Welcome to Stuff You missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm to playing a chok reboarding and I'm faired out and we are continuing on today with our discussion on Operation Mincemeat, which referred to as the most successful wartime deception ever attempted. It was essentially an elaborate World War two military hoax cooked up by British intelligence in ninety three to fool the Nazias into thinking the Allies next move was going to be an attack on Greece and Sardinia when they were actually about to invade Sicily in an offensive known as Operation Husky. So in part one of this podcast, we talked a little bit about what was going on in World War Two at the time, why Cecily was the logical next target for the Allies, and why a deception plan, or rather deception plans were really needed to throw Hitler off the sent We also laid out the basic premise for Operation mince Meat, and that was using a corpse to relay false information to the enemy by planting official looking documents on it and dropping it in an area where the enemy would be sure to find it. Ian Fleming, as we mentioned, was the first to propose this idea in a ninety nine memo called the Trout Memo, and no one did anything with it for years, probably just because it seemed so outrageous and and kind of Yeah, but by ninety three, British intelligence agents Charles Chumbley and you and Montague had caught hold of this idea, They developed it and had been given permission to kind of run with it. Yeah. So when we left off, Chumley and Montague were really in the thick of giving the dead body that they've managed to obtain a whole background, a life, and a personality of everything. From the uniform that it was going to wear, they decided to make it a Royal Marines officer, to its religion and its name Captain William Martin, he was going to be Bill Martin. Friends. That's the level of details that they attended to. Essentially, they created Bill as this likable, slightly irresponsible guy. The BBC documentary that's based on the story, called Operation Minsmey, described him as brave and romantic, but disorganized and deeply in debt. He was also recently engaged. As we mentioned before, Bill's fictional fiance Pam was based on an actual young woman who worked for British counterintelligence named Jane Leslie. Montague played the role of Bill and actually flirted with and dated Jean Leslie, who went right along on it. Yeah, they would call each other Bill and Pam in these scenarios, so really just getting into this fiction that they were creating around these people. Yeah, but there was also a practical side to all the story boarding and play acting, because once they've made up a life for Bill, Martin, Chumley and Montague needed to plant evidence that really would do something put this plan into effect. And we talked about the cross and the overdraft notice and this fake letters from Pam. They also went ahead and included a bill from a jeweler for an engagement ring, but also some other stuff which arguably would make the court seem even more like a real person than stuff like letters. Things that the spies referred to as wallet litter, and those are the things that you probably have in your pocket now, Things you just absent mindedly keep in your wallet or your purse or your pockets that don't necessarily mean anything to you, but they show that you're somebody who walks around and somebody who does stuff so pocket change ticket stubs. I don't know, Toblina, you might have law terror receipts in your pocket. It could be anything like that. And you just like trash like a gum wrapper. Totally. I have so much of the stuff that I just got rid of. I just moved, so I cleaned out my purses and things, and I thought about this because I just read this, you know, I just had done this research. I was thinking about all the wallet w Yes, I have bags and bags of wallet litter. But yeah, the stuff just tells you a little bit about the person. You know, maybe nothing significant, but maybe it does tell you a little something about a person's personality. And they made sure to plant some things like this on the corpse that they were using as well. Some of the items, like I said, we're meaningless, like a partially used book of stamps. Others were less so like ticket stubs for performance on a particular date, which might convince whoever found them that Bill Martin would have had to have been traveling by plane because they have that particular date on them. So, you know, just planning things here and there that would fill out the story. A little bit in some ways help them convince the Germans that this was a real person and of course make it realistic. So that process and all the considerations that it required could probably be a little bit tedious, but it was probably lots of fun to compared to the process of creating the most important information that they were going to have to plant on the body. I mean, forget whallet litter. The most important thing was going to be the fake official military documents, which were of course vital to misleading the Access powers in the first place. They decided that the secret documents would take the form of personal letters between high ranking Allied officials that just happened to drop vital info here and there, because actual battle plans and so forth would not have been carried by a single officer in this way. Those would have been sent by diplomatic pouch something like that. Specifically, the letter that aimed to convince the Nazis that Greece was a target and that Sicily was a decoy was created as a correspondence between Lieutenant General Archibald Nye, who was the Vice Chief of the Imperial General Staff in London, and General Harold Alexander, who was the senior British officer under Eisenhower in Tunisia. These guys knew each other. They were both important enough that the Germans would instantly know who they were, and it made sense that they would be privy to this sort of information. So just three essential things that they needed to have that they'd be corresponding about something like this. So Montagu took the first stab at writing this letter. He thought he made a pretty good attempt at it. But his bosses and several other of the high ranking folks immediately started weighing in on it, and it became a real source of frustration for Montague because various officials debated about the letter for more than a month trying to decide, you know, did it strike the right tone, didn't give enough away without getting too much away, that did it seem realistic? Um? And he just thought his letter was good. He thought it was good, like stop messing with jokes in there. He was like, this is the best letter, This is totally believable. But they didn't really so much agree. They wanted to make sure that they got, like you said, a little bit of information out there, you know, you want an element of truth in it. To make it realistic. But at the same time, you don't want to give