Operation Mincemeat [Kindle Edition]

Ben Macintyre (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

Praise for the U.S. edition:

"Here, finally, is the complete story with its full cast of characters (not a dull one among them), pure cathnip to fans of World War II thrillers and a lot of fun for everyone else."
—Joseph Kanon, Washington Post Book World

"Brilliant and almost absurdly entertaining…The cast of characters involved in Mincemeat, as the caper was called, was extraordinary, and Macintyre tells their stories with gusto."
—Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker

"OPERATION MINCEMEAT is utterly, to employ a dead word, thrilling. But to call it thus is to miss the point slightly in terms of admiring it properly….What makes OPERATION MINCEMEAT so winning, in addition to Mr. Macintyre’s meticulous research and the layers of his historical understanding, is his elegant, jaunty, and very British high style."
—Dwight Garner, New York Times

"Macintyre, whose previous book chronicled the incredible exploits of Eddie Chapman, the crook turned spy known as Zigzag, excels at this sort of twisted narrative….Great fun."
—Jennet Conant, New York Times Book Review

"A nearly flawless true-life picaresque…zeroes in on one of the few times in war history when excessive literary imagination, instead of hobbling a clandestine enterprise, worked beyond its authors’ wildest dream….Almost inedibly rich with literary truffles—doppelgangers, obsession, transgression, self-fashioning….It is hard to oversate how cinematic this story really was."
—New Republic

"Another true WWII tale that reads like something by Ian Fleming….the fullest account yet."
—Entertainment Weekly

"London Times writer-at-large Macintyre offers a solid and entertaining updating of WWII's best-known 'human intelligence' operation....[and] recounts [the...

Product Description

Ben Macintyre’s Agent Zigzag was hailed as “rollicking, spellbinding” (New York Times), “wildly improbable but entirely true” (Entertainment Weekly), and, quite simply, “the best book ever written” (Boston Globe). In his new book, Operation Mincemeat, he tells an extraordinary story that will delight his legions of fans.

In 1943, from a windowless basement office in London, two brilliant intelligence officers conceived a plan that was both simple and complicated— Operation Mincemeat. The purpose? To deceive the Nazis into thinking that Allied forces were planning to attack southern Europe by way of Greece or Sardinia, rather than Sicily, as the Nazis had assumed, and the Allies ultimately chose.
 
Charles Cholmondeley of MI5 and the British naval intelligence officer Ewen Montagu could not have been more different. Cholmondeley was a dreamer seeking adventure. Montagu was an aristocratic, detail-oriented barrister. But together they were the perfect team and created an ingenious plan: Get a corpse, equip it with secret (but false and misleading) papers concerning the invasion, then drop it off the coast of Spain where German spies would, they hoped, take the bait. The idea was approved by British intelligence officials, including Ian Fleming (creator of James Bond). Winston Churchill believed it might ring true to the Axis and help bring victory to the Allies.

Filled with spies, double agents, rogues, fearless heroes, and one very important corpse, the story of Operation Mincemeat reads like an international thriller.

Unveiling never-before-released material, Ben Macintyre brings the reader right into the minds of intelligence officers, their moles and spies, and the German Abwehr agents who suffered the “twin frailties of wishfulness and yesmanship.” He weaves together the eccentric personalities of Cholmondeley and Montagu and their near-impossible feats into a riveting adventure that not only saved thousands of lives but paved the way for a pivotal battle in Sicily and, ultimately, Allied success in the war.


From the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 2376 KB
• Publisher: Crown; 1 edition (May 4, 2010)
• Sold by: Random House Digital, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B0036S49QE
• Text-to-Speech: Not enabled
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #16,326 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
  • #2 in Books > History > Military > Canada
  • #8 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > History > Military > Intelligence & Espionage
  • #15 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > History > World > 20th Century

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

51 of 57 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good read, not great, May 26, 2010

By 

Mark B. Friedman (Woodinville, WA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Operation Mincemeat (Kindle Edition)

I read an occasional spy book for their entertainment value. This one came highly recommended. I enjoyed it, but I did not find it nearly as great as many of the other reviewers.
It is the true story of a spy caper that is credited with diverting Hitler's attention away from the Allies invading Sicily in 1943. It is the same incident that was dramatized in an earlier book called "The Man Who Never Was," which was also turned into a movie back in the 50's. The author presents some new details these 50 years on that were suppressed in the original due to security considerations at the time.
There are certainly some interesting characters involved, including some of the leading lights of the British MI5 & MI6 operation. Ian Fleming makes a brief, but pivotal appearance, as do the real life inspirations for his "M" and "Q" characters in the James Bond novels. Kim Philby and Winston Churchill also make cameo appearances.

The gist of the spy story is the British secret service dropped a dead body off the coast of Spain rigged with phony letters designed to put the German army off the scent of the upcoming invasion of Sicily. The fact that this crackpot scheme worked certainly makes a good story. As in all books of this type, the British triumph, so there's not much in the way of suspense. There was a great deal of spycraft necessary to make this work that is elaborated in great detail, and there is certainly a lot of spying going on.

One of the more interesting ideas mentioned in the book was that the gambit's success may have hinged on the willingness on the head of the German intelligence effort, someone named von Renne, to swallow this "fish" story, not because he believed the story, but because he figured it for a plant. He wanted Hitler to fail, so he may have put his stamp of approval on the intelligence gathered in Spain because he doubted its probity. If this is true, it makes for a very different story. Unfortunately, it is not possible to do more than speculate about this possibility because von Renne was rounded up, tried and executed in the aftermath of the undersuccessful attempt to assassinate Hitler known as "Operation Valkyrie." So we will never know, but it certainly seems fishy that he never asked the hard questions about the veracity of the original intelligence reports emanating from Spain, which is unusual behavior for a spymaster of his stature.

