Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assurd an Allied Victory
Ben Macintyre, 2010
Crown Publishing
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307453280
Summary
In 1943, from a windowless basement office in London, two brilliant intelligence officers conceived a plan that was both simple and complicated— Operation Mincemeat. The purpose? To deceive the Nazis into thinking that Allied forces were planning to attack southern Europe by way of Greece or Sardinia, rather than Sicily, as the Nazis had assumed, and the Allies ultimately chose.
Charles Cholmondeley of MI5 and the British naval intelligence officer Ewen Montagu could not have been more different. Cholmondeley was a dreamer seeking adventure. Montagu was an aristocratic, detail-oriented barrister. But together they were the perfect team and created an ingenious plan: Get a corpse, equip it with secret (but false and misleading) papers concerning the invasion, then drop it off the coast of Spain where German spies would, they hoped, take the bait. The idea was approved by British intelligence officials, including Ian Fleming (creator of James Bond). Winston Churchill believed it might ring true to the Axis and help bring victory to the Allies.
Filled with spies, double agents, rogues, fearless heroes, and one very important corpse, the story of Operation Mincemeat reads like an international thriller.
Unveiling never-before-released material, Ben Macintyre brings the reader right into the minds of intelligence officers, their moles and spies, and the German Abwehr agents who suffered the “twin frailties of wishfulness and yesmanship.” He weaves together the eccentric personalities of Cholmondeley and Montagu and their near-impossible feats into a riveting adventure that not only saved thousands of lives but paved the way for a pivotal battle in Sicily and, ultimately, Allied success in the war. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1963
• Where—England, UK
• Education—N/A
• Currently—lives in London, England, UK
Ben Macintyre is a British author, historian, and columnist writing for The Times newspaper (London). His columns range from current affairs to historical controversies.
Books
MacIntyre is the author of a book on the gentleman criminal Adam Worth, The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, Master Thief (1992). He also wrote The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan (2004). In 2008 MacIntyre released an informative illustrated account of Ian Fleming, creator of the fictional spy James Bond, to accompany the For Your Eyes Only exhibition at London's Imperial War Museum, which was part of the Fleming Centenary celebrations.
Three of his most recent books center on World War II and have become international bestsellers. In 2007, he published Agent Zigzag: The True Wartime Story of Eddie Chapman: Lover, Betrayer, Hero, Spy. The story centers on Chapman, a real-life double agent during the Second World War. Operation Mincemeat, issued in 2010, recounts the Allied deception their impending invasion of Italy. Double Cross, released in 2012, is about the Allies' D-Day spy network.
All three books have been made into BBC documentaries—Operation Mincemeat (in 2010), Double Agent: The Eddie Chapman Story (in 2011), and Double Cross (in 2012). His most recent book, published in 2014, is A Spy Among Friends: Phil Kilby and the Great Betrayal. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Operation Mincemeat is utterly, to employ a dead word, thrilling. But to call it thus is to miss the point slightly, in terms of admiring it properly.... What makes Operation Mincemeat so winning, in addition to Mr. Macintyre's meticulous research and the layers of his historical understanding, is his elegant, jaunty and very British high style. The major players in this spy story seem to have emerged from an Evelyn Waugh novel that's been tweaked by P. G. Wodehouse. This isn't to say that Mr. Macintyre has embellished his teeming cast of eccentrics. It's to say that he fully appreciates them, and his fondness for them is contagious.
Dwight Garner - New York Times
Ben Macintyre...is a first-rate journalist who seems to have talked to everyone connected with the operation (or their descendants) and worked his way through recently declassified documents in the National Archives. But—true to the spirit of the operation—his most important source turned out to be the deceased Montagu himself, or more specifically, a dusty trunk he left behind with bundles of files from MI5, MI6 and Naval Intelligence; letters, memos, photographs; original, uncensored drafts; and so on, an intelligence bonanza more genuine than the one foisted on the Germans. Macintyre has made the most of it. Here, finally, is the complete story with its full cast of characters (not a dull one among them), pure catnip to fans of World War II thrillers and a lot of fun for everyone else.
Joseph Kanon - Washington Post
A nearly flawless true-life picaresque …zeroes in on one of the few times in war history when excessive literary imagination, instead of hobbling a clandestine enterprise, worked beyond its authors’ wildest dream….Almost inedibly rich with literary truffles—doppelgangers, obsession, transgression, self-fashioning.... It is hard to oversate how cinematic this story really was.
New Republic
London Times writer-at-large Macintyre (Agent Zigzag) offers a solid and entertaining updating of WWII's best-known human intelligence operation. In 1943, British intelligence conceived a spectacular con trick to draw German attention away from the Allies' obvious next objective, Sicily. The bait was a briefcase full of carefully forged documents attached to the wrist of Major William Martin, Royal Marines—a fictitious identity given to a body floated ashore in neutral Spain. Making the deception plausible was the task given to two highly unconventional officers: Lt. Comdr. Ewen Montagu and Squadron Leader Charles Cholmondeley. Macintyre recounts their adventures and misadventures with panache. The body was that of a derelict. Its costuming included the underwear of a deceased Oxford don. An attractive secretary provided the photo of an imaginary fiancée. The carefully constructed documents setting up the bogus operation against Greece and Sardinia convinced even Hitler himself. The Sicily landings were achieved as almost a complete surprise. And the man who never was entered the history and folklore of WWII.