the whole thing away. You don't want to just tell them your plans by by trying to deceive them. Tell them, yes, we're going to be in Sicily. Well, and guys like that wouldn't be writing letters that gave away the whole plan anyway. Right. Well, finally the chiefs of staff just came up with a bright idea of having General Ni draft the letter himself. And when he did this, it just finally struck the right chord. I mean, I guess that's sort of the obvious answer, but nobody had really thought about it before for this more than a month that they were debating it. Nice's version of the letter hinted at this primary invasion in Greece and another elsewhere in the Mediterranean, while mentioning Sicily as a diversionary location where some smaller attacks might occur to confuse the Nazis. Of course, they were going to be doing air raids and everything anyway in preparation for their invasion, so this sort of helped them with that too. It's like, hey, if you see some mar raids happening, it's just a defasion exactly, so they had to include another letter to after this though. They were like, Okay, this sounds good, but we need in another letter to explain why this guy would be carrying a little place, right. So the second one was from the Chief of Combined Operations to Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, who was Commander in Chief in the Mediterranean, another well known figure that the Nazis would have heard of, and this letter explained what Bill Martin was doing traveling with this very important information in the first place, and also hinted that a secondary invasion would take place in Sardinia. I think they actually included kind of a PostScript or a little joke at the end of the letter that said, you know, maybe William Martin can bring back some sardines with him or something. They fit some jokes in there, didn't they did. They also tested different typewriter inc. Because they needed to find one that didn't become illegible after being in the water. They needed one that was a regular, non spy inc. That wouldn't tip anybody off, but it could still be read after all that time. And then they carefully folded and field all these important letters. They photographed the steals that they could easily tell if the letters had been tampered with, and Ben McIntyre, the author who we mentioned in the earlier episode, also described how an additional precaution was included. They put a dark eyelash in the fold of each letter, and so if the eyelash fell out, they'd know that the letter had been read. Just a back up thing to to provide even more caution than the seals. Yeah, not exactly scientific, but kind of a neat detail to include. Anyway, The letters were placed in a black government briefcase that was chained to the corpses belt, even though they knew that it seemed unlikely that Bill Martin would be carrying letters this way, because it was really the only way they could ensure that the letters wouldn't just float away and that whoever found the body would actually notice the letters. I mean, if they just kind of tucked it in his jacket pocket or something, there was always the chance, probably not, but always the chance that it would be overlooked. So they sort of needed this as safeguard. After these official letters were all complete, they sought and got final approval for Operation Mints Neat from the highest authorities necessary, Churchill and Eisenhower. So with all of these hard crafted materials finally put together and the character of their corpse career created, the British intelligence officers needed to nail down some logistics, namely where they were going to drop the body and how they were going to do it. So, as we mentioned in the last episode, Spain in general had already proven that it could be a prime location for this type of operation because there was evidence that they had passed on information to the Nazis in the past. Even though Spain was officially neutral, there were some pretty strong pro acts as sentiments prevalent in certain areas of the country, and even in the highest arenas of the government and law enforcement there were some pro access sentiments. So this was what Chumley and Montagu were counting on for the whole plan to really work. But they still needed to hone in on an exact area of the Spanish coast to drop the body because there were some pro British Spaniards as well, and if they got their hands on the body first, the documents might just be returned without ever making it into the hands of the Germans. So they consulted with the British naval attiche in Madrid, Alan Hill Garth and his assistant as well, who helped them settle on dropping the body near Velva on spain southwest coast, since it was an area where a lot of German influence was present. It was also the home base of notorious German spy Adolf Klaus, who basically bought off everyone who could in town and was responsible for helping target British ships off the Spanish coast for U boats, among other things. He had been in the service of the Nazis for a while and was considered one of their top spies. If something washed up on shore there, it was guaranteed that Adolf Klaus would make it his business to find out about it. So, with the location for the drop finally picked out, the next order of business for Operation Mincemeat Planners was to determine how they were going to drop the body. So the idea was to make it seem as if Bill Martin had died in a plane crash. You remember in the last episode they had to find a body that didn't have, you know, a telltale sign of death or a cause of death. To make this plane crash idea seem realistic, but the problem was if they actually dropped the body out of a plane, it might completely break apart, since it had already been decomposing for a couple of months in the Morgue. So they had a few other options, and one was to bring it in on a surface ship and sort of drop it close to shore, but that wouldn't work because they need to get pretty close to the shore to drop the body to make sure that it didn't float somewhere where they didn't want it to go. Another option was landing a sea plane on the water, but that seemed really complicated, really risky, and could possibly cause a real plane crash, which would defeat the purpose of the whole operation. So they finally decided that a submarine was the way to go. That way, they could make the drop at night and get pretty close to the shore, and it just so happened that a submarine with a young, well regarded commander, the HMS Sarah, was docked in Scotland getting ready to return to the Mediterranean in April, so it seemed perfect. And yet there was one little problem with even this scenario to solve, and that was how do you first of all, hide a body on a submarine without everybody finding out about it, because of course discretion was still of the most importance even among other members of the British military. And secondly, how do you keep this body fresh, so to speak, for the ride? This major issue. I think that point sort of relates to the earlier one. So Chumley found a solution to both of these problems by consulting with Charles Fraser of Q Branch, whose job was to provide the Secret Service with all kinds of nifty wartime gadgets like indivisible ink, hidden weapons, mini cameras. He worked with Ian Fleming too in case that all found sort of familiar, and he's believed to be the inspiration for Q in the James Bond movies. Uh Coincidentally, M is said to be based on Admiral John Godfrey, who was the trout memo guy. So it was Fraser Smith who helped Chumley come up with the design for a giant steel canister, which McIntyre refers to as quote the first underwater corpse transporter. It was six ft six inches long and air tight to keep oxygen out and which would help prevent the decomposition of the body. They also planned to pack it with dry ice to help with us with a body inside. This canister would weigh in at about four hundred pounds. Kind of a large can often almost so not something to z too hide, No, not at all, um So. With official approval though, and with a plan for logistics even down to this underwater corpse transporter, all Montague and Chumiley had to do at this point was put the plan into action. So the HMS Sarah set sail from Scotland on April nineteenth, and from there it would take an estimated ten or eleven days to get to Ulva. So Montague and Chumiley met up with their corner friend Bentley, purchased and on April eighteen they finished dressing Glenn Michael's body and prepared it for its journey as the fictional Bill Martin. Then they loaded it into the giant canister, put that into a customized van and headed off for Scotland, driven by Sinjin Jock horse Full, who was a famous race car driver who had turned into an m I five chauffeur. Uh it was good he was a race car driver because they were driving very fast. They drove through the wee hours of the night at very high speeds. They almost crashed a couple of times. Even because they were keeping things so secret, they didn't use headlights. Yeah, I mean, that was the not so good part about it, I guess, is that they weren't using headlights and stngin Horsewall, I should say. I didn't have the greatest eyesight from what I understand, and he didn't wear glasses. Yes, indeed, but they made it to Scotland by the morning of the nineteenth safely, and with some help, got the canister loaded onto the submarine, which set off when it was supposed to, all without a hitch. Incidentally, the commander of this submarine was the only one on it who was fully aware of the plan. The officers were partially in the know, and the crew had been told some other cover story to explain to Canister, basically that they were carrying meteorological equipment of some sort. Yeah. Sure. McIntyre suggests that actually the crew did suspect there was a person in this six foot six canister, and they started referring to him as our pal Charlie, which I think might be the most endearing aspect of this whole story, And the Sarah reached Velva around ap planned, but they had to wait for the perfect wind conditions that could carry the body to shore, and that finally happened in the early morning hours of April, so they surfaced. They got as close to the shore as possible, closer than they thought they could get, and the officers helped the commander remove the body from the canister, inflate the life fest put the documents where they needed to be, and then put the body in the sea. And after that the Sarah headed back out to sea and sunk the canister. All right, so safe travels Bill. But we've already explained in the last episode how the body was found that morning by a Spanish fisherman who brought it back to shore all by himself. He couldn't get help from the other fisherman. And with that, at least the very first part of the plan had been accomplished, and had been accomplished successfully. But really after that things did not go smoothly at all. First of all, the local Spanish authorities picked up the body. They turned it over to the Spanish navy, which called up Francis Hasselton, who was the local British Vice consul and the body was then transported to the cemetery an autopsy was performed, you remember, not something that they wanted to happen. That's why they made the fake identity supposedly Roman Catholic. So a couple of things went wrong, so the autopsy really got things off to a bad start. The pathologists performing it noticed that the rate of decomposition was faster than they were hoping he would think it was, and estimated that the body had been in the water for about eight to ten days. So this already conflicted with some of the evidence that had been planted on the body. Hasselton managed to cut the autopsy short, though before anything else major got noticed. However, there was still a little matter of the briefcase. The Spanish navy lieutenant who was present at the autopsy had it in his possession, and he had a pretty good relationship with Hasselton, so he actually offered to hand it over right then and there. But this was exactly what the Allies did not want. The whole point, after all, was to give the Germans a chance to catch a glimpse of this stuff, so Hasselton had to kind of act like it wasn't a big deal and just request that it go through the official channels. You know. He was just kind of like, Hey, I don't want you to get in trouble with your boss. Why don't you just go ahead and pass it on. We'll get it back exactly. We'll get it back eventually. It's fine. But it probably came off to this lieutenant and anyone else who was present as a little bit strange that he would want to do this. So, at least in some respects, it seems like Castleton may have averted disaster a little bit. But once the Navy lieutenant passed on the briefcase to the superiors, the situation got worse for both the Germans and the Allies. In fact, because even though as Chumley and Montague had hoped, the German spy Adolf Klaus had caught wind of the briefcase and it's important looking contents, he couldn't manage to get his hands on it. And this was because the Spanish Navy was pro British in general, and if pretty much anyone else in town had had possession of these goods, class would have been able to get his hands on them pretty much right away. But as it was he was out of luck. He just could not find a way to get them. Yeah. So, in the process of going through official channels, though, the briefcase did finally make its way to Madrid, and in the meantime the British had to pretend like they really want this briefcase back, give it back to us. So messages are just flying back and forth between London and British officials in Spain, which have at least the positive effect of making the Germans want the briefcase even more, making the whole thing seemed more legitimate. Finally, nine days after the body washed up, the letters did find their way into the German hands, and it seemed as if the pro Nazi Spanish