Operation Mincemeat

by Ben MacIntyre

  This, he told his mother in a letter, “added zest to the party.”51 “As the bombs came down,52 I hopped down beside a stone wall. A lot of dust and stuff flew about, and when I got up I found a bit of stone as big as a football had been blown out of the wall a few feet from my head.” Only an incurable optimist like Leverton could see the bright side of being bombed: “Another bomb fell in the sea53 and splashed us with nice cool water.” In case of further attacks, the undertaker instructed his men to dig “little graves about three feet deep54 which were most comfortable.” The guns had still not been unloaded, so Leverton tucked himself up in his foxhole and went back to sleep. Unlike his nourishing nap on the boat, this sleep was less restful. “I had rather an awful sort of dream55 of dive bombing and so forth and I woke up with a glorious sort of feeling that it was only a dream, when I realised it wasn’t a dream and the blighters were just above me in their dive.” The bombs caused only minor damage, although, as he wrote to his parents, “the concussion in my grave56 jarred a bit.”

  By nightfall, the guns were assembled and in action. To Leverton’s satisfaction, one dive-bomber was shot down on the first day. Over the next six weeks, eleven more kills would follow, “plus quite a lot of ‘possibles’57 and ‘damaged.’” Leverton was happy. “Our chaps are very bucked at knowing we were the first battery to go into action in Europe since Dunkirk.”

  It was hot on the beach, and organizing the guns in long drill slacks and gaiters was sweaty work. “I didn’t feel I was suitably dressed58 for the job,” wrote Major Leverton. “I therefore designed myself59 a utility invasion suit, consisting of a thin shirt, my blue Jantzen swimming shorts, a pair of blue gym shoes and a tin hat. An excellent and highly recommended costume.”

  And so, as the bombs fell around him, this heroic British undertaker sat in his own grave, wearing his swimming trunks and a helmet, drinking a nice cup of tea.

  MUSSOLINI WAS WOKEN by an army colonel at six in the morning to be told that the invasion of Sicily was under way. Il Duce was bullish: “Throw them back into the sea,60 or at least nail them to the shore.” He had been right all along: Sicily was the obvious target. “I’m convinced our men will resist,61 and besides the Germans are sending reinforcements,” he said. “We must be confident.”62 Never was confidence more misplaced.

  By the end of the day, more than one hundred thousand Allied troops were ashore, with ten thousand vehicles. The Italian defenders surrendered in large numbers, often simply stripping off their uniforms and walking away or running. Sicilian cheers, not bullets, greeted the invaders in many places. The British Eighth Army had expected some ten thousand casualties in the first week of the invasion; just one-seventh of that number were killed or wounded. The navy had anticipated the loss of up to three hundred ships in the first two days; barely a dozen were sunk.

  The butcher’s bill would be far smaller than Montgomery had feared, yet the invasion was still a bloody and chaotic affair. The airborne landings proved horrifically costly. Of the 147 gliders that set off from Tunisia, nearly half crashed in the sea, forced off course by strong winds and enemy flak. Just twelve landed in their assigned zones. The British held the bridge at Ponte Grande for seven hours, until the dwindling force of paratroopers ran out of ammunition and was forced to surrender. To the west, some three thousand paratroopers of the Eighty-second Airborne Division were supposed to land near Gela but ended up scattered by the storm across southeast Sicily, some as much as sixty miles off target. More than one in ten died in the first three days of fighting. Randall Harris, a sergeant in the Rangers, was one of the first onto the beach: he turned to see his company commander’s chest opened up, as if on a dissection table, by a mine. “I could see his heart beating.63 He turned to me and said ‘I’ve had it, Harry,’ then collapsed and died.” Aircraft carrying a second wave of paratroopers were shot to ribbons by “friendly fire” from the ground, resulting in the loss of twenty-three planes. “Stop, you bastards,64 stop!” screamed war correspondent Jack Belden as the gunners opened fire on what they assumed were enemy planes. At least four American paratroopers, mistaken for Germans, were shot dead on landing.

  But amid the fratricidal confusion, deception and surprise continued to provide a vital protective armor.

