Churchill's Wizards

by Nicholas Rankin

  On 8 November 1942, Allied forces under American command began making three separate landings in Morocco and Algeria. US General George S. Patton Jr led the Western Task Force in 100 ships directly across the Atlantic from the USA to land near Casablanca. Centre and Eastern Task Forces, comprising British and US troops who had sailed from the UK and assembled at Gibraltar, landed at Oran and Algiers. A huge Allied propaganda blitz accompanied the landings: a repeated radio broadcast by President Roosevelt, speaking French, and 22 million printed leaflets of his speech dropped by plane. ‘Mes amis,’ it began, and Roosevelt spoke of his friendship for France:

  The Americans, with the help of the United Nations, are doing all they can to establish a healthy future as well as the restoration of the ideals of freedom anddemocracy … Weare coming among you solely to crush and destroy your enemies.

  The giant radio transmitter Aspidistra, used for the first time, blasted Roosevelt’s speech from the South Downs to the Atlas Mountains so effectively that Moroccans thought it was coming from Rabat. A message from General Eisenhower to the armed forces and people of North Africa was also broadcast and printed in leaflets and the Free French leaders General Henri-Honoré Giraud and General de Gaulle broadcast a request to French commanders, soldiers, sailors, airmen, officials and colonists to rise in the war of liberation: ‘Help our Allies. Join them without reserve. The France which fights calls upon you. Despise the cries of traitors who would make you believe our Allies want to seize our Empire. Forward! The great moment has come!’

  In the event, the American torch landings were unrehearsed, shambolic, and followed by up to three days of bloody fighting. But they could have gone a great deal worse had it not been for British deception work on three continents.

  In January 1943, Churchill and Roosevelt met in plenary conference at Casablanca in Morocco. In comfortable villas at Anfa, surrounded by flowers, fruit and sunshine, the British Prime Minister and the US President gathered with their Anglo-American Chiefs of Staff to decide how they could at last bring the war to a successful conclusion. Led by the CIGS, Sir Alan Brooke, the British delegation knew exactly what they wanted and finally got the Americans to agree to it: first clear the Axis out of North Africa, and then jump to Sicily and mainland Italy in order to knock the Italians out of the war. Meanwhile, U-boats were to be sunk, Germany’s industrial heartland bombed, and plans made for a subsequent invasion of north-west Europe to ensure Germany’s final defeat. At the press conference, Roosevelt surprisingly declared that only ‘unconditional surrender’ was acceptable.

  With regard to North Africa, the Anglo-American summit agreed that the British Eighth Army would come under US General Dwight D. ‘Ike’ Eisenhower’s supreme command as soon as it crossed the Tunisian border from Libya, and that the British General Alexander would be deputy to Eisenhower, with operational command over all Allied forces in Tunisia, including the British First Army, the American II Corps and the Free French. General Alexander’s combined forces would be known as 18th Army Group.

  Campaigning with allies is rarely easy. Churchill said, ‘There is one thing, however, which you must never do, and that is mislead your Allies. You must never make a promise which you do not fulfil. I hope we shall show that we have lived up to that standard.’ But the British and the Americans – two people separated by a common language, as the cliché goes – were actually foreigners to each other, no more natural partners than Germans and Italians. The British referred to the Americans as ‘our Italians’ and many Americans, of all ranks, loathed ‘Limeys’ as patronising snobs and ancient enemies. Others, however, saw the relationship with America more positively. When the future Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was sent out to the new Anglo-American Allied Force Headquarters (AFHQ) in Algiers as Churchill’s personal political emissary, he told the future Labour minister Richard Crossman, who was running Psychological Warfare, that the British were now Greeks to the Americans’ Romans: ‘We must run AFHQ as the Greek slaves ran the operations of Emperor Claudius.’