security chief finally made this happen. But regardless of how they got there, the letters did end up with the German empathy in the hands of Major Carl Cullin Tall, a well respected head of German intelligence in Madrid. Clentel immediately bought into the information the letters had to offer, and after seeing that they were returned to their envelopes to be returned to the British, he personally took copies of them back to German so the ball was rolling at this point, and we should take a minute here to kind of talk about how they handled these letters, so to speak, because if you're into spy stuff, it's really kind of interesting. The letters had been carefully removed from the envelopes without breaking the seals, so you almost couldn't tell that they had been tampered with. How they did this was by bending open the lower flap of the envelope and using a thin metal double prong with a blunt hook to kind of roll the paper into a cylinder. So they just made the smallest opening in a bottom flap, stuck this double prong in, and just sort of wounded around until they turned the letter into a cylinder and then pulled it out. It out, but those tell tale eyelashes were missing, and there were a few other clues that told the British later upon examination that they had been viewed, So you could tell if you really examine them closely, if you were an expert, and you can to the naked eye, they seemed like they hadn't been tampered with. Once the copies of these letters were in Germany, though, the letters were immediately scrutinized and some people were quite skeptical of them, actually, but one of Hitler's top intelligence analysts, and that was Alexis Baron von Wren, also accepted them as authentic. He seemed to believe in them, pretty much a dent. Since Hitler trusted Wren implicitly. This was a huge step forward for Operation and Mince Meat. So about two to three weeks after the body had first washed up in Huelva, the letters made it to Hitler's death and he at first was also pretty skeptical of the whole thing, but once again, once Wren vouched for the letters, Hitler was convinced, and soon word got through to London via wireless messages that were intercepted by the British that the Germans had bought into Operation Mincemeat and believed that Greece was really the primary target. And everyone, especially Chumley and Montague, of course, we're just completely overjoyed by this news, and for many people involved it was their finest moment. The good news was relayed to Winston Churchill by telegram like this mince Meat swallowed road line and sinker. That was the message. But does Operation mince Meat really deserve credit for its own success? Some point out that the plan actually had a lot of flaws, and they asked this question a lot. I mean, some of the flaws we sort of hinted at, I think when we were going through the story and the preparations for the plan. The too good to be true story of Bill Martin was one of the things Well and the whole briefcase being chained to him. It was an unavoidable part of the story, but probably the least realistic aspect of it. In his New Yorker article, which we mentioned in the previous podcast, Malcolm Gladwell points out that the British also got some help from the Germans in this situation. Major Carl Culantall, for example, he wasn't necessarily as great an intelligence officer as most Germans believed at the time. He was actually kind of a screw up. He would believe and pass on just about anything that was fed to him because he was so eager to save his own hide. He was actually a quarter Jewish and he was trying to sort of solidify his position and show how loyal he was, and you know, just shame like within the know, Yeah exactly, I'm the one who's giving you this great information. Alexis Baron von n Though we as we said, Hitler loved this guy and totally trusted him because of past predictions he had made that had indeed come to pass. Wren actually despised Hitler and his regime. He was a smart intelligence analysts, definitely better than Culental, but he probably put his stamp of approval on those faked letters because he wanted to sabotage Hitler. Regardless of why the plan worked though, or why it was believed, thanks at least in part to Operation Mincemeat, Operation Husky was considered a success and Hitler was fouled. He sent about ninety thousand troops to grief. Meanwhile, a hundred and sixty thousand Allied troops invaded Sicily on July tenth, ninety three, and though they expected about ten thousand casualties from that invasion, according to the BBC documentary Operation Mincemeat, about fourteen hundred men and about a dozen ships were lost, so way fewer than they were expecting, and this set off it's chane of events that were positive for the Allies and many believe changed the entire course of the war. As for Bill Martin, that corpse that washed up on the beach in Spain. Glim Michael, as you remember, was his real name, and he was buried in Spain in a grave numbered eighteen eighty six. Eventually he was given a fake headstone that identified him as Bill Martin, and then finally in nineteen the British government had his real name put on his grave and the story has just continued to fascinate people throughout the years. Montague wrote a book himself called The Man Who Never Was and there was a nineteen fifty six movie that was based on this book. So so another movie to add to our list of history movies we need to see exactly. And I think we are back in the swing of telling spy stories now. We both have spy fever after researching this, and I think you've well come across some other stuff too that's gotten you interested. I was telling Dublina earlier that I'm on a Tinker Tailor Soldiers spy kick after I read the book, then saw the new movie, and just the other night finished watching the excellent mini Theories. So yeah, I had spies spies on the brain, although they're cold worth spies, so very different from from this kind of stuff. And if you like the story, I would really recommend researching it a little bit more, either reading Montague book or McIntyre's book, which we talked about, which is just I mean, we mentioned a lot of names in this podcast and hopefully it wasn't too confusing, but they're really just all fascinating characters in their own right, and there were something that we didn't even get a chance to mention that it could be a podcasts all on their own, I think. But if you have any podcast recommendations for us, any spy story recommendations, maybe in particular that you'd like us to do, or maybe you just want to write us and tell us what's in your wallet litter, you can certainly write us Where History Podcast at Discovery dot com, or you can look us up on Facebook or on Twitter at this in History. And if you want to learn a little bit more about the artific spining, we do have an article called how Spies Work. You can find it by searching for spies 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

