Operation Mincemeat: The gentleman and the tramp

Think of this for a moment. The greatest hero of the Second World War may not have been Winston Churchill with his defiant speechifying or Generals Patton and Eisenhower with their intricate invasion plans. It may have been a suicidal tramp.

In Operation Mincemeat, The Times columnist Ben Macintyre tells the too-true-to-be-falsified tale of an elite British spy unit that used a dead tramp to deceive the Germans. In 1943, as the Allies were gearing up to launch an invasion of mainland Europe through Sicily, the British desperately needed Hitler to move his troops to the Balkans. With nothing less than the fate of the free world depending on it, an eccentric barrister, a pretty young secretary and a coroner fleshed out a germ of an ideas provided by Ian Fleming, the man who would go on to create James Bond. They ransacked the morgues of London to find an anonymous body, one they could dress up in full military regalia and dump in the waters of Spain. The hope was that the local authorities, sympathetic to the Nazis, would send the body along with the treasure trove of false intelligence planted on him, to the Germans. It was an audacious plan and one that, against all reasonable expectations, worked. Thrown off the scent, Hitler moved many of his troops out of Sicily and the resulting Allied invasion was a resounding success.

There is no moral to Operation Mincemeat. It is written in spy-novel style and simply tells the tale of a bunch of misfits to decided to defeat the Krauts with brainpower. The only complexity in the book lies in the elaborate identity the group for their make-believe soldier. Just through the contents of his wallet, they were able to give him an aristocratic background, a history of financial recklessness and a tempestuous love affair.

The hero of the operation is Ewen Montagu, a brilliant lawyer who puts the plan into motion and ultimately implements. Montagu is a fascinating character, one cooks up all the little details that make the plan work. But even he is over staged by his younger brother, Ivor, a rebel to took to fashionable left-wing causes and, while his elder sibling was working for the British spy agencies, was feeding information to the Russians.The unsung hero of Operation Mincemeat is Glyndwr Michael, the vagabond with a history of mental disease, who in death managed to serve his country in a way he was never able to manage during his troubled life.

The plot of Operation Mincemeat is so intriguing, romantic and suspenseful that it was hardly likely to fail as a book. Macintyre, though, makes it a resounding success thanks to his zippy prose, thorough research and constant tone of credulity.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 21^st, 2010.