
Operation Mincemeat retells the story of the classic World War Two intelligence plan to pass misleading strategic information to Hitler and his Generals that was immortalized in the 1956 Hollywood film The Man Who Never Was. Drawing on a wealth of recently available documentation, Denis Smyth shows how British deceptioneers solved a multitude of medical, technical, and logistical problems to implement their deceptive design. The aim of their covert plan was to persuade the German High Command that the Allies were going to attack Greece, rather than Sicily in the summer of 1943. To achieve this, they equipped a dead body with a new military identity as a Royal Marine Major, a new private personality as the fiancé of an attractive young woman named 'Pam', and a government briefcase containing deceptive documents. They then planted the corpse in south-western Spanish coastal waters via a stealthy submarine operation, and carefully monitored (through their codebreakers and spies) how the Nazi intelligence services and their warlords proceeded to 'swallow Mincemeat whole'. The result was a stunning success. The German mis-deployment of their forces to meet the notional Anglo-American threat to Greece materially contributed to the Allied victory in Sicily - which, in its turn, drove Mussolini from power in Italy and inflicted irreparable damage on the German war effort.
How did British intelligence successfully execute Operation Mincemeat to manipulate the German High Command during the summer of 1943? Denis Smyth, a historian specializing in international relations and military strategy, utilizes recently declassified documentation to analyze the logistical and technical complexities of this deception operation. The book argues that the success of the mission relied not only on the fabrication of a corpse's identity but on the meticulous coordination between intelligence agencies, codebreakers, and field operatives to ensure the German military acted upon the planted misinformation.
What You Will Find
Scope Limits
Historians and military scholars frequently cite this work for its rigorous use of archival evidence to demystify a well-known intelligence operation. Readers often note the academic density of the prose, which provides a granular look at the mechanics of wartime deception.
Page Count:
392
Publication Date:
2010-01-01
Publisher:
OUP Oxford
ISBN-10:
0191613649
ISBN-13:
9780191613647
No comments yet. Be the first to share your thoughts!