  At eleven o’clock the previous evening, André Latham, Agent Gilbert, had sent a wireless message to his German handlers: “Most important. Have learned65 from reliable source that large force now on its way to Sicily. Invasion may be expected hourly.” He was only telling the defenders what they already knew, for the first major alert had reached Italian coastal units several hours before Jewell dropped his homing buoy. By then, it was far too late for the defenders to make adequate preparations, and the bombing of the Sicilian telephone network ensured that many units remained unaware of the attack until it was well under way. Some went to bed, assuming the enemy would not be so rash as to attack in the middle of a storm. The Italian commander in Sicily was fully expecting an attack—indeed, the Italian intelligence services were never as taken in by the deception as their German counterparts—yet owing in part to Operation Derrick, the secondary deception, the assault was expected in the west, not the south.

  As predicted, the response of the German divisions, stationed inland, was more vigorous. But by the time the Germans counter-attacked on Sunday, July 11, crucial hours had been lost and the Allied beachhead was firmly in place. Spitfires attacked the Luftwaffe’s Sicilian headquarters, disorienting what remained of German air defenses at the crucial moment. Field Marshal Kesselring had sent the Fifteenth Panzer Division to intercept the expected invasion in the west of the island, leaving the Hermann Göring Panzers to absorb the brunt of the assault. The Germans did nothing to hide their disgust as the Italian troops melted away and the coastal defenses collapsed like sand castles in a hurricane. A message to Berlin, sent on the day after the landings, reported the “complete failure of coastal defence”66 and noted sourly that “on enemy penetration many67 of the local police and civil authorities fled. In Syracuse, the enemy landings gave rise to plundering and rioting by the population, who accepted the landings with indifference.” So many Italians surrendered in the first two days that the long lines of prisoners impeded the advancing troops. Kesselring complained that “half-clothed Italian soldiers68 were careering around the countryside in stolen lorries.”

  AT FIVE FIFTEEN on the afternoon of D-day, Kesselring ordered the Hermann Göring Armored Division: “At once and with all forces attack69 and destroy whatever opposes the division. The Führer has ordered all forces to be brought into operation immediately in order to prevent the enemy from establishing itself.” The German tanks could not break through. Some forty-three were destroyed, in bitter and bloody combat. The commander of the Göring division conceded: “The counterattack against hostile70 landings has failed.” The German tanks rumbled north to continue the fight inland. General Patton, screeching around the battlefield in his jeep, called it “the shortest Blitzkrieg71 in history.” Montgomery agreed with him on this, if nothing else: “The German in Sicily72 is doomed. Absolutely doomed. He won’t get away.”

  THE CONQUEST OF the island was just beginning, and more ferocious fighting was to come, but the Sicilian D-day was over, and won.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Hook, Line, and Sinker

  A LOUD CHEER ERUPTED from Room 13 as the news of success in Sicily broke. Cholmondeley performed a shuffling dance and a strange ululation. “Auntie” Joan Saunders wiped her eyes.

  The strain of waiting had been almost unbearable. As the success of Operation Mincemeat became clearer, Montagu privately feared his part in the war might be coming to an end. “Even if I have once brought off1 something really important and worth-while … I’m never going to be allowed to do anything of the kind again.” The pressure had left the planners hollow-eyed, in Montagu’s words, “too keyed-up to read2 a book or to get to sleep.”

  Looking back, Montagu recalled the flooding relief as the Allie
s surged through Sicily.

  “It is really impossible3 to describe the feeling of joy and satisfaction at knowing that the team must have saved the lives of hundreds of Allied soldiers during the invasion—a feeling mixed with the delight that we had managed to do what we said we could do and what so many of our seniors had said was impossible—and what I have always thought even Churchill really thought was only worth trying as a desperate measure.” For Montagu, a special pleasure lay in the subsequent discovery that Hitler himself had fallen for the phony documents: “Joy of joys to anyone,4 and particularly a Jew, the satisfaction of knowing that they had directly and specifically fooled that monster.”

  The deception had succeeded beyond every expectation, and Montagu was jubilant: “We fooled those of the Spaniards5 who assisted the Germans, we fooled the German Intelligence Service both in Spain and in Berlin, we fooled the German Operational Staff and Supreme Command, we fooled Keitel, and, finally, we fooled Hitler himself, and kept him fooled right up to the end of July.” The operation had also been gratifyingly economical: “One specially made canister,6 one battledress uniform, some dry ice, the time of a few officers, a van drive to Scotland and back, about 60 miles added to HMS Seraph’s passage and a few sundries: about £200 at most.”

