1943 Disinformation about Sicily

Operation Mincemeat was a successful British disinformation strategy used during the Second World War. As a deception intended to cover the 1943 Allied invasion of Sicily, two members of British intelligence obtained the body of Glyndwr Michael, a tramp who died from eating rat poison, dressed him as an officer of the Royal Marines and placed personal items on him identifying him as Captain (Acting Major) William Martin. Correspondence between two British generals which suggested that the Allies planned to invade Greece and Sardinia, with Sicily as merely the target of a feint, was also placed on the body.

Part of the wider Operation Barclay, Mincemeat was based on the 1939 Trout memo, written by Rear Admiral John Godfrey, the Director of the Naval Intelligence Division, and his personal assistant, Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming. With the approval of the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and the overall military commander in the Mediterranean, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the plan began with transporting the body to the southern coast of Spain by submarine, and releasing it close to shore. It was picked up the following morning by a Spanish fisherman. The nominally neutral Spanish government shared copies of the documents with the Abwehr, the German military intelligence organisation, before returning the originals to the British. Forensic examination showed they had been read, and decrypts of German messages showed the Germans fell for the ruse. Reinforcements were shifted to Greece and Sardinia both before and during the invasion of Sicily; Sicily received none.

The true impact of Operation Mincemeat is unknown, although the island was liberated more quickly than anticipated and losses were lower than predicted. The events were depicted in Operation Heartbreak, a 1950 novel by the former cabinet minister Duff Cooper, before one of the agents who planned and carried out Mincemeat, Ewen Montagu, wrote a history in 1953. Montagu's work formed the basis for a 1956 film.

Inspiration for Mincemeat

On 29 September 1939, soon after the start of the Second World War, Rear Admiral John Godfrey, the Director of Naval Intelligence, circulated the Trout memo, a paper that compared the deception of an enemy in wartime to fly fishing. The historian Ben Macintyre observes that although the paper was published under Godfrey's name, it "bore all the hallmarks of ... Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming", Godfrey's personal assistant. The memo contained a number of schemes to be considered for use against the Axis powers to lure U-boats and German surface ships towards minefields. Number 28 on the list was titled: "A Suggestion (not a very nice one)"; it was an idea to plant misleading papers on a corpse that would be found by the enemy.

The following suggestion is used in a book by Basil Thomson: a corpse dressed as an airman, with despatches in his pockets, could be dropped on the coast, supposedly from a parachute that has failed. I understand there is no difficulty in obtaining corpses at the Naval Hospital, but, of course, it would have to be a fresh one.

The deliberate planting of fake documents to be found by the enemy was not new; known as the Haversack Ruse, it had been practised by the British and others in the First and Second World Wars. In August 1942, before the Battle of Alam el Halfa, a corpse was placed in a blown-up scout car, in a minefield facing the German 90th Light Division. On the corpse was a map purportedly showing the locations of British minefields; the Germans used the map and their tanks were routed to areas of soft sand where they bogged down.

In September 1942 an aircraft flying from Britain to Gibraltar crashed off Cádiz. All aboard were killed, including Paymaster-Lieutenant James Hadden Turner – a courier carrying top secret documents – and a French agent. Turner's documents included a letter from General Mark Clark, the American Deputy Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, to General Noel Mason-MacFarlane, British Governor and Commander in Chief of Gibraltar, informing him that General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander, would arrive in Gibraltar on the eve of the invasion's "target date" of 4 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. Other Allied intelligence sources established that the notebook carried by the French agent had been copied by the Germans, but they dismissed it as being disinformation. To British planners it showed that some material that was obtained by the Spanish was being passed to the Germans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat