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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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? 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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? 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com. I was Amber Day, that I was Amber Day, eat even