What was Operation Mincemeat? Operation Mincemeat was a deception by British military intelligence during World War Two to convince the Germans that Britain was going to invade Greece and Sardinia, rather than Sicily, the intended target. They planted false documents on a body that the Germans believed was a Royal Marine Major. The ruse was successful.
Britain had been forced out of Europe by the German occupation in early 1940. Since then, they had targeted Africa. In 1940, Italy had declared war on Britain and sent troops to Africa to extend Italian territories there. By early 1941, Britain had recaptured most of the territory and captured 130,000 Italian soldiers. Hitler realized that he would need to support the Italians and sent German troops into Africa. It was hit and miss for a while, but by May 1943, the Allies had captured the last German forces in Africa and secured the north of the continent. This gave them a very convenient stepping stone to begin an attack on southern Europe. The most logical stepping stone was Sicily because that would protect Allied shipping in the Mediterranean, and it would give the Allies a base to head into Italy. The Germans obviously new this and would send everything they had to prevent the invasion. The Allies needed the Germans to think that the invasion was going to take place somewhere else. And that is where Operation Mincemeat comes in.
The British needed a way to convince the Germans that Sicily wasn’t the real target. They hit upon the idea of the body of a soldier carrying fake military plans being found by the enemy. It would drift into Spain, where people sympathetic to the Nazis would pass the information on. This idea wasn’t new, but it had never been tested to the extent that British military intelligence would take it. The first step was to find the body. They couldn’t just use any body because all bodies were accounted for. They also needed a body that had died by causes that could be covered up. The idea was that the body the Germans would find had come from a plane that had crashed in the sea. It wouldn’t have needed to die by drowning because the shock of the plane crash would have killed it. After a lot of searching, the body of a homeless man who had eaten rat poison turned up. He was later identified as (probably) a Welshman called Ewen Montagu. After a lot of research, military intelligence learned that traces of the rat poison would have disappeared after the body’s time in the sea and that the Spanish very rarely performed post-mortems. The body was kept in a fridge at a temperature low enough to prevent decomposition but not low enough to freeze.
They needed to make the body into a realistic soldier, so they created an identity and a backstory. They named him Major William Martin. They filled his pockets with what the intelligence service calls “pocket litter”. They gave him a photo of his fiancée (just an office worker), love letters, a receipt for an engagement ring, bank overdraft letters, theater ticket stubs, and lots of other things to make him look like a real person. Then they put the most important items in a briefcase and chained it to his belt. The briefcase held letters that said the Allies were only pretending to attack Sicily as a diversion and were actually intending to hit Greece and Sardinia. The body was loaded aboard a submarine and released just off the Spanish coast.
The body was picked up by the Spanish authorities. The British used a code network that they knew the Germans had cracked to send messages about a plane crash and the importance of getting back the briefcase that Major Martin was carrying. They wanted the Germans to think it was important and believe its contents. The Spanish picked up the body and, after a while, the briefcase and its contents reached the Germans. The Germans opened the letters, photographed them, and then returned them so that the British would not know they had been opened, or so they thought. The British had planted small clues in the documents, such as an eyelash, to see if they had been read.
Because of the deception, Hitler believed it completely. He ordered thousands of troops, aircraft, and tanks from Sicily to Greece and Sardinia. When the Allies invaded Sicily on 9th July, 1943, the island was much less defended than it otherwise would have been, and the invasion succeeded fairly easily. Operation Mincemeat is still regarded as one of the greatest deception operations in military history. And this is what I learned today.
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat
https://www.history.com/articles/what-was-operation-mincemeat
https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/second-world-war/intelligence/the-war-on-paper-operation-mincemeat
https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/military-history-and-science/allied-forces-invade-sicily
Photo by simon phillips: https://www.pexels.com/photo/black-and-white-photo-of-an-aircraft-27057738/