Operation Mincemeat - Background

Background

In late 1942, Operation Torch, the invasion of French North Africa was imminent, victory in that campaign was expected. Allied planners considered the next step in the war and decided to continue the offensive in the Mediterranean, Middle East and African theatres .

From North Africa, attacks could be made either into Italy or through the Balkans, trapping the German forces there between the Western Allies and the Soviets. Control of Sicily would open the Mediterranean to Allied shipping and allow the invasion of continental Europe, making Sicily an obvious strategic objective. German planners saw this as well; Winston Churchill commented: "Everyone but a bloody fool would know that it's Sicily ."

The massive Allied buildup of resources for the invasion (code-named Operation Husky), would be detected. The Germans would know that some large attack was coming. However, if the Allies could deceive the Germans about where that attack was going, the Germans might disperse or divert some significant part of their forces, which would help the invasion succeed. This had already been practised by the British in the fighting in North Africa, they had established a competent system for deception of the enemy, able to give the appearance of fake formations and to feed misinformation through double agents and diplomatic rumour.

Several months previously, Flight Lieutenant Charles Cholmondeley (pronounced 'Chumley'), RAF of Section B1(a) of MI5, suggested dropping a dead man attached to a badly-opened parachute in France with a radio set for the Germans to find. The idea was for the Germans to think that the Allies did not know the set was captured, and pretend to be friendly agents operating it, thus allowing the Allies to feed them misinformation. This was dismissed as unworkable; however the idea was subsequently taken up by the Twenty Committee, the small inter-service, inter-departmental intelligence team in charge of double agents. Cholmondeley was on the Twenty Committee, as was Lieutenant Commander Ewen Montagu, a Royal Navy intelligence officer.

According to the historian Ben Macintyre, Cholmondeley got the idea from a 1939 memo written by Ian Fleming, later the author of the James Bond novels. Fleming himself reportedly got the idea from a 1930s detective novel by Basil Thomson.

Montagu and Cholmondeley developed Cholmondeley's idea into a workable plan, using documents instead of a radio. The Committee thought of planting the documents on a body with a defective parachute. However, the Germans knew that it was Allied policy never to send sensitive documents over enemy territory, so they decided to make the man a victim of a plane crash at sea. That would explain how the man would be several days dead and how he could be carrying secret documents. The body would be floated ashore in Spain, where the nominally neutral government was known to cooperate with the Abwehr (German intelligence). The British were sure that the Spanish authorities would search the body and allow German agents to examine anything found. Montagu gave the operation the code name of Mincemeat, just restored to the list of available names after its use for another successful mission.

The deliberate planting of fake documents on the enemy was not new. Known as the "Haversack Ruse", it had been practiced by the British in the First World War. Also, in August 1942 in North Africa, before the Battle of Alam Halfa a corpse was placed in a blown-up scout car, in a minefield facing the German 90th Light Division just south of Qaret el Abd. With the corpse was a map showing the locations of non-existent British minefields. The Germans fell for the ruse, and Rommel's panzers were routed to areas of soft sand where they bogged down.

In September 1942, a PBY Catalina crashed off Cadiz carrying Paymaster-Lt. James Hadden Turner, a courier. He was carrying a letter from General Mark Clark to the Governor of Gibraltar, which named French agents in North Africa and gave the date of the Torch landings as 4 November (although the actual date was 8 November). Turner's body washed up on the beach near Tarifa and was recovered by the Spanish authorities. When the body was returned to the British, the letter was still on it, and technicians determined that the letter had not been opened. The Germans had the means to read the letter without opening the envelope, but if they did, they apparently decided the letter was "planted" and the information was bogus, so they ignored it.