Operation Mincemeat

by Ben MacIntyre

  South of the village of Langbank, on the road between Glasgow and Greenock along the west side of the River Clyde, they stopped to stretch and eat Dottie’s sandwiches. In the pallid dawn light of the Highlands, they posed for photographs beside the van. Jock Horsfall climbed into the back and was photographed drinking a cup of tea perched on the canister with the corpse inside.

  At Greenock Dock, on the west coast of Scotland, a launch waited to meet them. With the help of half a dozen seamen and some rope, the four-hundred-pound canister was carefully lowered into the boat, followed by the dinghy and the oars. It took only a few minutes to motor to HMS Forth, the depot ship with the submarine lying alongside. The officers of the ship were “partially25 ‘in the know,’” and the arrival of the canister provoked no suspicion or comment among the crew, “being accepted as merely being26 a more than usually urgent and breakable F.O.S. shipment.” Montagu and Cholmondeley were greeted warmly by Jewell, who gave orders for the special shipment to be lowered onto the submarine the following morning, along with a large supply of gin, sherry, and whiskey he was transporting to refresh the Eighth Flotilla in Algiers. This cargo was also kept secret from the crew.

  Jewell now received his final instructions from Montagu and Cholmondeley, and a large buff envelope containing the documents, which would be securely stashed in the submarine safe until the body was ready to be launched. In the ship’s log, the operation would be referred to as “191435B,” the code number of Jewell’s secret operational orders. At the last moment, Montagu decided to keep one of the dinghy oars as a souvenir. If the forty-four-man crew of the Seraph thought it strange to be taking on a dinghy with only one oar, no one said so.

  After three months in the imaginary company of Bill Martin, Montagu and Cholmondeley headed for home. There was something oddly touching in the leave-taking. “By this time Major Martin27 had become a completely living person to us,” wrote Montagu, who would never have come across a man like Glyndwr Michael in his normal life. The fictional creation had taken on a form of reality. “We had come to feel28 that we had known Bill Martin from his early childhood and were taking a genuine and personal interest in the progress of his courtship and financial troubles.”

  Montagu wrote in excitement to Iris, relaying his “news such as can be written”29: “I had to go up to Scotland30 last weekend. It was great fun as I and another couple had to drive up in a lorry. It was a lovely moonlit night, so wasn’t too bad even with war-time headlights and it was quite like old times to go for a long drive. I had two days on board a ship (stationary … I haven’t been to sea yet!!). It was great fun as they were a grand lot on board. When I got back things were very hectic as I had to button up the job I had been on.”

  On board the Seraph, First Lieutenant David Scott, second-in-command, was instructed by Jewell to take extra care when bringing aboard the canister marked “optical instruments.” “I was to see that this package31 was treated with every precaution to ensure that it was not bumped while being embarked through the torpedo loading hatch,” he wrote. One torpedo was left behind, to make room for the canister in the reload rack. Like most wartime submarines, the Seraph did not have enough bunks to accommodate all the crew, so they took turns sleeping in the forward torpedo room. For the next ten days, they would be sleeping alongside Bill Martin.

  At 1600 hours on April 19, HMS Seraph slipped her moorings and sailed out of Holy Loch into the Clyde. Montagu sent word to the Admiralty that Operation Mincemeat was under way. “It was a real thrill,”32 he reflected. Yet the excitement was tinged with real anxiety. “Would it work?”

  The Seraph plowed toward the sea in the gloaming. “Spring was on the way,”33 wrote Scott, “but there was little sign of it in the wooded slopes of the hills on our port side. To starboard lay Dunoon, its outlines softened by a light mist and the smoke from wood and coal fires rising from the chimneys of its dour, grey houses.” Out in the broad Clyde, the Seraph linked up with her escort, a minesweeper, whose principal task was to ward off possible attacks from British aircraft, which tended to assume submarines were hostile unless there was clear evidence otherwise.

