Operation Mincemeat

by Ben MacIntyre

  Von Ribbentrop was having none of it. “The British Secret Service is quite30 capable of causing forged documents to reach the Spaniards,” he insisted. The deception had been intended to persuade Germany “that we should not adopt31 any defensive measures … or that we should adopt only inadequate ones.” With the Allies storming through Sicily, he wanted names, and he wanted heads to roll. “It is practically certain32 that the English purposely fabricated these misleading documents and allowed them to fall into Spanish hands so that they might reach us by this indirect route. The only question is whether the Spaniards saw through this game, or whether they were themselves taken in.” The finger of suspicion pointed at Admiral Moreno, the double-dealing Navy Minister, and at Adolf Clauss and his Spanish spies. Further up the chain of command, it cast a shadow over the Abwehr in Spain and the intelligence analysts in Berlin who had verified the fakes. “Who originally circulated33 the information?” demanded von Ribbentrop. “Are they directly in the pay of our enemies?”

  Karl-Erich Kühlenthal was also in the firing line. “After the invasion of Italy34 had actually taken place, Berlin reprimanded [the Abwehr office in] Spain for having failed to submit adequate data.” Kühlenthal, as adept at escaping blame as he was skilled at gathering credit, kept his head down until the storm passed. He must have known that the documents passed to Berlin back in May had been proven entirely misleading, but he said nothing. Kühlenthal watched the invasion of Sicily with mounting consternation, but at least one of his fellow intelligence experts, who had played an equal role in facilitating the fraud, may have witnessed the unfolding of events with secret satisfaction. Not until July 26, more than a fortnight after the landings in Sicily, did Alexis von Roenne, head of FHW and secret anti-Nazi conspirator, issue a report stating that “at present at any rate,35 the attack planned against the Peloponnese had been given up.” Von Roenne was too canny to acknowledge that the letters were fakes; he merely asserted, like Dieckhoff, that the plans had changed. In Hitler’s world there was no room for an honest mistake.

  The most significant victim in the fallout on the Axis side was Mussolini himself. From the first Allied footfall in Sicily, Il Duce was doomed, though he refused to acknowledge it. Goebbels noted: “The only thing certain36 in this war is that Italy will lose it.” The Pact of Steel was cracking up. By July 18, the Allied front line had moved halfway up Sicily. That day, Mussolini sent an almost defiant cable to Hitler: “The sacrifice of my country37 cannot have as its principal purpose that of delaying a direct attack on Germany.” The Führer summoned him to an urgent meeting. Il Duce did not care to be summoned anywhere but went meekly. The two fascist leaders met in Feltre, fifty miles from Venice, where Hitler launched into a long harangue, lambasting the “inept and cowardly”38 Italian troops in Sicily and insisting: “What has happened now in Sicily must not be allowed to happen again.” In the midst of the tirade, an aide interrupted to inform Mussolini that Rome was under massive air attack, the first time the capital had been targeted. Mussolini sat impassively through the two-hour monologue. The great Italian bull seemed to be fatally gored, diminished, and distant. At the end of the excruciating meeting, he said simply: “We are fighting for a common39 cause, Führer.” It sounded more like an epitaph than a statement of solidarity. On July 22, Palermo fell to Patton’s American troops. Three days later, Mussolini was outvoted by the Fascist Grand Council, summoned by King Victor Emmanuel III to a private audience, and toppled. “It can’t go on any longer,”40 said the king: Mussolini must resign at once, to be replaced by Marshal Pietro Badoglio, the former chief of the armed forces. Italy’s deposed dictator left the royal Villa Savoia hidden in an ambulance, and the new government in Rome began the secret task of extracting Italy from the war and Hitler’s poisonous embrace. In Badoglio’s words: “Fascism fell, as was fitting,41 like a rotten pear.” The next day, Rommel was recalled from Greece to defend northern Italy.

