Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory (6 page)

There was considerable courage in this act, although Montagu later denied it. If the Germans had invaded, they would have swiftly realized that the chart was phony, and Montagu would have been even more of a marked man than he was already. There was also the possibility that someone in British intelligence might hear of the chart and the treacherous Jewish lawyer prepared to sell secrets to save his own skin: at the very least, he would have had some complicated explaining to do. The plot made Montagu appear, to German eyes, to be “an out and out traitor.”
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He was unconcerned: what mattered was telling a convincing story.

Before placing Montagu in charge of naval deception, Godfrey had passed him a copy of the Trout Memo written with Ian Fleming. Montagu considered Fleming “a four-letter man”
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and got on with him very well: “Fleming is charming
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to be with, but would sell his own grandmother. I like him a lot.” Years later, when both men were long retired, Godfrey gently reminded Montagu of the debt, and the origins of the operation: “The bare idea of the dead airman
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washed up on a beach was among those dozen or so notions which I gave you when 17M was formed,” he wrote. Montagu replied blandly: “I quite honestly don’t remember
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your passing on this suggestion to me. Of course, what you said may have been in my subconscious and may have formed the link—but I can assure you that it was not conscious which shows the strange workings of fate (or something!).”

The strange workings of fate had now thrown together, in Room 13, Montagu, the whip-smart lawyer, and Cholmondeley, the gentle, lanky, unpredictable ideas man, an ill-matched pair who would develop into the most remarkable double act in the history of deception. They had the backing of the Twenty Committee, they had plenty of precedents, and they had the outline of a plan; what they did not yet have was a clear idea of what to do with it.

CHAPTER FOUR
Target Sicily

T
HE PLAN OF ACTION
agreed by Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt when they met in Casablanca in January 1943 was, in some respects, blindingly obvious: after the successful North Africa campaign, the next target would be the island of Sicily.

The Nazi war machine was at last beginning to stutter and misfire. The British Eighth Army under Montgomery had vanquished Rommel’s invincible Afrika Korps at El Alamein. The Allied invasion of Morocco and Tunisia had fatally weakened Germany’s grip, and with the liberation of Tunis, the Allies would control the coast of North Africa, its ports and airfields, from Casablanca to Alexandria. The time had come to lay siege to Hitler’s Fortress. But where?

Sicily was the logical place from which to deliver the gut punch into what Churchill famously called the soft “underbelly of the Axis.”
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The island at the toe of Italy’s boot commanded the channel linking the two sides of the Mediterranean, just eighty miles from the Tunisian coast. If the combined British and American armies were to free Europe, prize Italy out of the fascist embrace, and roll back the Nazi behemoth, they would first have to take Sicily. The British in Malta and Allied convoys had been pummeled by Luftwaffe bombers taking off from the island, and, as Montagu remarked, “no major operation could be
²
launched, maintained, or supplied until the enemy airfields and other bases in Sicily had been obliterated so as to allow free passage through the Mediterranean.” An invasion of Sicily would open the road to Rome, draw German troops from the eastern front to relieve the Red Army, allow for preparations to invade France, and perhaps knock a tottering Italy out of the war. Breaking up the “Pact of Steel” forged in 1939 by Hitler and Mussolini would shatter German morale, Churchill predicted, “and might be the beginning
³
of their doom.” The Americans were initially dubious, wondering if Britain harbored imperial ambitions in the Mediterranean, but eventually they compromised: Sicily would be the target, the precursor to the invasion of mainland Europe.

If the strategic importance of Sicily was clear to the Allies, it was surely equally obvious to Italy and Germany. Churchill was blunt about the choice of target: “Everyone but a bloody fool would know it was Sicily.”
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And if the enemy was foolish enough not to see what was coming, he would surely cotton on when 160,000 British, American, and Commonwealth troops and an armada of 3,200 ships began assembling for the invasion. Sicily’s five-hundred-mile coastline was already defended by seven or eight enemy divisions. If Hitler correctly anticipated the Allies’ next move, then the island would be reinforced by thousands of German troops held in reserve in France. The soft underbelly would become a wall of muscle. The invasion could turn into a bloodbath.