Publishers Weekly
Macintyre (assoc. editor, Times of London; Agent Zigzag) takes readers on an exciting World War II adventure as he details one of the most famous military intelligence operations of the 20th century. In July 1943 the semidecomposed body of a man who seemed to be a British soldier was discovered floating off of southwestern Spain. When the body was examined by Spanish officials (Spain was neutral but sympathetic to Germany), they identified him as Royal Marine officer William Martin and passed on the information discovered in his belongings. It was all a deception that included love letters from a fiancée, her photograph, stubs of London theater tickets, bank notices, and so on. More crucially, Major Martin was carrying sealed letters to senior military figures in North Africa. When these documents reached Berlin they induced a response from the German military that greatly enabled the Allied invasion of Sicily. Mcintyre turns this successful Allied endeavor into a rousing story, recounting also the life of the Welshman who died down on his luck and became the body of "William Martin." VERDICT This retelling of a well-known part of World War II espionage history will appeal to military history buffs, especially those new to this particular episode, and to readers of adventure fiction, who will find it hard to put down. —Sheri Beth Scovil, Bartow Cty. Lib. Syst., Cartersville, GA
Library Journal
The exciting story of the ingenious British ruse that distracted the Nazis from the Allied Sicilian invasion. Although the invasion finally took place July 10, 1943, allowing the Allied forces an initial foothold into the German "Fortress Europe," the trick that kept the Nazis from fortifying Sicily took place months before. The dead body of a British major, "William Martin," had been hauled in on April 30 by fishermen off the port of Huelva, Spain, a pro-German outpost, his briefcase full of top-secret letters by British officers detailing the invasions of Greece and Sardinia and sure to land in the eager hands of the Germans. In fact, the body was a plant, a suicide victim actually named Glyndwr Michael. He had been plucked from a morgue in London, kept on ice for a few months, dressed in a well-used British Navy uniform, stocked with identification, fake official letters and correspondence from his father and fiancee "Pam," and slipped into the Spanish waters by a British submarine. London Times writer at large Macintyre (Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal, 2007, etc.) skillfully unravels this crazy, brilliant plan by degrees. The "corkscrew minds" at British Navy Intelligence, headed by John Godfrey and his assistant, Ian Fleming (yes, of James Bond fame), put forth the germ of the idea, which was then developed to its fantastic implementation by RAF flight officer Charles Cholmondeley and Lt. Commander Ewen Montagu, first under the code name "Trojan Horse," then the more prosaic "Operation Mincemeat." The author's chronicle of how the last two intelligence officers lovingly created an entire personality for "Major Martin" makes for priceless reading. Astoundingly, as Winston Churchill noted exultantly, the Nazis swallowed the bait "rod, line and sinker."Macintyre spins a terrific yarn, full of details gleaned from painstaking detective work.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Operation Mincemeat:
1. What could explain the fact that German intelligence, hardly an un-intelligent group, fell for a feint like Operation Mincemeat...to the point where Hitler deployed troops to Greece rather than Sicily?
2. In an Amazon interview, Ben Macintyre says that what most fascinated him in researching the book was "the elaborate, many-layered deception...as if [the organizers of the operation] were writing a novel...." In what way was the creation of Mincemeat like a writing novel?
3. What do you think of Charles Cholmondeley? Would you consider him the unsung hero behind Operation Mincemeat? Or would you reserve the "hero" title for Ewan Montague? Or is there someone else?
4. Do you think Ewan (Bill) and Jean Leslie (Pam) actually had an actual affair? There are hints that, indeed, they might have, but only hints. What do you think?
5. The characters who worked on the the plot were a strange eccentric group of people, many with blistering egos. What do you think made them cohere as a group and pull off, successfully, this multi-faceted escapade?
6. Do you find it ironic that poor Glyndwr Michael, who led an insignificant life, became far more valuable as a dead men? What might this suggest about the pathos, even tragedy, of real life...or the old saw—"life is stranger than fiction"?
7. You might get a hold of the 1956 film, The Man Who Never Was, and play a few clips. The film is based on the events of Operation Mincemeat. Compare book and film.
8. Discuss the brilliant planning—and fine-tuning— that went into the success of the operation. What impressed you most...or surprised you most?
9. Talk about the ways in which luck also played a part in the operation's success.
10. Could someone create a story of your own (real) life and pass it on as credible to enemy intelligence? What would you want them to include in the bio—what kind of, say, "wallet litter"? Even better, divide up into groups and devise your own fictional character, someone who might be carrying information valuable to the enemy. How would you create such a life—and make it seem real? Is it sorta...kinda...like writing a novel?
11. What does Macintyre mean when he says that the overall scheme was a "double bluff"?
12. What does this book reveal about the spy-world during war—the role that "intelligence" played back then...and might still play today? How would you prioritize what is more important in determining the outcome of war? Would you say...intellligence, leadership, or fighting?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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