May 14, 2012 • 26 mins
Once the Allies invaded North Africa, the Nazis began planning. Both sides knew Sicily was the obvious choice for the next Allied invasion, so the Allies needed some subterfuge. Luckily, the British had an idea -- and all they needed was a dead body.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from house
works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast Time
to Glean a Charcoalboarding and I and today we start
our story off the coast of southwestern Spain, near the
port of Ulva on April nine. A local fisherman named
(00:25):
Jose Antonio ray Ma Maria was out in a little
skiff that morning trying to spot sardines for the larger
fishing boats. But what he spotted instead was a kind
of lumpy object just floating on the water, which he
at first mistook for a dead porpoise. Once he got closer, though,
he realized it was the dead body of a man,
floating face down. The man was wearing a yellow life
(00:46):
jacket over a trench coat, boots and a British uniform,
and there was a black briefcase attached to him by
a chain. The body was in pretty rough shape, as
you would imagine, it smelled terrible, and the face was rotting.
The fisherman on the larger boat had no interest in
helping them out. They did not want to get the body,
so Maria dragged the body aboard his tiny boat and
(01:09):
rowed it to shore, where he got help dragging the
body into the sand, and authorities kind of took over
from there. After this gruesome discovery, Maria just went back
about his business. This was, after all, World War two,
and although Spain was officially neutral, the fisherman probably just
assumed this was some sort of war casualty that had
(01:30):
washed up to their shores. But what he didn't realize
is that he had just set in motion what the
BBC has referred to as quote the most successful wartime
deception ever attempted. It was known as Operation Mincemeat, and
it was set into motion by the British to fool
the Nazis, and it's said to have changed the course
of the war. The dead man, whose personal effects identified
(01:52):
him as Major William Martin, was carrying documents that ultimately
convinced Hitler that the Allies were going to attack one
place when they really had designs on another. But how
did this plan work? And why was it so effective?
And who was that dead guy? So we're going to
look at all of those things, and we should mention
here that Ben McIntyre's book Operation Mints Neat helps us
(02:15):
answer a lot of these questions on the way through.
It's a source for a lot of the details that
we include in this two part episode, So there's a
lot to look forward to here. And if that name
sounds familiar, it's because we just consulted Ben McIntyre's book
on Adam Worth for our Napoleon of Crime, the Real
Professor Moriarty episode, So he's popping up all over the place.
(02:36):
You're coming like the Queen Victoria of authors, Queen Victoria
of historians. Before we get into talking about Operation mince
Meat specifically, first we need to talk a little bit
about what was going on worth World War two at
the time and why a deception plan like Operation mints
Meat would have been necessary in the first place. In
(02:57):
late ninety two, the Allies had invaded and six fessfully
taking control of North Africa from the Germans and an
offensive known as Operation Torch, and this was a real
blow to the Germans, not least of all because it
put the Allies just across the Mediterranean from Hitler's fortress,
as Nazi occupied Europe was sometimes called, and so the
Germans began speculating about where in southern Europe the Allies
(03:19):
would attack next. In an article for The New Yorker
and Malcolm Gladwell outlines a few of the possibilities. You know,
there was Sardino, which wasn't defended that heavily, Plus it
was a good spot from which to bomb southern Germany.
But the problem with it was that you couldn't land
a whole lot of ground troops there at once. There
was also Greece and the Balkans. Greece was vulnerable, and
(03:40):
the Balkans supplied Germans with raw materials for their war efforts,
so that could also be a huge blow to them
and a good contender for for a potential site. But
according to McIntyre, the obvious choice for the next Allied
invasion was really Sicily, which was located, of course at
the toe of Italy's boot, and this had the advantage
(04:01):
of being close enough in proximity to North Africa that
the Allies would be able to use short range fighter
plane and invading Sicily also opened up the possibility of
taking Italy out of the war, which would of course
be an enormous blow to the Germans and setting the
stage ultimately to invade France. So on January twenty three,
(04:23):
Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt jointly approved the invasion
of Sicily, which was known as Operation Husky and would
be the next big offensive for them. The problem though,
was that if Sicily was such an obvious choice for
an Allied invasion, it was probably going to be obvious
to the Access Powers as well, and if Hitler anticipated
their move and had the chance to concentrate more troops
(04:46):
in Sicily before they got there, things could turn out
really bad for the Allies. And that's where the need
for deception comes in. Yeah, the Allies had to somehow
convince their opponents that they were going to do something
completely different from what they were actually going to do
if they were going to have a fighting chance here.
One plan created for this purpose was Operation Barkley, which
(05:08):
basically aimed to convince the Germans that the Allies were
going to attack Greece, Sardinia and Southern France instead of Sicily.
And this plan was implemented in several ways, including creating
a fake army and the Eastern Mediterranean, having double agents
spread false information around, creating fake radio traffic, and recruiting
Greek interpreters and officers, among other things. But back in London,
(05:31):
a couple of British intelligence officers were working on something
a bit more unusual. Yeah, that's an understatement. So the
plan that was being hatched in London actually had its
roots in a top secret memo known as the Trout Memo,
which was distributed in nineteen thirty nine by Admiral John Godfrey,
who was Britain's Director of Naval Intelligence, and by his
(05:53):
personal assistant, Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming, who of course went
on to write the James Bond novel. According to McIntyre,
Fleming had a real knack for intelligence planning. It was
always coming up with these really imaginative, sometimes pretty cookie
or crazy ideas for deceiving or outsmarting the enemy, and
it's thought that he had a very heavy hand in
(06:15):
the Trout Memo. The memo essentially contained fifty one suggestions
for tricking the Germans by introducing erroneous ideas into their heads.
Many were outlandish, some maybe not so much. Ideas ranged
from things like distributing messages in bottles from a fictitious
U boat Captain kersen Hitler's Reich, to distributing false information
(06:35):
through fake copies of the newspaper. But number twenty eight
on the list is the one that interests us. And
that one was entitled quote a suggestion, not a very
nice one, and it read quote The following suggestion is
used in a book by Basil Thompson. The corpse, dressed
as an airman with dispatches in his pockets, could be
(06:56):
dropped onto the coast, supposedly from a parachute that had failed.
I understand there is no difficulty in obtaining corpses at
the Naval hospital, but of course it would have to
be a fresh one, so that outlines what's going to
happen here. But the Basil Thompson book mentioned was called
The Milliner's Hat Mystery. And Thompson himself had been the
(07:17):
head of Scotland Yards Criminal Investigation Division and made his
name as a spy catcher during World War One. He
also wrote twelve detective novels which weren't really that memorable.
But Fleming, the important guy here, had just read them
all devoured them. And that's the sort of spy novelist
connection we're looking at. Yeah, it's interesting. McEntyre points out
(07:38):
the spy novelist connection between Fleming and with Basil Thompson here.
Both of them were both spies and then later became novelists,
or simultaneously became novelists, we should say, and it's almost
as if with you know, this connection tells us, it's
almost as if you needed that imagination, the same imagination
needed to create a novel could create a great spy plan.
(08:02):
But the Trout memo kind of hung around British intelligence circles,
but no one really did anything with suggestion number twenty
eight for several years until a man named Charles Christopher
Chumbley came into the equation. Chumley was a twenty five
year old flight lieutenant in the Royal Air Force, seconded
two and MY five the Security Service. He couldn't fly
because it was bad eyesight, so that was a big
(08:23):
disappointment to him. But he was also the secretary of
the twenty Committee, which was the top secret group in
charge of overseeing double agents. So Chumley was this really tall,
kind of awkward looking guy, very eccentric, but much like Fleming,
he was said to possess a really great imaginative mind,
especially when it came to intelligence planning, which was the
(08:44):
important thing to be great at here. Even before Operation
Husky got underway, though, Chumley had seen the trial memo
and he had come up with his own plan, which
he presented to the twenty Committee in October two. He
called it the Trojan Horse, which was quote a plan
for introducing documents of a highly secret nature into the
(09:05):
hands of the enemy and um In this plan he
outlined how they'd get a body from one of the
London hospitals, they dress it up in an Army, Navy
or Air Force uniform, and they'd put these fake secret
documents into a pocket. Then they would fill the lungs
up with water and drop the body by plane in
some place where currents would eventually bring it into enemy territory.
(09:29):
He goes on to say that, quote, while the courier
cannot be sure to get through, if he does succeed,
information in the form of the documents can be of
a far more secret nature than it would be possible
to introduce through any normal b one a channel. And
that's far more secret, of course, because a dead body
can't be forced to reveal anything like a living person can.
(09:50):
So that's kind of what he meant, like meant by that.
So again to some people, this might sound kind of outlandish,
kind of crazy, but Chumley had good reason to think
that this would work because a similar real life situation
had actually presented itself during the British invasion of North Africa.
The precedent exactly, a British plane had crashed off of
(10:10):
Spain's Atlantic coast and everyone was killed. A couple of
the passengers who washed ashore were carrying information about the
North African operation, including the date of the attack, wireless
messages that the British intercepted, because of course they were
very worried about this, so they were trying to listen
into the Nazi chatter. So messages they intercepted after the
(10:31):
fact indicated that the Germans did get some info from that,
but fortunately for the British, the Germans ignored it. Ironically,
they thought the whole thing might be a trick. They
thought it was a deception, even though it for real.
But this precedent did tell the British a couple of things. First,
it told them that Spain, although it was officially neutral,
could be counted upon to path on info like a
(10:55):
dead body with letters paths on info like that to
the Nazis. And then set and lee after their loss
in North Africa, if the Nazis got this kind of
information again, they might be more likely to believe it
this time. So the twenty Committee, though they weren't entirely
convinced this plan would work, they were intrigued by Chumley's idea,
and they asked him to explore whether or not they
(11:16):
could actually make it happen. They assigned you and Montague
as his planning partner. Montague was really excited about the idea.
He was one of the more enthusiastic ones on the committee.
He had also read the Trout Memo and so he
kind of got it. And he had grown up in
London in a wealthy Jewish family, and he was a
brilliant forty two year old defense lawyer. McEntire says that
(11:36):
he quote possessed the rare ability to read an interlock
teacher's mind. After the war broke out, Montague joined the
Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve and became a lieutenant. But Godfrey
soon recognized his talents and recruited him for the Naval
Intelligence Department, and so he'd taken on more and more
responsibility there over time. So once Chumley and Montague started
(12:00):
working together, started putting their heads together on the Trojan
Horse plan, which is still what it was being called
at this point. Their first order of business was to
see if they could actually get their hands on a
dead body. I mean, no plan if you don't have
a body to work with. So when he outlined initial plan,
Chumley clearly thought that finding a body would be relatively simple.
(12:20):
He thought you could just walk into a military hospital,
plunk down ten pounds, walk off with anybody that you wanted.
But in reality the plan, that plan at least, wasn't
really very practical because deaths during war times, whether they
were from battles or whether they were suicides, didn't leave
behind the right kind of bodies for an operation like this.
