In April of 1943 as Hitler’s forces and the Allied powers struggled for dominance, a Spanish fisherman discovered a corpse with documents labeling the man as a British military official (Major Martin’s ID card is the first photo) who seemed to have drowned off the coast. This set in play the most successful ruse in the history of the Second World War, known as “Operation Mincemeat.” Although the body possessed information about a man with a pedantic father, a fiancee named Pam (second image), and a slight bank overdraft, in fact no such person existed. The body was actually a plant, and belonged to a homeless man called Glyndwr Michael. (Glyndwr’s corpse is the third picture.) The British had come up with the plan to put a decoy body with fake information suggesting that there would be an invasion of Greece and Sardinia — the point was to divert attention away from the island of Sicily, which was actually what the Allies wanted because of its strategic location. Although Spain was officially neutral in the war, the Allies correctly guessed that the Spanish would send the fake information to the Nazis, which they did. Operation Mincemeat resulted in far fewer Allied casualties and a much swifter takeover in the conquest of Sicily than British intelligence had anticipated.
Source(s): See _Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory_, by Ben Macintyre, 2011.