  Would it have fallen so fast, or rotted so quickly, without Operation Mincemeat? The invasion of Sicily was a far from perfect military operation, bedeviled by poor planning and personal rivalries between selfish and powerful men. A relatively small contingent of German troops successfully held up the advance of an Allied host seven times larger and then evacuated the island to continue the battle up mainland Italy. The fight for Sicily was grim, bitter, and costly. But how much worse would it have been had the Nazi high command been prepared for it? What if, say, the full-strength, battle-tempered First Panzer Division, instead of being dispatched to Greece to await an imaginary invasion, had been deployed along the coast at Gela?

  It is impossible to calculate how many lives, on both sides of the conflict, were saved by Operation Mincemeat, or exactly how much it contributed to hastening the end of the war and the defeat of Hitler. The Allies had expected it would take ninety days to conquer Sicily. The occupation was completed on August 17, thirty-eight days after the invasion began. Looking back after the war, Professor Percy Ernst Schramm, keeper of the OKW war diary, left no doubt that the fake documents had played a critical role: “It is well known that under42 the influence of the letters, Hitler moved troops to Sardinia and southern Greece, thereby preventing them from taking part in the defence against [Husky].” In September, Italy formally surrendered, although the war in Italy would not end until May 1945.

  The impact of the Sicilian invasion was felt 1,500 miles away on the blood-soaked eastern front and, most important, around the Russian city of Kursk. On July 4, Hitler had launched Operation “Citadel,” his massive, long-awaited offensive against the Red Army following the German defeat at Stalingrad. The battle of Kursk would be history’s largest tank battle, the most costly day of aerial warfare yet fought, and Germany’s last major strategic offensive in the east. With nine hundred thousand troops and three thousand tanks, Field Marshal Erich von Manstein planned to eliminate the bulge in the lines known as the Kursk salient, encircle the Soviets, and then head south to reconquer more lost territory. Repeated delays and excellent Soviet intelligence ensured that the Red Army had a good idea of what was coming. Like Sicily, Kursk was an obvious target; unlike Sicily, by the time the attack came, it was massively fortified, with layered, in-depth lines of defense, a million mines, three thousand miles of trenches, and an army of 1.3 million men, with reserves strategically placed to strike back when German troops were exhausted. After five days of furious combat, the battle still hung in the balance. The German blitzkrieg in the north of the battlefront had stalled, with terrible losses on both sides, but in the south the German forces, although heavily depleted, pushed on. By July 12, the German forces had broken through the first two Soviet lines of defense and believed that the final breakthrough was at hand.

  But by now, events in the Mediterranean had changed the strategic picture—and the cast of Hitler’s mind. Three days after the invasion of Sicily, the Führer summoned von Manstein to the Wolf’s Lair, his headquarters in East Prussia, and announced that he was suspending Operation Citadel. The field marshal insisted that the Red Army was tottering and the German offensive at a critical stage: “On no account should we43 let go of the enemy until the mobile reserves which he had committed were decisively beaten.” But Hitler had made up his mind. “Inescapably faced with the dilemma44 of deciding where to make his main effort, he gave the Mediterranean preference over Russia.” One week after Allied troops landed on the shores of Sicily, Hitler canceled the eastern-front offensive and ordered the transfer of the SS Panzerkorps to Italy. Hitler’s decision to call off the attack, partly in order to divert forces to threatened Italy and the Balkans (which he still feared were threatened), marked the turning of the tide. For the first time, a blitzkrieg attack had failed before breaking through enemy lines. The Red Army launched a devastating counterattack, taking first Belgorod and Orel and then, on August 11, the city of Kharkov. By November, Kiev itself would be liberated. The Third Reich never recovered from the failure of Operation Citadel, and from then until the end of the war, the
German armies in the east would be on the defensive as the Red Army rolled, inexorably, toward Berlin. “With the failure of Zitadelle45 we have suffered a decisive defeat,” wrote General Heinz Guderian, the foremost German theorist of tank combat. “From now on, the enemy was in undisputed possession of the initiative.”

