Still with "rumours" and how they can change the course of wars and turn a victor into a loser and the other way round...
And we go back together to early 1943, after the Allied forces "Britain, America and the Soviet Union" succeeded in defeating the German Nazi forces in North Africa; and they began preparing for a new, decisive phase of fighting in the heart of Europe...
And amid the pride of victory that swept the rulers and leaders of the Allies, the British Prime Minister "Winston Churchill" stood up to deliver a speech to the British people...
He was an alcoholic.. so before the speech he raised a bottle of alcohol.. and at the height of the speech the enthusiasm and the alcohol swept him away, so he shouted to the people that "Sicily" was the new battlefield of the Allies, where the Nazi forces would be defeated...
And the hearts of the Allied commanders would have stopped forever then from sheer panic..
The truth is that Churchill.. unintentionally.. revealed an extremely dangerous secret step, representing the Allies' plan for the move that was actually coming..
And it seems that Churchill realised the mistake he had fallen into after the speech, with the flood of telegrams and communications that came to him from the Allied leaders.. meetings were held, and they decided to put together an alternative plan.. and instead of Sicily to attack in Greece.. but Churchill asked them to wait, until he came up with a plan to fix his mistake...
And
Churchill placed the task on the shoulders of one of his most dangerous men, the writer, judge, musician and naval intelligence officer, Captain "Ewen Edward Samuel Montagu".. the one wearing the military cap in the picture...
And in turn Montagu met with the air lieutenant "Charles Cholmondeley".. the one wearing glasses in the second picture.. and they sat planning and studying.. and then went to Churchill with their idea...
It seems that what was said about Churchill was true and that he really was a man of cold nerve.. because when they went to him he was relaxing in bed smoking a cigar and drinking a fresh glass of alcohol.. after the disaster he had caused.. and they put their plan to him.. and he liked it.. and ordered it be put into effect...
And the execution began of one of the most brilliant plans of "tactical deception" in the history of the modern world.
"Operation Mincemeat"...
And the strange thing is that the operation relied on the Germans not believing Churchill's statement easily and assuming it was a trick.. and therefore Montagu and Cholmondeley decided to confirm this information to the Nazis..
The plan in brief.. a dead body.. of a young man from the Allied forces.. appearing on one of the coasts under Nazi control, as if he had drowned with one of the Allied aircraft that were constantly falling.. and with the body, misleading documents to deceive the Germans..
And with the help of the brilliant pathologist "Sir Bernard Spilsbury".. they chose the body of a 34-year-old young man named "Glyndwr Michael" from Wales.. an only child with no family or acquaintances.. who died after swallowing rat poison...
And the execution phase began...
At first the English experts began working towards confirming the dead man's identity.. giving him a history and an existence.. so they dressed the body in a British officer's suit and an inflated life jacket full of air and tied a briefcase around his wrist and placed forged documents inside it.. and soaked him in real seawater for several days.. until he entered the stages of decomposition...
And the contents of the briefcase indicated that when Churchill made his statement he was carrying out part of a plan.. and that the Allies were deceiving the Germans and would not land in Sicily.. they would land in Greece or specifically Sardinia...
And Montagu and his team continued the plan.. and filled the body's lungs and intestines with real seawater and preserved it in ice..
And then the identification phase began.
And with precision, skill and patience to be envied, Montagu and Cholmondeley placed in the pockets of the fake officer, whom they named "Major William Bill Martin", some items and papers such as his military ID - the one in this picture - and part of a cinema ticket in London.. then a love letter from an unknown girl, for which they used a real girl to write it, in anticipation of what the German handwriting expert might notice; of the difference between a woman's handwriting and a man's...
And in April 1943 a British submarine carried William's body preserved in ice.. and then put it out near the coasts of Huelva in Spain.. after the English experts had calculated with great precision where the sea currents would take the body..
And the body reached the shore...
At first some Spanish fishermen found the body and realised at once that it was the body of a British officer, and the presence of that leather briefcase fastened to his wrist astonished them, so they hurried to inform the Spanish authorities, which in turn immediately informed the commander of the Nazi forces there...