(12:42):
For example, you couldn't use a bombing victim because it
would be pretty obvious that that person had died in
a bombing and their body wouldn't be in the right
condition for what they were trying to suggest here, you know,
a drowning or something like that. Even with somebody who
had hanged himself or poisoned himself, it would be pretty
easy to tell how he really died. Also, in all
(13:04):
of these cases there is the family and friends of
the deceased to consider people who would want to know
why the body of their loved one was being taken away,
And you didn't want to let too many people in
on the plan because you want it to be secret.
Of course, according to McIntyre, they briefly considered quote pulling
a birken hair and just stealing a corpse from a grave,
(13:26):
but they quickly decided against that, ring a bell to
podcast listeners, Katie and I did an old episode on
the famous body snatchers in here. Instead, Montague ended up
approaching a man that he knew from his lawyer days
named Bentley Purchase, who was a coroner in northwest London. Now,
Purchase wasn't quite what you'd expect from a coroner. He
(13:47):
was kind of like a Tim Burton character the most.
He was happy go lucky, with the real mccab sense
of humor. For example, after he gave Montague directions to
where he worked, he said, quote, an alternative means of
getting here is, of course, to get run over. That
might be faster, you never know. Purchase was initially pretty
(14:09):
hesitant though, to just despite his sense of humor, hesitant
to just hand over a body, and he was pretty professional. Yeah,
But when he heard that it was for a matter
of national importance, he agreed to help Montague obtain a
body that could appear to have died in a plane
crash or to have died by drowning, and he'd have
Montague choose from one of the unidentified bodies. These wouldn't
(14:32):
have next kin looking for them, you know, so there'd
be fewer strings attached. But there wasn't anything currently in
the mortuary that fit the bill, fit the bill that
they were looking for, so they'd have to wait a
while until somebody came in. At the end of January nine,
a suitable candidate finally did come along. It was a
thirty four year old Welsh tramp named Glenn Michael, who
(14:54):
had committed suicide by drinking rat poison in an abandoned warehouse.
He'd grown up in complete poverty, both his parents were dead,
and he seemed to have come to London just simply
to die. We don't know that for sure, but that's
almost how it looked. He really didn't know anyone there,
He didn't have any sense of purpose, any sort of job,
any attachments. Um. He just ended up dead. Michael ended
(15:17):
up and purchases Morgue and Purchase put him in cold
storage and immediately contacted Montague. Michael seemed pretty perfect for
the plan. As we mentioned, he was single, penniless, no
relatives were looking for him, and Purchase said that the
amount of rat poison he'd taken wasn't enough to be
detected later as the cause of death. And we'll talk
about that a little more later on in part two.
(15:37):
But um but that was the situation that Montague came
into the Purchase off. I told Montague, though, he was
going to have to act fast because he couldn't stave
off decomposition of the body for very long. The military
would have to use the body of Michael within three
months if they were going to use it at all.
That meant Montague and Chumley had to get official permission
(15:59):
from the twenty Committee to actually go forward with the plan,
because remember they were just exploring the idea for now.
They didn't actually see if they could get a body
in the first place, right, They didn't actually have the
go ahead, So they presented their proposal a week later,
with the plan renamed Operation mince Meat. Since Trojan Horse
would obviously immediately took off the Nazis that was going on. Yeah,
(16:19):
if they heard any sort of like wireless chatter about
a trojan horse, they would know that something was going
to happen. The code names, interestingly, it was just kind
of a side note, but those were selected from random
lists that were periodically recycled. So mince meat had been
previously used for a mine lane operation in the early
nineteen forties. But it just happens to be really perfect. Yeah,
(16:39):
it happens to be really perfect for this kind of
a kind of operation. Of all the surprising things in
this story that might have surprised me most, that this
was not a purposefully chosen code name. It just worked, no,
because you know this is That's one of the interesting
discussions in McIntyre's book too, as he kind of talks
about how Churchill especially did not want them to use
(17:01):
names that could be associated with the type of mission
that could match exactly and um and usually Montagu went
along with that as well. But he just kind of
thought that it was almost like a good omen that
they that this happened to pop up on the list
that they could choose from, so they chose it and
it was a good fit and their proposal that they submitted,
(17:22):
obviously was more specific than the more general plan that
Chumley had laid out before, and it suggested that the
body would carry documents to throw the Nazis off on
the Allies plans to invade Sicily. So the twenty Committee
was good with it. They told them to go ahead.
But even with that hurdle behind them, Chumley and Montague's
real challenge was really just starting. Because they couldn't just
(17:43):
drop the body as is into the enemy's hands. It
would just be some random guy. They had to create
a whole new personality for it to make the entire
story believable. And of course Montague and Chumley did have
some experience with this because they had created fictional personas
and their work is double agents, and a lot of
(18:03):
the double agents who they worked with had armies of
sub agents who supposedly fed them information to report back
to Germany. But a lot of these sub agents were
just completely made up. Yeah. I mean, the reasoning here
is fake spies much easier to work with than real ones.
I mean, the hard part about it was really keeping
up with all of their various fake lives and personalities.
(18:24):
You had to be really consistent and remember all the details. Oh,
you know, does does this one sick? Um? What's going
on with us? Was it was he taking time off?
You know? Is this one shiftless? You have to remember?
