ON APRIL 30, 1943, at 4.30 am, the dead body of a man in his early thirties was slipped overboard from His Majesty’s Submarine
Seraph, 1,600 yards off southwest Spain. It was easily identified as the corpse of Major William Martin, Royal Marines, and interred the following day, with full military honours and in the presence of the British Vice-Consul, in the cemetery at Huelva.
What the Vice-Consul was not told was that there had also been found, chained to the body, a locked leather briefcase. Spain, as a technically neutral country, had a clear duty to return this case unopened to the British Embassy in Madrid; and when, after urgent representations by the naval attaché, it was duly delivered to him nearly a fortnight later, it showed no sign of having been tampered with. Subsequent events, however, proved that it had, and within a week translations of two letters it contained were in the hands of German Intelligence.
The first, addressed to General Sir Harold Alexander in Tunisia, was signed by the Vice-Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Archibald Nye. The second was from Vice-Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, Chief of Combined Operations in London, to Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean. Both letters were genuine; but the information that they contained was not. Read together, they made it clear that the Allies were planning two simultaneous attacks on Europe, one through Sardinia and the other through southern Greece, to cover which they intended to try to deceive the enemy into thinking that the real target was Sicily.
Since Sicily was indeed the target, this was a perfect double bluff; and, thanks to the ingenuity with which it was planned and the meticulous care with which it was carried out, it worked superbly. Those responsible in London had counted on the Nazi sympathies of Franco’s Spain to ensure that the documents found their way into Axis hands, and on German efficiency to do the rest. As a result, the Allied invasion of Sicily on July 10, just ten weeks after the finding of “Major Martin’s” body, caught the Germans unprepared, as the defence forces intended for the island were diverted at the last moment to Corsica, Sardinia and the Balkans.
Even after the invasion was in full swing, the German High Command saw it as a feint. As late as July 23, the Führer, notoriously slow to change his mind once an idea had become fixed in it, appointed his most trusted general, Erwin Rommel, to the defence of Greece.
Such is the story of Operation Mincemeat — as the scheme was named, with a nice sense of the macabre, by its principal begetters, planners and executors, a team led by Lieutenant-Commander Ewen Montagu, RNVR. A decade later Montagu — no longer a Lieutenant-Commander but Judge-Advocate of the Fleet — was to write the true story of the operation, The Man Who Never Was.
It was an apt title, but also something of a misnomer. Major Martin, to be sure, never existed. His name, like the whole persona with which he was imaginatively endowed — by means of keys, photographs, ticket stubs and letters — was an invention of Montagu’s. But the body which was slipped from the Seraph that spring night was real enough. And if it was not William Martin’s, whose was it? Who was this man, whose young corpse achieved more than most accomplish in whole lifetimes?
Speculation continues to this day. In 1996 previously secret papers became available suggesting that the body was that of a Welsh tramp named Glyndwr Michael, who died in 1943 after drinking rat poison. Some doubts persisted: what if the Spanish had carried out a post-mortem and found traces of the poison? Such a discovery would have rendered the operation useless; would those who planned it have taken such a risk? A recent book, The Secrets of HMS Dasher, by John and Noreen Steele, claims that when that ship blew up in mysterious circumstances in the Clyde in 1943, with the loss of 379 lives, the number of recovered bodies listed was greater than that of those buried by the War Graves Commission; they believe that “Martin” was one of the former, possibly Sub-Lieutenant John McFarlane, whose father’s request for his body was refused. In support of this theory, they point out that, according to Admiral Norman Jewell, who as a young lieutenant had commanded the Seraph, he had received last-minute orders to sail to Holy Loch, only eight miles from where Dasher went down.
At the time of writing, the most recent evidence is a letter to The Daily Telegraph last year, in which Ivor Leverton, a funeral director, tells of how one night, 60 years ago, he was secretly instructed by the St Pancras coroner to transfer a corpse from the local mortuary to that in Hackney. He adds that the body measured 6ft 4in. But was it Martin? Would a body so unusually tall have been selected for such a mission? All these questions remain unanswered; but let me quote Montagu:
“At last, when we had begun to feel that it would have either to be a ‘Burke and Hare’, after all, or we would have to extend our enquiries so widely as to risk suspicion of our motives turning into gossip, we heard of someone who had just died from pneumonia after exposure . . . it looked as if he might answer our requirements. We made feverish enquiries into his past and about his relatives; we were soon satisfied that these would not talk or pass on such information as we could give them. But there was still the crucial question: could we get permission to use the body without saying what we proposed to do with it and why? All we could possibly tell anyone was that we could guarantee that the purpose would be a really worthwhile one, as anything that was done would be with approval on the highest level, and that the remains would eventually receive proper burial, though under a false name.
“Permission, for which our indebtedness is great, was obtained on condition that I should never let it be known whose corpse it was.”
Nor did he; and historians have speculated ever since. Even if we discount the rat poison and accept the facts as Montagu gives them, we are no nearer to the truth. Tramps can easily die of “pneumonia after exposure”; so can young naval officers after disasters at sea; so can almost anybody. When Montagu died in 1985 he took the secret with him; and I am glad he did.
Reading his words, I cannot help thinking that if I were the next of kin from whom such permission were requested I should not only have agreed with pleasure and pride, I should have wanted the whole world to know about it. But there is another question, more challenging and infinitely more rewarding than the simple issue of whose body went into those waters. Whose, ideally, should it have been?
