Myths & Legends of the Second World War

by James Hayward

  Thanks to the Open Government Initiative of 1994, an Admiralty file by Ewen Montagu on ‘Naval Deception’ had been declassified without fanfare, and contained not only the definitive account of Operation Mincemeat, but also the long-coveted name – Glyndwr Michael. His true identity was subsequently confirmed to Morgan by the Ministry of Defence, and further research revealed Michael to have been the illegitimate son of illiterate South Wales mining stock, born in Aberbargoed on 4 January 1909 to Thomas Michael and Sarah Ann Chadwick. Against this background, the gravestone at Huelva is seen to offer substantial clues, interpolating Glyndwyr, An(tonia) and the Welsh connection. Sadly that link had been severed by 1995, and Morgan was unable to trace any surviving members of the Michael family.

  The naming of Glyndwr Michael also served to shed light on why Montagu and others were so keen to keep his identity secret. In The Man Who Never Was, Montagu recalled that the task of procuring a suitable corpse had thrown up unforeseen difficulties:

  At one time we feared we might have to do a body-snatch – ‘do a Burke and Hare’ as one of us put it; but we did not like that idea, if we could possibly avoid it. We managed to make some very guarded inquiries from a few Service Medical officers whom we could trust; but when we heard of a possibility, either the relatives were unlikely to agree or we could not trust those whose permission we would need not to mention to other close relatives what had happened.

  By 1977, in Beyond Top Secret U, Montagu felt able to state that his team had ‘searched and searched’ for a suitable body. Furthermore:

  I gave a solemn promise never to reveal whose body it was and, as there is no-one alive from whom I can get a release, I can say no more than that it was the body of a young man who had died of pneumonia. As I am not identifying him, I can perhaps add the ironic fact that he was a bit of a ne’er-do-well, and that the only worthwhile thing he ever did he did after his death.

  The truth is probably that no such inquiries were made, no consent sought or obtained from Glyndwr Michael’s relatives in Wales, and no promise of anonymity made. Instead it is far more likely that the very ‘body-snatch’ Montagu professed to dislike was not avoided at all, and that a body was simply hijacked. Even in wartime such ‘Burke and Hare’ activity was technically illegal, and ran contrary to a raft of legislation and procedures, including the rules relating to coroners and registrars, and the Removal of Bodies from England Regulations 1927. No relevant registry records survive from this period, but in any event may never have been made in the case of Glyndwr Michael. A failure to contact and gain consent from living relatives is probably chief among the unspecified ‘various reasons’ offered by Montagu for not obtaining a genuine photograph of Michael for his faked ID card.

  There is in fact more than a hint of professional unease in the following passage from the biography of coroner Bentley Purchase, written by Robert Jackson shortly after his subject died after falling from the roof of his home near Ipswich in September 1961:

  Purchase insisted that his name should not be mentioned. His action in providing the body had the sanction not only of the government but the man’s own relatives, but he was still worried about the effect on public opinion of the unorthodox disposal of a body which had been in his keeping.

  As a serving judge, and a Queen’s Counsel to boot, Montagu too would undoubtedly have been sensitive over any past conduct tainted by illegality, even though it is hard to conceive that anyone in their right mind would condemn any wartime aspect of Mincemeat. For it is beyond dispute that Charles Cholmondeley’s ‘wild idea’ ranks as one of the most successful deception operations of the entire war.

  Yet even with the identification of Glyndwr Michael, questions over Operation Mincemeat remain. Curiously, it was never integrated into the main strategic deception plan for the invasion of Sicily, code-named Barclay. Although Barclay was approved by the Chief of Staffs’ Committee on 10 April 1943, and is available for inspection at the PRO, in discussing various methods for feeding disinformation to the enemy, no mention whatsoever is made of Mincemeat. Nor was it mentioned in the definitive chronicle of the Allied planning for Husky by Richard Leighton, published in the US Naval Institute Proceedings. According to Masterman, the Controller of Deception ‘sponsored’ the scheme only at a late stage, and in May ‘took responsibility for the developments’ after the body had been washed ashore in Spain. All of which only serves to underline the fact that Mincemeat stood outside the central planning both for Barclay and Husky, and was simply part of a larger whole which paved the way for the successful conquest of Sicily in little more than a week.