Like about them? Yes, and so Monte and Chumbley they
wanted to similarly create a whole fictional life for the
dead body that they were using, the logic being that
(18:47):
the more believable he was, the more believable the whole
hoax would ultimately be. So Chumbley and Montague spent a
lot of time honing this guy's story, what he liked,
what he didn't like, what his strengths and weaknesses were,
the people in his life, you know. They made up
family members and stories for the family members. The first
big decision they had to make, though, is what kind
(19:07):
of officer he would be. He had to be someone
who could wear a standard size uniform, because they obviously
couldn't take a corpse to a tailor and have them
fitted for a uniform. And he had to be someone
who was important enough to be carrying secret documents, not
part of it had to be believable to so they
finally settled on the fact that he would be an
officer of the Royal Marines, and to pick a name,
(19:29):
they had to choose one from the current names on
the Navy list, because the Germans would probably have a
copy of that and they might even check up to
make sure that the name was there, that he wasn't
just an entirely fictitious person. They ultimately picked Captain William
hind Nori Martin, who was serving in Rhode Island at
the time and probably wouldn't hear about what was going on.
(19:50):
That he had just washed up dead in Spain, and
they made the corpse of fake I d so he
could be easily identified from there. They took several other
steps to round out the dead body's character. Just a
few examples of what they did. They got him a
new uniform, which Chumbley actually wore around for a while
so that it wouldn't seem so new. He wanted to
(20:10):
wear it out a little bit, make it a little dirty.
And they also gave the dead body a family background
in a place of origin, so they had him come
from an upper middle class family, and they said that
he was from Wales, which was incidentally the only real
thing about about the real identity of the body. Yes,
(20:31):
They made him Roman Catholic by putting across around his neck,
and this kind of did double duty. It added personality
to him and it also helped ensure that there probably
wouldn't be an autopsy. Catholic countries were hesitant to perform
autopsies anyway, but especially on other Catholics. I thought that
would discourage them even more. And they gave him kind
of a rascally side too. Aside from his religion and
(20:54):
his his family background, they made him fiscally irresponsible. They
planted and overdrow half notice on him, and they actually
had it written by a real bank manager, so everything
was legit. And they gave him a love life. They
created a fictional fiance for him, which was inspired by
a real young woman who worked for British counterintelligence. They
(21:15):
included letters from her, obviously changing her name, and they
even included a photo of her. And Montague kind of
got into character here by flirting with the girl and
actually dating her even though he was married. So in
a way, I mean McEntyre points out how they both
kind of take on this character. You know, exactly tell
(21:37):
me by wearing the clothes and Montu by pretend fiance
and that's just part of it. They discussed and they
developed every part of his life and thought through every
object they put on their fictional officers person. And part
two of this podcast we'll talk more about the man
that Montague and Chumley created and whether they did a
(21:57):
good job in doing it, because people have of freeing
opinions about that. We'll also get into their next big challenge,
planning the actual drop of the body and find out
what happened to the body once it got got past
the shore and onto Nazi radar. Al Right, so until
next time, lenty to look forward to. Until next time,
(22:18):
we will move on to listener mail. So for this
listener Mail, we have some postcards to share from people.
You know how we love postcards. We have one from
Strasburg from listener Ed and he says, dear to Blien
and Sarah, longtime listener, first time postcard and my trip
down the Rhine. I've been looking for unusual stories that
(22:40):
might make good podcast. Here's a picture of the astrological
clock that, for some mysterious reason is located inside the
cathedral in Strasburg. Keep up the good work. We also
got another postcard from Hillary and this is an amazing postcard.
It's one of those three d ones where there's like
the plastic really thing overlaying it, and if you look
(23:02):
at it one direction, it's one picture of man Cello.
If you look at it, the other picture is another
angle of manta Cello. She wrote to us, have you
ever seen such a trippy historical postcard before? I hadn't.
I don't think I have either, and we've received quite
a few of them. She said that she went to
visit Monticello a few weeks ago, and funny that you
just read about clock's Deablina because she mentions that she says,
(23:25):
for example, in Jefferson's day, it would have been a
sign of status to have a clock in the house.
He had one in every room he designed. The one
in the entryway it showed the days of the week,
not just the hours. Sunday was down in the basement
since he ran out of vertical room for the chain
with weights that sank into each day's allotted space on
the wall. Um, I have you ever been to Montochello?
(23:47):
I haven't. It's a very fun spot to visit, and
I feel like everybody has their own favorite weird Jefferson
designed thing in the house because there's a lot. What's yours? Um,
I really, I'm just like the triple hung windows. I
thought that was so smart because you get a double
air current coming in a good pre air conditioning thing
(24:07):
if you're living in Virgin cool, very green. Well, this
next postcard we have is the Spirit of seventies six,
the painting by Willard and apparently it hangs in the
Seleckman's Room and Abbot Hall in Marblehead, Massachusetts, which I
didn't realize. And the postcard is from listener Rachel, and
she says I love your podcast and listened regularly while
biking on our town's bike path. We have a great
(24:30):
deal of history here, the birthplace of the U. S. Navy,
the first soldiers for the Revolution and Civil Wars, protected
USS constitution in War of eighteen twelve, and much more.
I'd love to hear a podcast on my little hometown.
We get overshadowed here by our next door neighbors, Salem
and Uh. I thought this was a good one. Of course,
I used to live in Boston. We've mentioned that before,
(24:52):
and I've been to Marblehoad before I did. I covered
a freelance story there once and I went up there
once also with my husban and before he was my husband,
and it's a beautiful little town and we went to
like a great little ice cream shop and had ice
cream there, and I just I just loved it. So thanks.
(25:12):
Good to hear from you, Rachel. Good to hear from
all of you who write in and send us postcards.
If you want to share with us your travels or
an interesting note about your hometown, or just a podcast suggestion,
you can write us at History Podcast at Discovery dot com.
We're also on Facebook and we're on Twitter at Myston History.
And if you want to learn a little bit more
(25:32):
about dead bodies and I guess studying them in a
different sort of way than Chumley is doing. We do
have an article on how body farms work. You can
search for body farms on our homepage at www dot
how stuff works dot com for more on this and
(25:53):
thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com.
