Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory by Ben Macintyre

Aug 19, 2012 Hannah rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2012-reads, historicals, non-fiction, spies-espionage

Rating Clarification: 4.5 Stars

From the book blurb:
"In 1943, from a windowless basement office in London, two brilliant intelligence officers (Charles Cholmondeley of MI5 and the British naval intelligence officer Ewen Montagu) conceived a plan that was both simple and complicated— Operation Mincemeat. The purpose? To deceive the Nazis into thinking that Allied forces were planning to attack southern Europe by way of Greece or Sardinia, rather than Sicily, as the Nazis had assumed, and the Allie...more Rating Clarification: 4.5 Stars

From the book blurb:
"In 1943, from a windowless basement office in London, two brilliant intelligence officers (Charles Cholmondeley of MI5 and the British naval intelligence officer Ewen Montagu) conceived a plan that was both simple and complicated— Operation Mincemeat. The purpose? To deceive the Nazis into thinking that Allied forces were planning to attack southern Europe by way of Greece or Sardinia, rather than Sicily, as the Nazis had assumed, and the Allies ultimately chose.

Their ingenious plan: Get a corpse, equip it with secret (but false and misleading) papers concerning the invasion, then drop it off the coast of Spain where German spies would, they hoped, take the bait. The idea was approved by British intelligence officials, including Ian Fleming (creator of James Bond). Winston Churchill believed it might ring true to the Axis and help bring victory to the Allies."

The above is, once again, confirmation of why I love reading non-fiction. Because if it were fiction, I'd throw the book against the wall and scream: "that's improbable, crazy and impossible!" And yet Operation Mincemeat was so wildly improbable, so imaginatively crazy, so charged with failure at any given junction that the mere fact that the body in question made it to the attention of the Spanish & German authorities was a feat in itself. The cast of participants in this elaborate deception ranged from the pathetic: (the body of a down-trodden, mentally unstable Welshman whose sad, empty real life- and death- was replaced with a purpose-filled new "life"), to the romantic: (the dashing submarine commander), to the bizarre: (the cross-dressing British commanding officer) and finally to the brilliant: (the imaginations and talents of the counter-intelligence agents), who together pulled off this bold and audacious plan and fooled Hitler into shallowing a lie he already desperately wanted to believe.

Author Ben Macintyre lays out the operation from conception to completion, and shows how the coordinated efforts of people both larger-then-life as well as relatively obscure helped frame the most successful espionage operation of WWII. Great writing, page-turning suspense, humorous anecdotes, fully fleshed out true-life character studies, and a poignant ending make this a book that's hard to put down for the last 200 pages (and I didn't...)
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Aug 12, 2011 David rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-in-2011

I feel I ought to have liked this book more than I did. Lord knows, the author did his research, in commendable detail. But did he really have to include everything he learned in the final book? At some point the level of detail provided went (for me) beyond interesting and started to become stultifying. MacIntyre is a decent writer, but I think he falls into the trap that bedevils many non-fiction authors -- all the time and energy spent doing the research causes him to lose perspective. The st...more I feel I ought to have liked this book more than I did. Lord knows, the author did his research, in commendable detail. But did he really have to include everything he learned in the final book? At some point the level of detail provided went (for me) beyond interesting and started to become stultifying. MacIntyre is a decent writer, but I think he falls into the trap that bedevils many non-fiction authors -- all the time and energy spent doing the research causes him to lose perspective. The story is endlessly fascinating to him, but he forgets that some pruning of the details is needed in order to shape the narrative for the reader. But pruning is something that MacIntyre seems incapable of -- even the most peripheral actor is this tale gets at least two pages of backstory, which often does little to advance the real story.

Every chapter of the book is stuffed with irrelevant detail. Ewen Montagu, one of the main protagonists, came from an extremely wealthy family, a fact which is largely irrelevant to the story, but which nonetheless gets about 8 pages of text as MacIntyre gushes on about the number of family servants, the decor in the family mansion, their glittering social contacts etc etc. Discussion of the difficulties in acquiring a cadaver that can be used to fool the Germans is expanded (bloated) by inclusion of completely irrelevant biographical information on everyone consulted in the process, what everyone ate or drank at any given meeting, the temperature of the sherry, the mood of Montagu's stepmother, a digression on the history of grave-robbing, and any other random tidbit that showed up in MacIntyre's notebooks apparently. This kind of thing will either charm you or drive you up the wall.

Operation Mincemeat was an important, and fascinating, episode from the second world war, but it surely could have been told in fewer than 400 pages. That said, the book is not a bad read, and the occasional lapses into grandiosity of the kind "that single (hotel) register entry could have changed the course of World War II" are mercifully rare.

My inner pedant finds it necessary to point out that the correct term for what MacIntyre refers to as "champagne de mousse" (the white froth around the mouth that is characteristic of drowning victims) is actually "champignon de mousse".(less)

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Jan 03, 2011 Nancy Oakes rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction, espionage

Briefly, I have to say that this is one of the most fascinating books of history I've read in a very long time. You don't even need to be a WWII buff to appreciate it -- I'm not -- but it's simply amazing. The basic story is this: it's 1943, and the Allies have plans to invade Sicily to get a foothold in Europe and defeat Hitler. But since Sicily is the most obvious place for an Allied landing, Ewen Montagu and Charles Cholmondeley (it's pronounced "Chumley") of the Naval Intelligence section of...more

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May 13, 2013 Leon rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

One April morning in 1943, a sardine fisherman spotted the corpse of a British soldier floating in the sea off the coast of Spain and set in train a course of events that would change the course of the Second World War. Operation Mincemeat was the most successful wartime deception ever attempted, and certainly the strangest. It hoodwinked the Nazi espionage chiefs, sent German troops hurtling in the wrong direction, and saved thousands of lives by deploying a secret agent who was different, in o

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Mar 11, 2013 Barbara Mader rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: wwii

This book is about a secret operation that was part of a disinformation plan to confuse Germany as to the location of the invasion of Italy (from North Africa) in 1943.

Macintyre took good notes, but boy, does he want you to know it. The plethora of detail became annoying after a while, as did his practice of putting words into peoples' mouths without proper documentation--I hate paraphrasing and invention of conversation in books that are supposed to be factual. He also seems to have a tabloid-l...more

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Feb 21, 2013 Tony rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: history

OPERATION MINCEMEAT. (2010). Ben Macintyre. ****.
Using recently declassified files from the British Secret Service, the author has painstakingly pieced together the story of one of the most successful deceptions of the enemy utilized during wartime. In a nutshell, a body of a British officer was deposited in the sea off the coast of Spain, near a fairly well staffed German diplomatic office. A Spanish fisherman found the body and brought it to shore. It was turned over to the Spanish police and...more OPERATION MINCEMEAT. (2010). Ben Macintyre. ****.
Using recently declassified files from the British Secret Service, the author has painstakingly pieced together the story of one of the most successful deceptions of the enemy utilized during wartime. In a nutshell, a body of a British officer was deposited in the sea off the coast of Spain, near a fairly well staffed German diplomatic office. A Spanish fisherman found the body and brought it to shore. It was turned over to the Spanish police and later shared with German officials. The body was identified as Major William Martin, RM from the ID material found on it. It was assumed that the dead man was the victim of a plane crash while traveling to North Africa. Documents on the body included personal letters and a cache of communications that Martin was supposed to deliver to key military personnel. These documents alluded to the upcoming plans for the Allies to invade Europe through Greece, using Sardinia and Sicily as diversionary points of attack. The author leads us through the meticulous planning used to find a suitable body and to plant just the right kinds of documents on it so that the Germans would believe them. Should the plan work, large forces of the German troops would then be diverted away from Sicily and Sardinia to Greece to repel the attack there. Surprisingly, it all worked. As a result, thousands of lives of our Allied troops were saved, since they were now facing reduced levels of German resistance. What makes this book so interesting is the vast array of ‘characters’ that we encounter – members of the espionage networks of both Britain and Germany. This is a collection of men and women that it is hard to believe could be collected into acting groups. When you think of British eccentricity, multiply it by ten to get the average working spymaster’s personality. The body used actually belonged to a Welsh soldier, Glyn Michael, who had committed suicide by ingesting poison. The poison he took contained high levels of phosphorus, but not enough to kill him immediately. He later died of complications of several organs pushed over the edge by his dose of poison. Getting the body to the right place in the right condition was not trivial, and we are taken step-by-step through the whole process. Along the way we meet some very interesting people. One was Ian Flaming, the later author of the James Bond novels. Another character was code-named Garbo, a double agent upon whom Graham Greene based his novel, “Our Man in Havana.” There is no end to the detail provided by the author in this book. Recommended.
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Feb 19, 2013 Brendan rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2013, adventure-thriller, audio, history-journalism, non-fiction

Ben Macintyre has a strong sense for storytelling, crafting a tale full of vital details that bring it to life while providing the reader a strong sense of the history involved in his tale. This book, Operation Mincemeat, tells the true story of a secret British operation to dupe the Nazis by dropping a corpse carrying fake secret documents in the water off the coast of Spain in efforts to mislead the German hierarchy. A few quick thoughts:

- This book gives a better sense than any I’ve read pre...more

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Feb 16, 2013 Jim Gallen rated it 4 of 5 stars

When we read about World War II we are usually caught up in plans for invasions, the agony of bombing runs or suspense on or under the sea, but how often do we read about a man who never was, or at least never was who he was supposed to be, a man with a made-up past, a false identity and yet who changed the course and outcome of the war more than most of the people who lived through it. “Operation Mincemeat” is the story of that man. Hatched in fertile minds of British intelligence, the man take...more When we read about World War II we are usually caught up in plans for invasions, the agony of bombing runs or suspense on or under the sea, but how often do we read about a man who never was, or at least never was who he was supposed to be, a man with a made-up past, a false identity and yet who changed the course and outcome of the war more than most of the people who lived through it. “Operation Mincemeat” is the story of that man. Hatched in fertile minds of British intelligence, the man takes shape and a plot emerges that will change German troop deployments.

With North Africa cleared up, the Allies next step was as important for the Axis as it was for the Allies. Would it be Crete, Sicily, Sardinia, the Balkans or elsewhere? Charles Cholmondeley of M15 and British naval intelligence officer Ewen Montagu came up with the scheme of getting a body, dressing it as a British officer, loading it with false details about the location of the landing and letting it wash up on a shore where the information would get to the German leadership. The task was more challenging than we might think. They had to get a body that no one would claim, give the appearance that death was by drowning, preserve it without embalming, deliver it to a spot where the ocean currents would take it to the desired shore and then hope that the disinformation would be read and believed.

The found a Welshman with no family who cared about him, created an identity of an officer with a name that would be found on the British officer’s list but whom no one would think strange to see on a death list, released it off Spain, a Catholic country where autopsies would be less likely, got just the right theatre tickets to establish the time of death and hoped for the best. It worked like a charm. The Spanish turned the information over to the Germans, though not without some coaxing, the Germans fell for it and shifted troops to the Balkans, relieving some pressure on the Russian front and making the conquest of Sicily a much easier task than it otherwise would have been.

Author Ben Macintyre has added to prior histories through new research and tells it in a manner befitting a mystery novel. Besides making a story worth reading, it reminds us of the incredible detail required in prosecuting a war and just how a close run thing it was. Though a minor but fascinating operation of World War II, it is one that should be known and, lucky for the reader, is delivered in a masterfully written book.
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Feb 12, 2013 Dhiraj Sharma rated it 4 of 5 stars

This was my first purcahse from Flipkart and I got the book delivered the next day itself. Needless to say it made me a life long patron of Flipkart. For bookworms like me I consider Flipkart to be a real god sent boon to the e commerce sector in India.

Coming to the story, being a World War-II buff I was a bit familiar with the events but did not know the extent of planning which went into the Allied's efforts in leading the Germans on a Wild Goose chase. Probably one of the most effective espio...more

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Jan 18, 2013 Jack Lascom rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Operation Mincemeat is the story of one of the most bizarre and successful operations in WWII that resulted in thousands of saved lives on the massive invasion of Sicily. Charles Cholmondeley and Ewen Montagu master-minded the plot to use the dead body of a Welsh tramp with a new, completely made up life, rank and personality. He was floated ashore in the small Spanish fishing village of Huelva carrying a leather briefcase with fake letters indicating a full scale assault on Greece and Sicily as...more

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Dec 01, 2012 Mikey B. rated it 5 of 5 stars

A marvellous story of intrigue of actual events during World War II. There are a host of wonderful and eclectic characters in England, Spain and Germany. The author presents all these in readable detail.

The sequence of events – and there are several – are well depicted and we are clearly presented with the logical construction of this set-up meant to deceive the Germans into believing that the Allies mean to launch a multi-pronged invasion in the Mediterranean – instead of just Sicily.

The autho...more

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Nov 14, 2012 Rick Skwiot rated it 4 of 5 stars

Ben Macintyre’s entertaining 2008 Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi, Espionage, Love and Betrayal was a hard act to follow. A Boston Globe reviewer called it “the best book ever written”—praise that’s tough to top. But Macintyre’s new work, Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Insured a Allied Victory, makes a spirited attempt to equal its predecessor in readability, wit and solid reporting.

It details a strange bit of British espionage—hatched in part by J...more

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Oct 11, 2012 Denny rated it 4 of 5 stars

Allies' plans to deceive the Nazis about the next World War II battleground site following action in North Africa. Stalin had been pleading for a second front on the Atlantic coast of occupied France since Germany attacked the U.S.S.R. in mid-1941. Churchill, with Roosevelt's support, argued the Allies need more time. A compromise second front is agreed to, a Mediterranean coast attack in mid-1943.