  Montagu’s account gave rise to yet another myth, namely that Mincemeat alone made the landings successful. When The Man Who Never Was appeared in book form in 1953, the introduction penned by Ian Colvin for the Sunday Express serialisation was abandoned in favour of a short foreword by General Hastings Ismay, the Chief of Staff between 1940 and 1946, who wrote that:

  The operation succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. To have spread-eagled the German defensive effort right across Europe, even to the extent of sending German vessels away from Sicily itself, was a remarkable achievement. Those who landed in Sicily, as well as their families, have cause to be especially grateful.

  Montagu repeated these words in Beyond Top Secret U, but Ismay’s bold claim had little foundation in reality. True, from early May 1943 the enemy were deceived into rating the defence of Greece, Sardinia and Corsica on an equal footing with Sicily. In June the reconditioned 1st Panzer Division, with 83 tanks and 18,000 men, were moved from Brittany to Greece, while another 22 tanks were diverted to Corsica. On Sicily itself, there were just 30,000 German troops by July, and 42 tanks, together with a larger but much less effective Italian force. Mussolini alone was convinced that the blow would fall on Sicily, but by this stage in the war was little heeded in Berlin. Defences were concentrated in the west and north of the island, rather than the south, and motor torpedo boats were transferred to the Aegean. Indeed even two weeks after the main Allied assault on Sicily on 10 July, Hitler still felt sure that a heavier attack would fall on Greece, and on the 25th sent Rommel to command his forces there.

  Yet Mincemeat cannot claim sole credit for this. The plan hatched by Cholmondeley and Montagu did not exist in a vacuum, and formed part of an ongoing and methodical policy of strategic deception. In the Mediterranean, Operation Barclay sought to tie down Axis forces in the south of France and the Balkans peninsula, and to secure the greatest possible degree of surprise for the assault on Sicily. By late 1942 British deception agencies had already succeeded in convincing the Abwehr that the British army was 50 per cent larger than it actually was, and capable of attacking in several directions, when in fact there were insufficient landing craft for more than one operation. As part of Barclay bogus radio transmissions continued to talk up British military strength, and Mediterranean convoys were routed so as to aid the general deception, while on the day – 10 July – surprise was also achieved on Sicily by landing in rough weather. Against this background Mincemeat may be seen as simply a dividend which undoubtedly distracted attention from the island, but was not responsible for all German troop movements in southern Europe during the summer of 1943. Indeed the documents conveyed by Major Martin told the enemy little or nothing they did not already expect.

  In closing, it is perhaps relevant to Operation Mincemeat that the Americans were always nervous about the assault on Sicily. Forceful objections to the attack had been raised at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, partly informed by the sheer obviousness of Sicily as a target, while Eisenhower later tried to impose a condition that the landing was to be cancelled if there was reason to believe that more than two German divisions were defending the island. It can hardly have helped that early in May the US Naval Secretary, Colonel Frank Knox, declared publicly that Sicily was next in line for occupation. Clearly, much turned on the success of the various deception operations, which was reflected in the fact that it was deemed
expedient to enlist the services of Section B1A of MI5, which ran turned German agents in Britain. Charles Cholmondeley seems to have envisaged just such a critical mission in his original written proposal, quoted in the Official History:

  While this courier cannot be guaranteed to get through, if he does succeed, information in the form of the documents can be of a far more secret nature than it would be possible to introduce through any other normal B1A channel.

  It remains a matter of conjecture just how far these channels ran in relation to Major Martin. The Official History states that the corpse was released into the sea off Huelva because the German vice-consul there was known to be ‘highly competent’, while Montagu referred to a ‘very active German agent’ at Huelva who boasted ‘excellent contacts with certain Spaniards’. After being retrieved from the sea on 30 April the body was handed over to the Spanish naval headquarters at Huelva, but the briefcase dispatched straight to Madrid, from where the Abwehr appear to have been keen to endorse the false documents as genuine, and to emphasise the importance of the find. By 11 May Foreign Armies West (FHW), the traditionally sceptical army intelligence department, had described the Martin material as ‘absolutely convincing’, while an appraisal delivered to Admiral Dönitz on the 14th offered that ‘the genuineness of the captured documents is above suspicion’ and assessing as ‘slight’ any suggestion that ‘they have intentionally fallen into our hands’.

