What we’re reading – Deception in a Good Cause
Some of those who fought the hardest in the Second World War didn't carry guns or even leave home. They sat in cramped, overcrowded offices and let their imaginations run wild. Ewen Montagu was one of these. He and his colleague Charles Cholmondeley came up with the fantastical idea of using a dead body carrying secret documents that would conveniently wash up on the shores of Spain to convey disinformation to the Germans about the Allied plans for the invasion of Sicily. You may think this story is familiar from the movie The Man Who Never Was (based on the book of the same name by Montagu) but that was the story as it could be told not very long after the war when there were still sensitive issues. In writing Operation Mincemeat, Ben Macintyre has had access to much more information and has done incredible research putting the pieces of the story together.
The transformation of the dead vagrant Glyndwr Michael into Captain William Martin complete with fiancé, military career, problems with his bank and the right sort of underwear is fascinating in itself but there's also the technical difficulties involved in transporting a corpse to exactly the right spot off the coast Spain (starting with a London undertaker whose own brother would be involved in the invasion of Sicily and ending with a submarine) and then all the hundreds of things big and small that could have gone wrong but didn't, right up until Hitler himself swallowed the story hook, line and sinker and left Sicily under defended.
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