  Abreast of the Isle of Arran in the Inner Hebrides, the Seraph performed a “trim dive”34 to ensure that the submarine was correctly balanced, and then headed into the Irish Sea. South of the Scilly Isles, the minesweeper departed, having taken aboard a canvas bag of the crew’s last letters. “A final exchange of ‘Good Luck’35 signals passed by light and we headed out into the Atlantic swell, diving shortly afterwards.” The Seraph was alone. The weather was fine, and with only a light sea running, the ship settled into the strange, half-lit world of a long submarine journey, compounded of equal parts boredom, anticipation, and fear. By day, the submarine would travel submerged; at night she would resurface and continue by diesel to recharge her batteries, and then dive again as dawn broke. If they were not attacked or otherwise diverted, covering 130 miles a day, the passage to Huelva should take ten days. It was stuffy belowdecks. The crew and officers were on watch for two hours and then off for four, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. “Monotony never really set in,”36 wrote Scott, “because at the back of our minds was the determination to survive, which demanded constant alertness.” By wartime standards, the food on the Seraph was excellent and plentiful. “We were never short of meat,37 butter, sugar or eggs. We even had luxuries like chocolate biscuits and honey. … We were lucky enough to have a chef who could bake good bread.” No one shaved, and everyone slept in their clothes. A few days out of Holy Loch and the smell of unwashed bodies and engine oil suffused the ship.

  Submarine crews develop a sixth sense for the peculiar. Long periods spent underwater, in close proximity, with little to do, when the faintest noise or smallest mistake can mean death, render submariners acutely sensitive to anything out of the ordinary. Jewell firmly believed he was the only person aboard with an inkling of the additional passenger, but at least some members of the crew suspected that the strange tubular canister in the forward torpedo room did not contain optical or meteorological instruments. It was a telltale length and oddly heavy. When the submarine lurched, a faint sloshing noise could be heard inside. Crewmen began joking about “John Brown’s Body”38 moldering in the torpedo rack and “our pal Charlie,39 the weather man coming for a ride.” Jewell himself had no idea of the identity of the body, real or fictional; in his mind he, too, had begun to refer to his passenger as “Charlie.”

  Lieutenant Scott lay on his bunk, attempting to read War and Peace and trying not to think about death. He admired Jewell, considering him the “epitome of what a submarine captain40 should be, quite fearless, he was invariably cool and calculating.” Yet however brave and astute his commanding officer, Scott knew that he was quite likely to die before his twenty-third birthday. “At that time, the chances of returning41 home from a Mediterranean based submarine were 50/50.” Before joining the Seraph, Scott had spent a week in London. On the last day of his leave, his uncle Jack and recently widowed mother took him to lunch in an expensive restaurant. When the time came to say good-bye, both mother and uncle had tears in their eyes. “I realised with a bit of a shock,”42 he recalled, “that they were thinking they might not see me again.”

  A few feet away, in his own bunk, the commander of the Seraph, Lieutenant Bill Jewell, was not thinking about death. Indeed, in more than three years of the most ferocious submarine combat and several irregular and exceptionally dangerous missions, the thought of dying seems never to have crossed his mind.

  Jewell had been born in the Seychelles, where his father, a doctor, was in the Colonial Service. He volunteered for submarine work in 1936. The war was already two years old when the young lieutenant qualified for command of the newly launched Seraph, an S-class submarine. Shortly after taking command, Jewell fell down the hatch. In 1946, a doctor pointed out that Jewell had broken two vertebrae: he fought almost the entire war with a broken neck.

  His first patrol, in July 1942, had set t
he pattern for what followed: extreme danger, a narrow escape, and a certain amount of farce. The Seraph was fired on by an RAF plane but escaped serious damage. Then, in the waters off Norway, Jewell spotted a U-boat and blew it to pieces with a single torpedo. The Seraph’s first kill turned out to be a whale.