  Quite what transpired between Huelva, Madrid and Berlin between 30 April and 9 May, when the first appreciation reached the German High Command, is impossible to say. However, the suspicion remains that unspecified intelligence channels on both sides left less to chance than is apparent from the information so far disclosed by official papers, and that some in the Abwehr welcomed – and even expected – the arrival of Glyndwr Michael, alias Major William Martin, RM.

  10

  Canaris and the Abwehr

  In late 1934 Wilhelm Canaris was marking time as the commandant of Swinemunde Fort on the Baltic, patiently awaiting retirement with the rank of Rear-Admiral. The following January, very much to his surprise, he was appointed as chief of the German military intelligence service by Admiral Raeder, whose reputed dislike of Canaris was overridden by a desire to prevent the Abwehr falling under the control of the army. In February 1944 the labyrinthine and allegedly inefficient Abwehr was finally absorbed by the SS, and in July Canaris was arrested on suspicion of treason. On the evening of 8 April 1945 he was tried before an SS Standgericht (summary court) at Flossenburg and sentenced to death. The following morning he was hanged – twice, according to some accounts – and burned on a common funeral pyre.

  Although at least three major biographies of Canaris have been published since 1949, as well as countless studies of the Abwehr, there is little or no consensus on whether the Admiral acted as a British agent, or was simply a courageous German patriot who opposed the Nazi creed. Whatever the truth, the myths, legends and fictions surrounding Canaris are legion. He is said to have conducted an affair with Mata Hari while in Madrid in 1916, and then betrayed her to the British secret service once she had outlived her usefulness. Some allege that in the same year Stewart Menzies, later head of MI6, was sent to Spain to kill or capture Canaris, evidently without success. Some accounts portray him as a powerful and omnipotent Nazi leader, able to command all German forces on land, sea and air, as well as the SS and Gestapo. Others link him to an attempt to frustrate the sinking of the Royal Oak at Scapa Flow in October 1939 and the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in May 1942, while a film biography made in 1954 suggested that he secured the cancellation of Operation Sealion by showing the German High Command film of British flame defences. It hardly helped that Canaris himself revelled in intrigue, and fostered the belief that he was descended from the Greek freedom fighter Konstantin Kanaris, when in fact his family hailed from Lombardy. Had he survived the war, he might well have been flattered by the fact that he has appeared as a character in a string of novels and thrillers, including The Eagle Has Landed (1975), Sea Wrack (1980), The Canaris Fragments (1982) and Shingle Street (2002). Some even suggested that rumours of his demise were much exaggerated. In his highly unreliable account Secrets of the British Secret Service, published in 1948 under the name E.M. Cookridge, Edward Spiro reported that the previous year the French Intelligence Service had discovered Canaris ‘in Argentina, living under an assumed name’.

  Few, if any, of these theories have any basis in reality. However, in 1983 the intelligence historian Nigel West was able to establish as a fact that Canaris passed information to the Allies through his Polish mistress, Halina Szymanska. This much was afterwards confirmed by Andrew King, a former MI6 passport control officer in Zurich and a member of the same Z network. Szymanska was the wife of the former Polish military attaché in Berlin, who Canaris helped to escape to Switzerland in September 1939, where she was installed as a typist at the Polish legation in Berne. MI6 gave her the designation Z-5/1, and equipped her with a false French identity in the name of Marie Clenat. In February 1940 Canaris sent an Abwehr officer named Hans Bernd Gisevius to Switzerland under vice-consular cover to provide support for Szymanska. Canaris himself seems to have met with Szymanska on relatively few occasions, in Italy and France as well as Switzerland. As we shall see, the popular consensus is that the information passed by Canaris to London via this conduit was in the nature of political rather than military intelligence, although this is impossible to verify. Nevertheless, Gisevius too was in contact with MI6, and in this way information was passed from the Abwehr to British intelligence. Misinformation no doubt flowed the other way, and although no details are available there can be little doubt that in this way Allied counter-espionage and deception operations great and small were actively assisted by elements within the Abwehr.