But the logic of Sicily was immutable. On January 22, Churchill and Roosevelt gave their joint blessing to “Operation Husky,” the invasion of Sicily, the next great set-piece offensive of the war. General Eisenhower was summoned to Casablanca and given his orders.

All of which presented Allied intelligence chiefs with a fiendish conundrum: how to convince the enemy that the Allies were not going to do what anyone with an atlas could see they ought to do.

The previous June, Churchill had established the London Controlling Section (a deliberately vague title) under a “controller of deception,” Lieutenant Colonel John H. Bevan, to “prepare deception plans
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on a worldwide basis with the object of causing the enemy to waste his military resources.” Bevan was responsible for the overall planning, supervision, and coordination of strategic deception, and immediately after the Casablanca conference, he was instructed to draw up a new deception policy to disguise the impending invasion of Sicily. The result was “Operation Barclay,” a complex, many-layered plan that would try to convince the Germans that black was white or, at the very least, gray.

Johnnie Bevan was an Old Etonian and a stockbroker, an upright pillar of the establishment whose convivial and modest temperament belied an exceedingly sharp mind. He had that rare English ability to achieve impressive feats with a permanent air of embarrassment, and he tackled the monumental task of wartime deception in the same way that he played cricket: “When things were looking pretty bad
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for his side at cricket, he would shuffle in, about sixth wicket down, knock up 100 and shuffle out again looking rather ashamed of himself.” Bevan played with the straightest of straight bats, as honest and upright a team player as one could imagine—which was probably what made him such a superb deceiver.

While Bevan controlled the business of deception from within the Cabinet War Rooms, the fortified underground bunker beneath Whitehall, his counterpart in the Mediterranean was Lieutenant Colonel Dudley Wrangel Clarke, the chief of “A” Force, the deception unit based in Cairo. Clarke was another master of strategic deception, but of a very different stamp. Unmarried, nocturnal, and allergic to children, he was possessed of “an ingenious imagination
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and a photographic memory.” He also had a flair for the dramatic that invited trouble. For the Royal Tournament in 1925, he mounted a pageant depicting imperial artillery down the ages, which involved two elephants, thirty-seven guns, and “fourteen of the biggest Nigerians
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he could find.” He loved uniforms, disguises, and dressing up. Most of one ear was lopped off by a German bullet when he took part in the first commando raid on occupied France, and in 1940 he was summoned to Egypt at the express command of General Sir Archibald Wavell and ordered to set up a “special section of intelligence
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for deception.” Clarke and “A” Force had spent the last two years baffling and bamboozling the enemy in a variety of complicated and flamboyant ways.

Between them, Lieutenant Colonels Bevan and Clarke would construct the most elaborate wartime web of deception ever spun. Yet in its essence, the aim of Operation Barclay was quite simple: to convince the Axis powers that instead of attacking Sicily, in the middle of the Mediterranean, the Allies intended to invade Greece, in the east, and the island of Sardinia, followed by southern France, in the west. The lie went as follows: the British Twelfth Army (which did not exist) would invade the Balkans in the summer of 1943, starting in Crete and the Peloponnese, bringing Turkey into the war against the Axis powers, moving against Bulgaria and Romania, linking up with the Yugoslav resistance, and then finally uniting with the Soviet armies on the eastern front. The subsidiary lie was intended to convince the Germans that the British Eighth Army planned to land on France’s southern coast and then storm up the Rhône Valley once American troops under General Patton had attacked Corsica and Sardinia. Sicily would be bypassed.

