OPERATION MINCEMEAT

In its 4 June 1943 roll of wartime casualties, The Times of London dutifully reported that Major W. Martin, Royal Marines, had died. In itself, the report was rather innocuous, probably eliciting only passing interest from the average reader, whose eye gravitated toward another report that actor Leslie Howard had been killed when the plane he was aboard had been shot down by Luftwaffe fighters over the Bay of Biscay. Martin, however, had supposedly died in similar fashion, and the larger account gave subtle plausibility to the story of the dead major, which was – from start to finish – a work of pure fiction.

Martin’s death notice was, in fact, a coda to the elaborate ruse that fooled the Abwehr (German Intelligence) and convinced Hitler that the expected Allied invasion of southern Europe would come in Greece and Sardinia rather than its true location, Sicily. The Major’s illusory life, service and unfortunate demise were the fabric of an elaborate hoax, dubbed Operation Mincemeat, hatched by British Naval Intelligence and MI5, the nation’s domestic counterintelligence and security agency. Mincemeat was theoretically based on the Trout Memo, authored ostensibly in 1939 by Rear Admiral John Godfrey, head of Naval Intelligence, and probably ghost written by his capable assistant, Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming.

The Trout Memo described several possible deceptions that might be employed at critical moments during World War II to deceive the Germans as to Allied intent, providing a welcome advantage against the insidious enemy.