Customer Reviews

Operation Mincemeat

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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.

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)

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.

This is an EXTREMELY well-written, thoroughly-researched book on the greatest deception ever devised and foisted on the Nazis. Sure, there have been other books written about it, most notably Ewen Montagu's 'The Man that never was', which was written by the man who implemented the deception. That story was, however, of necessity incomplete, as it was published just a few years after World War II ended and was, by Montagu's own admission, censored to conceal many of the most important pieces of the giant puzzle.

This book is based on research of papers and other material released by the British government many decades after the War ended, and shines a light not just on the entire picture, but also details how the British could track the deception deep within German intelligence and government, all the way upto Hitler. I will warn you, though, not to start reading this book at night because you might find it impossible to put it down and go to bed without finishing it!

This true WWII scheme reads like a spy thriller. If it'd been fiction, I'd said no way do I believe it could've worked, but it did. Because the author had so much information, he gives detailed background on each person which is interesting. I usually don't read books based on wars and don't have interest in Hitler, but Operation Mincemeat was bizarre enough to keep me reading until the end.

Some many years ago now, back in the early '60's, when I was in high school, I read Ewan Montagu's fascinating "The Man Who Never Was". Breathtaking to read way back then, as I am sure it was when it first came out years before that, I was simply delighted to learn of Ben MacIntyre's "Operation Mincemeat" re-telling of this wonderful true tale that shows what just one incident can do to alter the course of history.

MacIntyre has had time on his side in that suppressed information that Montagu was not allowed to include in the original story has now become declassified and he is able to present the whole of the story to us in all of its "hard to believe" wonderment. After knowing the original story, and also having seen the fabulous movie (which, incidentally, starred Montagu himself in a small role) from 1956 that is simply unforgettable and always a welcome "re-watch", I was just as taken again with this reaffirming story of man's struggle for good over evil and how things work out to that end in some surprising cases. Again, unable to "put it down", as with the original "TMWNW", I read on, all through the night until sun-up, as I am sure I did all those years ago with my first exposure to this fascinating true story.

The following day I found myself scouring my shelves for the original Montagu book, and promptly plunked myself down in my "older-than-I" reading chair and re-read it "just because".

History is one fascinating aspect of this life we live here on this tortured little blue sphere we occupy, spinning into the future as it spins from its past.

A most worthy reiteration of the original book, I urge you to read MacIntyre's "Operation Mincemeat" whether you are already familiar with the story or not. It will fill your heart to the brim as Montagu's did all those years ago.

~operabruin

World War II included many odd circumstances and incidents. One of the oddest was the famous "Man Who Never Was", which revolved around a weird plot by British Intelligence intended to fool their German opponents into believing that they (the British and the American allies) intended to invade Greece and Sardinia rather than their actual target, the island of Sicily. The rather complicated plot involved putting fake documents either saying that this was what was happening, or hinting at it, in a briefcase, which was then attached to a corpse dressed in Royal Marines battledress, and thrown into the ocean off the coast of Spain, in an area where the British were confident that the authorities were pro-German. They of course would show the documents to their German allies, and the Germans would in turn act on the intelligence, especially because of the authenticity of the dead body attached to the briefcase. The trick, of course, was that the dead man wasn't a soldier, and hadn't died in a plane crash: he was a homeless indigent who was killed with rat poison, either because he committed suicide, or because he unknowingly ate some bread covered with the poison in the abandoned factory he was apparently squatting in.

The author here does a pretty good job of writing what I've decided to call a digressionography. This is a book of non-fiction, typically history, where the author takes one small event, and expands on it exponentially. This involves the author writing about the event at great length, and since there's not that much to write about, he writes about things connected to the event, instead. So here, the main personality involved in the whole caper was a fellow named Ewen Montagu. Ewen's brother Ivor was an interesting character. He apparently was a Communist spy, and he was also the first head of the International Table Tennis Federation. So there's a whole chapter devoted to him, and to his spying and his table tennis obsession. Other characters (the coroner who originally handled the body, the undertaker who dealt with it, even the guy who drove it across England in the dead of night) are examined in enough detail to emerge as interesting characters in the story. This sort of thing can be very fascinating, but it can also be a bit tedious, as inevitably the central plot moves at a snail's pace, as the author wanders off following every butterfly, so to speak. A friend of mine tried to read the book and gave up about 2/3 the way through, because of this.

MacIntyre's writing style is quite good, and the story itself is for the most part very interesting, so the book worked for me. I was especially intrigued by the story of the gravestone for the corpse of the man in question. Since he was carrying a false identity, the original inscription gave not only his name incorrectly, but those of his parents. However, half a century after the war the British Government corrected the inscription, somewhat, with an addition noting that "Glendwr Michael served as Major William Martin RM" (RM=Royal Marines). The poor guy was a homeless indigent during his life, apparently mentally troubled and never able to hold down a real job, but in death he served a very valuable purpose, preventing perhaps thousands of deaths among the Allied Forces.

This is a very good book, even if it does take off in various directions without warning at times. I enjoyed it, and would recommend it.

A marvellous story of intrigue of actual events during World War II. There are a host of wonderful and eclectic characters in England, Spain and Germany. The author presents all these in readable detail.

The sequence of events - and there are several - are well depicted and we are clearly presented with the logical construction of this set-up meant to deceive the Germans into believing that the Allies mean to launch a multi-pronged invasion in the Mediterranean - instead of just Sicily.

The author is careful to show all the nuances of the deception - how much embellishment do you do to preserve the initial lie? The author is also forthright to point out that "Mincemeat" was part of an overall package. The Germans in Spain pushed their find over-enthusiastically and many used it to reinforce their own preconceptions of an Allied invasion of Greece. As Mr. Macintyre demonstrates, if German Intelligence would have probed more in any direction (such as the ambiguous autopsy from the Spanish coroner) the ruse would have been exposed. Instead the clientele was an over-eager buyer.

It is with sadness at the end of the book when we are shown the tombstone of this "unknown civilian" - whose body was used in after-life to conjure this grand deception.

The paperback edition has some useful footnotes.

This is just a really fabulous spy story with all the different layers exposed for us to marvel at.

An extremely well written book with information that blew my mind. The facts & details were brilliantly researched and recorded. I highly recommend this wonderful book.
Robert Schartoff

I read this while trapped inside by the snowstorm of Christmas 2010 in NYC and it was a really fun read. The story is filled with facts and extensive research which are extremely impressive. But it isn't a slog, instead, it is quite the page turner for a non-fictional account of how the Allies fooled the Nazis. I thought one aspect of the book that could've been better was the explanation regarding why the Nazis were fooled. The author intimates that the Nazis need to have wanted to be misled to make it so. I can accept that but I wish there would have been a little more depth to the explanation. All in all, this was a great read and I recommend it.