Welcome to Stuff You missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm to playing a chok reboarding and I'm faired out and we are continuing on today with our discussion on Operation Mincemeat, which referred to as the most successful wartime deception ever attempted. It was essentially an elaborate World War two military hoax cooked up by British intelligence in ninety three to fool the Nazias into thinking the Allies next move was going to be an attack on Greece and Sardinia when they were actually about to invade Sicily in an offensive known as Operation Husky. So in part one of this podcast, we talked a little bit about what was going on in World War Two at the time, why Cecily was the logical next target for the Allies, and why a deception plan, or rather deception plans were really needed to throw Hitler off the sent We also laid out the basic premise for Operation mince Meat, and that was using a corpse to relay false information to the enemy by planting official looking documents on it and dropping it in an area where the enemy would be sure to find it. Ian Fleming, as we mentioned, was the first to propose this idea in a ninety nine memo called the Trout Memo, and no one did anything with it for years, probably just because it seemed so outrageous and and kind of Yeah, but by ninety three, British intelligence agents Charles Chumbley and you and Montague had caught hold of this idea, They developed it and had been given permission to kind of run with it. Yeah. So when we left off, Chumley and Montague were really in the thick of giving the dead body that they've managed to obtain a whole background, a life, and a personality of everything. From the uniform that it was going to wear, they decided to make it a Royal Marines officer, to its religion and its name Captain William Martin, he was going to be Bill Martin. Friends. That's the level of details that they attended to. Essentially, they created Bill as this likable, slightly irresponsible guy. The BBC documentary that's based on the story, called Operation Minsmey, described him as brave and romantic, but disorganized and deeply in debt. He was also recently engaged. As we mentioned before, Bill's fictional fiance Pam was based on an actual young woman who worked for British counterintelligence named Jane Leslie. Montague played the role of Bill and actually flirted with and dated Jean Leslie, who went right along on it. Yeah, they would call each other Bill and Pam in these scenarios, so really just getting into this fiction that they were creating around these people. Yeah, but there was also a practical side to all the story boarding and play acting, because once they've made up a life for Bill, Martin, Chumley and Montague needed to plant evidence that really would do something put this plan into effect. And we talked about the cross and the overdraft notice and this fake letters from Pam. They also went ahead and included a bill from a jeweler for an engagement ring, but also some other stuff which arguably would make the court seem even more like a real person than stuff like letters. Things that the spies referred to as wallet litter, and those are the things that you probably have in your pocket now, Things you just absent mindedly keep in your wallet or your purse or your pockets that don't necessarily mean anything to you, but they show that you're somebody who walks around and somebody who does stuff so pocket change ticket stubs. I don't know, Toblina, you might have law terror receipts in your pocket. It could be anything like that. And you just like trash like a gum wrapper. Totally. I have so much of the stuff that I just got rid of. I just moved, so I cleaned out my purses and things, and I thought about this because I just read this, you know, I just had done this research. I was thinking about all the wallet w Yes, I have bags and bags of wallet litter. But yeah, the stuff just tells you a little bit about the person. You know, maybe nothing significant, but maybe it does tell you a little something about a person's personality. And they made sure to plant some things like this on the corpse that they were using as well. Some of the items, like I said, we're meaningless, like a partially used book of stamps. Others were less so like ticket stubs for performance on a particular date, which might convince whoever found them that Bill Martin would have had to have been traveling by plane because they have that particular date on them. So, you know, just planning things here and there that would fill out the story. A little bit in some ways help them convince the Germans that this was a real person and of course make it realistic. So that process and all the considerations that it required could probably be a little bit tedious, but it was probably lots of fun to compared to the process of creating the most important information that they were going to have to plant on the body. I mean, forget whallet litter. The most important thing was going to be the fake official military documents, which were of course vital to misleading the Access powers in the first place. They decided that the secret documents would take the form of personal letters between high ranking Allied officials that just happened to drop vital info here and there, because actual battle plans and so forth would not have been carried by a single officer in this way. Those would have been sent by diplomatic pouch something like that. Specifically, the letter that aimed to convince the Nazis that Greece was a target and that Sicily was a decoy was created as a correspondence between Lieutenant General Archibald Nye, who was the Vice Chief of the Imperial General Staff in London, and General Harold Alexander, who was the senior British officer under Eisenhower in Tunisia. These guys knew each other. They were both important enough that the Germans would instantly know who they were, and it made sense that they would be privy to this sort of information. So just three essential things that they needed to have that they'd be corresponding about something like this. So Montagu took the first stab at writing this letter. He thought he made a pretty good attempt at it. But his bosses and several other of the high ranking folks immediately started weighing in on it, and it became a real source of frustration for Montague because various officials debated about the letter for more than a month trying to decide, you know, did it strike the right tone, didn't give enough away without getting too much away, that did it seem realistic? Um? And he just thought his letter was good. He thought it was good, like stop messing with jokes in there. He was like, this is the best letter, This is totally believable. But they didn't really so much agree. They wanted to make sure that they got, like you said, a little bit of information out there, you know, you want an element of truth in it. To make it realistic. But at the same time, you don't want to give