British Intelligence took a dead man's body, gave him a new identity, and planted fake documents on him to deceive the Nazis.
Operation Mincemeat became one of the greatest deceptions in wartime history.
Here’s how they pulled it off:
Ahead of the invasion of Sicily in the summer of 1943, the Twenty Committee planned a new covert operation with Section 17M, the section within Naval Intelligence 12 (NID 12) responsible for naval deception and handling of special intelligence from ISOS.
Its head Ewen Montagu served as the NID representative on the Twenty Committee.
The aim of the new major deception was to fool the Germans about the location of the invasion in Southern Europe by floating the dead body of an officer of the Royal Marine off the coast of Spain.
In his briefcase, chained to his wrist, would be papers that included fake invasion plans.
It was a work of total fiction that took some of the most creative minds in intelligence to write the script.
It was codenamed Operation Mincemeat and would be one of the most audacious naval deceptions of the war.
The unknown element was whether the Germans would fall for it...
Section 17M set to work in meticulous detail on Operation Mincemeat to ensure that nothing was left to chance.
By the planning stage, the section had 14 members, two-thirds of whom were women.
The female secretarial team was nicknamed ‘the Beavers’, the youngest of whom was 18-year old Jean Leslie.
The first priority was to acquire a corpse and preserve it until the operation was set to go.
Sir Bernard Spilsbury (British pathologist) and Bentley Purchase (coroner of the St Pancras mortuary) were consulted by Section 17M.
In St Pancras mortuary was the corpse of 34-year-old Glyndwr Michael, an unemployed labourer of no fixed abode who had committed suicide with rat poison.
He was about to be given a new identity and the leading role in Operation Mincemeat.
The details of his new identity were to be worked out by Montagu, Flight Lieutenant Cholmondeley and Joan Saunders.
They decided on ‘Major William Martin of the Royal Marines’, born in 1907.
It was not only a matter of identity but creating a new personality – his likes and dislikes – and his family background to be more convincing to the Germans.
They spent the days discussing and slowly compiling a portfolio of the man.
In the evenings they went off to the Gargoyle, Montagu’s club in Soho, where over drinks they continued to build up their imaginary hero.
Major Martin was given identity papers, and a card to show he was a member of the Naval and Military Club in London, with a history of mounting debts as confirmed in a fake letter from his bank asking him to pay off an overdraft of £27. 19. 2d.
The fictitious paperwork and apparent extravagant lifestyle were necessary to hold his cover.
Joan Saunders noticed that Major Martin had no love life and it would be more realistic for him to have a girlfriend.
The women of Section 17M created ‘Pam’ as the pretty young fiancée.
A photograph of ‘Pam’, whose real name was Jean Leslie, was placed on his body to authenticate the cover story further.
The snapshot black and white holiday photograph was of Jean Leslie, taken by a friend and member of the Grenadier Guards who had fallen in love with her.
Miss Hester Leggett who headed the secretarial team has been credited with writing the fictitious love letters purporting to be from Pam, but in reality it was probably a combined effort by a number of women.
On 3 April 1943, the body of Major Martin was dressed in the battle dress and flashes of the Royal Marines by Montagu and Cholmondeley, with assistance from the coroner.
A briefcase with the forged documents was strapped to the wrist of the corpse, and included invasion plans to deceive the Germans that an Allied assault was soon to take place on Greece and Crete.
The body was placed in a specially manufactured air-tight container to prevent deterioration and loaded onto submarine HMS Seraph.
The submarine left the port of Greenock in Scotland and headed for Spain.
At 04:30hrs on 30 April 1943, the body was launched from HMS Seraph near Huelva, off the coast of Spain.
It was picked up by a Spanish fisherman who passed it to Spanish naval headquarters.
This set off a chain of events that would lead to the invasion plans falling into the hands of the Germans.
The Spanish naval authorities refused to hand over the briefcase to the British consul and instead sent it to Madrid where the three letters were opened and photographed.
The envelopes were then re-sealed to look untouched and passed to the British Naval attaché.
The photographed versions were dispatched to the Germans with a request for strict secrecy.
The German Intelligence Service in Portugal finally heard about the documents and was summoned to a conference on 12 May.
In the interim period between the body’s discovery and the conference, a post mortem by Spanish authorities concluded death by drowning.
On 2 May 1943, Major Martin was buried at Huelva and his funeral attended by Spanish naval and military officers.
On 12 May, at the Admiralty in London, Juliette Ponsonby picked up the day’s decrypts from the teleprinter room.
Bletchley Park had intercepted a wireless message sent by general Alfred Jodl, the chief of the Operations Staff of the German forces, responsible for all planning and strategic operations, and he confirmed that an enemy landing on a large scale was projected in the near future in the Eastern and Western Mediterranean.
Copies of Jodl’s message were dispatched across the German High Command, and Montagu knew that the Germans had been duped by Operation Mincemeat.
It achieved its aim of convincing the Germans that an invasion was planned for Sardinia, rather than Sicily and resulted in the Germans dispersing their troops and sending reinforcements to Sardinia.
A whole Panzer division was moved from France to the Peloppennese and establishing communication headquarters at Tripoli in mid-May 1943.
Verification of this was received back in England via Special Intelligence and Ultra decrypts.
Operation Mincemeat was supported, too, by female Agent Bronx who informed her German handler that an Allied invasion of France was to take place in September 1943.
Her messages were part of Operation Cockade which was a series of deceptions designed to relieve pressure on the Allied landings in Sicily. It had the dual effect of aiding the Russians on the Eastern front by diverting attention towards other alleged attacks by the Allies in Western Europe.
Documents captured by the Allies at the end of the war corroborated the fact that the Germans had fallen for the fictional invasion plans.
Operation Mincemeat was ‘a small classic of deception, brilliantly elaborate in detail, completely successful in operation.’
An appendix to a report on the operation ended with the words: ‘MINCEMEAT swallowed whole.’
The Double Cross System was proving so successful that by the end of 1943, the system was more powerful and better equipped than before.
The Twenty Committee was confident to tackle the biggest deception of all.
Uppermost in the mind of its members was whether a similar ruse as Operation Mincemeat could deceive the Germans ahead of D-Day...
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