  In October 1942, during the run-up to Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa, Bill Jewell was given his first secret mission: transporting the American general Mark Clark, Eisenhower’s deputy, to the Algerian coast for secret negotiations with the French commanders there. The invasion, led by General Patton, was already under way, and the neutrality of the Vichy forces in French Algeria was considered critical if it was to succeed. Many Vichy officers were deeply hostile to the British following the sinking of much of the French fleet at Mers el-Kébir. Clark faced an extremely delicate situation. Jewell had the equally tricky task of getting him ashore without being spotted. On October 19, the Seraph and her American passengers arrived at the designated spot, a remote coastal villa some fifty miles west of Algiers. Soon after midnight, Jewell brought the submarine to within five hundred yards of the shore and the American negotiating party disembarked in four collapsible canoes, accompanied by a protection squad of three British Marines of the Special Boat Service, led by Roger “Jumbo” Courtney, a former big-game hunter with a “bashed-in sort of face43 and a blunt no-nonsense manner.”

  The all-night negotiations went well, but at one point the visitors were forced to hide in a dusty cellar to avoid an impromptu visit from the gendarmes. Courtney suffered a coughing fit, which threatened to give them away. General Clark passed the choking commando some chewing gum.

  “Your American gum44 has so little taste,” whispered Courtney, once the spasm subsided.

  “Yes,” said Clark. “I’ve already used it.”

  When the time came to pick up the party, Jewell brought the Seraph perilously close to shore, until she was almost aground. Clark appears to have been betrayed, and moments ahead of a French raiding party the general and his party dashed for the boats, paddled through the surf, and scrambled aboard the Seraph. Jewell gave the order to turn tail and then dive. Sir Andrew Cunningham, the addressee of one of the Mincemeat letters and Royal Navy commander in chief in the Mediterranean, described the joint Anglo-American adventure as “a happy augury for the future.”45

  Jewell’s unflappability had marked him out for secret work, and his next assignment was even stranger: to pick up, from the south coast of France, General Henri Honoré Giraud. A charismatic, self-important, and popular veteran of the Great War, the sixty-three-year-old French general was seen as the only officer able to deliver French North African forces to the Allies. Giraud was hiding out with the French Resistance after having escaped from the Germans. Allied command decided that Giraud could be an important figurehead to galvanize Vichy opposition to the Germans, if he could be safely collected. The mission was code-named “Operation Kingpin.” The only problem was that the crusty general, like de Gaulle, was said to entertain a hearty loathing for the British and had insisted that if he were to be rescued, this must be done by Americans. The Seraph, therefore, would briefly have to adopt a new nationality. An American captain, Jerauld Wright, was placed in nominal command.

  Flying the Stars and Stripes, Seraph duly waited off the coast at Le Lavandou until Jewell spotted the light signals from the shore and sent a boat to pick up Giraud. The French general managed to miss his footing while transferring to the submarine and was hauled aboard dripping wet. To maintain the charade, the crew of the Seraph attempted to adopt American accents and spent the rest of the voyage imitating Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart. General Giraud, it turned out, spoke English, and was not remotely fooled. He was far too proud, however, to acknowledge the trick.

  In the wake of the North African invasion, the Seraph roamed the Mediterranean, conducting more traditional submarine operations and attacking any and every enemy vessel. In the space of a few weeks, she sank four cargo ships destined to supply Rommel’s army and disabled an Italian destroyer. Back in Algiers harbor, the piratical Jewell raised the Jolly Roger. Late in December 1942, Seraph was assigned to another secret mission: reconnaissance of the Mediterranean island of La Galite, fifty-five miles north of the African coast. The island was occupied by German and Italian troops and was used as a lookout post to monitor the movements of Allied ships. Jewell’s mission—code-named “Operation Peashooter”—was to reconnoiter the island in secret and establish whether it could be successfully attacked by a commando force led by an American, Colonel William Orlando Darby of the U.S. Army Rangers. On December 17, Jewell set off for Galita with Bill Darby as his passenger.

