Operation Mincemeat: Counterintelligence and Deception in World War II

War is more than a clash of men and materials; instead, small and seemingly insignificant actions often determine the course of entire campaigns more than massive armored movements or battalions of marching infantry. In the context of World War II, the sheer scale of the open conflict often overshadows the importance of behind-the-scenes intelligence actions and attempts to deceive the enemy. Though deception is not a new concept in warfare, few counterintelligence operations have succeeded as brilliantly as Operation Mincemeat, an Allied effort in 1943 aimed at deceiving German and Italian forces regarding the target of the coming invasion of Europe. The invasion, aimed at Sicily and codenamed Operation Husky, would enable the Allies to open a southern front against the Axis domination of Europe and divert valuable resources from the Eastern Front, thereby offering relief to struggling Soviet forces. Operation Mincemeat, however, persuaded the Axis high command that the true target of the coming invasion was Sardinia and Greece and that the attack, originating from the Allied base of operations in North Africa, would focus on the Balkans instead of Sicily. This misdirection, fed to the Germans via Spanish double agents and a washed-up British corpse with documents describing the bogus invasion of Greece, was completely swallowed by the German high command, resulting in the transfer of three divisions to Greece and other preparations that cost the defense of Sicily valuable men and materials that would be needed to defeat the Allied attempts to seize the southern portion of the Italian peninsula. 

Sicily itself had long been the logical point from which any invasion into Europe could be launched. The island occupies a critical strategic junction in the center of the Mediterranean, offers operational capability into Sardinia, Corsica, Southern France, and Italy proper, as well as guaranteeing that German reinforcements could not travel via sea to Greece and the Balkans from anywhere but Istria. Italy itself was the weak, “soft underbelly” of Axis-dominated Europe, garrisoned by a comparatively weak military that had suffered substantial losses in the early campaigns against the British in North Africa during 1940-1941 conflict in that region of the war. Italy, moreover, had long since been a reluctant player in the war for Europe, especially following its ignominious defeat in North Africa. North Africa had “been the proving ground of successful deception operations” and now “another one was needed to divert the attention of the German High Command from Sicily toward Greece and Sardinia”.  By successfully ensuring control over North Africa, the German command was forced to ask itself where the inevitable invasion would strike. Italy and Sicily, in particular, were marked as the principal targets of a possible invasion, and Churchill reportedly said that “Everyone but a bloody fool would know that it's Sicily”.    Thus, significant German and Italian forces had been diverted to Sicily to ensure that the island would not go undefended. 

However, the nagging specter of an invasion of Greece did exist in the circles of German military thought. In theory, an Allied liberation of Greece before any attacks into France or Italy would enable a united Allied front to meet up with Soviet divisions from the East, enabling not only fresh supply routes, but combined operations between a unified British, American airforce, and Soviet military camp in the Balkans. While a simple glance at a map reveals that the mountainous terrain of Greece and the brutal logistic difficulties present in maneuvering large armored divisions through the southern Balkans would almost certainly ruin any theoretical attempts to create this unified front, the idea was nonetheless present and would come to play a role in the conduct of Operation Mincemeat. It was through the manipulation of this fear that enabled, in part, the deception to succeed. 

The impetus of the operation came from an accident in the latter part of 1942, when a British plane crashed in the sea in southern Spain. The plane was carrying a British courier, who in turn carried sensitive documents that revealed confidential information about intelligence operations in occupied France. The German high command, inspecting the body, eventually returned it to Spanish authorities and the British determined that the letter, which had been read by German intelligence operatives, had been determined to have been deliberately planted as a ruse by the Allies in order to mislead the Germans. The British, having realized the value of misdirection in campaign against Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in North Africa, quickly decided to utilize a similar method to attempt to mislead German commanders regarding the coming invasion of Sicily. Thus, “in advanced of the 1943 Allied invasion of Sicily, intelligence officers acquired an anonymous corpse, dressed it in uniform, planted false papers on it and set it adrift near Spain”, which then successfully convinced German leaders that “the assault would come in Greece and not Sicily”.  The architects of this plan, Flight Lieutenant Charles Cholmondeley and Lieutenant Commander Ewen Montagu, found inspiration for the idea in both the case of the British courier, as well as operations in World War I featuring planted false documents purposefully set to be obtained by German leaders and thus misdirect the enemy war effort. Hardly new to counterintelligence operations, however, both Cholmondeley and Montagu were acutely aware of the need to give “complete respect for [their] German opposite[s]”.  The example of the British courier, in particular, revealed the need to create an entire backdrop upon which to base the identity of this anonymous corpse. Merely planting false documents on a random dead body would be insufficient to deceive the experienced and wary German intelligence analysts, thus Montagu and Cholmondeley began the business of falsifying an entire identity in order to make the operation believable. 