  Unsurprisingly, those involved in the planning and execution of Mincemeat were unanimous in their self-congratulation. A “top secret” assessment of the operation, written shortly before the end of the war, described it as “a small classic of deception,46 brilliantly elaborate in detail, completely successful in operation. … The Germans took many actions, to their own prejudice, as a result of Mincemeat.” At the very least, the deception had encouraged Hitler to do what he already wanted to do. The German defenses in southern Europe had been spread “as widely and thinly as possible”47 by stoking fears of multiple assaults, instead of the one massive attack on southern Sicily. “There can be no doubt48 that Mincemeat succeeded in the desired effect [and] caused the dispersal of the German effort at a crucial time. … It was largely responsible for the fact that the East end of Sicily, where we landed, was much less defended both by troops and fortifications.” Even more gratifying, the progress of the lie had been tracked at every stage: “Special intelligence enabled us49 to know that the enemy was deceived by it.” In one of his last private messages to Churchill from Madrid, Alan Hillgarth described how the success of the Sicilian campaign had transformed public and official opinion in Spain: “Sicily has impressed50 everyone and delighted most. Mussolini’s resignation and what it presages has stunned opponents.” The fear that Franco might side with the Axis was now over, and so was Hillgarth’s role in Spain.

  Bill Jewell often wondered, in later years, how much Operation Mincemeat “really affected the outcome51 in Sicily.” He was told that this was “impossible to estimate.”52 Deception may not be measured in battlefield yards won or soldiers lost, but it can be gauged in other ways, large and small: in the toppling of Mussolini and the buttressing of Hitler’s fixation with the Balkans; in the thin defenses on Sicily’s coast that allowed the Allied army ashore with so little bloodshed; in the Axis troops tied up in Sardinia and the Peloponnese and the great retreat at Kursk; in the Panzers waiting on the shores of Greece for an attack that never came; in Derrick Leverton sitting unscathed in his foxhole as the German counterattack petered out.

  Later historians have been equally convinced that the deception not only worked but succeeded dramatically, and with a profound impact. Hugh Trevor-Roper called Operation Mincemeat “the most spectacular single episode53 in the history of deception.” The official history of World War II deception described it as “perhaps the most successful single54 deception of the entire war.” It was also the luckiest. The deception depended on skill, timing, and judgment, but it would never have succeeded without an astonishing run of good fortune.

  Wars are won by men like Bill Darby, storming up the beach with all guns blazing, and by men like Leverton, sipping his tea as the bombs fell. They are won by planners correctly calculating how many rations and contraceptives an invading force will need; by tacticians laying out grand strategy; by generals inspiring the men they command; by politicians galvanizing the will to fight; and by writers putting war into words. They are won by acts of strength, bravery, and guile. But they are also won by feats of imagination. Amateur, unpublished novelists, the framers of Operation Mincemeat, dreamed up the most unlikely concatenation of events, rendered them believable, and sent them off to war, changing reality through lateral thinking and proving that it is possible to win a battle fought in the mind, from behind a desk, and from beyond the grave. Operation Mincemeat was pure make-believe; and it made Hitler believe something that changed the course of history.

  This strange story was conceived in the mind of a writer and put into action by a fisherman, who cast his fly on the water with no certainty of success but an angler’s innate optimism and guile. The most fitting, and aptly fishy, tribute to the operation was contained in a telegram sent to Winston Churchill on the day the Germans took the bait: “Mincemeat swallowed rod, line and sinker.”55

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Mincemeat Revealed

  EWEN MONTAGU began lobbying the British government for permission to reveal Operation Mincemeat before the war had even ended. In 1945, he was offered the “considerable sum” of £750 to reveal the story, although who made the offer and how they learned of Operation Mincemeat is unclear. Montagu wrote to the War Cabinet Office asking to be allowed to publish his account of what had happened. “I am a prejudiced party,1 but I feel strongly that no harm could result and good might well be obtained,” he wrote, adding that the story had already “leaked fairly widely.” Anticipating the objection that the operation would reveal how Britain had partly lied its way to victory, he argued: “It would pay to release Mincemeat2 as a specialised ad hoc operation to draw attention away from the fact that deception was a normal operation.”

  Montagu’s request was turned down flat. Guy Liddell of MI5 told him, “The Foreign Office3 would never allow publication in any form in view of the inevitable effect on our relationship with Spain.” Yet it was true that the story was starting to leak. Indeed, a copy of the report on Operation Mincemeat, one of only three made, had gone missing in March 1945. Another remained in Montagu’s possession, apparently with Guy Liddell’s blessing, “in case the embargo4 should eventually be lifted.”

  Two months after the Normandy landings, a British radio journalist named Sydney Moseley picked up the scent from a contact in British intelligence. Moseley had worked for the Daily Express and the New York Times; he was also John Logie Baird’s business manager and a tireless promoter of the new technology of television. And he knew a good story when he heard one. In August 1944, Moseley broadcast an item on the Mutual Broadcasting System radio network in America: “Our intelligence [agents] obtained5 over in England the body of a patient that had died, and dressed it up in the uniform of a senior officer. In due course this body … floated across the Channel to the enemy-occupied coast where, as was hoped, it was picked up. As a result of a set of faked documents, orders, and plans, the Nazis actually did concentrate their forces elsewhere, and when we made the big move into Normandy, they still regarded it as a feint.” Moseley concluded his report: “I believe this story6 is the greatest of the war.” Moseley had the wrong location, and the wrong D-day, but his story was close enough to the truth to put a gale-force wind up the secret services.

  Tar Robertson wrote to Bevan, pointing out that while the Official Secrets Act could silence the inquisitive in the UK, it had no power in the United States: “Unless some action is taken7 fairly soon, this, being such an attractive subject, will produce sooner or later, a flood of stories in America, some of which will be true, others invented.” On the other hand, if the journalist was approached and urged to keep quiet, that would show that “there was in fact some truth8 behind what Moseley says.” It would be better to ignore the story and “leave the American authorities9 and Moseley in ignorance on this whole question.” Even so, it was only a matter of time before others came hunting. Britain’s spymasters were adamant: “We should do our utmost10 to stop the true story getting out.”

  The story, when it finally emerged, came not from an inquisitive journalist but from Winston Churchill himself. In October 1949, Alfred Duff Cooper, later Viscount Norwich, the wartime minister for information, began work on a novel based on the story of Operation Mincemeat. Operation Heartbreak tells the story of William Maryngton—an unambiguous tribute to William Martin—a man unable to serve his country in life but deployed in death in a way that was equally unmistakable. The last chapter reads: “Dawn had not broken,11 but was about to do so, when the submarine came to the surface. The crew were thankful to breathe the cool, fresh air, and they were still more thankful to be rid of their cargo. The wrappings were removed, and the Lieutenant stood to attention and saluted as they laid the body of the
officer in uniform as gently as possible on the face of the waters. A light breeze was blowing shoreward, and the tide was running in the same direction. So Willie went to war at last, the insignia of field rank on his shoulders, and a letter from his beloved lying close to his quiet heart.” Operation Heartbreak is a charming fiction quite obviously based on fact.

  Duff Cooper had learned of the case in March 1943, while head of the Security Executive, but he must also have obtained access to the Mincemeat file itself after the war was over. Montagu believed “Duff Cooper learned of Mincemeat12 from Churchill in one of his expansive ‘after-dinner’ moods and then was (I’m pretty sure, but my evidence doesn’t amount to proof) shown a copy of the report by someone I won’t name.” It is just possible that Montagu himself showed Duff Cooper the file, as a way of bringing pressure on the government to allow him to tell the nonfiction version. Churchill may well have wanted the story to be told. When the other Operation Mincemeat—a simple mine-laying operation—was revealed in the 1950s, Alan Brooke, former chief of the Imperial General Staff, apparently got his Mincemeats confused and wrote: “Sir W always wanted to hear13 this story told.”