Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory (29 page)

Operation Mincemeat almost came to a premature and embarrassing end. On passing a local cinema where a spy film was showing, Jock Horsfall remarked on the “much better story”
²⁴
they were currently engaged in, became paralyzed with giggles, and nearly drove into a tram stop. A little later, the racing driver failed to see a roundabout until too late and shot over the grass circle in the middle. This is what driving with Jock Horsfall was like—an experience rendered yet more alarming by the need to drive with masked headlights during the blackout. Luckily there were few other cars about. Montagu and Cholmondeley took turns lying in the back and trying to sleep, as if that were possible when being driven at high speed by a myopic Grand Prix driver with no headlights. This was the closest either came to death in action during the war. It was still pitch dark as they hurtled across the border into Scotland.

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 “partially
²⁵
‘in the know,’” and the arrival of the canister provoked no suspicion or comment among the crew, “being accepted as merely being
²⁶
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 Martin
²⁷
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 feel
²⁸
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 Scotland
³⁰
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 package
³¹
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 captain
⁴⁰
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 returning
⁴¹
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 the 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 face
⁴³
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 gum
⁴⁴
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.