The Allies plan to attack via Sicily, which is <100 miles from Tunisia's coastline, similar to t...more

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Sep 25, 2012 Regina Lindsey rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Here's an idea to use in wartime, "a corpse dressed as a an airman, with dispatches in his pockets, could be dropped on the coast, supposedly from a parachute that had failed," to trick the enemy (pg 20). Yeah, and we could do this trick the Nazis into thinking, from the dispatches, that we (the Allies) are going to attack Greece instead of Sicily! Sound like a scene from a James Bond movie? That's because it's the brainchild of Ian Fleming who would go on to write the James Bond novels. Of cour...more

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Sep 12, 2012 Hillari Delgado rated it 5 of 5 stars

'Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,' Macintyre cites from Horace's 'Odes:' 'It is sweet and fitting to die for your country.' Glyndwr Michael, the dead man of the title, did not die for his country in any designed way (he ate rat poison, possibly because he was starving, not suicidal) but being dead for his country redeemed Michael's short and brutal life. His post-mortem adventures played a significant part in decoying the Nazi military forces away from Normandy during D-Day, saving countles...more 'Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,' Macintyre cites from Horace's 'Odes:' 'It is sweet and fitting to die for your country.' Glyndwr Michael, the dead man of the title, did not die for his country in any designed way (he ate rat poison, possibly because he was starving, not suicidal) but being dead for his country redeemed Michael's short and brutal life. His post-mortem adventures played a significant part in decoying the Nazi military forces away from Normandy during D-Day, saving countless soldiers' lives and hastening the end of WWII.

Ironically, Michael/Martin was the creation of and avatar for two intelligence officers who were denied the opportunity to give their lives for their country. Charles Cholmondeley was brilliant but mole-sighted; Ewen Montagu was equally brilliant but too old to fight. They came together in the perfect storm brewed by British Intelligence's Twenty Committee, the punningly named unit that tracked, recruited and ran double agents. As an American I am tempted to chalk up their schemes and successes to inspired English eccentricity. Macintyre revels in detailing their 'corkscrew minds' and machinations. The cross dressing vice-consul (Macintyre includes the picture); Montagu's Soviet double agent brother who just happened to invent table tennis and some of whose most suspicious communications really were just discussions over ball dimensions; the road racing champion recruited by MI5 to drive double agents around England at top speed; the head of Naval Intelligence who penned a 'Trout memo' and hired future James Bond author Ian Fleming as his personal assistant. The misogynistic head of operations who hired the prettiest girls he could find as a subtle inducement to secrecy as they had 'the most to lose.'
And these are just the British agents. Nazi intelligent was replete with their own cast of eccentrics, many of whom were playing out their double or even triple games and personal cons. And beneath all the lunacy was the deadly game of outfoxing the enemy. The stakes were literally life or death, not just for individuals or armies, but for nations.

'Operation Mincemeat' is densely packed with characters, events and details. Fortunately Macintyre is the master of his material and his prose is engaging and lucid. His vivid recreations of individual personalities and the fascinating details of spycraft combine for a compulsively readable account of a little known aspect of WWII history. Highly recommended. See also his 'Double Cross' (2012) and 'Agent Zigzag' (2008) for further accounts of WWII espionage.(less)

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Sep 02, 2012 Boris Limpopo rated it 4 of 5 stars

Macintyre, Ben (2010). Operation Mincemeat. London: Bloomsbury. 2010. ISBN 9781408808542. Pagine 337. 12,65 $

Non ho molto da aggiungere rispetto a quello che ho detto di questo libro nella recensione al romanzo Sweet Tooth di Ian McEwan. Per vostra comodità riporto l’estratto saliente.

[La] ricostruzione che Ben Macintyre fa di Operation Mincemeat, una vicenda di spionaggio culminata nel 1943. Ma lasciamo raccontare a Tom/Ian e poi commentiamo:

[L]et me tell you my favourite spy story. MI5 had a...more

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Aug 06, 2012 Rob Kitchin rated it 4 of 5 stars

Operation Mincemeat tells the true story of how the British deceived the Germans into believing that the massing of troops in the Mediterranean, and scheduled for an invasion of Sicily, were actually going to invade Sardinia and Greece. Billed as ‘the most successful wartime deception ever attempted’, and undoubtedly saving many thousands of allies lives, Macintyre charts the operation from its initial conception through to when a film version of the story, The Man Who Never Was, was made post-w...more Operation Mincemeat tells the true story of how the British deceived the Germans into believing that the massing of troops in the Mediterranean, and scheduled for an invasion of Sicily, were actually going to invade Sardinia and Greece. Billed as ‘the most successful wartime deception ever attempted’, and undoubtedly saving many thousands of allies lives, Macintyre charts the operation from its initial conception through to when a film version of the story, The Man Who Never Was, was made post-war.

The ruse was relatively straightforward. Take a fresh corpse, dress it in the uniform of a British soldier, attach a briefcase containing supposed confidential correspondence, drop the body into the sea a few hundred metres from a Spanish beach, wait for the Spaniards to discover the body and the secret documents and for them to give copies to the Germans, and make a bit of a flap to appear as if most distressed at the unfolding events. It was an idea lifted by a future novelist, Ian Fleming, from a crime novel by Basil Thomson, The Milliner’s Hat Mystery (1937). It was then developed by Charles Cholmondeley and Ewen Montagu, and approved for implementation by crime novelist, John Masterman. A key player in its unfolding was Alan Hillgarth, the naval attaché in Madrid, and another crime novelist. It seems that war gave some novelists the opportunity to use their imagination in creative ways and to live out their fantasies.

I picked up the book as an impulse buy, mainly because I’d enjoyed one of Macintyre’s other books, Agent Zigzag. Macintyre is strong at providing a readable historical narrative, that does not get too bogged down in factual description, nor strays too close to seemingly like fiction. Operation Mincemeat does a good job at weaving together the biographies of several principal characters, and structuring the story so that it maintains interest. There is a little repetition in places, and sometimes the narrative does drift along some unnecessary sidelines, but generally the book does a good job explaining the unfolding of events and painting a picture of its main protagonists.(less)

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Jul 06, 2012 Dawn rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: history-european

“In 1943, two brilliant intelligence officers conceived a plan that was dubbed Operation Mincemeat. They would trick the Nazis into thinking that Allied forces were planning to attack southern Europe by way of Greece rather than Sicily… Their plan was to get a corpse, equip it with misleading papers concerning the invasion, then drop it off the coast of Spain where German spies would take the bait.”

History aside, this was a fun book just for its insight into intelligence operations. I assumed go...more “In 1943, two brilliant intelligence officers conceived a plan that was dubbed Operation Mincemeat. They would trick the Nazis into thinking that Allied forces were planning to attack southern Europe by way of Greece rather than Sicily… Their plan was to get a corpse, equip it with misleading papers concerning the invasion, then drop it off the coast of Spain where German spies would take the bait.”

History aside, this was a fun book just for its insight into intelligence operations. I assumed government spies would be strictly military types. Instead I found the spies of MI-5 to be novelists, cartoonists, disappointed soldiers, police officers, lawyers, and teachers. Indeed, the book’s author believes the original germ of the idea for Operation Mincemeat came from Ian Fleming, who worked in British naval intelligence and went on to write the James Bond books.

These spies were among the many colorful characters MacIntyre uses to narrate his story. The author opens his book with a quote from Winston Churchill: “Who in war will not have his laugh among the skulls?” You can feel MacIntyre’s sense of humor coming through in the anecdotes he chooses to share: the race car driver who careens through the darkness to deliver the dead man, pausing to have a picture of himself drinking tea on the corpse’s coffin; the levity of an undertaker’s brother as he stormed Sicily’s beach: “Another bomb fell in the sea and splashed us with nice cool water”; and asides about the “somewhat unambitious” number of condoms issued to the invading force. The only drawback here is that, combined with other segues into engagements, family histories, table tennis, et cetera – the diversions were distracting, and the book was a little longer than it needed to be.

Initially, I found the subtitle of this book rather suspect (How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory). Holy hubris! I assumed that the author had a bet with a friend on whether his publisher would actually approve such a long-winded subtitle. Ultimately, I decided two things: one: that the subtitle, like the book, was a bit longer than necessary; and two: that, converse to my expectation of self-serving, book-selling B.S., there was some merit in this claim after all. Obviously, Operation Mincemeat did not assure an Allied Victory on its own. However, it did play a more important role than I’d imagined when I picked the book up. It was a successful operation in that it not only confused the Germans about the true target of the Allied invasion, but also caused Hitler to weaken his Sicilian defenses by redeploying his troops to the decoy locations suggested in “William Martin”’s papers.

