Mincemeat

José Antonio Rey Maria rowed out from his coastal Andalusian village into the Atlantic Ocean looking for sardines. Instead, he found a body.

”The body was placed in the water at 0430 in a position 148° Portil Pillar 1.3 miles approximately eight cables from the beach and started to drift ashore.”

Lieutenant Norman A. Jewell, commander, HMS Seraph

Off the coast of Huelva, Spain, April 1943

On an overcast day in April 1943, twenty-three-year-old José Antonio Rey Maria rowed out from his coastal Andalusian village into the Atlantic Ocean looking for sardines. Instead, he found a body.

Shocking though it was, his discovery was certainly not unexpected. World War II raged beyond Spain’s coastal headwaters. Out there, German U-Boat “Wolf Packs” hunted Allied transport convoys with fierce regularity, hoping to sever the vital arteries of supplies, equipment, and manpower destined for campaigns around the globe. With the nearest unfolding just inside the Mediterranean - a bitter struggle to expel the Axis from North Africa - surely, out of all the air and naval traffic sustaining such an effort, there were bound to be a casualties.

José found the uniformed, face-down body suspended on the water’s surface by a yellow life jacket. Odorous putrefaction washed over the fisherman. Holding his breath, he grabbed the saturated corpse. It bobbled and flipped, revealing a half-decomposed, half-burnt visage covered in slimy green mold.

José’s fellow fishermen wanted nothing to do with his catch. Struggling, he hauled the body halfway over the gunwale of his skiff, secured it to the stern, and rowed back to his village alone. Offloading the man on the Playa de Portil, José and another fisherman dragged him onto a sand dune, depositing him in the shade of a pine tree overlooking the ocean.

While waiting for authorities to arrive, a growing assembly of villagers speculated over the man’s origins. Who was he? At over six feet tall, the white, uniformed man wore a khaki overcoat, dark boots, and, most curiously, had a black briefcase chained to his belt. Soon a group of Spanish soldiers arrived to take the body to their post in Huelva. Loading the man onto a donkey, flies hovered in the air as townspeople spoke in hushed tones.

As it turned out, the man was not a fighter, but a fiction - the brainchild of a creative batch of British intelligence officers eager to preserve the secrecy of future Allied operations in the Mediterranean. With the North African campaign winding down, two months thence the Allies planned to assault the island of Sicily.

Much hinged on the invasion’s success: Harboring hopes of knocking Italy out of the war, the Sicilian landings represented the first meaningful Allied attack on Hitler’s “Fortress Europe.” Looking ahead, it offered promising avenues for continued military operations on the continent.

Preserving the Allied secret demanded desperate measures. Drawing inspiration from a 1937 mystery novel in which a bright British inspector attempts to identify a dead man porting forged papers, Rear Admiral John Godfrey, Director of Britain’s Naval Intelligence Division, and his personal assistant, Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming wondered whether such a plan might actually deceive the Nazi’s into believing the invasion would come elsewhere - maybe the Balkans, or Greece.

Operation Mincemeat - as their plan became known - ballooned into an elaborate ruse. To lend credence to the deception, layers of misleading radio traffic intermingled with leaked rumors painted Greece as a viable Allied target; Greek linguists, maps, and currency appeared in London; a fictitious British army even surfaced within striking distance of the Peloponnese.

The keystone of the operation, however, was the planted body whose classified correspondence would confirm Axis suspicions - and to plant a body, one needed a body.

The task of acquiring one fell to thirty-eight-year-old Lt. Commander Ewen Montagu, a member of Britain’s Naval Intelligence Division, and twenty-five-year-old Charles Christopher Cholmondeley, a bespectacled RAF intelligence officer attached to MI5.

Creating a convincing backstory left little margin for error. The duo needed an intact, military-age cadaver, killed recently in an innocuous, easily obscured manner, with no immediate circle of friends of family to mourn his loss - a tall task. To their great astonishment, on January 28, 1943 an informed St. Pancras coroner alerted them to an acceptable candidate.

Thirty-four-year-old Glyndwr Michael led a hard life. Born in Wales on January 4, 1909, he spent his life in abject poverty. Moving from one dilapidated dwelling to another, he and his two siblings witnessed the grinding, traumatizing decline of their syphilatic coal-miner father, who, invariably drunk and depressed, died of influenza in 1924 after attempting suicide four months prior. Michael was sixteen at the time.

Sixteen years later, working as a part-time laborer and living off alms and charity donations, his mother died of a heart attack. Alone and unstable, Michael disappeared. Eventually, he came to London. Living out of an abandoned warehouse near King’s Cross, on January 24, 1943 he ingested rat poison for reasons unknown. He died four days later.

In life, Michael was forgotten; in death, he found new life. The coroner refrigerated Michael’s body for three months while Montagu and Cholmondeley fabricated his new identity: Major William Martin. By mid-April, the duo finalized plans for Martin’s final mission. They outfitted the body as an upper-middle class Royal Marine courier posing as a member of Lord Louis Mountbatten’s Combined Operations Headquarters. At the last minute, they found a doppelgänger to pose for an ID photograph.