  The British Eighth Army advancing west met the British First Army and the American II Corps advancing east, and General Harold Alexander joined them all together. He had a small tactical team from ‘A’ Force at his headquarters and managed to surprise the enemy totally by a German-style blitzkrieg attack which drove a narrow offensive blow straight through their lines to capture Tunis. German soldiers were caught sitting astonished at café tables, aperitifs undrunk, while others came out of the hairdresser’s, mouths agape in shaving foam, or still draped in the barber’s sheet, with their hair only half cut. David Strangeways was at the point of the spearhead, leading a small tri-service advance team of intelligence officers and men from 30 AU Commando – called ‘S’ Force – into Tunis and Bizerta to seize vital Axis intelligence material before it was destroyed; he won the DSO. The journalists Alexander Clifford, Alan Moorehead and Geoffrey Keating got into Tunis on 7 May just behind the first troops of the 11th Hussars and the Derbyshire Yeomanry and found a kind of madness: in one street people were throwing flowers, in the next grenades; here there was sniping, there cheering as hundreds of British captives were freed. Alexander kept up the pressure on the peninsula east of Tunis, the last area to hold out; suddenly it cracked, and thousands and thousands of German and Italian soldiers were throwing down their arms and surrendering. There were no aeroplanes for the generals; no boats for the soldiers; no Dunkirk for the Axis in Africa. At 19.52 hours on 12 May 1943 it was over. The next day, General Alexander sent his famous signal to Winston Churchill: ‘Sir, it is my duty to report that the Tunisian campaign is over. All enemy resistance has ceased. We are masters of the North African shores.’

  25

  MINCEMENT

  For Churchill, North Africa was ‘a springboard, not a sofa’. Now the combined American and British armies would have to get back into Europe to achieve the final defeat of Italy and Germany. But where exactly should the attacks first thrust? In their conference at Casablanca in January 1943, Churchill and Roosevelt had decided on Sicily. Logically, it had to be the big island at the toe of Italy, just at the narrowest point of the middle of the Mediterranean. But Churchill wanted the Axis forces to fear and prepare for the two alternatives to what Alan Moorehead called ‘the obvious route’. To the east lay ‘the attractive route’: through Greece and the Balkans, and to the west lay ‘the quick route’: via Sardinia and Corsica, stepping stones to France and the north of Italy. The deception planners had six months to distract the Axis. The code-name for the (real) invasion of Sicily was HUSKY; the name of the Mediterranean deception plan was BARCLAY, which would mark the peak of the deception effort in the Mediterranean theatre. What did the Allies want the Axis to do? Reinforce everywhere but Sicily.

  The broad outline of the deception story went like this. The British Twelfth Army in Egypt (which, being one of Clarke’s ‘notional’ units, did not exist at all) was going to attack Crete and Greece in May. Turkey would be persuaded to join the war on the Allied side, then major Allied forces would move through Bulgaria and Rumania to attack the Germans in Russia from behind. Meanwhile, the British Eighth Army would land in the south of France in early June, and together with French forces, drive up the Rhône valley. At the same time General Patton would lead the US Seventh Army in the attack on Corsica and Sardinia. These wholly fictional attacks would be postponed first to June and then to July.

  John Bevan of LCS and Dudley Clarke of ‘A’ Force met in Algiers on 15 March to coordinate BARCLAY. For its part, ‘A’ Force gathered a mighty host of dummies to simulate the Twelfth Army in Cyrenaica, eastern Libya, within easy view of German reconnaissance aircraft flying south from Crete. There were dummy landing craft in the harbours, a division of dummy gliders and eleven squadrons of dummy aircraft on seven airfields (protected by real aircraft that ‘scrambled’ whenever German ‘bandits’ appeared and real antiaircraft guns that blotched the sky with flak), an entire ‘8th Armoured Division’ of dummy tanks, dummy cam
ps, dummy training areas, and lots of dummy wireless traffic along the Mediterranean coast.

  ‘A’ Force gave a strong Greek flavour to the assembly. Greek troops were given conspicuous amphibious training; calls went out for Greek-speaking British officers, and maps and pamphlets on Greece were distributed; there was heavy buying of Greek drachmas on the Cairo exchange, and fifty heavy strongboxes labelled as Greek bullion arrived from London and were taken under armed guard to a Cairo bank.

