Operation Mincemeat put a nameless Welshman, dressed as a Royal Marines major, into the sea off Huelva on 30 April 1943. The corpse that fooled Hitler carried a forged briefcase into the hands of the Abwehr, and roughly 160,000 Allied soldiers went ashore on Sicily ten weeks later against a defence that Berlin had been persuaded to weaken. The German high command would never see the trap until the landing craft were already on the beach.
This documentary follows Operation Mincemeat from the 1939 Trout Memo of Admiral John Godfrey to the invasion of Sicily on 10 July 1943. It covers Ewen Montagu and Charles Cholmondeley, the Twenty Committee, the body of Glyndwr Michael, the letters of General Archibald Nye and Lord Louis Mountbatten, the voyage of HMS Seraph, the Abwehr agent in Huelva, Ultra decrypts, Hitler's orders for Sardinia and Greece, Rommel's transfer, the 1st Panzer Division, Operation Husky and the Kursk decision.
Every date, unit and figure comes from the surviving records, the after-action accounts and the campaign loss tables, not from the film version of the story. The result is a cost ledger as well as a triumph.
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