“Operation Mincemeat” (2021)

The work

The film was directed by John Madden from a screenplay by Michelle Ashford and produced by See-Saw Films. It follows the intelligence officers Ewen Montagu and Charles Cholmondeley as they plan to plant a corpse carrying false papers off the coast of Spain.¹

According to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission the film is based on the book by the historian Ben Macintyre; Colin Firth plays Montagu and Matthew Macfadyen plays Cholmondeley. It was released in 2022.^2,4

The real case

The plan was devised by Ewen Montagu of naval intelligence and Charles Cholmondeley of the RAF, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill approved it. The body of Glyndwr Michael, who had died in London in January 1943, was dressed in the uniform of ‘Major William Martin’ of the Royal Marines (see Operation Mincemeat).^2,3

On 30 April 1943 the submarine HMS Seraph released the body into the sea off the coast of Spain. The documents were secretly photographed, and copies reached German intelligence. The Germans doubled the number of troops on Sardinia and moved additional divisions to Greece and the Balkans; the landing on Sicily on 9 July 1943 took the defenders by surprise.^2,3

What is accurate

The National WWII Museum in New Orleans recalls that the idea of such a deception had already appeared at the beginning of the war in the so-called Trout memo issued by Rear Admiral John Godfrey, head of naval intelligence; it was most probably written by Ian Fleming, later the creator of James Bond.⁴

According to media and secondary accounts · not confirmed by official sourcesMacintyre, writing in ‘The Times’, recalls that the body was obtained with the help of the St Pancras coroner, Bentley Purchase. Of the adaptation he writes that the story is so astonishing that he sometimes cannot quite believe it is fact, not fiction.⁵

What was not told before

Many details of the operation remained secret for a long time and were left out of both Montagu’s book ‘The Man Who Never Was’ (1953) and the 1956 film. The museum points out that codebreakers at Bletchley Park were reading German communications about shifting troops from Italy to Greece, and that the real identity of ‘Major Martin’ was revealed only in 1997, when the CWGC added Glyndwr Michael’s name to the grave in Huelva.^2,4

According to media and secondary accounts · not confirmed by official sourcesMacintyre writes that Montagu’s account was partly deceptive and concealed the crucial role of the intercepts; the 1956 film added a wholly invented subplot involving an IRA spy.⁵

What is left for the viewer to judge

According to media and secondary accounts · not confirmed by official sourcesThe emotional core of the new film, as Macintyre writes, is the relationship between Montagu and Jean Leslie. In this article Macintyre does not say how far the romantic subplot matches the facts, and the documents we cite do not describe it.^5,6