They filled his pockets with ticket stubs and intermixed personal letters from Martin’s fiancée with classified planning documents revealing Greece as the primary Allied target in his briefcase.

On April 18, 1943, they loaded Martin into an airtight, 400-lb steel canister lined with dry ice, drove north in a boxy van to Holy Loch in Greenock, Scotland, placed it aboard the HMS Seraph, a British submarine bound for Spain, and waited.

Anxiety abounded during the Seraph’s ten-day voyage to Spain. The gambit ran a high risk of failure. The submarine could break down; the life vest could deflate; the body might sink. In the eventuality someone somehow discovered Martin, there was every possibility German intelligence might easily see through his fictitious persona.

Aboard the Seraph, only its commander, twenty-nine-year-old Lieutenant Norman L.A. Jewell knew the canister’s true contents. To the rest of his crew, the mysterious case marked “Handle with Care” carried an experimental weather-reporting device earmarked for undercover testing off the Spanish coast. Hefting the weighty canister into a forward storage chamber, six crewman “joked about ‘John Brown’s body’” and their “new shipmate, Charlie.” If only they knew.

Shortly after 4:00 a.m. on April 30, the Seraph surfaced undetected in the inky pre-dawn darkness 1,600 yards from shore. Standing on the casing with four officers, Jewell ordered the rest of his fifty-man crew to stay below decks. Though morning mist they saw dimly silhouetted fishing boats operating in the bay.

It took ten minutes to open the canister. While they worked, Jewell revealed the secret of their delicate cargo. Unraveling the corpse from its blankets, they found it more decomposed than expected. The body, however, still resembled a drowning victim after several days at sea. It would have to do.

Together, the five officers lifted Michael’s body out of the container, inflated his life vest, double-checked his briefcase, and slid him gently into the water. Out of respect, Jewell offered an appropriate parting prayer from Psalm 39 with as much significance for them as it did for their unknown passenger: “I will keep my mouth shut as it were with a bridle: while the ungodly is in my sight. I held my tongue and spake nothing: I kept silence, yea, even from good words; but it was pain and grief to me.” The five reentered the submarine through the conning tower. Turning the craft seaward, Jewell used the current from its rotating screw to prod Michael toward his final destination.

Later that day, a curious José Antonio Rey Maria, mistaking the body for a dead porpoise, hauled the Allied bait ashore.

British intelligence chose Martin’s destination with great care. Within the small city of Huelva lived an eclectic range of Axis collaborators and groups of Allied sympathizers who regularly fed them information. With so much furor raised by Michael’s arrival, it did not take long for enemy agents to bite.

When the body arrived in Huelva, a Spanish naval officer took charge of Martin’s personal effects, sending the locked briefcase up the chain of command and the body to the local mortuary for examination. A doctor confirmed the intended cause of death: Per his report, between five and eight days before the courier fell into the sea alive, perishing from asphyxiation while immersed in seawater.

Communicating with the British Naval Attaché in Huelva, Montagu and Cholmondeley learned that at noon on May 1, 1943, Major William Martin was given a full military funeral at the Huelva’s Cemeterio de la Soledad attended by Spanish and British civil-military authorities. The attaché made no mention of the briefcase then, but over the ensuing weeks a fuller picture emerged tracing its journey through neutral Spain’s military hierarchy and, amazingly, the subsequent leak of its documents to German intelligence.

When the contents of Martin’s briefcase eventually made it back to London, a battery of scientific testing confirmed they had been tampered with. In the interim, the Germans made quick use of their discovery; as photo reproductions of the classified documents made their way to the Führer’s desk, in the buildup to D-Day, July 9, 1943, Nazi commanders diverted several divisions from Sicily, doubling their garrison at Sardinia while transferring 90,000 soldiers to Greece and the Balkans.

In a telegram to the Prime Minister, Montagu pithily wrote, “Mincemeat swallowed rod, line, and sinker.”

It is impossible to know how the campaign through Sicily might have unfolded against the combined weight of these enemy forces, just as it is impossible to know how much their redirection was directly attributable to Mincemeat. While today, historians agree that the body of Glyndwyr Michael markedly contributed to preserving the secrecy of the true Allied target - potentially even saving thousands of lives - at the time Allied leaders could do little more than hope their outlandish deception plan worked.

Montagu and Cholmondeley arranged for the Naval Attaché to deposit a wreath on Martin’s marble tombstone in Huelva. In homage to their unknown warrior, the tombstone read: “William Martin. Born 29th March 1907. Died 24th April 1943. Beloved son of John Glyndwyr Martin and the late Antonia Martin of Cardiff, Wales. Dulce et decorum west pro patria mori. R.I.P.”

In 1998, the British Government finally amended the tombstone to reflect its occupant’s true identity: “Glyndwyr Michael; Served as Major William Martin, RM.”

Michael rests in Huelva to this day.