The Dead Man Who Fooled the Nazis

The Allies needed to invade Sicily in 1943. Sicily is an island, which meant the Germans would know exactly where they were coming from — unless they could be persuaded to look somewhere else.

The plan was called Operation Mincemeat, and it was the invention of two British intelligence officers, Ewen Montagu and Charles Cholmondeley. They obtained the body of Glyndwr Michael, a Welsh man who had died alone in London, and dressed him as Major William Martin of the Royal Marines.

The body was given a life: a fiancée's photograph, a receipt for a shirt, ticket stubs, a stern letter from a bank. And, chained in a briefcase, letters between senior officers discussing Allied intentions — indicating an invasion of Greece and Sardinia, with Sicily dismissed as a diversion.

On 30 April 1943, the submarine HMS Seraph released the body off the coast of Huelva, Spain, where currents and a known German intelligence presence would do the rest.

It worked. Spanish authorities recovered the body and allowed German agents to photograph the documents. Germany moved forces — including an armoured division — toward Greece and Sardinia. When the Allies landed in Sicily in July, they faced a substantially weaker defence than expected.

Glyndwr Michael was buried in Huelva under a false name, and for 55 years nobody knew who he was. In 1998 his real name was added to the grave.

The detail that makes the story land isn't the cleverness of the trick. It's that the deception succeeded because the Germans were already disposed to believe it — the whole thing worked by confirming what they suspected, which is how most successful lies operate.