How Adolf Hitler was fooled by a trick that changed the course of history

A telegram dispatched to Winston Churchill, who was meeting Roosevelt in Washington, stated cryptically that “Mincemeat” had reached “the right people and from best information they look like acting on it”.

Montagu was relieved, yet cautious. The Abwehr in Madrid had fallen for the hoax, and so, it seemed, had the analysts in Berlin. The initial messages, wrote Montagu, “proved that we had convinced them. Now would they convince the general staff?”

Back in Germany, the Mincemeat lie was building up steam. On the day Jodl’s cable was sent to Germany’s Mediterranean commanders, Hans-Heinrich Dieckhoff, the German Ambassador in Madrid, sent a telegram to the Foreign Office in Berlin: “According to information just received from a wholly reliable source, the English and Americans will launch their big attack on southern Europe in the next fortnight. The plan, as our informant was able to establish from English secret documents, is to launch two sham attacks on Sicily and the Dodecanese, while the real offensive is directed in two main thrusts against Crete and the Peloponnese.” The secret was streaming through the upper echelons of the Spanish Government, and being fed back to the Germans, albeit in slightly mangled form.

Three weeks, and 3,000 miles, after their journey began, the Mincemeat letters finally landed on the desk of the man for whose eyes they had always been intended, the only person whose opinion really mattered.

Hitler’s initial response was sceptical, but by May 12, his doubts had evaporated. That day, the F?hrer issued a general military directive: “It is to be expected that the Anglo-Americans will try to continue the operations in the Mediterranean ... Measures regarding Sardinia and the Peloponnese take precedence over everything else.”

The orders reflected a dramatic shift in priorities since, as Montagu observed, “the original German appreciation had been that Sicily was more likely to be invaded than Sardinia”. Sicily now appeared to be, in German thinking, the least vulnerable of the Mediterranean islands, with the focus firmly on Greece and Sardinia.

The lie was beginning to metastasise, spreading out through the veins of Axis intelligence. Important and exciting information, whether true or false, develops its own momentum. The expected attacks in Greece and Sardinia were fast becoming accepted wisdom. When Mussolini argued that Sicily was a more likely target, Hitler flatly contradicted him. In his diary for May 14, the German admiral Doenitz noted: “The F?hrer does not agree with the Duce that the most likely invasion point is Sicily ... the discovered Anglo-Saxon order confirms the assumption that the planned attack will be directed mainly against Sardinia and the Peloponnesus.”

Nazi confidence was in dire need of reinforcement, with the Axis powers defeated in North Africa and bogged down in blood on the Eastern Front. The tide of war was turning, but here, floating in on the waves, was a chance to reverse the current. No wonder they chose to believe.

The announcement of the fictitious Major William Martin’s death on active service duly appeared in The Times on Friday, June 4, 1943. Goebbels was an enthusiastic Times reader. The Times was the place all important people wanted to be seen dead in and it is not possible to be deader than in the columns of Britain’s most venerable newspaper. This was the first time in this newspaper’s history that a person was formally pronounced dead without having been alive. As Allied forces gathered to attack Sicily in early July, the Mincemeat deception took practical shape. Hitler’s fear for Greece and the Balkans coloured his every strategic move. At the critical moment in the Kursk tank battle on the Eastern Front in July, two more German armoured divisions were placed on alert to go to the Balkans. German torpedo boats were ordered from Sicily to the Aegean. Shore batteries were installed in Greece, and three new minefields were laid off its coasts. Between March and July 1943, the number of German divisions in the Balkans was increased from eight to 18, while forces defending Greece increased from one division to eight.

By the time it became clear that Sicily was the real target, it was too late. Mussolini was woken on July 10 to be told that the invasion of Sicily was under way. He had been right all along. Il Duce was bullish: “Throw them back into the sea, or at least nail them to the shore. Our men will resist, and besides, the Germans are sending reinforcements. We must be confident.” Never was confidence more misplaced. By the end of the day, more than 100,000 Allied troops were ashore, with 10,000 vehicles. The Italian defenders surrendered in large numbers, often simply stripping off their uniforms and walking away, or running. Sicilian cheers, not bullets, greeted the invaders in many places. The British 8th Army had feared 10,000 casualties in the first week; just one seventh of that number were killed or wounded. The Navy had anticipated the loss of up to 300 ships in the first two days; barely a dozen were sunk. The Allies had expected to take at least 90 days to conquer Sicily. The occupation was completed in 38 days.

A loud cheer erupted from Room 13 as the news of success broke. Montagu recalled the flooding relief as the Allies surged on to the beaches, facing only limited opposition. “It is really impossible to describe the feeling of joy and satisfaction at knowing that the team must have saved the lives of hundreds of Allied soldiers — a feeling mixed with the delight that we had managed to do 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 phoney documents: “Joy of joys to anyone, and particularly a Jew, the satisfaction of knowing that they had directly and specifically fooled that monster.”

The operation was also economical: “One specially made canister, one battledress uniform, some dry ice, the time of a few officers, a van drive to Scotland and back, about sixty miles added to HMS Seraph’s passage and a few sundries: about £200 at most.”

The recriminations on the Axis side started almost immediately. Hitler never admitted he had been fooled, but others in the German hierarchy realised they had been sold a fantastic and damaging lie. Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi Foreign Minister ordered a full-scale witch-hunt: “Undertake a most careful 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.”

The impact of the Sicilian invasion was felt 1,500 miles away on the blood-soaked Eastern Front, and most importantly around the Russian city of Kursk. On July 4, Hitler had launched Operation Citadel, his massive, long-awaited offensive against the Red Army after the German defeat at Stalingrad. The Battle of Kursk would be history’s largest tank battle, the most costly day of aerial warfare yet fought, and Germany’s last major strategic offensive in the east. By July 12, German forces had broken through the first two Soviet lines of defence and believed that the final breakthrough was at hand. But by now, events in the Mediterranean had changed the strategic picture. Three days after the invasion of Sicily, the F?hrer announced that he was suspending Operation Citadel, and ordered the transfer of the SS Panzer Korps to Italy. Hitler’s decision marked the turning of the tide. From now until the end of the war, the German armies in the east were on the defensive as the Red Army rolled, inexorably, towards Berlin.

Deception may not be measured in battlefield yards won, or soldiers lost, but it can be gauged in other ways, large and small: in the toppling of Mussolini and the buttressing of Hitler’s fixation with the Balkans; in the thin defences on Sicily’s coast that allowed the Allied army ashore with so little bloodshed; in the Axis troops tied up in Sardinia and the Peloponnese, and the great retreat at Kursk; in the Panzers, waiting on the shores of Greece for an attack that never came.

Later historians have concluded that the deception had a profound impact. Hugh Trevor-Roper called Operation Mincemeat “the most spectacular single episode in the history of deception”. The ruse depended on skill, timing and judgment, but it would never have succeeded without an astonishing run of good fortune.

Wars are won by fighters, but also by planners, correctly calculating how many rations and contraceptives an invading force will need; by tacticians, laying out grand strategy; by generals, inspiring the men they command; by politicians, galvanising the will to fight; and by writers, putting war into words. They are won by acts of strength, bravery and guile. But they are also won by feats of imagination.

Amateur, unpublished novelists, the framers of Operation Mincemeat, dreamed up the most unlikely concatenation of events, rendered them believable, and sent them off to war, proving that it is possible to win a battle fought in the mind, from behind a desk, and from beyond the grave. The most fitting tribute was in a telegram sent to Winston Churchill on the day the Germans took the bait: “Mincemeat swallowed rod, line and sinker.”