Major William Martin, born in 1907 in Cardiff, Wales, was a Royal Marine and had a fiancée named Pam. He owed money, had an engagement ring receipt, and two love letters in his pocket. He, moreover, never existed Martin was the name chosen for the thirty-four-year-old dead corpse obtained from a London mortuary. Major William Martin was one of many acting majors in the British military and thus was not expected to be identified in public or by association with the armed services. Montagu and Cholmondeley fabricated the existence of Martin in order to create a believable identity for a British military officer that, if found with sensitive documents, would be both trustworthy as a legitimate source of information, as well as verifiable as a real person. In finding this man, the British intelligence operators knew full well that would have to pay attention to the most minute of details. 

 He must, for example, be somewhat physically fit, but not too much, as a staff officer of his rank would not be known for the extent of his physical capabilities. The body itself must have expired of subtle means, without any obvious disfigurements or injuries that would detract from the veracity of the story.  Thus, the corpse acquired for the operation was chosen to ensure that the man had died of rat poison digestion, which caused liver failure and allowed the man to expire. Without any obvious signs of trauma or death, the body would sufficient to pass inspection by the Spanish authorities. Moreover, the Spanish, as devout Roman Catholics, were known to avoid performing autopsies and desecrating a body unless it was obviously needed to determine the cause of death.  Death by rat poisoning created a forensic situation in which an autopsy would not be required by the conservative Spanish, thereby allowing the body's death date to be estimated by external observation and not an invasive procedure. Moreover, as Major Martin would be deployed in the sea off the coast of Spain, the environment's natural degradation and salination would help to disguise the actual time of death. Dressed in standard British battledress, Martin would stand a solid chance at successfully convincing the German command that the documents and identity were, in fact, real.

Thus, equipped with an appropriate corpse and a successful false identity, Montagu and Cholmondeley began the efforts to falsify documents that would stand up to the harsh scrutiny for which the German intelligence corps were known. The documents themselves, in line with the rest of the operational themes, were actually not forged or made-up. Instead, the conspirators had the actual British commanders draw up the letters. Lieutenant General Archibald Nye, a top-level German commander, wrote several pieces regarding internal British transfers and subjects, though the important section of the letter itself focused on giving orders to General Henry Maitland Wilson to begin preparations for Operation Husky, which was designated as the codename for the invasion of Greece in the false document. Such attention to detail and, more importantly, the inclusion of verifiable facts that the Germans likely had already know from other sources, were critical to the success of Operation Mincemeat.  Using the actual codewords for the invasion of Sicily, for example, is a detail that the Germans likely already knew. The massive build-up of men and materials in North Africa did not go unnoticed by the Germans and it is not unlikely that the Germans were aware of the codewords assigned to coming operations. Admiral Mountbatten of the British Navy signed two of the letters himself, lending more weight to the documents already supplied by General Wilson and Lt. General Nye. Thus, the inclusion of accurate, yet still misleading information, would lend substantial credibility and veracity to the documents.

With the preparations complete, the submarine HMS Seraph was chosen to deploy the corpse of Major Martin near Spain. The submarine “surfaced about a mile off the estuary of the Huelva River” and launched the body of Martin into the water to be “picked up by the ingoing tide”.  The body, picked up by Spanish authorities, did its job well. The falsified documents were handed over to German intelligence and the digested information was sent up the military hierarchy until it reached Adolf Hitler himself, who “actually sent Marshall Rommel to Greece, where he expected the real attack to come”.   From Huelva, a city in southwestern Spain, the information disseminated throughout the German ranks and caused a substantial shift in the defensive preparation made by the Axis powers. Multiple armored divisions were transferred from Italy into Greece, and full redeployment of forces back from Greece towards the actual invasion site took nearly two weeks.  The “Nazi-friendly stretch of the Spanish coast” ensured delivery of the corpse to German agents, despite Spain's stated neutrality in the conflict.   Regardless of the stance of the Spanish government, the British received notice from double agents in Spain that Operation Mincemeat had been a complete success. Indeed, the Germans had deployed  so many “torpedo boats [to Greece] that the German patrols were ineffective [and] the 1st Panzer Division [was sent] to meet the expected invasion of Greece [...] In Sicily itself, Axis forces were shifted from the south, where the attack came, to the north.”  Thus, while Operation Mincemeat had been a great success in terms of having the Germans fall for the trap, the actual comprehension of the practical benefits of the operation were not know until after the war and captured documents could be analyzed. 