  Surprisingly, the core of the astonishing revelation about agent Z-5/1 had been made public as early as 1951, although at the time the significance of Halina Szymanska’s story seems not to have been appreciated. For this we have to thank Ian Colvin, the veteran journalist whose role in the tortuous story of The Man Who Never Was was examined in Chapter Nine. Unfortunately, there is rather less to admire in his contribution to the Canaris debate. In 1951 Colvin published Chief of Intelligence, a speculative assessment of the Admiral’s career later reprinted as Hitler’s Secret Enemy. The book invited readers to make up their own minds on whether Canaris had acted as a British agent, and, as with The Man Who Never Was, Colvin claimed his curiosity had first been aroused by chance remark over dinner with a senior establishment figure. His source this time was Sir Christopher Warner, an under secretary at the Foreign Office, who hinted that:

  British intelligence was not badly equipped. As you know, we had Admiral Canaris, and that was a considerable thing.

  In about 1950, a Polish diplomat introduced Colvin to one ‘Madame J’, then living in Surrey. Madame J was in fact Halina Szymanska, although Colvin obscured her true identity, and during her lifetime it was never expressly acknowledged that Szymanska had been a mistress to Canaris. To Colvin, Madame J acknowledged that she had known the Admiral, but denied ever having been a spy. By her account (albeit edited by Colvin), during his visits Canaris had never asked Szymanska for information concerning the Allies, but did volunteer information about Hitler’s plans:

  The Admiral never asked me to find out anything for him about the Allies, although he must have known that I was in touch with my own countrymen in Berne, and, through them, with the British. Not long after I had arrived in Switzerland he made a visit to Berne. That was in the winter of 1939 … During his first visit I could not be sure that Switzerland was not going to be invaded next, so I asked him whether I should go on to France. ‘No, not France, that is an uncertain place.’

  I don’t suppose you could call Admiral Canaris an indiscreet man or he would not have held that high position in Germany for so long. But he could be very outspoken. He told me that winter of 1940 that Germany would certainly make w
ar on her treaty partner Russia sooner or later … During the first stages of the Russian campaign he visited me again – that would have been in October 1941 – and said that the German front had run fast and bogged down in Russia and that it would never reach its objectives. But he was most interesting when he was talking about the tension within Germany and the conspiracy that was gathering against Hitler.

  When Colvin asked Szymanska if Canaris had known that she had the ear of British intelligence, she replied that his ‘calculated indiscretions’ were exclusively ‘in the sphere of high politics’, but that she could ‘sense from them what was imminent’. Furthermore:

  He would not have told me of purely military matters – small treason such as agents deal in … At times the tension in him affected me deeply when he spoke of their aims against Hitler. I asked the British sometimes, ‘Shall I tell him to go ahead?’ The British were very correct in such matters and said nothing. But the British Secret Service could keep secrets, and throughout the war this link was undiscovered.

  Colvin met Madame J again some months later, when she instructed him to ‘make it plain that he did not give away ordinary military secrets, otherwise the Germans will say that he was a British spy’.

  In his book Colvin covered his meetings with Madame J in isolation, and perhaps doubted the truth of her story. Certainly all details of the Admiral’s anonymous Polish ladyfriend were ignored by all subsequent biographers, including André Brissaud (1973) and Heinz Hohne (1979). It was not until 1983 that the truth of Halina Szymanska’s story was confirmed by Nigel West, at a stroke rendering much of what had previously been written about Canaris redundant. Had Colvin stopped there, his part in the development of the Canaris story (and mythology) would mirror his role in the story of The Man Who Never Was: that of a determined investigative journalist who touched on the truth, but by virtue of being first on the case in a climate of close official secrecy, was unable to unravel the full story. However, in his introduction to a biography of Canaris by André Brissaud, published in Britain in 1973, Colvin made a claim which was as unlikely as it was startling: