Operation Mincemeat, Part 2

Operation Mincemeat aimed to relay false information to the Nazis by dropping a corpse where they would find it, along with fake documents. The British agents gave their corpse a backstory to make it more believable. But was the story too good to be true?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm to playing a chok reboarding and I'm faired out
and we are continuing on today with our discussion on
Operation Mincemeat, which referred to as the most successful wartime

(00:23):
deception ever attempted. It was essentially an elaborate World War
two military hoax cooked up by British intelligence in ninety
three to fool the Nazias into thinking the Allies next
move was going to be an attack on Greece and
Sardinia when they were actually about to invade Sicily in
an offensive known as Operation Husky. So in part one

(00:44):
of this podcast, we talked a little bit about what
was going on in World War Two at the time,
why Cecily was the logical next target for the Allies,
and why a deception plan, or rather deception plans were
really needed to throw Hitler off the sent We also
laid out the basic premise for Operation mince Meat, and
that was using a corpse to relay false information to

(01:08):
the enemy by planting official looking documents on it and
dropping it in an area where the enemy would be
sure to find it. Ian Fleming, as we mentioned, was
the first to propose this idea in a ninety nine
memo called the Trout Memo, and no one did anything
with it for years, probably just because it seemed so
outrageous and and kind of Yeah, but by ninety three,

(01:31):
British intelligence agents Charles Chumbley and you and Montague had
caught hold of this idea, They developed it and had
been given permission to kind of run with it. Yeah.
So when we left off, Chumley and Montague were really
in the thick of giving the dead body that they've
managed to obtain a whole background, a life, and a
personality of everything. From the uniform that it was going

(01:54):
to wear, they decided to make it a Royal Marines officer,
to its religion and its name Captain William Martin, he
was going to be Bill Martin. Friends. That's the level
of details that they attended to. Essentially, they created Bill
as this likable, slightly irresponsible guy. The BBC documentary that's
based on the story, called Operation Minsmey, described him as

(02:16):
brave and romantic, but disorganized and deeply in debt. He
was also recently engaged. As we mentioned before, Bill's fictional
fiance Pam was based on an actual young woman who
worked for British counterintelligence named Jane Leslie. Montague played the
role of Bill and actually flirted with and dated Jean Leslie,

(02:38):
who went right along on it. Yeah, they would call
each other Bill and Pam in these scenarios, so really
just getting into this fiction that they were creating around
these people. Yeah, but there was also a practical side
to all the story boarding and play acting, because once
they've made up a life for Bill, Martin, Chumley and
Montague needed to plant evidence that really would do something

(03:03):
put this plan into effect. And we talked about the
cross and the overdraft notice and this fake letters from Pam.
They also went ahead and included a bill from a
jeweler for an engagement ring, but also some other stuff
which arguably would make the court seem even more like
a real person than stuff like letters. Things that the

(03:23):
spies referred to as wallet litter, and those are the
things that you probably have in your pocket now, Things
you just absent mindedly keep in your wallet or your
purse or your pockets that don't necessarily mean anything to you,
but they show that you're somebody who walks around and
somebody who does stuff so pocket change ticket stubs. I
don't know, Toblina, you might have law terror receipts in

(03:44):
your pocket. It could be anything like that. And you
just like trash like a gum wrapper. Totally. I have
so much of the stuff that I just got rid of.
I just moved, so I cleaned out my purses and things,
and I thought about this because I just read this,
you know, I just had done this research. I was
thinking about all the wallet w Yes, I have bags
and bags of wallet litter. But yeah, the stuff just

(04:07):
tells you a little bit about the person. You know,
maybe nothing significant, but maybe it does tell you a
little something about a person's personality. And they made sure
to plant some things like this on the corpse that
they were using as well. Some of the items, like
I said, we're meaningless, like a partially used book of stamps.
Others were less so like ticket stubs for performance on

(04:28):
a particular date, which might convince whoever found them that
Bill Martin would have had to have been traveling by
plane because they have that particular date on them. So,
you know, just planning things here and there that would
fill out the story. A little bit in some ways
help them convince the Germans that this was a real
person and of course make it realistic. So that process

(04:51):
and all the considerations that it required could probably be
a little bit tedious, but it was probably lots of
fun to compared to the process of creating the most
important information that they were going to have to plant
on the body. I mean, forget whallet litter. The most
important thing was going to be the fake official military documents,
which were of course vital to misleading the Access powers

(05:12):
in the first place. They decided that the secret documents
would take the form of personal letters between high ranking
Allied officials that just happened to drop vital info here
and there, because actual battle plans and so forth would
not have been carried by a single officer in this way.
Those would have been sent by diplomatic pouch something like that. Specifically,

(05:34):
the letter that aimed to convince the Nazis that Greece
was a target and that Sicily was a decoy was
created as a correspondence between Lieutenant General Archibald Nye, who
was the Vice Chief of the Imperial General Staff in London,
and General Harold Alexander, who was the senior British officer
under Eisenhower in Tunisia. These guys knew each other. They

(05:54):
were both important enough that the Germans would instantly know
who they were, and it made sense that they would
be privy to this sort of information. So just three
essential things that they needed to have that they'd be
corresponding about something like this. So Montagu took the first
stab at writing this letter. He thought he made a
pretty good attempt at it. But his bosses and several

(06:16):
other of the high ranking folks immediately started weighing in
on it, and it became a real source of frustration
for Montague because various officials debated about the letter for
more than a month trying to decide, you know, did
it strike the right tone, didn't give enough away without
getting too much away, that did it seem realistic? Um?
And he just thought his letter was good. He thought

(06:37):
it was good, like stop messing with jokes in there.
He was like, this is the best letter, This is
totally believable. But they didn't really so much agree. They
wanted to make sure that they got, like you said,
a little bit of information out there, you know, you
want an element of truth in it. To make it realistic.
But at the same time, you don't want to give
the whole thing away. You don't want to just tell

(06:58):
them your plans by by trying to deceive them. Tell them, yes,
we're going to be in Sicily. Well, and guys like
that wouldn't be writing letters that gave away the whole
plan anyway. Right. Well, finally the chiefs of staff just
came up with a bright idea of having General Ni
draft the letter himself. And when he did this, it
just finally struck the right chord. I mean, I guess

(07:19):
that's sort of the obvious answer, but nobody had really
thought about it before for this more than a month
that they were debating it. Nice's version of the letter
hinted at this primary invasion in Greece and another elsewhere
in the Mediterranean, while mentioning Sicily as a diversionary location
where some smaller attacks might occur to confuse the Nazis.

(07:40):
Of course, they were going to be doing air raids
and everything anyway in preparation for their invasion, so this
sort of helped them with that too. It's like, hey,
if you see some mar raids happening, it's just a
defasion exactly, so they had to include another letter to
after this though. They were like, Okay, this sounds good,
but we need in another letter to explain why this

(08:02):
guy would be carrying a little place, right. So the
second one was from the Chief of Combined Operations to
Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, who was Commander in Chief in
the Mediterranean, another well known figure that the Nazis would
have heard of, and this letter explained what Bill Martin
was doing traveling with this very important information in the

(08:24):
first place, and also hinted that a secondary invasion would
take place in Sardinia. I think they actually included kind
of a PostScript or a little joke at the end
of the letter that said, you know, maybe William Martin
can bring back some sardines with him or something. They
fit some jokes in there, didn't they did. They also
tested different typewriter inc. Because they needed to find one
that didn't become illegible after being in the water. They

(08:48):
needed one that was a regular, non spy inc. That
wouldn't tip anybody off, but it could still be read
after all that time. And then they carefully folded and
field all these important letters. They photographed the steals that
they could easily tell if the letters had been tampered with,
and Ben McIntyre, the author who we mentioned in the

(09:09):
earlier episode, also described how an additional precaution was included.
They put a dark eyelash in the fold of each letter,
and so if the eyelash fell out, they'd know that
the letter had been read. Just a back up thing
to to provide even more caution than the seals. Yeah,
not exactly scientific, but kind of a neat detail to include. Anyway,

(09:33):
The letters were placed in a black government briefcase that
was chained to the corpses belt, even though they knew
that it seemed unlikely that Bill Martin would be carrying
letters this way, because it was really the only way
they could ensure that the letters wouldn't just float away
and that whoever found the body would actually notice the letters.
I mean, if they just kind of tucked it in
his jacket pocket or something, there was always the chance,

(09:54):
probably not, but always the chance that it would be overlooked.
So they sort of needed this as safeguard. After these
official letters were all complete, they sought and got final
approval for Operation Mints Neat from the highest authorities necessary,
Churchill and Eisenhower. So with all of these hard crafted
materials finally put together and the character of their corpse

(10:18):
career created, the British intelligence officers needed to nail down
some logistics, namely where they were going to drop the
body and how they were going to do it. So,
as we mentioned in the last episode, Spain in general
had already proven that it could be a prime location
for this type of operation because there was evidence that
they had passed on information to the Nazis in the past.

(10:41):
Even though Spain was officially neutral, there were some pretty
strong pro acts as sentiments prevalent in certain areas of
the country, and even in the highest arenas of the
government and law enforcement there were some pro access sentiments.
So this was what Chumley and Montagu were counting on
for the whole plan to really work. But they still

(11:02):
needed to hone in on an exact area of the
Spanish coast to drop the body because there were some
pro British Spaniards as well, and if they got their
hands on the body first, the documents might just be
returned without ever making it into the hands of the Germans.
So they consulted with the British naval attiche in Madrid,
Alan Hill Garth and his assistant as well, who helped

(11:25):
them settle on dropping the body near Velva on spain
southwest coast, since it was an area where a lot
of German influence was present. It was also the home
base of notorious German spy Adolf Klaus, who basically bought
off everyone who could in town and was responsible for
helping target British ships off the Spanish coast for U boats,

(11:47):
among other things. He had been in the service of
the Nazis for a while and was considered one of
their top spies. If something washed up on shore there,
it was guaranteed that Adolf Klaus would make it his
business to find out about it. So, with the location
for the drop finally picked out, the next order of
business for Operation Mincemeat Planners was to determine how they

(12:10):
were going to drop the body. So the idea was
to make it seem as if Bill Martin had died
in a plane crash. You remember in the last episode
they had to find a body that didn't have, you know,
a telltale sign of death or a cause of death.
To make this plane crash idea seem realistic, but the
problem was if they actually dropped the body out of

(12:30):
a plane, it might completely break apart, since it had
already been decomposing for a couple of months in the Morgue.
So they had a few other options, and one was
to bring it in on a surface ship and sort
of drop it close to shore, but that wouldn't work
because they need to get pretty close to the shore
to drop the body to make sure that it didn't

(12:51):
float somewhere where they didn't want it to go. Another
option was landing a sea plane on the water, but
that seemed really complicated, really risky, and could possibly cause
a real plane crash, which would defeat the purpose of
the whole operation. So they finally decided that a submarine
was the way to go. That way, they could make
the drop at night and get pretty close to the shore,

(13:14):
and it just so happened that a submarine with a young,
well regarded commander, the HMS Sarah, was docked in Scotland
getting ready to return to the Mediterranean in April, so
it seemed perfect. And yet there was one little problem
with even this scenario to solve, and that was how
do you first of all, hide a body on a
submarine without everybody finding out about it, because of course

(13:38):
discretion was still of the most importance even among other
members of the British military. And secondly, how do you
keep this body fresh, so to speak, for the ride?
This major issue. I think that point sort of relates
to the earlier one. So Chumley found a solution to
both of these problems by consulting with Charles Fraser of

(14:00):
Q Branch, whose job was to provide the Secret Service
with all kinds of nifty wartime gadgets like indivisible ink,
hidden weapons, mini cameras. He worked with Ian Fleming too
in case that all found sort of familiar, and he's
believed to be the inspiration for Q in the James
Bond movies. Uh Coincidentally, M is said to be based

(14:22):
on Admiral John Godfrey, who was the trout memo guy.
So it was Fraser Smith who helped Chumley come up
with the design for a giant steel canister, which McIntyre
refers to as quote the first underwater corpse transporter. It
was six ft six inches long and air tight to
keep oxygen out and which would help prevent the decomposition

(14:45):
of the body. They also planned to pack it with
dry ice to help with us with a body inside.
This canister would weigh in at about four hundred pounds.
Kind of a large can often almost so not something
to z too hide, No, not at all, um So.
With official approval though, and with a plan for logistics

(15:06):
even down to this underwater corpse transporter, all Montague and
Chumiley had to do at this point was put the
plan into action. So the HMS Sarah set sail from
Scotland on April nineteenth, and from there it would take
an estimated ten or eleven days to get to Ulva.
So Montague and Chumiley met up with their corner friend Bentley,

(15:28):
purchased and on April eighteen they finished dressing Glenn Michael's
body and prepared it for its journey as the fictional
Bill Martin. Then they loaded it into the giant canister,
put that into a customized van and headed off for Scotland,
driven by Sinjin Jock horse Full, who was a famous

(15:50):
race car driver who had turned into an m I
five chauffeur. Uh it was good he was a race
car driver because they were driving very fast. They drove
through the wee hours of the night at very high speeds.
They almost crashed a couple of times. Even because they
were keeping things so secret, they didn't use headlights. Yeah,
I mean, that was the not so good part about it,
I guess, is that they weren't using headlights and stngin Horsewall,

(16:14):
I should say. I didn't have the greatest eyesight from
what I understand, and he didn't wear glasses. Yes, indeed,
but they made it to Scotland by the morning of
the nineteenth safely, and with some help, got the canister
loaded onto the submarine, which set off when it was
supposed to, all without a hitch. Incidentally, the commander of
this submarine was the only one on it who was

(16:36):
fully aware of the plan. The officers were partially in
the know, and the crew had been told some other
cover story to explain to Canister, basically that they were
carrying meteorological equipment of some sort. Yeah. Sure. McIntyre suggests
that actually the crew did suspect there was a person
in this six foot six canister, and they started referring

(16:58):
to him as our pal Charlie, which I think might
be the most endearing aspect of this whole story, And
the Sarah reached Velva around ap planned, but they had
to wait for the perfect wind conditions that could carry
the body to shore, and that finally happened in the
early morning hours of April, so they surfaced. They got

(17:19):
as close to the shore as possible, closer than they
thought they could get, and the officers helped the commander
remove the body from the canister, inflate the life fest
put the documents where they needed to be, and then
put the body in the sea. And after that the
Sarah headed back out to sea and sunk the canister.
All right, so safe travels Bill. But we've already explained

(17:40):
in the last episode how the body was found that
morning by a Spanish fisherman who brought it back to
shore all by himself. He couldn't get help from the
other fisherman. And with that, at least the very first
part of the plan had been accomplished, and had been
accomplished successfully. But really after that things did not go
smoothly at all. First of all, the local Spanish authorities

(18:03):
picked up the body. They turned it over to the
Spanish navy, which called up Francis Hasselton, who was the
local British Vice consul and the body was then transported
to the cemetery an autopsy was performed, you remember, not
something that they wanted to happen. That's why they made
the fake identity supposedly Roman Catholic. So a couple of

(18:25):
things went wrong, so the autopsy really got things off
to a bad start. The pathologists performing it noticed that
the rate of decomposition was faster than they were hoping
he would think it was, and estimated that the body
had been in the water for about eight to ten days.
So this already conflicted with some of the evidence that

