Authors: Ben Macintyre
Tags: #General, #Psychology, #Europe, #History, #Great Britain, #20th Century, #Political Freedom & Security, #Intelligence, #Political Freedom & Security - Intelligence, #Political Science, #Espionage, #Modern, #World War, #1939-1945, #Military, #Italy, #Naval, #World War II, #Secret service, #Sicily (Italy), #Deception, #Military - World War II, #War, #History - Military, #Military - Naval, #Military - 20th century, #World War; 1939-1945, #Deception - Spain - Atlantic Coast - History - 20th century, #Naval History - World War II, #Ewen, #Military - Intelligence, #World War; 1939-1945 - Secret service - Great Britain, #Sicily (Italy) - History; Military - 20th century, #1939-1945 - Secret service - Great Britain, #Atlantic Coast (Spain), #1939-1945 - Spain - Atlantic Coast, #1939-1945 - Campaigns - Italy - Sicily, #Intelligence Operations, #Deception - Great Britain - History - 20th century, #Atlantic Coast (Spain) - History, #Montagu, #Atlantic Coast (Spain) - History; Military - 20th century, #Sicily (Italy) - History, #World War; 1939-1945 - Campaigns - Italy - Sicily, #Operation Mincemeat, #Montagu; Ewen, #World War; 1939-1945 - Spain - Atlantic Coast
A
T FIVE FIFTEEN
on the afternoon of D-day, Kesselring ordered the Hermann Göring Armored Division: “At once and with all forces attack
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and destroy whatever opposes the division. The Führer has ordered all forces to be brought into operation immediately in order to prevent the enemy from establishing itself.” The German tanks could not break through. Some forty-three were destroyed, in bitter and bloody combat. The commander of the Göring division conceded: “The counterattack against hostile
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landings has failed.” The German tanks rumbled north to continue the fight inland. General Patton, screeching around the battlefield in his jeep, called it “the shortest Blitzkrieg
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in history.” Montgomery agreed with him on this, if nothing else: “The German in Sicily
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is doomed. Absolutely doomed. He won’t get away.”
T
HE CONQUEST OF
the island was just beginning, and more ferocious fighting was to come, but the Sicilian D-day was over, and won.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Hook, Line, and Sinker
A
LOUD CHEER ERUPTED
from Room 13 as the news of success in Sicily broke. Cholmondeley performed a shuffling dance and a strange ululation. “Auntie” Joan Saunders wiped her eyes.
The strain of waiting had been almost unbearable. As the success of Operation Mincemeat became clearer, Montagu privately feared his part in the war might be coming to an end. “Even if I have once brought off
1
something really important and worth-while … I’m never going to be allowed to do anything of the kind again.” The pressure had left the planners hollow-eyed, in Montagu’s words, “too keyed-up to read
2
a book or to get to sleep.”
Looking back, Montagu recalled the flooding relief as the Allies surged through Sicily.
“It is really impossible
3
to describe the feeling of joy and satisfaction at knowing that the team must have saved the lives of hundreds of Allied soldiers during the invasion—a feeling mixed with the delight that we had managed to do what we said we could do and what so many of our seniors had said was impossible—and what I have always thought even Churchill really thought was only worth trying as a desperate measure.” For Montagu, a special pleasure lay in the subsequent discovery that Hitler himself had fallen for the phony documents: “Joy of joys to anyone,
4
and particularly a Jew, the satisfaction of knowing that they had directly and specifically fooled that monster.”
The deception had succeeded beyond every expectation, and Montagu was jubilant: “We fooled those of the Spaniards
5
who assisted the Germans, we fooled the German Intelligence Service both in Spain and in Berlin, we fooled the German Operational Staff and Supreme Command, we fooled Keitel, and, finally, we fooled Hitler himself, and kept him fooled right up to the end of July.” The operation had also been gratifyingly economical: “One specially made canister,
6
one battledress uniform, some dry ice, the time of a few officers, a van drive to Scotland and back, about 60 miles added to HMS Seraph’s passage and a few sundries: about £200 at most.”
