"Mincemeat Swallowed Whole"

August 8, 2005 7:53 AM

Operation Mincemeat Sometimes in war, you don't need kilotonnage; you need a good plan instead. And what a plan it was. A dead body, a submarine commander, and a future spy novelist. The amazing thing is, it worked.
posted by John of Michigan (11 comments total)

This plan was loosely fictionalized in Neil Stephenson's Cryptonomicon.
posted by Rothko at 7:56 AM on August 8, 2005

Isn't it also mentioned in A Man Called Intrepid?
posted by Billegible at 8:22 AM on August 8, 2005

My favorite British WWII intelligence coup was during the Battle of Britain when the Brits discovered a decoy German "airfield" that was constructed entirely of wood. Wooden hangers, oil tanks, gun emplacements, trucks, and aircraft. The day that the airfield was finished, a lone RAF plane crossed the Channel, came in low, circled the field once, and dropped a large wooden bomb.
posted by three blind mice at 8:25 AM on August 8, 2005

Ah, the good old days when war was approached with humour.
posted by five fresh fish at 8:39 AM on August 8, 2005

...and dropped a large wooden bomb.

Or maybe not. Awwww. Funny story though.
posted by Billegible at 8:41 AM on August 8, 2005

That Snopes debunking doesn't really provide any evidence that it didn't happen. Just reasons why it probably wouldn't have been a good idea. WTF Snopes?
posted by drezdn at 8:50 AM on August 8, 2005

Or maybe not.

William Shirer described this event - from German sources - in Berlin Diary published in 1941. Snopes has to do a better job if I am to believe them instead of Shirer.
posted by three blind mice at 9:10 AM on August 8, 2005

Operation Fortitude: Before D-Day the Allies put Patton, the most famous American general, in command of the fake First U.S. Army Group (FUSAG), which was equipped with rubber tanks, plywood cannons, and canvas ships.

FUSAG was based in southeast England and intended to trick the Germans into thinking the invasion would be at Calais, which was a more likely invasion site because the English Channel is narrower there, it's closer to Germany, and a landing there wouldn't have involved crossing major rivers (the Seine and the Somme) on the way to Germany.

The plan worked:

powerful German combat forces, capable of smashing an invasion, were fixed out of place for several weeks. German forces north of the Seine, away from the actual landing sites, were actually stronger in July than they had been on D-Day, one month prior. Movements of any significance did not occur until after the Allied breakout from their beachhead, when the Battle of Normandy was already lost for the Germans.

(Ken Follett's Eye of the Needle is a suspenseful book and movie about a German spy who discovers that FUSAG is fake.)
posted by kirkaracha at 9:24 AM on August 8, 2005

whoa ... my first Meta synchronicity event. I just read the short story "Fortitude", which I found on the same site as the BLIT FPP. And then here it is again.
Oh, fyi .. the short story was ok, but it requires some knowledge of Patton to "get it" and even then it gets to weird near the end for me.
posted by forforf at 10:56 AM on August 8, 2005

John of Michigan's dead body link reveals the identity of The Man Who Never Was. Interesting stuff.
posted by kirkaracha at 12:22 PM on August 8, 2005

When I was about ten years old, I was poking through my mother's bookshelves and discovered Ewen Montagu's The Man Who Never Was. What a wonderful read and an audacious plot.

[this is good]
posted by Vidiot at 6:49 PM on August 8, 2005