  But Greece was, in reality, treacherous terrain to work in. Early in 1943, Dudley Clarke managed with difficulty to get a list of all their secret agents from all six Secret Organisations operating in the western Mediterranean (‘A’ force, MI9 Middle East, ISLD or MI6, SIME or MI5, SOE and Hellas, the Greek Intelligence Services). He found that 40 per cent of all agents in Greece were working for no fewer than three different Allied secret services, wasting time, money, information and security. Nevertheless, to assist BARCLAY, a six-man SOE team (no Greeks were included) blew up the railway viaduct at Asopas and stirred up the Greek resistance; men landed by submarine on the Greek island of Zante and left evidence of reconnaissance; in Crete, SOE officers like the future writer Patrick Leigh-Fermor were busy laying on guides to help Special Boat Service commandos across the mountains to blow up a few German planes and installations and sink ships with limpet mines in Heraklion harbour. The Germans were worried enough to move a spare Panzer division across Europe from France to the Peloponnese.

  In London, John Bevan was providing the Foreign Office with rumours and gossip for diplomats to spread. Also in London, the Double Cross Committee came up with one of the most famous ruses of the war, modelled closely on real life events: in October 1942, a Catalina plane carrying Lieutenant Clamorgan of the Free French to Gibraltar to liaise with the US Army for operation TORCH had crashed in the sea off La Barrosa, south of Cádiz. Two bodies had been washed ashore in Franco’s Spain carrying ID cards, letters and a report including the names of many secret agents in North Africa. It was believed that the Abwehr agent in Cádiz managed to see and photograph the papers before the British could get there from Gibraltar.

  Inspired by this, in the Double Cross Committee meeting of the same month Flight Lieutenant Charles Cholmondely of the RAF (on attachment to MI5) suggested deliberately dropping a dead body from an aeroplane into the sea near enemy territory, carrying apparently important letters or secret documents. Cholmondely invited Ewen Montagu of Naval Intelligence to help him, and the two got cracking.

  Their first job was finding a dead body. They went to see the pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury for advice, and the coroner Bentley Purchase pointed them in the direction of the body of a 34-year-old man, ‘a bit of a ne’er-do-well’ who had died in January 1943 ‘from pneumonia after exposure’. The corpse was kept on ice, and Montagu claimed that a relative gave permission for his body to be used on condition that his true identity never be divulged. In return, the family were promised that he would later get a proper burial, though under a false name. Sir Bernard assured them that no pathologist in Spain would be able to detect that the man’s pleural effluvia did not come from drowning in an aircraft lost at sea.

  The dead body would be packed in dry ice in a 400-lb steel container labelled ‘Optical Instruments’, wearing the battledress uniform of a major in the Royal Marines, with a trenchcoat and a life-vest over the top. A black leather briefcase would be chained to the trenchcoat belt. Alan Hillgarth, the naval attaché from Madrid, advised that Huelva, west of Seville on the Spanish coast that runs towards Portugal, was the best place to make the drop. Montagu went to see Bill Jewell, captain of the Royal Navy submarine Seraph, who was used to special operations. He agreed to deposit the body in the sea north-west of the mouth of the Rio Tinto in late April.

  The documents the dead man would be carrying had to be carefully planned. His Royal Navy identity card and his pass to Combined Operations Headquarters named him as Major William Martin, RM. He was carrying three letters with authentic signatures. The first, a covering note introducing ‘Martin’ to Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, commander-in-chief Mediterranean, was from Lord Louis Mountbatten, chief of Combined Operations. This covering note said that ‘Major Martin’ was well up on experiments with barges and landing craft and had been ‘more accurate than some of us about the probable run of events at Dieppe’. (An admission by Mountbatten of failure in the Allied assault on Dieppe in August 1942 would be an interesting tit-bit for the Germans.) ‘Let me have him back, please, as soon as the assault is over.’ Mountbatten’s note ended, ‘He might bring some sardines with him – they are on ‘points’ here.’ This was supposed to be read as a veiled allusion to Sardinia. This covering note also asked Admiral Cunningham to pass on a second letter.