the whole thing away. You don't want to just tell them your plans by by trying to deceive them. Tell them, yes, we're going to be in Sicily. Well, and guys like that wouldn't be writing letters that gave away the whole plan anyway. Right. Well, finally the chiefs of staff just came up with a bright idea of having General Ni draft the letter himself. And when he did this, it just finally struck the right chord. I mean, I guess that's sort of the obvious answer, but nobody had really thought about it before for this more than a month that they were debating it. Nice's version of the letter hinted at this primary invasion in Greece and another elsewhere in the Mediterranean, while mentioning Sicily as a diversionary location where some smaller attacks might occur to confuse the Nazis. Of course, they were going to be doing air raids and everything anyway in preparation for their invasion, so this sort of helped them with that too. It's like, hey, if you see some mar raids happening, it's just a defasion exactly, so they had to include another letter to after this though. They were like, Okay, this sounds good, but we need in another letter to explain why this guy would be carrying a little place, right. So the second one was from the Chief of Combined Operations to Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, who was Commander in Chief in the Mediterranean, another well known figure that the Nazis would have heard of, and this letter explained what Bill Martin was doing traveling with this very important information in the first place, and also hinted that a secondary invasion would take place in Sardinia. I think they actually included kind of a PostScript or a little joke at the end of the letter that said, you know, maybe William Martin can bring back some sardines with him or something. They fit some jokes in there, didn't they did. They also tested different typewriter inc. Because they needed to find one that didn't become illegible after being in the water. They needed one that was a regular, non spy inc. That wouldn't tip anybody off, but it could still be read after all that time. And then they carefully folded and field all these important letters. They photographed the steals that they could easily tell if the letters had been tampered with, and Ben McIntyre, the author who we mentioned in the earlier episode, also described how an additional precaution was included. They put a dark eyelash in the fold of each letter, and so if the eyelash fell out, they'd know that the letter had been read. Just a back up thing to to provide even more caution than the seals. Yeah, not exactly scientific, but kind of a neat detail to include. Anyway, The letters were placed in a black government briefcase that was chained to the corpses belt, even though they knew that it seemed unlikely that Bill Martin would be carrying letters this way, because it was really the only way they could ensure that the letters wouldn't just float away and that whoever found the body would actually notice the letters. I mean, if they just kind of tucked it in his jacket pocket or something, there was always the chance, probably not, but always the chance that it would be overlooked. So they sort of needed this as safeguard. After these official letters were all complete, they sought and got final approval for Operation Mints Neat from the highest authorities necessary, Churchill and Eisenhower. So with all of these hard crafted materials finally put together and the character of their corpse career created, the British intelligence officers needed to nail down some logistics, namely where they were going to drop the body and how they were going to do it. So, as we mentioned in the last episode, Spain in general had already proven that it could be a prime location for this type of operation because there was evidence that they had passed on information to the Nazis in the past. Even though Spain was officially neutral, there were some pretty strong pro acts as sentiments prevalent in certain areas of the country, and even in the highest arenas of the government and law enforcement there were some pro access sentiments. So this was what Chumley and Montagu were counting on for the whole plan to really work. But they still needed to hone in on an exact area of the Spanish coast to drop the body because there were some pro British Spaniards as well, and if they got their hands on the body first, the documents might just be returned without ever making it into the hands of the Germans. So they consulted with the British naval attiche in Madrid, Alan Hill Garth and his assistant as well, who helped them settle on dropping the body near Velva on spain southwest coast, since it was an area where a lot of German influence was present. It was also the home base of notorious German spy Adolf Klaus, who basically bought off everyone who could in town and was responsible for helping target British ships off the Spanish coast for U boats, among other things. He had been in the service of the Nazis for a while and was considered one of their top spies. If something washed up on shore there, it was guaranteed that Adolf Klaus would make it his business to find out about it. So, with the location for the drop finally picked out, the next order of business for Operation Mincemeat Planners was to determine how they were going to drop the body. So the idea was to make it seem as if Bill Martin had died in a plane crash. You remember in the last episode they had to find a body that didn't have, you know, a telltale sign of death or a cause of death. To make this plane crash idea seem realistic, but the problem was if they actually dropped the body out of a plane, it might completely break apart, since it had already been decomposing for a couple of months in the Morgue. So they had a few other options, and one was to bring it in on a surface ship and sort of drop it close to shore, but that wouldn't work because they need to get pretty close to the shore to drop the body to make sure that it didn't float somewhere where they didn't want it to go. Another option was landing a sea plane on the water, but that seemed really complicated, really risky, and could possibly cause a real plane crash, which would defeat the purpose of the whole operation. So they finally decided that a submarine was the way to go. That way, they could make the drop at night and get pretty close to the shore, and it just so happened that a submarine with a young, well regarded commander, the HMS Sarah, was docked in Scotland getting ready to return to the Mediterranean in April, so it seemed perfect. And yet there was one little problem with even this scenario to solve, and that was how do you first of all, hide a body on a submarine without everybody finding out about it, because of course discretion was still of the most importance even among other members of the British military. And secondly, how do you keep this body fresh, so to speak, for the