. But it's impossible to quantify, of course. It's like trying to quantify how many lives might have been saved. It's one of those sort of immeasurable moments. But no, I mean, the whole thing was a massive jeopardy from the beginning. In fact, even more than depicted in the film. I mean, they consulted a famous pathologist called Bernard Spilsbury and asked him, you know, would someone poisoned by rat poison, will that be detectable after the body's been in the water for a certain amount of time? And he said, in order to be able to identify that level of poisoning, they would be required to be a coroner as good as me in Spain, and there aren't any. That was his typical British attitude. And he was also wrong, of course, because in fact, you would have been able to pick up traces of poison. So not only was he incredibly pleased

and pompous, he was wrong. So yes, I mean, that jeopardy runs throughout the film and throughout the book. And it underlines it it all and i think that's one of the wonderful things about these characters is they are very aware of their own fallibility as well except for stills where he was one we actually had to leave up on the shelf because really you get there was no stopping if you try to include everybody in the story and you mentioned the characters there and at the core of this as well is some very human stories. So how much do we know about the real relationships between Ewan and Charles and Jean, particularly that central triangle? How much of that that's in the film is true to the story? unfolded during wartime when everything is upended and everything is inverted and couples, families are separated. And in our case, obviously, we're telling a story about people who,

to an extent, can't help themselves from disappearing into the fiction that they've created. That said, I felt it was both my responsibility to the material, Michelle Ashford, the screenwriter, and I felt this strongly, that actually it was our duty to tell the story vividly and to frame it in such a way as to, I suppose, maximise its impact, but not to the degree of grossly falsifying circumstance. A litmus test for us, obviously, was to show the film to the families involved, which must have been a highly charged experience for them, probably slightly more so for me, actually. I mean, I'm giving you an ambiguous answer, because I don't really want to create a tick list of, well, this we made up, this we didn't make up.

I mean, as Ben alluded to earlier in The Man Who Never Was, the film of Ewan Montague's account, there sat in the middle of it a gigantic piece of misinformation about the body and how they got permission to use the body and so forth. Likewise, they came up with their own invention of a real problem the story proposes, which is how you deal with the third act, how you deal with the point where the body has actually got into the hands of the Germans. And in their case, it was really about whether they could validate this as something that they could believe in, in that version of the story. And in ours, it's something slightly different. So I felt vindicated and reassured, actually, by the fact that Ewan Montague's own account

was probably as unreliable as ours in certain. I mean, not that ours is unreliable, because it's much better research, to be honest, and not vetted. So, you know, the answer is, I stand by everything that Michelle and I did. And I think it's all perfectly, you know, the underpinnings of it are absolutely true. But I wouldn't say moment for moment. It's absolutely pinpoint accurate. It's in the nature of the story that it can't be. And it's not a documentary.

I mean, I'd go further. I mean, I think you were asking about the emotional relationships between the three principal characters. Well, we know a lot about the relationship between Montague and Chumley because that's all in the files. They are exchanging memos. You can tell when it's getting heated. You can tell when they, because that's all in the files. They are exchanging memos. You can tell when it's getting heated. You can tell when they disagree. They disagreed after the war. So that is all evidence. I imagine you're also asking about the romantic element that

sits at the centre of this story. Well, I mean, I knew Jean Leslie. I interviewed her many times. I asked her about this question many times, and I always got the same funny, flirtatious, non-answer. She was in her 80s. She was still a tremendous flirt at 80, whatever she was. And she would say, oh, don't be so ridiculous. I'm not talking about that. And then she'd blush very prettily in a way that made you think, well, of course you did.

Of course there was a racism. So I can only hint at it in the book. The letters exchanged after the war are more than flirtatious. There's clearly something there. And this, as John was saying, is true to wartime. We know that in the strange and strained and sort of febrile circumstances of an underground war that they were fighting, relationships bloomed very, very quickly. The words, I shall miss you terribly, I'm sure, are uttered by so many people in so many different circumstances and comparable ones. And the other thing that is definitely true, as Ben knows,

because that's where we really got it all from, is that they definitely role-played the characters they were creating. I mean, Montague always used to refer to Jean as Pam. Yeah. Into their 70s, he was writing to her as Pam. That was partly a kind of a game they were playing. But of course, it was something that enabled an emotional connection to flourish. And certainly it's true that Montague's mother,

because he was actually living in a house with the matriarch of the house, mother, because he was actually living in a house with the matriarch of the house, noticed the picture of Jean Leslie, Pam, as it were, on his shaving mirror and wrote to Iris, say, I think it's time for you to come home. And I think Hester Leggett, played by the wonderful Penelope Wilton, is another side of this story as well, because she's a woman who sits sort of aside from that, isn't defined by any kind of man in her life at all. She's defined by her work and her contribution and her relationship with her friends. Was that a way of looking at the changing role of women in World War II and how it affected what women were able to do? Yes, yes.

That was, again, sort of a wonderful situation to be able to explore. As you say, both the women in the story passed the Bechdel test. And of course, it was a time when women suddenly surged into the foreground and into the most important areas of operation, particularly this kind of operation, because there were no men to fill it. And so Hester, I think, is a kind of critical and often overlooked figure in this story. I mean, Penelope Wilton is a genius anyway, so she just occupies the center of the thing. So completely, she's the sort of moral and emotional conscience of the piece and is aware of everything that's going on, of course.

And that was a structure I very much enjoyed. She always struck me as being a sort of parallel of, you know, Queen Elizabeth or something in Shakespeare in Love. You know, she could see it all and was observing it all. And of course, was hugely committed to both sides of the Montague family relationship, as she was to Jean and to Chumley as well. So, yeah, the role of the women in this story was a very nice thing to be able to open up and examine because from my own family, my mother died quite young and my stepmother, who I knew a lot about for my whole life, was very, very active during the war.

And it's a great sadness of mine that she never lived long enough to see this because this was her world and she would understand it completely and you know in the world of the brief encounters as it was now emblematized by that film obviously it was so common so pervasive and very very evocative to me wonderful i think we're sorry we've unfortunately run out of time i'm afraid i would gladly sit here and talk to you all day about this fantastic film and all of the history behind it, but unfortunately I think we've run out of time. So thank you so much for joining us and talking about Operation Mincemeat with us. Thank you. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history,

our songs, this part of the history of our country, all work on and finish. Thank you for making it to the end of this episode of Dan Snow's History. I really appreciate listening to this podcast. I love doing these podcasts. It's a highlight of my career. It's the best thing I've ever done. And your support, your listening is obviously crucial for that project. If you did feel like doing me a favour, if you go to wherever you get your podcasts and give it a review, give it a rating, obviously a good one, ideally, then that would be fantastic and feel free to share it. We obviously depend on listeners, depend on more and more people finding out about it, depend on good reviews to keep the listeners coming in. Really appreciate it. Thank you.