Operation Mincemeat

Winston Churchill said of wartime deception and espionage: “In the higher range of Secret Service work the actual facts of many cases were in every respect equal to the most fantastic inventions of romance and melodrama.” In April 1943, Churchill, the prime minister of Great Britain, gave approval for an elaborate deception program, Operation Mincemeat, on the condition that General Dwight Eisenhower would approve the plan, which the American commander quickly did.

Operation Mincemeat was a plan by British intelligence to arrange for the body of a British Marine officer to wash up on a Spanish beach, the apparent victim of an airplane crash in the Mediterranean. The officer would have a briefcase chained to him, and in it would be letters between generals that obliquely suggested the Allies' next invasion targets. British intelligence hoped that the briefcase would come to the attention of German intelligence operatives, who were rife in that part of nominally neutral Spain.

According to the plan, the German spies would investigate the military briefcase, find the letters, and take the bait; access would come from the spies' close cooperation with Spanish officials, assured by a mixture of political affinity and bribery. After the covert copying, Spanish officials would return the dead man's effects to British authorities. Then German agents would pass the information on to Berlin. If top German analysts believed their “find,” they would alter their strategy and staffing, moving resources to Greece and Sardinia, the letters' nominal targets. These actions would leave fewer defenses in [Page 734]Sicily, described in the “discovered” letters as the Allies' cover target but, in fact, the genuine invasion target.

Mincemeat's deception succeeded in spite of universal agreement on the logic of Sicily as the Allies' next step after the North Africa campaign. Churchill observed: “Everybody but a bloody fool would know it was Sicily.” And yet with an imaginative plan and the expenditure of only 200 pounds, members of British intelligence, diplomats, double agents, ordinary civilians, and the Royal Navy fooled the German intelligence hierarchy. The plan was designed to exploit the two major flaws that Admiral John Henry Godfrey, Britain's director of naval intelligence, identified in spies: wishfulness and yesmanship. Mincemeat's deception enabled Allied forces to take Sicily with a force of 160,000 men in 38 days with only 7000 casualties. Original estimates anticipated a 90-day campaign and much higher losses.

From Sicily, the Allies rolled up Italy: Benito Mussolini resigned, and Italy got out of the war. Because of the invasion, Adolf Hitler suspended Operation Citadel with 900,000 troops and 3,000 tanks poised to retake Russian territory, and sent its panzer units to Italy. This action was the blitzkrieg's first failure and marked the beginning of the end on the Eastern Front.