ride? This major issue. I think that point sort of relates to the earlier one. So Chumley found a solution to both of these problems by consulting with Charles Fraser of Q Branch, whose job was to provide the Secret Service with all kinds of nifty wartime gadgets like indivisible ink, hidden weapons, mini cameras. He worked with Ian Fleming too in case that all found sort of familiar, and he's believed to be the inspiration for Q in the James Bond movies. Uh Coincidentally, M is said to be based on Admiral John Godfrey, who was the trout memo guy. So it was Fraser Smith who helped Chumley come up with the design for a giant steel canister, which McIntyre refers to as quote the first underwater corpse transporter. It was six ft six inches long and air tight to keep oxygen out and which would help prevent the decomposition of the body. They also planned to pack it with dry ice to help with us with a body inside. This canister would weigh in at about four hundred pounds. Kind of a large can often almost so not something to z too hide, No, not at all, um So. With official approval though, and with a plan for logistics even down to this underwater corpse transporter, all Montague and Chumiley had to do at this point was put the plan into action. So the HMS Sarah set sail from Scotland on April nineteenth, and from there it would take an estimated ten or eleven days to get to Ulva. So Montague and Chumiley met up with their corner friend Bentley, purchased and on April eighteen they finished dressing Glenn Michael's body and prepared it for its journey as the fictional Bill Martin. Then they loaded it into the giant canister, put that into a customized van and headed off for Scotland, driven by Sinjin Jock horse Full, who was a famous race car driver who had turned into an m I five chauffeur. Uh it was good he was a race car driver because they were driving very fast. They drove through the wee hours of the night at very high speeds. They almost crashed a couple of times. Even because they were keeping things so secret, they didn't use headlights. Yeah, I mean, that was the not so good part about it, I guess, is that they weren't using headlights and stngin Horsewall, I should say. I didn't have the greatest eyesight from what I understand, and he didn't wear glasses. Yes, indeed, but they made it to Scotland by the morning of the nineteenth safely, and with some help, got the canister loaded onto the submarine, which set off when it was supposed to, all without a hitch. Incidentally, the commander of this submarine was the only one on it who was fully aware of the plan. The officers were partially in the know, and the crew had been told some other cover story to explain to Canister, basically that they were carrying meteorological equipment of some sort. Yeah. Sure. McIntyre suggests that actually the crew did suspect there was a person in this six foot six canister, and they started referring to him as our pal Charlie, which I think might be the most endearing aspect of this whole story, And the Sarah reached Velva around ap planned, but they had to wait for the perfect wind conditions that could carry the body to shore, and that finally happened in the early morning hours of April, so they surfaced. They got as close to the shore as possible, closer than they thought they could get, and the officers helped the commander remove the body from the canister, inflate the life fest put the documents where they needed to be, and then put the body in the sea. And after that the Sarah headed back out to sea and sunk the canister. All right, so safe travels Bill. But we've already explained in the last episode how the body was found that morning by a Spanish fisherman who brought it back to shore all by himself. He couldn't get help from the other fisherman. And with that, at least the very first part of the plan had been accomplished, and had been accomplished successfully. But really after that things did not go smoothly at all. First of all, the local Spanish authorities picked up the body. They turned it over to the Spanish navy, which called up Francis Hasselton, who was the local British Vice consul and the body was then transported to the cemetery an autopsy was performed, you remember, not something that they wanted to happen. That's why they made the fake identity supposedly Roman Catholic. So a couple of things went wrong, so the autopsy really got things off to a bad start. The pathologists performing it noticed that the rate of decomposition was faster than they were hoping he would think it was, and estimated that the body had been in the water for about eight to ten days. So this already conflicted with some of the evidence that had been planted on the body. Hasselton managed to cut the autopsy short, though before anything else major got noticed. However, there was still a little matter of the briefcase. The Spanish navy lieutenant who was present at the autopsy had it in his possession, and he had a pretty good relationship with Hasselton, so he actually offered to hand it over right then and there. But this was exactly what the Allies did not want. The whole point, after all, was to give the Germans a chance to catch a glimpse of this stuff, so Hasselton had to kind of act like it wasn't a big deal and just request that it go through the official channels. You know. He was just kind of like, Hey, I don't want you to get in trouble with your boss. Why don't you just go ahead and pass it on. We'll get it back exactly. We'll get it back eventually. It's fine. But it probably came off to this lieutenant and anyone else who was present as a little bit strange that he would want to do this. So, at least in some respects, it seems like Castleton may have averted disaster a little bit. But once the Navy lieutenant passed on the briefcase to the superiors, the situation got worse for both the Germans and the Allies. In fact, because even though as Chumley and Montague had hoped, the German spy Adolf Klaus had caught wind of the briefcase and it's important looking contents, he couldn't manage to get his hands on it. And this was because the Spanish Navy was pro British in general, and if pretty much anyone else in town had had possession of these goods, class would have been able to get his hands on them pretty much right away. But as it was he was out of luck. He just could not find a way to get them. Yeah. So, in the process of going through official channels, though, the briefcase did finally make its way to Madrid, and in the meantime the British had to pretend like they really want this briefcase back, give it back to us. So messages are just flying back and forth between London and British officials in Spain, which have at least the positive effect of making the Germans want the briefcase even more, making the whole thing seemed more legitimate. Finally, nine days after the body washed up, the letters did find their way into the German hands, and it seemed as if the pro Nazi Spanish