There was no grand celebration over the success of Operation Mincemeat, no return to the Gargoyle Club with Montagu and Jean Leslie playing the parts of Bill Martin and his beloved Pam. Montagu’s wife, Iris, perhaps prompted by the dark hints from her mother-in-law, had announced that she was returning from America with the children. Montagu knew that Hitler was still planning to unleash pilotless flying bombs on London and that the capital remained deeply unsafe. Since this information came from Ultra, however, he could not tell Iris. “The most I could do
7
was make vague references to ‘Hitler’s last fling.’ But this made no impression on her.” It was probably not Hitler’s fling that worried her. Iris and the children returned to London while the invasion of Sicily was under way. The reunion was a joyful one. The photograph of Pam in her bathing suit, lovingly signed, was swiftly removed from Montagu’s dressing table. Montagu could not yet explain what that was all about. Perhaps this was just as well.
Secret messages of congratulation flooded in from those who had touched, or been touched by, Operation Mincemeat. Dudley Clarke, the cross-dressing maverick behind “A” Force, wrote: “I do congratulate you
8
most warmly on the success of your ‘M’ operation. It was very remarkable and a fine piece of organisation and whatever the developments may be you have achieved 100% success.” General Nye also applauded the planners: “It is a most interesting story
9
and it seems it was swallowed hook, line and sinker.” Frank Foley, the celebrated MI6 officer who had helped thousands of Jews to escape from Germany before the war, told Montagu that the operation had been “the greatest achievement
10
in the [deception] line ever brought off.” In his diary, Guy Liddell celebrated: “Mincemeat has been an outstanding success.”
11
There was already talk of medals for the framers of Operation Mincemeat. Johnnie Bevan and Ewen Montagu had spent months at loggerheads, but to Bevan’s great credit he insisted that both Montagu and Cholmondeley deserved formal recognition, albeit secretly. “From evidence at present available
12
it appears that a certain deception operation proved a considerable success and influenced German dispositions with all-important strategical and operational results. The fact that it achieved such very successful results must be attributed in large measure to the ingenuity and tireless energy on the part of these two officers.” Montagu had pushed the operation through by force of personality, while Cholmondeley “was the originator of this ingenious
13
scheme and was responsible, in conjunction with a certain naval officer, for the detailed execution of the operation.” Both men, Bevan recommended, “should receive a similar decoration, since each seems to have played equally vital parts on the plot.”
Montagu was so delighted by the success of Mincemeat that he proposed a sequel. A plane carrying the Polish prime minister in exile, Władysław Sikorski, had crashed on takeoff from Gibraltar on July 4. Six days later, on Sicilian D-day, Montagu sent a note to Bevan pointing out that “papers from Sikorski’s aircraft
14
are still washing up and likely to reach the Spanish shore” and suggesting that this might be an opportunity to plant some false documents among the debris. The object would be “to show that Mincemeat was genuine
15
and that we are going to attack Greece, etc. and that we only delayed it and switched from Brimstone [Sardinia] to Sicily because we suspected that the Spaniards might have shown the papers in Mincemeat to the Germans.” Mincemeat II was vetoed by Rushbrooke, the director of naval intelligence, because the Germans could not be expected to fall for the same ruse twice. “Not worth trying.
16
The Spaniards will know that everything of importance has been recovered, and a valuable secret ‘wash up’ could have no verisimilitude.”
The success of the Sicily invasion could not, of course, be attributed to Operation Mincemeat alone. To an important degree, the deception plan reinforced what the Germans already believed. Every element of Operation Barclay—of which Mincemeat was but one strand—tended to back up that misperception. Moreover, the comparative weakness of German forces in Sicily reflected Hitler’s mounting doubts about Italy’s commitment to the war. Sicily was a strategic jewel, but it was also an island, physically separated from the rest of the Axis forces. If large numbers of German troops were committed to defend it, but Italy dropped out of the war, they would be isolated, and Sicily would become, in Kesselring’s words, a “mousetrap for all German
17
and Italian forces fighting down there.”
