“Operation Mincemeat” unfurls in weeks and months before July 10, 1943, the day Allied troops swept ashore along the coast of Sicily in the first major assault against Hitler’s forces in Europe. At the time, Mr. Macintyre writes, this invasion would be “the largest amphibious landing ever attempted.”
For this attack to succeed, and for this force not to be repelled from Sicily, an element of surprise was crucial. Back in England, the intelligence service set to work and devised a fiendishly simple plan that would be fiendishly difficult to get exactly right.
It would find a corpse, create a false identity for it, plant misleading secret papers on its person and set it afloat off the coast of Spain, where German spies would most likely find it. If all went according to plan, the Germans would take the bait and believe what the faked papers declared: that the Allied attack would take place in Greece or Sardinia rather than Sicily. The operation took its gory code name, Mincemeat, from the fact that its protagonist was literally dead meat.
Gladwell had a long riff on the mission in The New Yorker (probably prompted in a review of the book, or at least a reading of it) , but I didn't save it, for some reason. This review is pretty terrible, to be honest, but the story is a great one, and the book received good reviews all around, so I suspect it is a thrilling read. Plus, Macintyre's columns for the Times are a delight.
No comments:
Post a Comment