And German intelligence picked up the body with the briefcase..
And the most delicate and dangerous stages of the plan began..
The briefcase was fastened with a handcuff around Martin's arm with secret numbers "and that was not common at the time".. and also inside the briefcase was a special automatic defence system.. that made any attempt to open it release concentrated sulphuric acid inside it that would destroy all its contents...
And because the Germans were no fools, they began through their spies to verify William's identity.. and they confirmed - from the fake history Britain had made for him - that he was indeed a major in the navy.. and they reached his hometown and watched his fiancée "Pam".. who had supposedly learned of her fiancé's death and lived in terrible grief and began to drink heavily..
And the Germans were reassured about the matter.. especially after the business of his fiancée.. without knowing that the grieving fiancée "Pam" was at the time an agent of "British MI5".. and her real name was "Nancy Jean Leslie"...
And with their well-known skill, the Germans opened the briefcase's secret lock.. and also, before they opened the briefcase itself.. they disabled the defence mechanism that destroys the documents (and the English knew the Germans would be able to open the bag) and photographed all the documents in the briefcase.. and closed it and returned it as it was.. as if no one had touched it..
And since the British were all along protesting through their embassy in Spain about the handover of their officer's body and the briefcase.. in the end, after the Germans had photographed the documents.. they returned the body with the briefcase handcuffed to its wrist to the Spaniards.. to return it to the English..
And the body reached London.. and Montagu and his companion rushed to it with the experts to examine it..
And Montagu almost jumped for sheer joy...
The truth is that the Germans, despite their skill and shrewdness and their returning of everything to how it was.. missed one extremely fine hair.. that they had planted in the briefcase's secret lock...
Meaning the briefcase had been opened...
And the Germans read the documents saying the attack would be through Greece..
And then came the role of "rumours"...
And the Germans' discovery coincided with dozens of systematic whispered rumours that the Allies launched.. about confirmation to people close to Churchill.. that the attack would indeed be in Greece.. and about preparations for an attack in Greece.. and about officers preparing to be transferred to naval units said to be heading to Greece...
And just as rumours spread on social media in the way they do it to us today.. they spread at the time this creeping rumour.. and it reached the ears of the Germans..
And they believed it..
And that meant the plan had succeeded..
And in a solemn military ceremony.. the body of "William Martin" was buried..
And the Germans prepared to meet the Allies in Greece.. but the attack happened in Sicily after all.. just as Churchill had said in his speech.. and Sicily fell into the hands of the Allies without notable resistance...
Because of this operation.. German intelligence afterwards ignored top-secret documents they found in a sunken plane near Normandy.. and other documents about future targets, found on an officer's body in the Netherlands...
And the problem is that this time the documents were real and their contents were real.. but because the Allies, when they lost them.. launched two rumours through their spies, that they were about two new deception operations like "Operation Mincemeat".. the rumours reached the Germans and they ignored these documents and papers.. and they could have changed the course of the war..
After his retirement from legal work in 1950.. Montagu published the story of William Martin in the novel "The Man Who Never Was"..
In 1970 Montagu issued his second book "Beyond Top Secret ULTRA".. in which he spoke at length about his exploits and his role in secret operations, among them the William Martin operation..
To this day Operation Mincemeat is studied by every intelligence officer in almost every country in the world without exception...
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References
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1 - Acintyre, Ben (2010-05-11). "Operation Mincemeat - By Ben Macintyre". The New York Times...
2 - Arthur, Max. Forgotten Voices of The Second World War, 2004, Random House...
3 - Simon Corble – This is the Man – Operation Mincemeat...
4 - Smith, Capt. Kevin D. (July–August 2002). "Coming Into its Own: The Contribution of Intelligence at the Battle of Alam Halfa". Military Review: 74–77.
5 - Montagu, Ewen (1977). Beyond Top Secret ULTRA. Coward McGann and Geoghegan. pp. 12–13...
6 - Ben Macintyre, Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory (Random House Digital, 2010) p204...
7 - Dead Men's Secrets Documentary, D-Day Deception Episode...