I also later discovered that the book was originally published in Great Britain with the subtitle “The True Spy Story that Changed the Course of World War II” – so I was wrong! It must’ve been an American publisher that dreamed up the spicy-yet-unwieldy subtitle!(less)

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Feb 26, 2012 Cameling rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: history

It's a rare gem when history is unfolded for us in such a detailed and thrilling form. In 1943, Ewan Montagu of the British Naval Intelligence and Charles Cholmondeley of MI5 came together in collaboration of a complex plan of deception. The plan that was ultimately approved was to take a suitable corpse, dress it in a suitable military uniform, place certain well-planned personal items, attach to it a chained briefcase containing fake official documents and personal letters, and then drop it th...more It's a rare gem when history is unfolded for us in such a detailed and thrilling form. In 1943, Ewan Montagu of the British Naval Intelligence and Charles Cholmondeley of MI5 came together in collaboration of a complex plan of deception. The plan that was ultimately approved was to take a suitable corpse, dress it in a suitable military uniform, place certain well-planned personal items, attach to it a chained briefcase containing fake official documents and personal letters, and then drop it the ocean close to Huelva in Spain, where German agents and sympathizers were known to work. The objective? To deceive Hitler and his army that the Allies were going to use Sicily as a cover, but that they were going to attack Greece and Sardinia instead. If the plan was successful, Hitler would move his troops away from Sicily, thus leaving this underbelly of Italy vulnerable to the British armada and air attacks.

Sicily was identified as being the pivotal point at which a successful Allied attack could destroy Germany's hold over Italy. Secret agents and double agents were seemingly living cheek by jowl in Spain, and both Great Britain and Germany built an impressive network of spies in Spain.

What makes this a fascinating read is the attention to the cast of characters that had any part at all in this particular secret operation, both on the British side as well as on the German side. The personalities of all characters, their background before, during and after the war, and the parts they played, both in the development, and the witting and unwitting execution of Operation Mincemeat are carefully detailed. And this includes the life of the person who took the central spotlight in this play - the corpse, who never in his living days thought he'd be serving his country in such a dramatic fashion.

The unfolding of Operation Mincemeat once the corpse was released into the water was a non-stop thrill. There were so many opportunities for the plan to go pear-shaped but the way in which the British spymasters manipulated their network was sheer genius and eventually led to the successful invasion of Sicily, wrenching away Germany's control and the toppling of Mussolini.

There is a reference to a similar outline of a plan to use a corpse by Ian Fleming, and indeed it could have given the duo the idea, but credit must be given to both Cholmondeley and Montagu for crafting and thinking of all angles to this plan and then being instrumental in executing it so successfully.(less)

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Sep 06, 2011 Bob rated it 4 of 5 stars

In the middle of WWII a 36 year old British citizen who is down on his luck and known to no one, has no relatives, no friends, and is not serving or fighting in the war consumes rat poison and dies an agonizing death. Yet, in death he becomes one of the oddest heroes of the allied invasion of Sicily. He is the MAN WHO NEVER WAS made famous by the book and 1956 movie. Ben Macintyre while writing his excellent book, AGENT ZIGZAG came upon declassified papers and has in OPERATION MINCEMEAT recreate...more

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Sep 05, 2011 Grace rated it 5 of 5 stars

This book is amazing! It's twisty and factual and FUNNY, which is not necessarily what you'd think, given it's a story about a high-risk WWII spy plot. But I frequently laughed aloud while reading - MacIntyre's timing is impeccable, hilarious while never jarring you out of the story.

If you know the plot to the film "The Man Who Wasn't There", then you're familiar with Operation Mincemeat. It's the same operation, just fictionalized. I'm not going to go into detail because reading it is such a jo...more

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Sep 02, 2011 Charles rated it 4 of 5 stars

Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory by Ben MacIntyre

On the back cover, Malcolm Gladwell describes the book as "almost absurdly entertaining". It was a phrase I couldn't get out of my mind as I was reading it.

I already knew the story of The Man Who Never Was from a scary Saturday night film shown at prep school.

MacIntyre's sometimes exhaustingly thorough account of the successful plot to fool the Germans about the Allied invasion o...more

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Aug 25, 2011 Kurt rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: world-war-ii, history, espionage, military

The rule of thumb is that if you have to explain a joke, it isn't funny. But if you do explain a joke, then I know how it works.

Operation Mincemeat was the name of an intelligence plan carried out by the British against the Germans during World War II, designed to fool them into thinking that the Allied assault from North Africa would not be going through Sicily - where all rational people assumed it would go - but instead through Sardinia and Greece, and any references to Sicily were merely de...more The rule of thumb is that if you have to explain a joke, it isn't funny. But if you do explain a joke, then I know how it works.

