Invasion of Italy

At 4.30 a.m. on 30 April 1943, after a brief service, a body was lowered into the sea off Huelva on the southern coast of Spain from the Royal Navy submarine Seraph. It was no ordinary commitment to the deep. The body was the centrepiece of an elaborate deception by British intelligence, codenamed Operation Mincemeat, intended to convince the Germans that the Allies planned to land in Sardinia and Greece rather than the real target of Sicily. The intelligence service MI5 dressed the body in the uniform of the Royal Marines and added him to the active service list as Major William Martin. Before he was dropped into the sea a briefcase was handcuffed to his wrist. It contained top-secret documents addressed to General Alexander in Egypt with references to Allied plans for landings at Kalemata and Cape Araxos on the coast of Greece. The body was retrieved from the sea by Spanish fishermen and, as anticipated, the Spanish authorities read and copied the documents and passed them on to the Germans. Within days the code-breakers at Bletchley Park picked up orders from Hitler for the transfer of the 1st Panzer Division from France to Greece under the direction of Field Marshal Rommel. The deception had worked, and Major Martin was later buried in the Cemetery of Solitude, Huelva. After the war the British government refused to release the real identity of Major Martin, ostensibly out of sensitivity to the next of kin; it is probable, though, that the body was ‘enlisted’ without the permission of the wider family. In consequence, up until 1996 Major Martin was known only as the ‘Man Who Never Was’. The mystery was finally resolved in 1996 when research conducted by the amateur historian Roger Morgan identified the dead man as Glyndwr Michael from Wales. He was a ‘down-and-out’ who had apparently died from pneumonia after several years of living rough in London. However, in 2003 new research by the authors John and Noreen Steele has indicated that at the last moment Michael’s body was replaced by the body of a sailor drowned in the Clyde when HMS Dasher exploded and sank with the loss of 379 of the crew. The tragedy presented British Intelligence with a genuine victim of drowning, thereby strengthening the deception in the event of a post mortem. The evidence presented by the Steeles suggests that the ‘man who never was’ was Lieutenant John McFarlane, one of the crew of the Dasher.