Royal Air Force News Friday, May 6, 2022 P21
Operation Mincemeat
By Tracey Allen
Feature
How a dead tramp fooled Hitler and changed the course of WWII
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T WAS a far-fetched plan stranger than fiction dreamt up to fool the enemy – from an idea by Ian Fleming – that saved tens of thousands of lives in World War II. Instrumental in the creation of Operation Mincemeat was RAF officer Charles Cholmondeley, a Flt Lt seconded to MI5, who hatched the plot with Naval Intelligence Officer Ewen Montagu. Historian and Times columnist Ben MacIntyre’s bestselling book telling the fascinating story of Operation Mincemeat (bloomsbury. com) has been adapted into a thrilling film, starring Colin Firth (The King’s Speech) as Montagu, Matthew Macfadyen (Succession) as Cholmondeley and Johnny Flynn (The Outfit) as James Bond creator Fleming, who was then assistant to the director of Naval Intelligence Admiral Sir John Godfrey (Jason Isaacs, the Harry Potter film series) – later immortalised as M in the 007 novels. The film also features Simon Russell Beale (The Death of Stalin) as Winston Churchill, Kelly McDonald (Line of Duty) and Paul Rutter (Friday Night Dinner) in his final role as Bentley Purchase, the ‘cheerful coroner’ of St Pancras, London.
AUTHOR: Ben Macintyre and his book
BRAINS BEHIND AUDACIOUS PLAN: The film features, from left, Macfadyen as Cholmondeley, Firth as Montagu and Flynn as Fleming
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Cholmondeley was so discreet, he never really wanted to tell this story
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Operation Mincemeat was probably the most successful military deception operation ever carried out
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In 1943 the Allies were determined to break Hitler’s grip on occupied Europe; they planned to launch an all-out assault on Sicily, but faced an impossible challenge – how to protect the invasion force from potential annihilation. Montagu and Cholmondeley devised the most inspired and improbable disinformation strategy of the war – centred on the most unlikely of secret agents: a dead man. Macintyre said: “Operation Mincemeat was probably the most successful military deception operation ever carried out. It strategically altered the battlefield. What the deceivers had to do was to try to persuade the Germans that black was white and white was black. And they did this in the most extraordinary way. “The British decided that the plot would be to get a dead body and to give that body a completely false identity by disguising it as someone totally different. They would dress
fictionalised. The files really are the most extraordinary cornucopia of detail because they’re written by and for people who never expected them to be made public.” When Macintyre was researching his book some of the protagonists were still alive – he got to know former MI5 secretary Jean Leslie (played by McDonald) who volunteered to be Maj Martin’s fictional fiancée Pam, supplying a photograph of herself and writing him letters for all-important ‘wallet litter’.
MI5 SPY: Real Flt Lt Charles Cholmondeley
DEAD MAN’S ‘GIRL’: Jean Leslie (played by Kelly McDonald) with ‘Cholmondeley’ in film
the body up in a military uniform and pretend he was a special courier who had come down in a plane crash in the Mediterranean.”
“The meat of the story – the mincemeat of the story, if you like – was trying to find a body and then to go through the incredibly complicated system of inventing a completely different character, a new person who’d never existed.” The body used was that of Welsh tramp Glyndwr Michael, who died, aged 34, in St Pancras Hospital, after eating stale bread laced with rat poison. The plan worked. Giving the corpse a false identity as military courier Major William ‘Bill’ Martin, of the Royal Marines, they equipped it with false documents indicating a looming attack on Greece and floated the body at Huelva, off the coast of Spain, where the Germans could find it. Hitler and his Italian allies fell for it; they diverted defensive troops from Sicily and
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incemeat was extremely hard to pull off. Working from a dingy basement in central London, the top secret Twenty Committee of Naval Intelligence led by the remarkable intelligence officers Montagu and Cholmondeley was presented with almost insurmountable challenges. Macintyre said: “It proved extraordinarily difficult because, believe it or not, in wartime it was actually very hard to get hold of a dead body. People were dying all the time. But you had to find a body that looked as if it had drowned at sea and had come from a plane crash.
redeployed them to Greece, ensuring a successful invasion with minimal loss of life.
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he story had been told previously in Montagu’s book The Man Who Never Was, written after WWII, which inspired the 1956 film of the same name. Macintyre explained Montagu was able to write the book only because Churchill’s wartime minister of information, Duff Cooper, had already published the novel Operation Heartbreak (persephonebooks.co.uk), based on the case, giving away some of the key facts disguised behind fiction. Macintyre added: “It wasn’t until MI5 began declassifying its files that you could really begin to tell true stories about a subject that’s been so heavily mystified and
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Macfadyen said: “It’s always weird when you play a real person because you always fall short – they are either dishier than you or they are fitter. Cholmondeley looked extraordinary by all accounts, he was very tall. You’re not doing an impersonation of the person, it’s an impression.” Macintyre said: “Cholmondeley was so discreet, he never really wanted to tell this story. The Cholmondeley family feel (with this film) finally he got the credit he deserved. Charles died when his son Tom was very young, so he didn’t really know his father. “Charles’ wife Alison said ‘Matthew Macfadyen has caught magically the essence of this very interesting and strange man’.” Cholmondeley stayed in MI5 after the war. After leaving he ran a machine shop in Somerset. Glyndwr Michael was buried with full military honours in the cemetery of Nuestra Señora in Huelva. The inscription on his gravestone states: Glyndwr Michael served as Major William Martin, RM. n Operation Mincemeat is in cinemas now.