I was Amber Day, that I was Amber Day, eat
even
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from house
works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast Time
to Glean a Charcoalboarding and I and today we start
our story off the coast of southwestern Spain, near the
port of Ulva on April nine. A local fisherman named
(00:25):
Jose Antonio ray Ma Maria was out in a little
skiff that morning trying to spot sardines for the larger
fishing boats. But what he spotted instead was a kind
of lumpy object just floating on the water, which he
at first mistook for a dead porpoise. Once he got closer, though,
he realized it was the dead body of a man,
floating face down. The man was wearing a yellow life
(00:46):
jacket over a trench coat, boots and a British uniform,
and there was a black briefcase attached to him by
a chain. The body was in pretty rough shape, as
you would imagine, it smelled terrible, and the face was rotting.
The fisherman on the larger boat had no interest in
helping them out. They did not want to get the body,
so Maria dragged the body aboard his tiny boat and
(01:09):
rowed it to shore, where he got help dragging the
body into the sand, and authorities kind of took over
from there. After this gruesome discovery, Maria just went back
about his business. This was, after all, World War two,
and although Spain was officially neutral, the fisherman probably just
assumed this was some sort of war casualty that had
(01:30):
washed up to their shores. But what he didn't realize
is that he had just set in motion what the
BBC has referred to as quote the most successful wartime
deception ever attempted. It was known as Operation Mincemeat, and
it was set into motion by the British to fool
the Nazis, and it's said to have changed the course
of the war. The dead man, whose personal effects identified
(01:52):
him as Major William Martin, was carrying documents that ultimately
convinced Hitler that the Allies were going to attack one
place when they really had designs on another. But how
did this plan work? And why was it so effective?
And who was that dead guy? So we're going to
look at all of those things, and we should mention
here that Ben McIntyre's book Operation Mints Neat helps us
(02:15):
answer a lot of these questions on the way through.
It's a source for a lot of the details that
we include in this two part episode, So there's a
lot to look forward to here. And if that name
sounds familiar, it's because we just consulted Ben McIntyre's book
on Adam Worth for our Napoleon of Crime, the Real
Professor Moriarty episode, So he's popping up all over the place.
(02:36):
You're coming like the Queen Victoria of authors, Queen Victoria
of historians. Before we get into talking about Operation mince
Meat specifically, first we need to talk a little bit
about what was going on worth World War two at
the time and why a deception plan like Operation mints
Meat would have been necessary in the first place. In
(02:57):
late ninety two, the Allies had invaded and six fessfully
taking control of North Africa from the Germans and an
offensive known as Operation Torch, and this was a real
blow to the Germans, not least of all because it
put the Allies just across the Mediterranean from Hitler's fortress,
as Nazi occupied Europe was sometimes called, and so the
Germans began speculating about where in southern Europe the Allies
(03:19):
would attack next. In an article for The New Yorker
and Malcolm Gladwell outlines a few of the possibilities. You know,
there was Sardino, which wasn't defended that heavily, Plus it
was a good spot from which to bomb southern Germany.
But the problem with it was that you couldn't land
a whole lot of ground troops there at once. There
was also Greece and the Balkans. Greece was vulnerable, and
(03:40):
the Balkans supplied Germans with raw materials for their war efforts,
so that could also be a huge blow to them
and a good contender for for a potential site. But
according to McIntyre, the obvious choice for the next Allied
invasion was really Sicily, which was located, of course at
the toe of Italy's boot, and this had the advantage
(04:01):
of being close enough in proximity to North Africa that
the Allies would be able to use short range fighter
plane and invading Sicily also opened up the possibility of
taking Italy out of the war, which would of course
be an enormous blow to the Germans and setting the
stage ultimately to invade France. So on January twenty three,
(04:23):
Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt jointly approved the invasion
of Sicily, which was known as Operation Husky and would
be the next big offensive for them. The problem though,
was that if Sicily was such an obvious choice for
an Allied invasion, it was probably going to be obvious
to the Access Powers as well, and if Hitler anticipated
their move and had the chance to concentrate more troops
(04:46):
in Sicily before they got there, things could turn out
really bad for the Allies. And that's where the need
for deception comes in. Yeah, the Allies had to somehow
convince their opponents that they were going to do something
completely different from what they were actually going to do
if they were going to have a fighting chance here.
One plan created for this purpose was Operation Barkley, which
(05:08):
basically aimed to convince the Germans that the Allies were
going to attack Greece, Sardinia and Southern France instead of Sicily.
And this plan was implemented in several ways, including creating
a fake army and the Eastern Mediterranean, having double agents
spread false information around, creating fake radio traffic, and recruiting
Greek interpreters and officers, among other things. But back in London,
(05:31):
a couple of British intelligence officers were working on something
a bit more unusual. Yeah, that's an understatement. So the
plan that was being hatched in London actually had its
roots in a top secret memo known as the Trout Memo,
which was distributed in nineteen thirty nine by Admiral John Godfrey,
who was Britain's Director of Naval Intelligence, and by his
(05:53):
personal assistant, Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming, who of course went
on to write the James Bond novel. According to McIntyre,
Fleming had a real knack for intelligence planning. It was
always coming up with these really imaginative, sometimes pretty cookie
or crazy ideas for deceiving or outsmarting the enemy, and
it's thought that he had a very heavy hand in
(06:15):
the Trout Memo. The memo essentially contained fifty one suggestions
for tricking the Germans by introducing erroneous ideas into their heads.