(18:46):
had been planted on the body. Hasselton managed to cut
the autopsy short, though before anything else major got noticed. However,
there was still a little matter of the briefcase. The
Spanish navy lieutenant who was present at the autopsy had
it in his possession, and he had a pretty good
relationship with Hasselton, so he actually offered to hand it

(19:10):
over right then and there. But this was exactly what
the Allies did not want. The whole point, after all,
was to give the Germans a chance to catch a
glimpse of this stuff, so Hasselton had to kind of
act like it wasn't a big deal and just request
that it go through the official channels. You know. He
was just kind of like, Hey, I don't want you

(19:30):
to get in trouble with your boss. Why don't you
just go ahead and pass it on. We'll get it
back exactly. We'll get it back eventually. It's fine. But
it probably came off to this lieutenant and anyone else
who was present as a little bit strange that he
would want to do this. So, at least in some respects,
it seems like Castleton may have averted disaster a little bit.
But once the Navy lieutenant passed on the briefcase to

(19:54):
the superiors, the situation got worse for both the Germans
and the Allies. In fact, because even though as Chumley
and Montague had hoped, the German spy Adolf Klaus had
caught wind of the briefcase and it's important looking contents,
he couldn't manage to get his hands on it. And
this was because the Spanish Navy was pro British in general,

(20:15):
and if pretty much anyone else in town had had
possession of these goods, class would have been able to
get his hands on them pretty much right away. But
as it was he was out of luck. He just
could not find a way to get them. Yeah. So,
in the process of going through official channels, though, the
briefcase did finally make its way to Madrid, and in

(20:36):
the meantime the British had to pretend like they really
want this briefcase back, give it back to us. So
messages are just flying back and forth between London and
British officials in Spain, which have at least the positive
effect of making the Germans want the briefcase even more,
making the whole thing seemed more legitimate. Finally, nine days
after the body washed up, the letters did find their

(21:00):
way into the German hands, and it seemed as if
the pro Nazi Spanish security chief finally made this happen.
But regardless of how they got there, the letters did
end up with the German empathy in the hands of
Major Carl Cullin Tall, a well respected head of German
intelligence in Madrid. Clentel immediately bought into the information the

(21:23):
letters had to offer, and after seeing that they were
returned to their envelopes to be returned to the British,
he personally took copies of them back to German so
the ball was rolling at this point, and we should
take a minute here to kind of talk about how
they handled these letters, so to speak, because if you're
into spy stuff, it's really kind of interesting. The letters

(21:45):
had been carefully removed from the envelopes without breaking the seals,
so you almost couldn't tell that they had been tampered with.
How they did this was by bending open the lower
flap of the envelope and using a thin metal double
prong with a blunt hook to kind of roll the
paper into a cylinder. So they just made the smallest

(22:06):
opening in a bottom flap, stuck this double prong in,
and just sort of wounded around until they turned the
letter into a cylinder and then pulled it out. It out,
but those tell tale eyelashes were missing, and there were
a few other clues that told the British later upon
examination that they had been viewed, So you could tell

(22:27):
if you really examine them closely, if you were an expert,
and you can to the naked eye, they seemed like
they hadn't been tampered with. Once the copies of these
letters were in Germany, though, the letters were immediately scrutinized
and some people were quite skeptical of them, actually, but
one of Hitler's top intelligence analysts, and that was Alexis

(22:48):
Baron von Wren, also accepted them as authentic. He seemed
to believe in them, pretty much a dent. Since Hitler
trusted Wren implicitly. This was a huge step forward for
Operation and Mince Meat. So about two to three weeks
after the body had first washed up in Huelva, the
letters made it to Hitler's death and he at first

(23:09):
was also pretty skeptical of the whole thing, but once again,
once Wren vouched for the letters, Hitler was convinced, and
soon word got through to London via wireless messages that
were intercepted by the British that the Germans had bought
into Operation Mincemeat and believed that Greece was really the
primary target. And everyone, especially Chumley and Montague, of course,