Operation Mincemeat was the name of an intelligence plan carried out by the British against the Germans during World War II, designed to fool them into thinking that the Allied assault from North Africa would not be going through Sicily - where all rational people assumed it would go - but instead through Sardinia and Greece, and any references to Sicily were merely decoys. They made up some fake documents, put them in a briefcase that they handcuffed to a corpse that they found in London, threw it into the water off the Spanish coast, and hoped that (a)the corpse would be found by the Spanish (b) the locked briefcase would inspire interest (c) the Germans would find the documents, having obtained them from the Spanish and (d) the Germans would believe the documents were real.

Other reviews here note the "excess" of background information. I disagree that there is too much. MacIntyre is trying to sell this story (which is true, of course) not for its implausibility, but for its difficulty. To that end, he has to elaborate on the various individuals (i.e. characters) who were involved in the plotting, who were to carry out aspects of the mission without knowing what the mission was, who could be affected by the mission, and who had to be fooled.

If this was fiction, we'd be talking about character flaws and motivations (that the author would famously "show and not tell" to tighten up the narrative) and about the stakes. There would also be an inciting incident and a climax.

It is, however, history, and as such MacIntyre (much like with his other World War II history, Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal, chooses to elaborate on each person as a historical individual. The reason I only give it 3/5 stars is because while he has settled primarily upon history, he tries to structure the story as a bit of a thriller, and in that regard the "excessive detail" slows the pacing down.

My other criticism is that, for all he is at pains to illustrate how many ways this whole plot could have gone wrong, there is an inevitability about his writing. We know that Operation Mincemeat succeeded, but its success (as a reader) never feels like it's in any doubt.

In other words, in explaining the deception we lose the thrill.

If World War II history is your thing, or if you are interested in espionage, this will probably appeal. If you like thrillers, it may appeal. (less)

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Jul 31, 2011 Penny rated it 4 of 5 stars

Tremendously fun thriller that also happens to be true. The author leads with a quote from Winston Churchill -- "Who in war will not have his laugh amid the skulls?" -- and the book is designed to give the most entertainment non-fiction can provide. MacIntyre has a great story at his disposal: a World War II British plot to plant a corpse off the coast of Spain with a briefcase of top-secret (and forged) documents chained to his wrist. The hope was that the documents would make their way back to...more

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Jun 19, 2011 Elli rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: england, espionage, germany, historical, world-war-2

This was wonderful! Seemed to be where the novel meets non-fiction. There's something in the requirements of successfully gathering intelligence, disseminating false information with an objective in mind (and if successfully winning world war II isn't an objective, I don't know what is). Imagination is required, monitoring that information, translating what you get from how you get it, and making use of it. The British Intelligence system is the originating background (M15 & M16) for this. A...more

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Jan 26, 2011 Darryl Mexic rated it 4 of 5 stars

“Operation Mincemeat” by Ben Macintyre is the true account of possibly the greatest deception employed by the Allies on the Germans in WWII. In 1956 there was an enormously popular movie, “The Man Who Never Was”, starring Clifton Webb as Ewen Montagu, the British naval intelligence officer who was one of the two people who originated and saw to the execution of Operation Mincemeat, the other being Charles Cholmondeley. The movie was based on a book of the same name by Montagu. The book was only...more “Operation Mincemeat” by Ben Macintyre is the true account of possibly the greatest deception employed by the Allies on the Germans in WWII. In 1956 there was an enormously popular movie, “The Man Who Never Was”, starring Clifton Webb as Ewen Montagu, the British naval intelligence officer who was one of the two people who originated and saw to the execution of Operation Mincemeat, the other being Charles Cholmondeley. The movie was based on a book of the same name by Montagu. The book was only generally true and contained many fictions to protect wartime secrets the British did not want revealed. The movie was even more fictional, but contained some essential truths of Operation Mincemeat. Author Ben Macintire, with the addition of many more facts, some in the available British archives and some based on interviews with participants and mostly with descendents of the now deceased participants, has pieced together a thrilling true account on the operation. Mr. Macintyre writes truth in a mystery writer’s style, maintaining the reader’s interest in this detailed factual account. Following the Allied success in kicking the Germans out of North Africa, everyone knew that the Allies would follow up with an invasion of Europe from North Africa. The optimum target for the landing of Allied troops was Sicily, and in fact Sicily was the target. But even Supreme Allied Commander Eisenhower thought that the invasion would be unsuccessful if the Germans were prepared and waiting. Hence, convincing the Germans that the landing would be elsewhere was of critical importance. The essence of the deception was the delivery by submarine of the body of a derelict dressed up as a British marine major, who was given an elaborate background and identity and who was carrying false letters between Allied commanders pointing out that the forthcoming Allied attack on Sicily was but a ruse to hide large scale Allied attacks on Greece and Sardinia. As intended, the body washed up on the Spanish beaches, was discovered by a fisherman and turned over the Spanish authorities, who were sympathetic to the Nazi side and who in turn allowed German spies in Spain to access the letters before returning them to the British. The deception worked like a charm. Hitler moved substantial forces away from Sicily to Greece, thereby being unprepared for the real Allied landing and almost guaranteeing its success. The detail of the plan, its execution, the Spanish duplicity, and the Nazi gullibility is the grist of the book. (less)