  There was no grand celebration over the success of Operation Mincemeat, no return to the Gargoyle Club with Montagu and Jean Leslie playing the parts of Bill Martin and his beloved Pam. Montagu’s wife, Iris, perhaps prompted by the dark hints from her mother-in-law, had announced that she was returning from America with the children. Montagu knew that Hitler was still planning to unleash pilotless flying bombs on London and that the capital remained deeply unsafe. Since this information came from Ultra, however, he could not tell Iris. “The most I could do7 was make vague references to ‘Hitler’s last fling.’ But this made no impression on her.” It was probably not Hitler’s fling that worried her. Iris and the children returned to London while the invasion of Sicily was under way. The reunion was a joyful one. The photograph of Pam in her bathing suit, lovingly signed, was swiftly removed from Montagu’s dressing table. Montagu could not yet explain what that was all about. Perhaps this was just as well.

  Secret messages of congratulation flooded in from those who had touched, or been touched by, Operation Mincemeat. Dudley Clarke, the cross-dressing maverick behind “A” Force, wrote: “I do congratulate you8 most warmly on the success of your ‘M’ operation. It was very remarkable and a fine piece of organisation and whatever the developments may be you have achieved 100% success.” General Nye also applauded the planners: “It is a most interesting story9 and it seems it was swallowed hook, line and sinker.” Frank Foley, the celebrated MI6 officer who had helped thousands of Jews to escape from Germany before the war, told Montagu that the operation had been “the greatest achievement10 in the [deception] line ever brought off.” In his diary, Guy Liddell celebrated: “Mincemeat has been an outstanding success.”11

  There was already talk of medals for the framers of Operation Mincemeat. Johnnie Bevan and Ewen Montagu had spent months at loggerheads, but to Bevan’s great credit he insisted that both Montagu and Cholmondeley deserved formal recognition, albeit secretly. “From evidence at present available12 it appears that a certain deception operation proved a considerable success and influenced German dispositions with all-important strategical and operational results. The fact that it achieved such very successful results must be attributed in large measure to the ingenuity and tireless energy on the part of these two officers.” Montagu had pushed the operation through by force of personality, while Cholmondeley “was the originator of this ingenious13 scheme and was responsible, in conjunction with a certain naval officer, for the detailed execution of the operation.” Both men, Bevan recommended, “should receive a similar decoration, since each seems to have played equally vital parts on the plot.”

  Montagu was so delighted by the success of Mincemeat that he proposed a sequel. A plane carrying the Polish prime minister in exile, Władysław Sikorski, had crashed on takeoff from Gibraltar on July 4. Six days later, on Sicilian D-day, Montagu sent a note to Bevan pointing out that “papers from Sikorski’s aircraft14 are still washing up and likely to reach the Spanish shore” and suggesting that this might be an opportunity to plant some false documents among the debris. The object would be “to show that Mincemeat was genuine15 and that we are going to attack Greece, etc. and that we only delayed it and switched from Brimstone [Sardinia] to Sicily because we suspected that the Spaniards might have shown the papers in Mincemeat to the Germans.” Mincemeat II was vetoed by Rushbrooke, the director of naval intelligence, because the Germans could not be expected to fall for the same ruse twice. “Not worth trying.16 The Spaniards will know that everything of importance has been recovered, and a valuable secret ‘wash up’ could have no verisimilitude.”

  The success of the Sicily invasion could not, of course, be attributed to Operation Mincemeat alone. To an important degree, the deception plan reinforced what the Germans already believed. Every element of Operation Barclay—of which Mincemeat was but one strand—tended to back up that misperception. Moreover, the comparative weakness of German forces in Sicily reflected Hitler’s mounting doubts about Italy’s commitment to the war. Sicily was a strategic jewel, but it was also an island, physically separated from the rest of the Axis forces. If large numbers of German troops were committed to defend it, but Italy dropped out of the war, they would be isolated, and Sicily would become, in Kesselring’s words, a “mousetrap for all German17 and Italian forces fighting down there.”

