Operation Mincemeat
How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory
Ratings15
Average rating3.9
15
How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory
Ratings15
Average rating3.9
One April morning in 1943, a sardine fisherman spotted the corpse of a British soldier floating in the sea off the coast of Spain and set in train a course of events that would change the course of the Second World War. Operation Mincemeat was the most successful wartime deception ever attempted, and certainly the strangest. It hoodwinked the Nazi espionage chiefs, sent German troops hurtling in the wrong direction, and saved thousands of lives by deploying a secret agent who was different, in one crucial respect, from any spy before or since: he was dead. His mission: to convince the Germans that instead of attacking Sicily, the Allied armies planned to invade Greece. The brainchild of an eccentric RAF officer and a brilliant Jewish barrister, the great hoax involved an extraordinary cast of characters including a famous forensic pathologist, a gold-prospector, an inventor, a beautiful secret service secretary, a submarine captain, three novelists, a transvestite English spymaster, an irascible admiral who loved fly-fishing, and a dead Welsh tramp. Using fraud, imagination and seduction, Churchill's team of spies spun a web of deceit so elaborate and so convincing that they began to believe it themselves. The deception started in a windowless basement beneath Whitehall. It travelled from London to Scotland to Spain to Germany. And it ended up on Hitler's desk. Ben Macintyre, bestselling author of Agent Zigzag, weaves together private documents, photographs, memories, letters and diaries, as well as newly released material from the intelligence files of MI5 and Naval Intelligence, to tell for the first time the full story of Operation Mincemeat.
Reviews with the most likes.
I've seen videos on YouTube that talk about the story of Operation Mincemeat but if it was to any extent, I'd forgotten the details. It was the Netflix movie that fully captured my attention. When I happened upon this book in a used bookstore shortly after, I knew I needed to pick it up.
Sometimes the craziest ideas are the ones that work. Such was the case with Operation Mincemeat which involved planting a deceased ‘soldier' carrying fake documents in enemy waters. Finding a corpse that met the criteria was a challenge of its own, never mind having to pull off such an incredible feat. In the day of modern technology in medicine, it's easy to think that this all would be impossible. Even in the early 1940s this deception was a huge risk, but miraculously, it worked.
The book discusses many sides of the operation such as the inventors of the idea, the coroner tasked with finding an unclaimed body, the secretaries involved, the spies, and ‘William Martin' himself. There are sections that drag on and occasionally feel irrelevant, but as a whole, the book is well-researched and fascinating.
The thing that struck me most while reading this was how much luck was involved in the operation's success. It's fascinating how such an event as large-scale as the invasion of Sicily was affected by a series of small events that made Operation Mincemeat work. Little things like finding the right photograph to match the dead body, the documents landing in the hands of an anti-Nazi German officer, etc... if any of those things had happened differently, the entire operation could have failed. The book does a good job of revealing these turns of fortune in an entertaining way so that it reads like a suspense novel.
