A rather breath­less review in The New York Times in May described Ewen Mon­tagu, “The man who never was,” as a prin­ci­pal in a decep­tion which tricked the Nazis into expect­ing an inva­sion of Greece rather than Sicily by the Allies in 1943, after hav­ing dri­ven Rom­mel and the Afrika Korps from North Africa. The idea—which the Times implies was unheard of until now—was to drop a corpse where it would con­ve­niently wash up on a Span­ish beach, planted with false papers nam­ing Greece as the inva­sion tar­get and Sicily as the diver­sion. The Spaniards would hope­fully place the false papers in Ger­man hands, and the Ger­mans would shift their defenses to Greece and ignore Sicily—the real target.

The corpse was that of Glyn­dwr Michael, a Welsh gar­dener, “The Man Who Never Was,” sub­ject of a video and a website.

Improb­a­ble? Yet, the review continues,

…the oper­a­tion suc­ceeded beyond wildest expec­ta­tions, fool­ing the Ger­man high com­mand into chang­ing its Mediter­ranean defense strat­egy and allow­ing Allied forces to con­quer Sicily with lim­ited casu­al­ties. It was one of the most remark­able hoaxes in the his­tory of espionage.

Accord­ing to the review, Oper­a­tion Mince­meat, by Ben Macintyre, credits the decep­tion to Ewen Mon­tagu, “a shrewd crim­i­nal lawyer and worka­holic with a pre­ma­turely reced­ing hair­line and a pen­chant for stinky cheese.” Won­der­ful stuff, but like many sto­ries in the Churchill genre, this is not a new story but an old one, which Sir Mar­tin Gilbert cov­ered long ago—nearly a quar­ter cen­tury ago, in fact, in his Vol­ume VII of the Churchill offi­cial biog­ra­phy, Road to Vic­tory (1976).

The Times review omits the orig­i­na­tor of the plan, who was not Ewen Mon­tagu but Flight Lieu­tenant Charles Chol­mond­ley (pro­nounced “Chum­ley”) of MI5, who had been act­ing as a liai­son offi­cer with Col. John Bevan’s decep­tion team, the Lon­don Con­trol­ling Sec­tion. It was Bevan who secured the approval of the Prime Min­is­ter, albeit with some doubts. “Of course,” Churchill said, “there’s a pos­si­bil­ity that the Spaniards might find out that this dead man was in fact not drowned at all from a crashed air-craft, but was a gar­dener in Wales who’d killed him­self with weed-killer.”  When Bevan added that the wind and tide might be wrong and the body might not wash up, Churchill replied, “…well, in that case you’ll have to take him on another swim, won’t you.” (Road to Vic­tory, page 405.)

As Mar­tin Gilbert’s book explains, Chol­mond­ley had the idea and Mon­tagu was put in charge of set­ting it up. Sir Mar­tin does credit Mon­tagu with “indis­pens­able sup­port” for the suc­cess­ful hoax.

While Sir Mar­tin gives this story the three pages it deserves, I won­der if it’s the stuff of an entire book. A his­to­rian col­league writes: “It may be just a good story that exag­ger­ates the impor­tance of the decep­tion, as intell oper­a­tives and offi­cers invari­ably do. But to do more than sug­gest that would require research in the mil­i­tary intell files to detect just what the effect of the decep­tion really was.”

Macintyre’s book per­haps does this. Among pre­vi­ous avail­able infor­ma­tion, none men­tions any trans­fer of sig­nif­i­cant (or insignif­i­cant) num­bers of troops from Italy to Greece. Mine­fields and port defenses in Greece hardly diverted resources from Sicily. The loss of a group of motor tor­pedo boats would not have had a sig­nal effect on the inva­sion of Sicily. Send­ing Rom­mel to Greece was a sign that the Ger­mans bought the deception—but Rom­mel he was no “defen­sive” general.

Mar­tin Gilbert wrote that “Oper­a­tion Mince­meat” was a suc­cess­ful enter­prise. The Spaniards found the washed up body, allowed the Ger­mans to copy the papers, and the Ger­man High Com­mand “antic­i­pated” Greece and the Balkans as the loca­tions of Allied land­ings, with Sicily as a cover oper­a­tion. Mus­solini demurred, but accord­ing to Gilbert, Hitler rejected his ally’s wise skep­ti­cism. Wrote Admi­ral Doenitz: “The Fuehrer does not agree with the Duce that the most likely inva­sion point is Sicily.”

Tote one up to Mus­solini, not famous for his mil­i­tary per­spi­cac­ity, and another boner for Adolf Hitler. The story puts me in mind of what Churchill said when Hitler escaped assas­si­na­tion in July 1944:

When Herr Hitler escaped his bomb on July 20th he described his sur­vival as providential; I think that from a purely mil­i­tary point of view we can all agree with him, for cer­tainly it would be most unfor­tu­nate if the Allies were to be deprived, in the clos­ing phases of the strug­gle, of that form of war­like genius by which Cor­po­ral Schickl­gru­ber has so notably con­tributed to our victory.

Tagged as: Afrika Korps, Ben Macintyre, Charles Cholmondley, Erwin Rommel, Ewen Montagu, Glyndwr Michael, Invasion of Sicily, John Bevan, Martin Gilbert, MI5, Operation Mincemeat, Road to Victory