Another interesting aspect is how the British's Project Ultra that cracked the German navy's Enigma coding scheme allowed British Intelligence to monitor how well their ruse was actually working. The Ultra project gave the British access to all manner of secret military communications and was a pivotal to the success of the entire war effort. Operation Mincemeat is certainly an interesting episode, but Project Ultra was much more important and, at least, to this Reader, a more engrossing story.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars So much stranger than the long-lasting myth, July 8, 2010

By 

Mal Warwick (Berkeley, California) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Operation Mincemeat (Kindle Edition)

Sometime in the mid-1950s, when I was in what is today called "middle school," I eagerly snapped up a book recently published in the U.S. that related an astonishing World War II British spy story. The book, The Man Who Never Was by Ewen Montagu, had been published in 1953 in the UK to great acclaim and enormous sales. It told the story of how Montagu, then a Lieutenant Commander in the British Naval Reserve engaged in planning operations to deceive Nazi Germany, had masterminded a successful plot that played a large role in the Allies' victory in World War II. I don't remember many of the books I read then, more than half a century ago, but I vividly remember The Man Who Never Was, even though I missed the Hollywood film released a couple of years later that was based on Montagu's book.

Now comes Ben McIntyre's even more astonishing book based on the same facts, told at greater length, in much greater depth, and with all the warts and official secrets revealed in the telling. Never have I seen more convincing evidence that truth is, truly, stranger than fiction. McIntyre's Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured Allied Victory is nothing short of a revelation. It's the latest, and in many ways the very best, of a torrent of books based on the gradual opening of the files of the British secret service beginning in the 1970s.

Here's just a taste of the unlikely facts and circumstances that come to light in Operation Mincemeat, contradicting the convenient untruths and obfuscations of Montagu's own account:

* It was not Montagu alone who managed the case but Montagu working with a Royal Air Force officer named Charles Cholmondeley (pronounced "Chumley"; don't you just love the English?).
* The original idea for the plot had been cooked up several years earlier by a certain Naval Commander, Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, then a Naval intelligence officer;
* The dead body washed onto the Spanish shore to launch the plot was that of a mentally unbalanced, poverty-stricken, substance-abusing Welshman who probably committed suicide, not a middle-class Scotsman who died an honorable death in a hospital, and the Welshman's family was never asked for permission to use his body;
* The famous English pathologist who assured Montagu and Cholmondeley that no one would discover the true cause of death of the man now rechristened "Major William Martin" was clearly mistaken;
* The Abwehr agent in Spain who examined the phony papers on "Major Martin's" body and declared them genuine may have done so simply because he was desperate to prove he could deliver high-value intelligence to Berlin, since he himself was one-quarter Jewish and fearful about being sent back home;
* The "German spy" sent to England to investigate the bona fides of "Major Martin" was a figment of the Nazis' imagination, because British intelligence had captured, turned, or executed every single Abwehr agent infiltrated into Britain -- a fact still a secret when Montagu wrote his book in the early 1950s; and
* The Abwehr officer in Berlin who was the ultimate authority on the authenticity of the documents and was Hitler's favorite intelligence analyst was easily able to detect the phoniness of "Martin's" papers but chose to reassure Hitler because he was a dedicated anti-Nazi and was prepared to do anything to help the Allies win the war. (He was later executed in the wake of the failed von Stauffenberg assassination plot.)

And that's just a smattering of the revelations in this wonderful book. If you have any interest in British history, World War II, espionage, or just want to read a real-world thriller, pick up a copy of Operation Mincemeat. I doubt you'll be able to put it down.

(From Mal Warwick's Blog on Books)

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars 'The Man Who Never Was' and 'Operation Mincemeat', July 27, 2010

By 

Rea Andrew Redd "Civil War Librarian" (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania metropolitan region) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Operation Mincemeat (Kindle Edition)

Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory, Ben Macintyre, Crown Publisher, 416 pages, illustrations, maps, $25.99.

Having read and thoroughly enjoyed Ben Macintyre's account of a British double agent, 'Agent Zigzag', his second effort seemed appealing. 'Operation Mincemeat' is a thorough updating of a previous book, 'The Man Who Never Was', that I had read during junior high study halls.

'Operation Mincemeat' and 'The Man Who Never Was' reveal the elaborate British deception of the Nazis into thinking that Allied forces were planning an invasion southern Europe from Greece or Sardinia, rather than Sicily.

Ewen Montagu, author of 'The Man Who Never Was' and co-planner of Operation Mincemeat could not have been more different than Charles Cholmondeley of MI5 and British naval intelligence officer. Montagu was an aristocratic, detail-oriented barrister and Cholmondeley was an adventure seeker. Together they created an ingenious up tenuous plan: Plant a corpse on a Spanish beach and load it with false and misleading documents concerning the invasion. Approved by Ian Fleming (creator of James Bond) and other British intelligence officials the plan was present to Winston Churchill who believed it might look real to the Nazi and mislead them.

Presenting previously top secret material, Ben Macintyre brings the reader right into the minds of intelligence officers, their moles and spies, and the German Abwehr agents who suffered from wishfulness and yesmanship. He weaves together the eccentric personalities of Cholmondeley and Montagu and their near-impossible feats into a riveting adventure that not only saved thousands of lives but paved the way for a pivotal battle in Sicily and, ultimately, Allied success in the war. Most importantly, the corpse does not remain anonymous.

Macintyre's discovery of the identity of the corpse, its route into the hands of the British intelligence officers and then its delivery into the sea currents that took it ashore is astonishing and compelling. At the end of the book, the reader is conveyed to a Spanish cemetery that holds the body of an improverished and mentally disadvantaged Welshman who inadvertently committed suicide and afterward heroically served his country.