Operation Mincemeat: Fooling the Nazis, One Dead Body at a Time

Though they say that truth is stranger the fiction, there are situations such as those portrayed in Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory when the story told has greater appeal and more enduring impact precisely because it is essentially true, at least to the extent that facts can be verified.

With regard to Operation Mincemeat, Ben Macintyre The object of this rouse was to fool Germany about where Allied forces would choose to land coming from the southern Mediterranean. Eccentric minds of Allied intelligence got to thinking and decided to float a body -- containing secret documents -- on a Spanish beach fully assuming that the ostensibly neutral Spanish fascists would share the information they found with the Germans and that the Germans would believe it. To make the Operation work, Hitler had to be persuaded that the push from Africa would not be towards the obvious choice -- Sicily, but rather Sardinia to the west and Greece to the east. Charles Cholmondeley, the MI5 agent responsible for this rouse, as well as his superior, Ewan Montagu, and a host of minor players (including the creator of James Bond, Ian Fleming) make this one of the best international spy thrillers I’ve read in some time.

The intricate details of the Operation recounted by Macintyre are on display throughout the book, and make this book a page-turner.  For instance, Cholmondeley thought that a new uniform on the body would look suspect, so he put on Marine battle dress and wore it every day for three months while the decoy body was on ice. Once the body was loaded with faked documents from Churchill and Eisenhower, it was clandestinely transported by submarine and washed up on the Spanish coast as planned. What follows is intrigue of the highest order.  Whether it’s the Spanish attempting to fool the Germans that they didn’t look at the documents before handing them over or the head of Nazi intelligence in Berlin creating a fanciful story of how he obtained the documents, the resultant dance between all the characters in this story ends Hitler ordering the fortification of Greece and Sardinia, with Sicily dropped from precedence.  But as so often in war, the devil is in the details, and Macintyre tells the story of the Abwehr officer in Berlin who was the ultimate authority on the authenticity of the Mincemeat documents and was Hitler's favorite intelligence analyst; he easily detected the phoniness of the recovered papers but chose to reassure Hitler because he was a dedicated anti-Nazi and was prepared to do anything to help the Allies win the war.  The success – or potential failure – of Operation Mincemeat relies on “violent emotion, chance, and rational calculation,” according to Clausewitz.

All of the key factors of the intelligence craft are on display in Operation Mincemeat: personal antagonisms, petty arguments and bureaucratic entanglements, the unpredictability of human behavior, and the requirement for secrecy.  This detailed and interesting book lays bare the potential for self-delusion as well as the potential to achieve significant goals outside of traditional military mechanisms.  Highly recommended for history buffs and those who enjoy a good – and true! – thriller!

*9/10*