The dead man with fake letters who helped fool Hitler about Sicily
In 1943 British intelligence floated a corpse off Spain dressed as a Royal Marines officer, carrying letters hinting that the Allies would strike Greece and Sardinia. The Germans read them, believed them, and sent reinforcements elsewhere. Sicily, the real target, got none, and the idea traced back to a memo bearing the hand of Ian Fleming.
On 29 September 1939 the director of naval intelligence, Rear Admiral John Godfrey, circulated the Trout memo, which likened wartime deception to fly fishing. The author Ben Macintyre sees the fingerprints of Godfrey's assistant, Ian Fleming, all over it. Item 28, flagged as not a very nice suggestion, borrowed an idea from a Basil Thomson novel: drop a dead airman carrying dispatches on an enemy coast. Planting false papers, the so-called Haversack Ruse, was an old trick. In August 1942 a doctored minefield map left on a body before the Battle of Alam el Halfa steered German tanks into soft sand.
A real accident sharpened the thinking. In September 1942 a plane crashed off Cádiz, killing a courier whose secret papers washed ashore near Tarifa with his body and passed through Spanish hands. The following month Charles Cholmondeley, an RAF officer attached to MI5, proposed his own version, codenamed Trojan Horse. The Twenty Committee, which ran double agents, rejected it in November as unworkable but paired him with the naval lawyer Ewen Montagu to develop it.
The strategic stakes were high. At the Casablanca Conference in January 1943 the Allies chose Sicily, so obvious a target that Churchill supposedly said only a fool would miss it. Hitler, meanwhile, feared for the Balkans and their copper, bauxite, chrome and oil, and a wider deception called Operation Barclay even invented a twelve-division army in Cairo. The pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury told Montagu that air-crash victims at sea often die of shock rather than drowning, and that Spanish Catholic authorities rarely ordered post-mortems. On 28 January 1943 the coroner Bentley Purchase found a suitable body, probably Glyndwr Michael, a homeless man with no family to claim him.
Renamed Major William Martin, he was carried by submarine to southern Spain, released near shore and found by a fisherman. Spain passed copies of his papers to German military intelligence, and intercepted Ultra messages confirmed the bait was taken. Sicily fell faster and at lower cost than planners had feared. Montagu's 1953 account became the 1956 film The Man Who Never Was; another film followed in 2021.
Source: Operation Mincemeat