Yet up to, and even after, the invasion of Sicily, the effects of Mincemeat lingered on in German tactical planning, slewing attention to the east and west. The night before the attack, Keitel had distributed a “Most Immediate”
18
analysis of Allied intentions, predicting a major Allied landing in Greece, and a joint attack on Sardinia and Sicily: “Western assault forces appear
19
to be ready for an immediate attack while the Eastern forces appear to be still forming up,” he wrote. “A subsequent landing
20
on the Italian mainland is less probable than one on the Greek mainland.” Half the Allied troops available in North Africa, Keitel predicted, would be used “to reinforce the bridgehead which … would be established in Greece.”
Ultra intercepts showed that four hours after the landings, twenty-one ground-attack aircraft took off from Sicily, which was now under attack, heading for Sardinia, which was not. The same day, the Abwehr in Berlin sent a message to its Spanish office “stating that the High Command
21
in Berlin were particularly anxious that a sharp lookout should be kept for convoys passing through the straits of Gibraltar which might be going to attack Sardinia. It gave, as a reason for these orders that the High Command appreciated that the attack on Sicily was possibly only a feint and that the main attack was going to be elsewhere.” That assessment, Naval Intelligence noted with satisfaction, was “entirely consistent with the Mincemeat story.”
22
The same effects were visible at the other end of the Mediterranean, where the fictional attack on Greece was directly undermining Germany’s ability to repel the genuine attack on Sicily. The R-boats, or Räumboote, were 150-ton minesweepers and a key component of German naval strength, used to pick up mines but also for convoy escort, coastal patrol, mine laying, and rescuing downed air crews. On July 12, Sicilian D-day +2, the commander of German naval forces in Italy cabled headquarters to complain that “the departure of the 1st R-boat
23
Group, sent to the Aegean for the defence of Greece, had prejudiced the defence of Sicily, as the Gela barrages were no longer effective, the shortage of escort vessels was ‘chronic,’ and the departure of any more boats, as ordered, would have a serious effect.” Yet the belief in an impending Greek attack remained rooted: in late July, Rommel was dispatched by Hitler to Salonika to take command of the defense of Greece if and when the Allies attacked. The Abwehr laid intricate plans in anticipation of the expected assault on Greece, including teams of secret agents and saboteurs to be left behind if the Germans were forced to withdraw.
The recriminations on the Axis side started almost immediately after the invasion. When he heard that the Italian coastal defenders had failed to repulse the attack, Goebbels muttered darkly about “macaroni-eaters”
24
but refrained from pointing out that he had never quite believed in the Abwehr’s great intelligence coup. Hitler never admitted he had been fooled, but his military response to the invasion was proof enough that he knew he had made a major strategic error in failing to reinforce Sicily. “Hitler’s own reaction
25
was immediate. He ordered two more German formations, 1st Parachute and 29th Panzer Grenadier Division to be hurried to Sicily to throw the invaders into the sea.” Again, it was too late.
Others within the German hierarchy realized they had been sold a fantastic and extremely damaging lie and responded with fury. Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi foreign minister, demanded a full explanation of why Major Martin’s documents, indicating that the attack on Sicily was a decoy, had been so blithely accepted as genuine: “This report has been proved
26
to be false, since the operation directed by the English and Americans against Sicily, far from being a sham attack, was of course one of their planned major offensives in the Mediterranean. … The report from ‘a wholly reliable source’ was deliberately allowed by the enemy to fall into Spanish hands in order to mislead us.” Von Ribbentrop suspected that the Spaniards had been in on the ruse all along and ordered his ambassador in Madrid, Dieckhoff, to conduct a full-scale witch-hunt: “Undertake a most careful
27
reappraisal of the whole matter and consider in so doing whether the persons from whom the information emanated are directly in the pay of the enemy, or whether they are hostile to us for other reasons.” Dieckhoff blustered and tried to swerve out of the way: “The documents had been found
28
on the body of a shot-down English officer, and handed over in the original to our counter-intelligence here by the Spanish General Staff. The documents were investigated by the Abwehr and I have not heard their investigations cast any doubt on their authenticity.” Rather weakly, Dieckhoff argued that the enemy must have altered its plans after losing the documents. “The English and Americans had
29
every intention of acting in the way laid down in the documents. Only later did they change their minds, possibly regarding the plans as compromised by the shooting down of the English bearer.”