Allied plot 75 years ago used a dead man with a fake identity to baffle the Germans

A HOMELESS man who took his life became part of a bizarre plot to fool the Germans using a dead body, false identity and faked war plans

Charles Cholmondeley and Ewen Montagu deliver the dead man’s body to Scotland in 1943 for Operation Mincemeat.

WHEN homeless and jobless Welshman Glyndwr Michael ended his life with a dose of rat poison in January 1943, he was about to help change the course of World War II.

Michael’s body was found on a cold winter’s night in an abandoned warehouse in King’s Cross, London. His death certificate noted the cause of death as “phosphorus poisoning. Took rat poison (to) kill himself while of unsound mind”. That was his first death.

The coroner of St Pancras, Sir Bentley Purchase, put Michael’s body on ice in Hackney Mortuary for three months while his persona was changed from hobo to Major William Martin.

With a totally new backstory and a briefcase full of fake documents, Martin’s corpse was then trucked to Scotland, loaded into a submarine and taken to the coast of southern Spain where it was left floating in the Atlantic as part of a brazen plan to fool the Nazis. That was his second death.

The outlandish plot involving Michael/Martin was part of Operation Mincemeat, a deception said to be cooked up by Ian Fleming, later of James Bond fame, and put into operation by intelligence officers Charles Cholmondeley and Ewen Montagu. Winston Churchill tagged them his War Office “corkscrew thinkers”.

Author Ian Fleming in 1966.

British Navy Captain Ewen Edward Samuel Montagu, one of the masterminds behind Operation Mincemeat, in 1943.

Cholmondeley and Montagu spent months creating Martin’s false identity. So, 75 years ago today, when a Spanish sardine fisherman found Martin’s corpse near the port of Huelva on the morning of April 30, 1943, he was assumed to be a British military courier who’d died in a plane crash.

He was carrying an identity card marking him as a Captain (Acting Major) in the Royal Marines, faked personal letters, receipts, bills and photographs. Although Michael’s parents were both dead, Cholmondeley and Montagu gave him (Martin) a father and a fiancee with his backstory.

The briefcase he was carrying contained official-looking documents and a letter marked “Personal and most secret”, identifying plans for the fake invasion of Greece — not Sicily — by Allied armies massed in North Africa.

As Spain was still ostensibly a neutral country, Spanish authorities placed Martin’s belongings under lock and key and buried him with full military honours. While Michael/Martin was laid to rest, Operation Mincemeat was up and running.

Spain had been targeted as the location for the body to be found as it was awash with German spies, particularly around Huelvae.

The faked Naval identity card for Major William Martin, the dead man at the heart of Operation Mincemeat in 1943.

When news of the discovery of Martin’s body reached the Nazi spy network they made a number of attempts to obtain the contents of the briefcase. The British hoped that the fake documents being carried by a Royal Marine would be convincing enough to be passed up the chain of command.

The Operation Mincemeat planners, working in a windowless basement beneath Whitehall, had already included Martin’s details in the published list of British casualties which appeared in The Times on June 4.

And they soon knew his “personal and most secret information” had been read by the German spy network. They’d left an eyelash in the sealed documents.

Spanish authorities allowed the documents to be photographed by the Germans before they were resealed and handed over to the British. When they were reopened, the eyelash was missing.

The Mincemeat hoax had travelled from London to Scotland to Spain to Germany and was on its way to Hitler’s desk. It’s said Montagu and his team sent a telegram to Churchill reading: “Mincemeat swallowed rod, line and sinker.”

It certainly was. The fake information convinced the Germans to deploy 90,000 soldiers — an entire Panzer division — to Greece while, in early July, the Allies attacked Sicily.

The island soon fell, with thousands of British, Canadian and American lives saved; a fraction of the casualties and ship losses Britain had feared.

The surprise deception also played a part in Italian dictator Mussolini being toppled from power and, forced to confront the Allied invasion from the south, Hitler called off a huge offensive against the Soviets.

With the Germans in retreat, the tide of the war changed. The Red Army took to the offensive and didn’t stop until it reached Berlin. And it was all thanks, in part, to the body of a tramp being set adrift in the waters off Spain.

Montagu later wrote a book about the plot and, in 1956, the story was turned into a Hollywood film, The Man Who Never Was.

In a final twist, Operation Mincemeat was in the news again in 1977 when the Commonwealth War Graves Commission took responsibility for Major Martin’s grave in Huelva and added a postscript to his headstone: “Glyndwr Michael served as Major William Martin RM”.

The unfortunate Welshman hadn’t taken his life in vain.