Many were outlandish, some maybe not so much. Ideas ranged
from things like distributing messages in bottles from a fictitious
U boat Captain kersen Hitler's Reich, to distributing false information
(06:35):
through fake copies of the newspaper. But number twenty eight
on the list is the one that interests us. And
that one was entitled quote a suggestion, not a very
nice one, and it read quote The following suggestion is
used in a book by Basil Thompson. The corpse, dressed
as an airman with dispatches in his pockets, could be
(06:56):
dropped onto the coast, supposedly from a parachute that had failed.
I understand there is no difficulty in obtaining corpses at
the Naval hospital, but of course it would have to
be a fresh one, so that outlines what's going to
happen here. But the Basil Thompson book mentioned was called
The Milliner's Hat Mystery. And Thompson himself had been the
(07:17):
head of Scotland Yards Criminal Investigation Division and made his
name as a spy catcher during World War One. He
also wrote twelve detective novels which weren't really that memorable.
But Fleming, the important guy here, had just read them
all devoured them. And that's the sort of spy novelist
connection we're looking at. Yeah, it's interesting. McEntyre points out
(07:38):
the spy novelist connection between Fleming and with Basil Thompson here.
Both of them were both spies and then later became novelists,
or simultaneously became novelists, we should say, and it's almost
as if with you know, this connection tells us, it's
almost as if you needed that imagination, the same imagination
needed to create a novel could create a great spy plan.
(08:02):
But the Trout memo kind of hung around British intelligence circles,
but no one really did anything with suggestion number twenty
eight for several years until a man named Charles Christopher
Chumbley came into the equation. Chumley was a twenty five
year old flight lieutenant in the Royal Air Force, seconded
two and MY five the Security Service. He couldn't fly
because it was bad eyesight, so that was a big
(08:23):
disappointment to him. But he was also the secretary of
the twenty Committee, which was the top secret group in
charge of overseeing double agents. So Chumley was this really tall,
kind of awkward looking guy, very eccentric, but much like Fleming,
he was said to possess a really great imaginative mind,
especially when it came to intelligence planning, which was the
(08:44):
important thing to be great at here. Even before Operation
Husky got underway, though, Chumley had seen the trial memo
and he had come up with his own plan, which
he presented to the twenty Committee in October two. He
called it the Trojan Horse, which was quote a plan
for introducing documents of a highly secret nature into the
(09:05):
hands of the enemy and um In this plan he
outlined how they'd get a body from one of the
London hospitals, they dress it up in an Army, Navy
or Air Force uniform, and they'd put these fake secret
documents into a pocket. Then they would fill the lungs
up with water and drop the body by plane in
some place where currents would eventually bring it into enemy territory.
(09:29):
He goes on to say that, quote, while the courier
cannot be sure to get through, if he does succeed,
information in the form of the documents can be of
a far more secret nature than it would be possible
to introduce through any normal b one a channel. And
that's far more secret, of course, because a dead body
can't be forced to reveal anything like a living person can.
(09:50):
So that's kind of what he meant, like meant by that.
So again to some people, this might sound kind of outlandish,
kind of crazy, but Chumley had good reason to think
that this would work because a similar real life situation
had actually presented itself during the British invasion of North Africa.
The precedent exactly, a British plane had crashed off of
(10:10):
Spain's Atlantic coast and everyone was killed. A couple of
the passengers who washed ashore were carrying information about the
North African operation, including the date of the attack, wireless
messages that the British intercepted, because of course they were
very worried about this, so they were trying to listen
into the Nazi chatter. So messages they intercepted after the
(10:31):
fact indicated that the Germans did get some info from that,
but fortunately for the British, the Germans ignored it. Ironically,
they thought the whole thing might be a trick. They
thought it was a deception, even though it for real.
But this precedent did tell the British a couple of things. First,
it told them that Spain, although it was officially neutral,
could be counted upon to path on info like a
(10:55):
dead body with letters paths on info like that to
the Nazis. And then set and lee after their loss
in North Africa, if the Nazis got this kind of
information again, they might be more likely to believe it
this time. So the twenty Committee, though they weren't entirely
convinced this plan would work, they were intrigued by Chumley's idea,
and they asked him to explore whether or not they
(11:16):
could actually make it happen. They assigned you and Montague
as his planning partner. Montague was really excited about the idea.
He was one of the more enthusiastic ones on the committee.
He had also read the Trout Memo and so he
kind of got it. And he had grown up in
London in a wealthy Jewish family, and he was a
brilliant forty two year old defense lawyer. McEntire says that
(11:36):
he quote possessed the rare ability to read an interlock
teacher's mind. After the war broke out, Montague joined the
Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve and became a lieutenant. But Godfrey
soon recognized his talents and recruited him for the Naval
Intelligence Department, and so he'd taken on more and more
responsibility there over time. So once Chumley and Montague started
(12:00):
working together, started putting their heads together on the Trojan
Horse plan, which is still what it was being called
at this point. Their first order of business was to
see if they could actually get their hands on a
dead body. I mean, no plan if you don't have
a body to work with. So when he outlined initial plan,
Chumley clearly thought that finding a body would be relatively simple.
(12:20):
He thought you could just walk into a military hospital,
plunk down ten pounds, walk off with anybody that you wanted.
But in reality the plan, that plan at least, wasn't
really very practical because deaths during war times, whether they
were from battles or whether they were suicides, didn't leave
behind the right kind of bodies for an operation like this.
(12:42):
For example, you couldn't use a bombing victim because it
would be pretty obvious that that person had died in
a bombing and their body wouldn't be in the right
condition for what they were trying to suggest here, you know,
a drowning or something like that. Even with somebody who
had hanged himself or poisoned himself, it would be pretty
easy to tell how he really died. Also, in all
(13:04):
of these cases there is the family and friends of
the deceased to consider people who would want to know
why the body of their loved one was being taken away,
And you didn't want to let too many people in
on the plan because you want it to be secret.