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Dec 30, 2010 Tony rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction

I like reading about espionage and World War II every once in a while, so based on some favorable review I read somewhere, I picked this up. Unfortunately, like all too many popular nonfiction books I seem to encounter these days (such as The Tiger and In the Heart of the Sea, to name the two most recent examples I read), the book is overstuffed with extraneous detail and (to my mind at least) vastly overstates the importance of the topic it covers. The title refers to a British intelligence ope...more I like reading about espionage and World War II every once in a while, so based on some favorable review I read somewhere, I picked this up. Unfortunately, like all too many popular nonfiction books I seem to encounter these days (such as The Tiger and In the Heart of the Sea, to name the two most recent examples I read), the book is overstuffed with extraneous detail and (to my mind at least) vastly overstates the importance of the topic it covers. The title refers to a British intelligence operation designed to misdirect the German High Command into believing that the impending Allied invasion of southern Europe in 1943 would take place in Sardinia instead of Sicily, and thus lead the Germans to concentrate their forces in the wrong place. The scheme involved planting a corpse in the coast off of Spain with documents that could be interpreted to indicate the false invasion location so that the Spanish would pass the information along to the Germans.

While this was certainly a colorful ruse (so colorful indeed, that this is one of two books published this year about it: see also Deathly Deception: The Real Story of Operation Mincemeat), it's pretty well worn territory. You can learn about all you need to know from chapters in recent books such as The Deceivers: Allied Military Deception in the Second World War or Deceiving Hitler: Double Cross and Deception in World War II. Moreover, the plan's principal engineer, Ewen Montague, wrote his own self-aggrandizing account of the whole affair (The Man Who Never Was) some fifty years ago, which itself was turned into a passable film of the same title. I suppose this new book is best regarded as an updated and expanded look at the operation, but one that really seems all to intent on following every possible thread and injecting every single piece of research into the text. In short, it reads like a long magazine essay or book chapter inflated to book-length.

Of course, there's also the issue of just how important Mincemeat actually was. The author makes it out to be absolutely pivotal to all that followed and the eventual Allied victory, but other histories of the war place it as just a component in a much larger plan to misdirect the Germans over Sicily (I forget the codename for the larger plan, maybe Barclay?). Moreover, as the author recounts, it wasn't even that original -- a similar scheme had been tried before (which begs the question of why they thought a second attempt was a good idea). Indeed the whole premise of the operation's importance is somewhat confounded by the author's admission at the end that high-ranking anti-Nazi elements in German intelligence may well have seen through the ruse but chosen to look the other way in an attempt to speed up Hitler's downfall. On the whole, an interesting episode that certainly involved a lot of interesting people, but I'm not sure how many people will really find an entire book on it that fascinating.(less)

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Nov 22, 2010 Bob Uva rated it 3 of 5 stars

This is the story of an ingenious plan to deceive the Nazis into thinking that the southern European invasion would come in Greece rather than in Sicily, as actually happened. The plan involved floating a dead courier's body ashore in southern Spain, after which it was hoped the many pro-German spies would discover a letter between Allied Generals indicating the direction of the European invasion plans. The story is quite amazing, especially in the fact that it worked. I enjoyed hearing how the...more

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Nov 11, 2010 Mike Knox rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: history, non-fiction

A thrilling book about how British espionage and deception in World War II fooled Hitler and enabled the Allies to make a decisive takeover of the island of Sicily.

The author, being an author, cannot help himself from noting the influence of writers in this complicated scheme. The story begins with a top secret memo entitled “The Trout Fisher,” issued under the name of Admiral John Godfrey, who was helped along by the future James Bond novelist Ian Flemming. The memo contained 51 suggestions on...more

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Nov 08, 2010 Khalid rated it 4 of 5 stars

If you are a fan of intelligence operations you will love this book. The author demonstrates intimate knowledge of his subject matter with exhaustive research and shares his enthusiasm with wit and style.
In 1943 the Allies were victorious in Africa, driving Rommel's Afrika Corps back to Italy. The next step was to invade some part of Europe, and "Operation Husky" was to take the fight to Italy. The Allies deluded the Nazis into thinking that the main attack on Sicily was just a diversion, and t...more

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