security chief finally made this happen. But regardless of how they got there, the letters did end up with the German empathy in the hands of Major Carl Cullin Tall, a well respected head of German intelligence in Madrid. Clentel immediately bought into the information the letters had to offer, and after seeing that they were returned to their envelopes to be returned to the British, he personally took copies of them back to German so the ball was rolling at this point, and we should take a minute here to kind of talk about how they handled these letters, so to speak, because if you're into spy stuff, it's really kind of interesting. The letters had been carefully removed from the envelopes without breaking the seals, so you almost couldn't tell that they had been tampered with. How they did this was by bending open the lower flap of the envelope and using a thin metal double prong with a blunt hook to kind of roll the paper into a cylinder. So they just made the smallest opening in a bottom flap, stuck this double prong in, and just sort of wounded around until they turned the letter into a cylinder and then pulled it out. It out, but those tell tale eyelashes were missing, and there were a few other clues that told the British later upon examination that they had been viewed, So you could tell if you really examine them closely, if you were an expert, and you can to the naked eye, they seemed like they hadn't been tampered with. Once the copies of these letters were in Germany, though, the letters were immediately scrutinized and some people were quite skeptical of them, actually, but one of Hitler's top intelligence analysts, and that was Alexis Baron von Wren, also accepted them as authentic. He seemed to believe in them, pretty much a dent. Since Hitler trusted Wren implicitly. This was a huge step forward for Operation and Mince Meat. So about two to three weeks after the body had first washed up in Huelva, the letters made it to Hitler's death and he at first was also pretty skeptical of the whole thing, but once again, once Wren vouched for the letters, Hitler was convinced, and soon word got through to London via wireless messages that were intercepted by the British that the Germans had bought into Operation Mincemeat and believed that Greece was really the primary target. And everyone, especially Chumley and Montague, of course, we're just completely overjoyed by this news, and for many people involved it was their finest moment. The good news was relayed to Winston Churchill by telegram like this mince Meat swallowed road line and sinker. That was the message. But does Operation mince Meat really deserve credit for its own success? Some point out that the plan actually had a lot of flaws, and they asked this question a lot. I mean, some of the flaws we sort of hinted at, I think when we were going through the story and the preparations for the plan. The too good to be true story of Bill Martin was one of the things Well and the whole briefcase being chained to him. It was an unavoidable part of the story, but probably the least realistic aspect of it. In his New Yorker article, which we mentioned in the previous podcast, Malcolm Gladwell points out that the British also got some help from the Germans in this situation. Major Carl Culantall, for example, he wasn't necessarily as great an intelligence officer as most Germans believed at the time. He was actually kind of a screw up. He would believe and pass on just about anything that was fed to him because he was so eager to save his own hide. He was actually a quarter Jewish and he was trying to sort of solidify his position and show how loyal he was, and you know, just shame like within the know, Yeah exactly, I'm the one who's giving you this great information. Alexis Baron von n Though we as we said, Hitler loved this guy and totally trusted him because of past predictions he had made that had indeed come to pass. Wren actually despised Hitler and his regime. He was a smart intelligence analysts, definitely better than Culental, but he probably put his stamp of approval on those faked letters because he wanted to sabotage Hitler. Regardless of why the plan worked though, or why it was believed, thanks at least in part to Operation Mincemeat, Operation Husky was considered a success and Hitler was fouled. He sent about ninety thousand troops to grief. Meanwhile, a hundred and sixty thousand Allied troops invaded Sicily on July tenth, ninety three, and though they expected about ten thousand casualties from that invasion, according to the BBC documentary Operation Mincemeat, about fourteen hundred men and about a dozen ships were lost, so way fewer than they were expecting, and this set off it's chane of events that were positive for the Allies and many believe changed the entire course of the war. As for Bill Martin, that corpse that washed up on the beach in Spain. Glim Michael, as you remember, was his real name, and he was buried in Spain in a grave numbered eighteen eighty six. Eventually he was given a fake headstone that identified him as Bill Martin, and then finally in nineteen the British government had his real name put on his grave and the story has just continued to fascinate people throughout the years. Montague wrote a book himself called The Man Who Never Was and there was a nineteen fifty six movie that was based on this book. So so another movie to add to our list of history movies we need to see exactly. And I think we are back in the swing of telling spy stories now. We both have spy fever after researching this, and I think you've well come across some other stuff too that's gotten you interested. I was telling Dublina earlier that I'm on a Tinker Tailor Soldiers spy kick after I read the book, then saw the new movie, and just the other night finished watching the excellent mini Theories. So yeah, I had spies spies on the brain, although they're cold worth spies, so very different from from this kind of stuff. And if you like the story, I would really recommend researching it a little bit more, either reading Montague book or McIntyre's book, which we talked about, which is just I mean, we mentioned a lot of names in this podcast and hopefully it wasn't too confusing, but they're really just all fascinating characters in their own right, and there were something that we didn't even get a chance to mention that it could be a podcasts all on their own, I think. But if you have any podcast recommendations for us, any spy story recommendations, maybe in particular that you'd like us to do, or maybe you just want to write us and tell us what's in your wallet litter, you can certainly write us Where History Podcast at Discovery dot com, or you can look us up on Facebook or on Twitter at this in History. And if you want to learn a little bit more about the artific spining, we do have an article called how Spies Work. You can find it by searching for spies 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