  This main letter had to be A1, something to make an enemy intelligence officer really sit up. How about the vice-chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Archibald Nye, writing to General Harold Alexander, the active British army commander under General Eisenhower in Tunisia, about future plans for the Mediterranean? General Nye wrote a magnificent letter of Byzantine duplicity. He used HUSKY, the code-name of the real attack on Sicily, as the name for the fictional attack on Greece, and also referred to operation BRIMSTONE, a fictional assault on Sardinia. Even better, Nye referred to an attack on Sicily as if it were merely the cover plan or deception for the supposed attacks on Greece and Sardinia! So in this Borgesian world, the real attack was offered as the cover plan for the fictional ones. Built in to the letter was the equally fictional reason why it had to be delivered by hand rather than being sent by signal which an American might read at Allied Headquarters: there were references to a British disagreement with the Americans about the awarding of medals to the wounded. This letter went through several drafts coordinated with Dudley Clarke. Chance favoured it, too, as the days went by: General Alexander’s defeat of the Germans in Tunis in May added to his status and made it all the more likely to German Intelligence that he would be leading the advance towards Europe, as the letters suggested.

  A courier could easily have slipped these two letters into a pocket, so to justify ‘Major Martin’ carrying a briefcase, Montagu and Cholmondely also gave him two proof copies of the forthcoming Ministry of Information illustrated book by Hilary St George Saunders, Combined Operations 1940–1942, together with a letter from Mountbatten to General Eisenhower asking him to write an introduction for its American edition. This (real) book drove the threat of Allied invasion home: it recounted the growth of the Commandos and Special Service troops, the birth of Combined Operations and their raids and landings from the Lofoten Islands to Madagascar. (A very careful German intelligence officer could have read a partial account of a certain Lieutenant Colonel D. W. Clarke’s role in all this on page 11.)

  Now Montagu and Cholmondely carefully built up Bill Martin’s identity with fictional letters from his father in Wales, his fiancée, Pam, in Wiltshire and his Lloyds Bank manager, bills from the tailor Gieves and the Naval and Military Club, two 10/6 ticket stubs from the Prince of Wales Theatre (the show was Strike a New Note), a pair of bus tickets, a photo of Pam drying herself on a beach, his bunch of keys and wristwatch and leather wallet with £8 and a used book of stamps, his Players cigarettes and box of Masters safety matches. (‘Details are always poignant,’ as Borges observed.) Major Martin wore a silver cross on a chain round his neck and carried a St Christopher medallion in his wallet. The pair of regulation British identity discs of hard cardboard was attached to the braces of his trousers (the higher octagonal green one with two holes stays with the body, and the lower, red, round disc is removed as token of death). A soldier’s name, rank, number and religion – his was RC – were stamped on the front, and his blood group on the back.

  After permission was given by Churchill and Eisenhower, His Majesty’s Submarine Seraph left Holy Loch, Scotland on 19 April and was off Huelva early on the 30th. When they unbolted the metal container, the body inside was wrapped in a blanket s
ecured by knotted tapes. They could smell that the dry ice had not been wholly successful; decomposition had started and the lower face was green. But the briefcase stamped with the official crown was secure and the Mae West needed no more air. Captain Jewell said a few words from the burial service as the other four officers bowed their heads. They put the body in the water at 04.30 hours and saw it drift inshore. There were Spanish fishing boats in the distance. They dropped a rubber dinghy in, upside down, half a mile south of the corpse, and then riddled the metal container coffin with small arms gunfire till it sank. Jewell then signalled: ‘Operation Mincemeat completed.’

  The corpse was duly retrieved, and the British vice-consul in Huelva, Francis Haselden, was summoned to the morgue, where the Spanish followed the formal procedures of examination and identification; the port medical officer performed a swift autopsy on the corpse and pronounced death by drowning. In Andalusia’s African heat, a late April afternoon can be much hotter than midsummer England, and Francis Haselden was glad to get out of the small morgue. The body was placed in the coffin the vice-consul had brought along. The Spanish naval officer attending wondered what should be done with the black briefcase and other possessions. The vice-consul, pretending to be a stickler for protocol and a respecter of Spanish neutrality, suggested they should be deposited overnight with the naval commandant of Huelva and collected officially the next morning. When he came back he was told they had been forwarded to the Almirantazgo de Cádiz, local naval headquarters.

  Hasleden duly cabled Alan Hillgarth, the naval attaché in Madrid, who was apparently getting urgent signals from London about the briefcase and its documents. The British ambassador in Madrid, Sir Samuel Hoare, pressed for their return. The black briefcase and its contents travelled from Cádiz to Seville and then to Madrid through the coils of Spanish bureaucracy (and, of course, under the clicking shutters of German cameras) until Hillgarth was finally given it back, with the key still in the lock, on 13 May.