Of course, according to McIntyre, they briefly considered quote pulling
a birken hair and just stealing a corpse from a grave,
(13:26):
but they quickly decided against that, ring a bell to
podcast listeners, Katie and I did an old episode on
the famous body snatchers in here. Instead, Montague ended up
approaching a man that he knew from his lawyer days
named Bentley Purchase, who was a coroner in northwest London. Now,
Purchase wasn't quite what you'd expect from a coroner. He
(13:47):
was kind of like a Tim Burton character the most.
He was happy go lucky, with the real mccab sense
of humor. For example, after he gave Montague directions to
where he worked, he said, quote, an alternative means of
getting here is, of course, to get run over. That
might be faster, you never know. Purchase was initially pretty
(14:09):
hesitant though, to just despite his sense of humor, hesitant
to just hand over a body, and he was pretty professional. Yeah,
But when he heard that it was for a matter
of national importance, he agreed to help Montague obtain a
body that could appear to have died in a plane
crash or to have died by drowning, and he'd have
Montague choose from one of the unidentified bodies. These wouldn't
(14:32):
have next kin looking for them, you know, so there'd
be fewer strings attached. But there wasn't anything currently in
the mortuary that fit the bill, fit the bill that
they were looking for, so they'd have to wait a
while until somebody came in. At the end of January nine,
a suitable candidate finally did come along. It was a
thirty four year old Welsh tramp named Glenn Michael, who
(14:54):
had committed suicide by drinking rat poison in an abandoned warehouse.
He'd grown up in complete poverty, both his parents were dead,
and he seemed to have come to London just simply
to die. We don't know that for sure, but that's
almost how it looked. He really didn't know anyone there,
He didn't have any sense of purpose, any sort of job,
any attachments. Um. He just ended up dead. Michael ended
(15:17):
up and purchases Morgue and Purchase put him in cold
storage and immediately contacted Montague. Michael seemed pretty perfect for
the plan. As we mentioned, he was single, penniless, no
relatives were looking for him, and Purchase said that the
amount of rat poison he'd taken wasn't enough to be
detected later as the cause of death. And we'll talk
about that a little more later on in part two.
(15:37):
But um but that was the situation that Montague came
into the Purchase off. I told Montague, though, he was
going to have to act fast because he couldn't stave
off decomposition of the body for very long. The military
would have to use the body of Michael within three
months if they were going to use it at all.
That meant Montague and Chumley had to get official permission
(15:59):
from the twenty Committee to actually go forward with the plan,
because remember they were just exploring the idea for now.
They didn't actually see if they could get a body
in the first place, right, They didn't actually have the
go ahead, So they presented their proposal a week later,
with the plan renamed Operation mince Meat. Since Trojan Horse
would obviously immediately took off the Nazis that was going on. Yeah,
(16:19):
if they heard any sort of like wireless chatter about
a trojan horse, they would know that something was going
to happen. The code names, interestingly, it was just kind
of a side note, but those were selected from random
lists that were periodically recycled. So mince meat had been
previously used for a mine lane operation in the early
nineteen forties. But it just happens to be really perfect. Yeah,
(16:39):
it happens to be really perfect for this kind of
a kind of operation. Of all the surprising things in
this story that might have surprised me most, that this
was not a purposefully chosen code name. It just worked, no,
because you know this is That's one of the interesting
discussions in McIntyre's book too, as he kind of talks
about how Churchill especially did not want them to use
(17:01):
names that could be associated with the type of mission
that could match exactly and um and usually Montagu went
along with that as well. But he just kind of
thought that it was almost like a good omen that
they that this happened to pop up on the list
that they could choose from, so they chose it and
it was a good fit and their proposal that they submitted,
(17:22):
obviously was more specific than the more general plan that
Chumley had laid out before, and it suggested that the
body would carry documents to throw the Nazis off on
the Allies plans to invade Sicily. So the twenty Committee
was good with it. They told them to go ahead.
But even with that hurdle behind them, Chumley and Montague's
real challenge was really just starting. Because they couldn't just
(17:43):
drop the body as is into the enemy's hands. It
would just be some random guy. They had to create
a whole new personality for it to make the entire
story believable. And of course Montague and Chumley did have
some experience with this because they had created fictional personas
and their work is double agents, and a lot of
(18:03):
the double agents who they worked with had armies of
sub agents who supposedly fed them information to report back
to Germany. But a lot of these sub agents were
just completely made up. Yeah. I mean, the reasoning here
is fake spies much easier to work with than real ones.
I mean, the hard part about it was really keeping
up with all of their various fake lives and personalities.
(18:24):
You had to be really consistent and remember all the details. Oh,
you know, does does this one sick? Um? What's going
on with us? Was it was he taking time off?
You know? Is this one shiftless? You have to remember?
Like about them? Yes, and so Monte and Chumbley they
wanted to similarly create a whole fictional life for the
dead body that they were using, the logic being that
(18:47):
the more believable he was, the more believable the whole
hoax would ultimately be. So Chumbley and Montague spent a
lot of time honing this guy's story, what he liked,
what he didn't like, what his strengths and weaknesses were,
the people in his life, you know. They made up
family members and stories for the family members. The first
big decision they had to make, though, is what kind
(19:07):
of officer he would be. He had to be someone
who could wear a standard size uniform, because they obviously
couldn't take a corpse to a tailor and have them
fitted for a uniform. And he had to be someone
who was important enough to be carrying secret documents, not
part of it had to be believable to so they
finally settled on the fact that he would be an
officer of the Royal Marines, and to pick a name,
(19:29):
they had to choose one from the current names on
the Navy list, because the Germans would probably have a
copy of that and they might even check up to
make sure that the name was there, that he wasn't
just an entirely fictitious person. They ultimately picked Captain William
hind Nori Martin, who was serving in Rhode Island at
the time and probably wouldn't hear about what was going on.
