Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory in Around the World in 80 Books

Dec 30, 2010 Tony rated it it was ok · 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 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. ...more

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Jun 04, 2010 Kay rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: espionage, world_war_ii, nonfiction, credulity

Years back I read The Man Who Never Was, the first account of this famous WWII deception campaign, written by Ewan Montagu, who was one of the plan's two main architects. Like many, I was captivated by this real-life story of clever wartime deception. I have a keen interest in WWII deception campaigns, and Operation Mincemeat was certainly one of the finest: documents planted on a corpse that was strategically floated ashore in Spain, where German agents were apt to gain access to them. The docu Years back I read The Man Who Never Was, the first account of this famous WWII deception campaign, written by Ewan Montagu, who was one of the plan's two main architects. Like many, I was captivated by this real-life story of clever wartime deception. I have a keen interest in WWII deception campaigns, and Operation Mincemeat was certainly one of the finest: documents planted on a corpse that was strategically floated ashore in Spain, where German agents were apt to gain access to them. The documents contained salient details on a planned Allied invasion of Greece and Sardinia. The Germans took the bait and bolstered defenses in those areas -- but of course the Allies were planning to invade Sicily instead, and when they did so the invasion went much better -- and casualties were much lower -- than would have been the case if the Germans have not been so deceived.

Then a month or so ago, I happened on a book review in the New Yorker about a new account of Operation Mincemeat by Ben MacIntyre. The article was so intriguing that I not only passed it on to friends but also ordered a copy of the book. I'd previously read several of Ben McIntyre's other books, most notably Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal and The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan and had enjoyed them both. (A third, earlier, book The Napoleon of Crime was, I regret to say, lackluster.) Happily Operation Mincemeat is, in my opinion, McIntyre's best to date.

Not only does McIntyre round out the earlier accounts of this well-known WWII episode with new revelations, such as the fact that Ewan McIntyre's brother, Ivor, was a Soviet agent, but he also has a novelist's eye for colorful detail. As he makes clear, it was the imagination of several novelists (including Ian Fleming) who made Mincemeat a success, so it's fitting, then, that MacIntyre brings a similar flair to this non-fictional account.

Most of the reviews here and elsewhere give the general outline of Operation Mincemeat, so rather than doing that I'd like to mention what interested me most in the book. As is mentioned in the New Yorker article, the fate of the operation ultimately rested with two Germans who were responsible for vetting -- and passing on -- the planted documents as genuine. The motivations of these two men, Major Karl-Erich Kühlenthal, an incompetent "one-man espionage disaster area," in MacIntyre's words, and Alexis Baron von Roenne, an intelligence officer whom Hitler trusted implictly, could not have been more dissimilar. Kühlenthal merely sought to bolster his status with the powers that be by passing on anything he considered valuable. In doing so, he inevitably inflated and tampered with the original material (in this case, almost disastrously, as he passed on the wrong date of death for the recovered corpse of "Major William Martin"). But it is von Roenne who had the greatest hand in assuring Mincemeat's acceptance. He, most astonishingly, hated Hitler and was doing everything within his power to undermine the Nazi war effort.

It is this revelation that makes the most sensational reading. Von Roenne not only almost certainly knew that the Mincemeat documents were planted, he inflated the Allied menace, feeding an already paranoid Hitler visions of an invasion through the Balkans. More remarkably, prior to the invasion of Normandy in 1944, the same man had a hand in passing on "every deception ruse fed to him accepted the existence of evry bogus unit regardless of evidence, and inflated forty-four divisions in Britain to an astonishing eighty-nine. Without von Roenne's willing connivance, the entire elaborate net of deception woven for D-Day might have been unraveled."

This is mind-boggling stuff. But wait! (as the infomercials say) There's more! Add to this the role of Juan Pujol García, better known as "Garbo," the most successful double agent of WWII, who ran a network of highly successful -- and completely fictitious -- spies. This elaborate network of fictitious spies fed the Germans misinformation. His role in Mincemeat was collaborative, verifying details where needed, shoring up the deception.

Add to this mix a brave submarine captain, an unflappable mortician given to sitting in his foxhole dressed in swimming trunks and a helmet, and the second mastermind of the entire ruse, Charles Cholmondeley, who refused to take credit for it and lived -- apparently quite happily -- under a self-imposed MI5 code of silence. These are but a few of the people MacIntyre brings to life in this highly readable and fascinating account.

To top it all off, McIntyre does a postmortem of Montagu's The Man Who Never Was, a chapter that makes illuminating reading for anyone who has read that 1953 classic. It seems that Montagu's account was highly edited, for not only was Cholmondeley, one of the plan's two architects, virtually eliminated from the account but the identity of the corpse -- and the way it was obtained -- were suppressed. The books ends with a final tribute to the man who "served" as Major William Martin, whose grave in Spain is faithfully maintained by a grateful British government. ...more

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Mar 27, 2011 Ken rated it really liked it

Engaging and fun account of a strange and secret covert operation during World War II. Macintyre has covered this territory before (“Agent Zigzag”), and he knows his material and writes it well. It’s a breezy nonfiction.

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Jun 17, 2010 Jessica rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, england, world-war-ii, secrecy-and-security, spy

Absolutely fascinating, and a story so unbelievable you have to keep reminding yourself that it's true. And as an added bonus, MacIntyre stuffs it full of sly English humor - reminds me of the occasional one-liner that sneaks its way into an Economist article just to surprise the reader. ...more

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