Operation Mincemeat: The Sicily Deception
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.…