Operation Husky, the massive Allied invasion of Sicily in the summer of 1943, featured nearly half a million personnel from the combined Allied forces arrayed against nearly three hundred thousand Germans and Italians. Diverted from the southern tip of Sicily in order to defend Greece from the assumed invasion, German and Italian divisions were completely unprepared for the opening stages of the campaign. While the “initial landing was largely unopposed”, Allied forces quickly “ran into difficult fighting” as they attempted to “capture German forces before they escaped to the Italian mainland”.  Striving to neutralize as many Germans as possible, the Allied force benefited greatly from the initial disruption of Axis forces as a result of Operation Mincemeat. However, some of the major Axis troop movements, primarily the deployment of the 1st Panzer Division to Greece from its base in France, and two additional divisions transferred from the Eastern Front, were not directly involved in the positive effects of Operation Mincemeat as it aided the invasion of Sicily. Those forces had already been deployed elsewhere and would not have been involved in the direct defense of the Italian peninsula. Indeed, though many global theater troops were reassigned to Greece, the actual defense of Sicily was still strong, as the Germans had substantial forces from the retreat from North Africa that had been assigned to temporary garrison duty of Sicily. Thus, while Operation Husky benefited from Mincemeat, it would be wrong to claim that Mincemeat diverted the majority of the Sicilian garrison to Greece, nor did the deception allow the Allies to take Sicily without trouble. The fighting was fierce and the forces on the island were still substantial. Despite this, the benefits of Mincemeat were easily worth the time invested, and the diverting of divisions from the Eastern Front to defend Greece would have unseen, yet arguably substantial effects, in the conduct of the war in that theater. 

Operation Mincemeat, led by Montagu and Cholmondeley, is one of the greatest successful counterintelligence operations of the Second World War. It completely fooled the German high command and Hitler himself into diverting valuable resources to Greece and repositioning forces so that they were not in an optimal strategic location to defend Sicily from the coming Allied invasion. Though the fight for Sicily was nonetheless an arduous task, Mincemeat still effectively diverted German attention towards the Balkans and away from Sicily, enabling Allied forces to land largely unopposed and gain valuable time to begin offensive operations on the island. The operation was, without a doubt, a valuable and important lesson when considering the efficacy of counterintelligence and misdirection in wartime and represents the chief classic case of successful espionage and misdirection during the Second World War. 

Bibliography

1954. "Dead Was the Hero." Time 63, no. 5: 78. Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed June 8, 2013). 

Geier, Thom. 2010. "Operation Mincemeat." Entertainment Weekly no. 1102: 79. Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed June 8, 2013). 

Gottlieb, Klaus. 2009. "The Mincemeat Postmortem: Forensic Aspects of World War II's Boldest Counterintelligence Operation. “Military Medicine 174, no. 1: 93-99.  Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed June 8, 2013).   

Manley, Brendan. 2010. "Historian Claims to ID 'Man Who Never Was.'." Military History 27, no. 1: 11. Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed June 8, 2013). 

Raugh, Jr., Harold E. 2011. "DEATHLY DECEPTION: THE REAL STORY OF OPERATION MINCEMEAT." Journal of The Society for Army Historical Research 89, no. 360: 343-344. Historical Abstracts, EBSCOhost (accessed June 8, 2013).

West, Nigel. 2011. "Operation Mincemeat: The True Spy Story that Changed the Course of World War II. /Deathly Deception: The Real Story of Operation Mincemeat." Global  War Studies 8, no. 1: 178-182. Historical Abstracts, EBSCOhost (accessed June 8, 2013).  

Yeates, Ian. 2010. "Operation Mincemeat. How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory. “Northern Mariner / Le Marin Du Nord 20, no. 4: 452-453. Historical Abstracts, EBSCOhost (accessed June 8, 2013).