(19:50):
That he had just washed up dead in Spain, and
they made the corpse of fake I d so he
could be easily identified from there. They took several other
steps to round out the dead body's character. Just a
few examples of what they did. They got him a
new uniform, which Chumbley actually wore around for a while
so that it wouldn't seem so new. He wanted to
(20:10):
wear it out a little bit, make it a little dirty.
And they also gave the dead body a family background
in a place of origin, so they had him come
from an upper middle class family, and they said that
he was from Wales, which was incidentally the only real
thing about about the real identity of the body. Yes,
(20:31):
They made him Roman Catholic by putting across around his neck,
and this kind of did double duty. It added personality
to him and it also helped ensure that there probably
wouldn't be an autopsy. Catholic countries were hesitant to perform
autopsies anyway, but especially on other Catholics. I thought that
would discourage them even more. And they gave him kind
of a rascally side too. Aside from his religion and
(20:54):
his his family background, they made him fiscally irresponsible. They
planted and overdrow half notice on him, and they actually
had it written by a real bank manager, so everything
was legit. And they gave him a love life. They
created a fictional fiance for him, which was inspired by
a real young woman who worked for British counterintelligence. They
(21:15):
included letters from her, obviously changing her name, and they
even included a photo of her. And Montague kind of
got into character here by flirting with the girl and
actually dating her even though he was married. So in
a way, I mean McEntyre points out how they both
kind of take on this character. You know, exactly tell
(21:37):
me by wearing the clothes and Montu by pretend fiance
and that's just part of it. They discussed and they
developed every part of his life and thought through every
object they put on their fictional officers person. And part
two of this podcast we'll talk more about the man
that Montague and Chumley created and whether they did a
(21:57):
good job in doing it, because people have of freeing
opinions about that. We'll also get into their next big challenge,
planning the actual drop of the body and find out
what happened to the body once it got got past
the shore and onto Nazi radar. Al Right, so until
next time, lenty to look forward to. Until next time,
(22:18):
we will move on to listener mail. So for this
listener Mail, we have some postcards to share from people.
You know how we love postcards. We have one from
Strasburg from listener Ed and he says, dear to Blien
and Sarah, longtime listener, first time postcard and my trip
down the Rhine. I've been looking for unusual stories that
(22:40):
might make good podcast. Here's a picture of the astrological
clock that, for some mysterious reason is located inside the
cathedral in Strasburg. Keep up the good work. We also
got another postcard from Hillary and this is an amazing postcard.
It's one of those three d ones where there's like
the plastic really thing overlaying it, and if you look
(23:02):
at it one direction, it's one picture of man Cello.
If you look at it, the other picture is another
angle of manta Cello. She wrote to us, have you
ever seen such a trippy historical postcard before? I hadn't.
I don't think I have either, and we've received quite
a few of them. She said that she went to
visit Monticello a few weeks ago, and funny that you
just read about clock's Deablina because she mentions that she says,
(23:25):
for example, in Jefferson's day, it would have been a
sign of status to have a clock in the house.
He had one in every room he designed. The one
in the entryway it showed the days of the week,
not just the hours. Sunday was down in the basement
since he ran out of vertical room for the chain
with weights that sank into each day's allotted space on
the wall. Um, I have you ever been to Montochello?
(23:47):
I haven't. It's a very fun spot to visit, and
I feel like everybody has their own favorite weird Jefferson
designed thing in the house because there's a lot. What's yours? Um,
I really, I'm just like the triple hung windows. I
thought that was so smart because you get a double
air current coming in a good pre air conditioning thing
(24:07):
if you're living in Virgin cool, very green. Well, this
next postcard we have is the Spirit of seventies six,
the painting by Willard and apparently it hangs in the
Seleckman's Room and Abbot Hall in Marblehead, Massachusetts, which I
didn't realize. And the postcard is from listener Rachel, and
she says I love your podcast and listened regularly while
biking on our town's bike path. We have a great
(24:30):
deal of history here, the birthplace of the U. S. Navy,
the first soldiers for the Revolution and Civil Wars, protected
USS constitution in War of eighteen twelve, and much more.
I'd love to hear a podcast on my little hometown.
We get overshadowed here by our next door neighbors, Salem
and Uh. I thought this was a good one. Of course,
I used to live in Boston. We've mentioned that before,
(24:52):
and I've been to Marblehoad before I did. I covered
a freelance story there once and I went up there
once also with my husban and before he was my husband,
and it's a beautiful little town and we went to
like a great little ice cream shop and had ice
cream there, and I just I just loved it. So thanks.
(25:12):
Good to hear from you, Rachel. Good to hear from
all of you who write in and send us postcards.
If you want to share with us your travels or
an interesting note about your hometown, or just a podcast suggestion,
you can write us at History Podcast at Discovery dot com.
We're also on Facebook and we're on Twitter at Myston History.
And if you want to learn a little bit more
(25:32):
about dead bodies and I guess studying them in a
different sort of way than Chumley is doing. We do
have an article on how body farms work. You can
search for body farms on our homepage at www dot
how stuff works dot com for more on this and
(25:53):
thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com.
I was Amber Day, that I was Amber Day, eat
even
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