On the dusty shelves of World War Two movies, there is a 1956 Clifton Webb spy thriller called The Man Who Never Was, which tells a sanitized version of an extraordinary 1943 plot known as Operation Mincemeat, wherein British intelligence was able to pass misleading information to Hitler’s generals that led them down the garden path to an Allied victory in Sicily and to Germany’s ultimate defeat. With documents recently made available, historian Denis Smyth has been able to tell the whole “untold” story in his new book, Deathly Deception: The Real Story of Operation Mincemeat.
Seeds of the plot were sown back on September 26, 1942. An Allied transport plane crashed near the coast of fascist Spain. All the souls on board were lost, including a courier carrying official documents likely to tip off the Germans to an amphibious assault, code-named Torch. If the courier’s corpse floated onto Spanish shores, Torch might be betrayed to German...
William Stevenson was a Royal Navy fighter pilot in World War Two and later worked for Sir William Stephenson and wrote a book about him (A Man Called Intrepid: The Secret War, originally published in 1976 and reissued by Lyons Press in 2009 with a foreword by Ronald Reagan). He has been a foreign correspondent in Russia, China, India and other parts of Asia and Africa, as well as the author of 16 books. He is currently working on his memoirs.
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