  The two Bills struck up an immediate friendship, which was hardly surprising, since Darby was, in Jewell’s words, “a two-fisted fighting man”46 with a taste for danger that matched Jewell’s own. The Rangers were the counterpart to Britain’s Commandos, an elite and highly trained assault force. Formed in Northern Ireland under Darby’s leadership in 1942, the Rangers had already distinguished themselves in North Africa by their courage and devotion to their leader: “We’ll fight an army on a dare,47 we’ll follow Darby anywhere.” At thirty-one years old, “El Darbo,” as his troops called him, gave the impression of having been hewn out of Arkansas granite: three times in his career he spurned promotion in order to stay at the head of his troops, a varied crew that included a jazz trumpeter, a hotel detective, a gambler, and several toughened coalminers. At Arzew in North Africa, Darby had led the First Ranger Battalion into battle, hurling hand grenades in the face of heavy machine-gun fire, “always conspicuously48 at the head of his troops.” On the way to La Galite, Darby regaled Jewell and his crew with ribald stories. For two days, the Seraph prowled around the island charting possible landing spots, while the American took photographs. “I think we can do it,”49 declared Darby. Eventually, it was ruled that no troops could be spared for the assault on La Galite, and Operation Peashooter was called off, but not before Darby got a taste of Jewell’s methods. All friendly forces had been cleared from the operational area, and Jewell’s orders invited him to “sink on sight any vessel.”50 On the way back to Algiers, he rammed one U-boat underwater and attacked another with three torpedoes, one of which failed to detonate on impact and the other two of which veered off target owing to the damage sustained in the earlier collision. Even the unshakable Darby found the experience of underwater combat alarming, telling Jewell: “Put me ashore, give me a gun51 and there isn’t anyone or anything I won’t face. But, gee, Bill, I haven’t been so scared in my life as in the last two days.”

  The Seraph had sustained serious damage to her bows, and her crew was suffering from the “constant strain,”52 as became apparent when two former friends fell out and “one grabbed a large,53 evil-looking carving knife from the galley and tried to stab the other in the back.” The Seraph was ordered to return home for rest, recuperation, and repairs. On the return journey, the submarine was attacked, once again, by a flight of Allied bombers.

  The repairs at Blyth dockyard had reset the submarine’s “broken nose,”54 giving the Seraph “a lithe, graceful look.”55 A cartoon of Ferdinand the Bull was painted on her conning tower, a reference to the children’s story about the bull who shunned the bullring—a nickname reflecting the fact that Seraph spent more time on special missions than on operational patrols.

  As the Seraph made toward Huelva, Jewell was itching for another scrap but knew he must avoid contact with the enemy if possible. “We were told that we were not56 going to be required to attack anything, as this was more important.” The RAF had issued strict instructions to aircraft not to attack any submarines on the route, and naval intelligence confirmed that there were no known enemy vessels in the Gulf of Cádiz. But then, west of Brest, about midway through the voyage, the submariners heard a noise they all knew and dreaded: the “unmistakable sounds57 of a submarine being depth charged.” Somewhere, very close at hand, a duel was under way. “We knew t
hat at least58 one of our boats was in the vicinity,” wrote Lieutenant Scott, “and as each series of explosions hit our pressure hull like a hammer, despite the distance, we feared for the safety of our friends.” Jewell had his orders, and the Seraph continued south. Scott returned to War and Peace.

  At the precise moment Bill Jewell was uncharacteristically turning his back on a fight, Ewen Montagu and Jean Leslie were preparing to go out to the theater and dinner, for the last time, as Bill Martin and his fiancée, Pam.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Bill’s Farewell

  EWEN MONTAGU HAD BEEN PLANNING “Bill Martin’s Farewell Party” for some time, but he did not tell Jean Leslie until the afternoon of April 22. He sent a note from “Bill” inviting “Pam” to see the variety star Sid Field in “Strike a New Note” at the Prince of Wales, to be followed by dinner at the Gargoyle Club. The MI5 secretary was thrilled by the invitation from her office admirer: “I rushed home,1 changed out of office clothes, and threw on some makeup.” Cholmondeley had bought four tickets for the evening performance—that way they could demonstrate that the tickets had been bought in a block, even though the counterfoils of the two in the middle were missing and already en route to Spain in a dead man’s pocket. Wasting the tickets, Montagu later wrote, would have been “absurd.”2 Besides, it was an ideal opportunity to continue the courtship of his imaginary fiancée. Charles Cholmondeley’s date for the evening was Avril Gordon, another young secretary in the office who had helped Hester Leggett compose Pam’s letters. Both women were “in the loop” on Operation Mincemeat, although ignorant of its details.