Operation Mincemeat

Richard

Those over a certain age will probably have seen the film The Man Who Never Was, likely as not on TV on a wet Sunday afternoon. But when it was released in 1956, it caused a sensation.

The film revealed one of the biggest secrets of the second world war, and Ben Macintyre revisits the story in the beautifully researched and tautly written Operation Mincemeat. Mincemeat was the code name of the most audacious intelligence scam ever pulled off by the British secret services and it changed the course of the entire war.

In the spring of 1943, the British and American armies were poised to invade southern Europe. The outcome of the war rested on a knife-edge. The allies knew they could still lose to Hitler and the stakes were almost unimaginably high.

The Germans believed the blow would fall in either Greece or Sicily, with the smart money on Sicily. The smart money was right: Sicily was exactly where the allies planned landings. Somehow, Hitler - who always had the last word on strategy – had to be personally convinced that Greece was the target.

Macintyre’s account of how British intelligence conspired to dupe Hitler into moving his divisions to Greece is so fantastical that if Operation Mincemeat were a work of fiction, we might deride it as being hopelessly over the top. But this is a true story.

Judy

I normally shy away from factual books about the last war, but this one is so rich in real-life characters and a plot that had me rubbing my eyes in sheer disbelief, that I was hooked from the first page. The opening paragraphs tell the story of a sardine fisherman off the coast of southwest Spain who, one overcast April morning 67 years ago, spotted the rotting body of a man floating in the water.

Once ashore, Spanish officials quickly established the dead man was a British intelligence officer carrying top-secret documents to a meeting in North Africa. It was assumed his plane had crashed at sea, en route. Fascist Spain was supposed to be neutral but Franco nodded to the Fuhrer and German spies were soon photographing the papers. Sensationally, they revealed the allies were about to invade Greece.

Hokum, all of it. The body was that of a Welsh tramp who had died after accidentally eating rat-poison; the documents were beautiful forgeries. The whole scam was the brainchild of an eccentric RAF officer and a ferociously intelligent Jewish barrister, with an unlikely backup team including a forensic pathologist and a transvestite English spymaster. In a somehow uniquely British piece of ‘corkscrew thinking’ they conjured out of thin air a man who never was. The hare-brained scheme began in a secret basement under Whitehall and ended up on Hitler’s desk.

Macintyre’s description of the misfits and geniuses who pulled the whole thing off is a delight to read and evokes a lost era of spooks and spies whose sheer ingenuity fooled Hitler into doing exactly what they wanted him to. A thrilling adventure story, and one that makes you proud to be British.

Ben Mcintyre meets Richard and Judy