(23:33):
we're just completely overjoyed by this news, and for many
people involved it was their finest moment. The good news
was relayed to Winston Churchill by telegram like this mince
Meat swallowed road line and sinker. That was the message.
But does Operation mince Meat really deserve credit for its
own success? Some point out that the plan actually had

(23:55):
a lot of flaws, and they asked this question a lot.
I mean, some of the flaws we sort of hinted at,
I think when we were going through the story and
the preparations for the plan. The too good to be
true story of Bill Martin was one of the things
Well and the whole briefcase being chained to him. It
was an unavoidable part of the story, but probably the

(24:15):
least realistic aspect of it. In his New Yorker article,
which we mentioned in the previous podcast, Malcolm Gladwell points
out that the British also got some help from the
Germans in this situation. Major Carl Culantall, for example, he
wasn't necessarily as great an intelligence officer as most Germans
believed at the time. He was actually kind of a

(24:36):
screw up. He would believe and pass on just about
anything that was fed to him because he was so
eager to save his own hide. He was actually a
quarter Jewish and he was trying to sort of solidify
his position and show how loyal he was, and you know,
just shame like within the know, Yeah exactly, I'm the
one who's giving you this great information. Alexis Baron von

(25:00):
n Though we as we said, Hitler loved this guy
and totally trusted him because of past predictions he had
made that had indeed come to pass. Wren actually despised
Hitler and his regime. He was a smart intelligence analysts,
definitely better than Culental, but he probably put his stamp
of approval on those faked letters because he wanted to
sabotage Hitler. Regardless of why the plan worked though, or

(25:24):
why it was believed, thanks at least in part to
Operation Mincemeat, Operation Husky was considered a success and Hitler
was fouled. He sent about ninety thousand troops to grief. Meanwhile,
a hundred and sixty thousand Allied troops invaded Sicily on
July tenth, ninety three, and though they expected about ten

(25:45):
thousand casualties from that invasion, according to the BBC documentary
Operation Mincemeat, about fourteen hundred men and about a dozen
ships were lost, so way fewer than they were expecting,
and this set off it's chane of events that were
positive for the Allies and many believe changed the entire
course of the war. As for Bill Martin, that corpse

(26:09):
that washed up on the beach in Spain. Glim Michael,
as you remember, was his real name, and he was
buried in Spain in a grave numbered eighteen eighty six.
Eventually he was given a fake headstone that identified him
as Bill Martin, and then finally in nineteen the British
government had his real name put on his grave and
the story has just continued to fascinate people throughout the years.

(26:31):
Montague wrote a book himself called The Man Who Never
Was and there was a nineteen fifty six movie that
was based on this book. So so another movie to
add to our list of history movies we need to
see exactly. And I think we are back in the
swing of telling spy stories now. We both have spy
fever after researching this, and I think you've well come

(26:54):
across some other stuff too that's gotten you interested. I
was telling Dublina earlier that I'm on a Tinker Tailor
Soldiers spy kick after I read the book, then saw
the new movie, and just the other night finished watching
the excellent mini Theories. So yeah, I had spies spies
on the brain, although they're cold worth spies, so very

(27:15):
different from from this kind of stuff. And if you
like the story, I would really recommend researching it a
little bit more, either reading Montague book or McIntyre's book,
which we talked about, which is just I mean, we
mentioned a lot of names in this podcast and hopefully
it wasn't too confusing, but they're really just all fascinating
characters in their own right, and there were something that
we didn't even get a chance to mention that it

(27:37):
could be a podcasts all on their own, I think.
But if you have any podcast recommendations for us, any
spy story recommendations, maybe in particular that you'd like us
to do, or maybe you just want to write us
and tell us what's in your wallet litter, you can
certainly write us Where History Podcast at Discovery dot com,
or you can look us up on Facebook or on

(27:58):
Twitter at this in History. And if you want to
learn a little bit more about the artific spining, we
do have an article called how Spies Work. You can
find it by searching for spies on our homepage at
www dot how stuff works dot com. For more on
this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff

(28:19):
works dot com