If Operation Barclay succeeded, the Germans would reinforce the Balkans, Sardinia, and southern France in preparation for invasions that would never materialize, while leaving Sicily only lightly defended. At the very least, enemy troops would be spread over a broad front and the German defensive shield would be weakened. By the time the real target became obvious, it would be too late to reinforce Sicily. The deception plan played directly on Hitler’s fears, for the Ultra intercepts had clearly revealed that the Führer, his staff, and local commanders in Greece all feared that the Balkans represented a vulnerable point on the Nazis’ southern flank. Even so, shifting German attention away from Sicily would not be easy, for the strategic importance of the island was self-evident. A German intelligence report produced in early February for the supreme command of the armed forces, the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), was quite explicit, and accurate, about Allied intentions: “The idea of knocking
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Italy out of the war after the conclusion of the African campaign, by means of air attacks and a landing operation, looms large in Anglo-Saxon deliberations. … Sicily offers itself as the first target.” The deception operation would need to shift Hitler’s mind in two different directions: reducing his fears for Sicily, while stoking his anxiety about Sardinia, Greece, and the Balkans.

“Uncle” John Godfrey identified what he called “wishfulness” and “yesmanship”
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as the twin frailties of German intelligence: “If the authorities were clamouring
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for reports on a certain subject the German Secret Intelligence Service was not above inventing reports based on what they thought probable.” The Nazi high command, at the same time, when presented with contradictory intelligence reports, was “inclined to believe the one
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that fits in best with their own previously formed conceptions.” If Hitler’s paranoid wishfulness and his underlings’ craven yesmanship could be exploited, then Operation Barclay might work: the Germans would deceive themselves.

The deception swung into action on a range of fronts. Engineers began fabricating a bogus army in the eastern Mediterranean; double agents started feeding false information to their Abwehr handlers; plans were drawn up for counterfeit troop movements, fake radio traffic, recruitment of Greek interpreters and officers, and the acquisition of Greek maps and currency to indicate an impending assault on the Peloponnese.

While Bevan and Clarke began weaving together the strands of Operation Barclay, Montagu and Cholmondeley went hunting for a dead body.

In his initial plan, Cholmondeley had assumed one could simply pop into a military hospital and pick a bargain cadaver off the shelf for ten pounds. The reality was rather different. The Second World War may have been responsible for the deaths of more people than any conflict in history, yet dead bodies of the right sort were surprisingly hard to find. People tended to be killed, or to kill themselves, in all the wrong ways. A bombing victim would never do. Suicides were more common than in peacetime, but these were usually by rope, gas, or chemical means that could easily be detected in a postmortem examination. Moreover, the requirements were specific: the plan called for a fresh male body of military age, with no obvious injuries or infirmities, and cooperative next of kin who would not object when the corpse of their loved one was whisked away for unspecified purposes, in an unstipulated place, by complete strangers. For advice, Montagu turned to someone who knew more about death than any man living.

Sir Bernard Spilsbury was the senior pathologist of the Home Office, an expert witness in many of the most famous trials of the age, and the pioneer of the modern science of forensics. Sir Bernard collected deaths as other people collect stamps or books. For half a century, until his own mysterious demise in 1949, Spilsbury accumulated ordinary deaths and extraordinary deaths, carrying out some twenty-five thousand autopsies: he studied death by asphyxiation, poisoning, accident, and murder, and he jotted down the particulars of each case in his spidery handwriting on thousands of index cards, laying the foundations for modern crime scene investigation (CSI).

Spilsbury had come to public attention with the infamous Dr. Crippen case of 1910. When Michigan-born Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen was captured attempting to flee to North America with his mistress, it was Spilsbury who identified the remains buried in his cellar in London as those of his missing wife, Cora, through distinctive scar tissue on a fragment of skin. Crippen was hanged in 1910. Over the next thirty years, Spilsbury would testify in courtrooms across the land, laying out the Crown’s case in clear, precise, inarguable tones of moral rectitude. The newspapers adored this erect, handsome figure in the witness box, combining scientific certainty with Edwardian moral character. As one contemporary observed, Spilsbury was a one-man instrument of retribution: “He could achieve single-handed
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all the legal consequences of homicide—arrest, prosecution, conviction and final post mortem—requiring only the brief assistance of the hangman.” His courtroom manner was famously oracular and clipped, never using three words where one would suffice: “He formed his opinion;
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expressed it in the clearest, most succinct manner possible; then stuck to it come hell or high water.”