  Yet up to, and even after, the invasion of Sicily, the effects of Mincemeat lingered on in German tactical planning, slewing attention to the east and west. The night before the attack, Keitel had distributed a “Most Immediate”18 analysis of Allied intentions, predicting a major Allied landing in Greece, and a joint attack on Sardinia and Sicily: “Western assault forces appear19 to be ready for an immediate attack while the Eastern forces appear to be still forming up,” he wrote. “A subsequent landing20 on the Italian mainland is less probable than one on the Greek mainland.” Half the Allied troops available in North Africa, Keitel predicted, would be used “to reinforce the bridgehead which … would be established in Greece.”

  Ultra intercepts showed that four hours after the landings, twenty-one ground-attack aircraft took off from Sicily, which was now under attack, heading for Sardinia, which was not. The same day, the Abwehr in Berlin sent a message to its Spanish office “stating that the High Command21 in Berlin were particularly anxious that a sharp lookout should be kept for convoys passing through the straits of Gibraltar which might be going to attack Sardinia. It gave, as a reason for these orders that the High Command appreciated that the attack on Sicily was possibly only a feint and that the main attack was going to be elsewhere.” That assessment, Naval Intelligence noted with satisfaction, was “entirely consistent with the Mincemeat story.”22

  The same effects were visible at the other end of the Mediterranean, where the fictional attack on Greece was directly undermining Germany’s ability to repel the genuine attack on Sicily. The R-boats, or Räumboote, were 150-ton minesweepers and a key component of German naval strength, used to pick up mines but also for convoy escort, coastal patrol, mine laying, and rescuing downed air crews. On July 12, Sicilian D-day +2, the commander of German naval forces in Italy cabled headquarters to complain that “the departure of the 1st R-boat23 Group, sent to the Aegean for the defence of Greece, had prejudiced the defence of Sicily, as the Gela barrages were no longer effective, the shortage of escort vessels was ‘chronic,’ and the departure of any more boats, as ordered, would have a serious effect.” Yet the belief in an impending Greek attack remained rooted: in late July, Rommel was dispatched by Hitler to Salonika to take command of the defense of Greece if and when the Allies attacked. The Abwehr laid intricate plans in anticipation of the expected assault on Greece, including teams of secret agents and saboteurs to
be left behind if the Germans were forced to withdraw.

  The recriminations on the Axis side started almost immediately after the invasion. When he heard that the Italian coastal defenders had failed to repulse the attack, Goebbels muttered darkly about “macaroni-eaters”24 but refrained from pointing out that he had never quite believed in the Abwehr’s great intelligence coup. Hitler never admitted he had been fooled, but his military response to the invasion was proof enough that he knew he had made a major strategic error in failing to reinforce Sicily. “Hitler’s own reaction25 was immediate. He ordered two more German formations, 1st Parachute and 29th Panzer Grenadier Division to be hurried to Sicily to throw the invaders into the sea.” Again, it was too late.

  Others within the German hierarchy realized they had been sold a fantastic and extremely damaging lie and responded with fury. Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi foreign minister, demanded a full explanation of why Major Martin’s documents, indicating that the attack on Sicily was a decoy, had been so blithely accepted as genuine: “This report has been proved26 to be false, since the operation directed by the English and Americans against Sicily, far from being a sham attack, was of course one of their planned major offensives in the Mediterranean. … The report from ‘a wholly reliable source’ was deliberately allowed by the enemy to fall into Spanish hands in order to mislead us.” Von Ribbentrop suspected that the Spaniards had been in on the ruse all along and ordered his ambassador in Madrid, Dieckhoff, to conduct a full-scale witch-hunt: “Undertake a most careful27 reappraisal of the whole matter and consider in so doing whether the persons from whom the information emanated are directly in the pay of the enemy, or whether they are hostile to us for other reasons.” Dieckhoff blustered and tried to swerve out of the way: “The documents had been found28 on the body of a shot-down English officer, and handed over in the original to our counter-intelligence here by the Spanish General Staff. The documents were investigated by the Abwehr and I have not heard their investigations cast any doubt on their authenticity.” Rather weakly, Dieckhoff argued that the enemy must have altered its plans after losing the documents. “The English and Americans had29 every intention of acting in the way laid down in the documents. Only later did they change their minds, possibly regarding the plans as compromised by the shooting down of the English bearer.”