The man whose death saved thousands of lives was named Glyndwr Michael. He was a Welsh vagrant who died in London in January 1943 after eating rat poison — almost certainly accidentally. He had no family to claim him. He was buried in a pauper's grave.
And then British intelligence requisitioned his body.
The Concept
The proposal originated with an intelligence officer named Ewen Montagu, working under the direction of the XX Committee, which managed the British deception campaign against Germany. The plan was elegant in its premise and extraordinarily detailed in its execution.
The Allied high command had decided in early 1943 that after the fall of North Africa, the next invasion would target Sicily — Operation Husky. Sicily was so obvious a stepping stone to Italy that German intelligence almost certainly anticipated it. The Allies needed the Germans to believe the real attack was coming somewhere else.
Montagu's solution: create a fictitious British officer, give him plausible identity documents, load his briefcase with correspondence between high-ranking British officers discussing a fake invasion plan, and then arrange for him to wash ashore in Spain — a neutral country with strong German intelligence connections — in a manner suggesting he had died in an aircraft crash at sea.
Major William Martin, Royal Marines
The British assembled an identity for their dead man with the attention to detail of a theatrical costume department. They created a face: Major William Martin of the Royal Marines, Combined Operations. They gave him identification from the Combined Operations headquarters. They gave him a wallet containing personal effects — ticket stubs, a receipt from a London jeweler for a diamond engagement ring, a letter from his fictional fiancée "Pam" expressing her love in suitably specific and personal terms, a stern letter from his fictional bank manager about his overdrawn account.
The personal effects were constructed by officers who understood precisely what kind of slightly disheveled, romantically preoccupied young staff officer Major Martin should be.
In the briefcase chained to his body: a letter from Lieutenant General Archibald Nye, Vice Chief of the Imperial General Staff, to General Harold Alexander, discussing — in the coded but unmistakable language of high command — that the planned invasion of the Mediterranean would target Greece and Sardinia. Sicily, the letter implied in careful circumlocution, was a diversionary target only.
The Drop
On April 30, 1943, HMS Seraph surfaced off the coast of Huelva, Spain, and released the body of Glyndwr Michael — now Major William Martin — into the current. The briefcase was chained to his wrist. A life jacket was put on him. He drifted ashore as intended.
A Spanish fisherman found him and reported it to the Spanish Navy. The Spanish Navy, as British intelligence had calculated, allowed German intelligence agents to photograph and copy the documents before returning them to the British in apparently undisturbed condition.
The Germans analyzed the documents and declared them authentic. The letter from Archibald Nye was genuine — it had been genuinely authored by him. Hitler personally ordered the contents of the "Martin" letter to be treated as confirmed intelligence. German armored and infantry divisions were deployed to Greece and Sardinia. The Panzer divisions that had been in reserve for the defense of Sicily were redeployed.
When the Allied landings began in Sicily on July 10, 1943 — the largest amphibious operation to that date in the Mediterranean — the Germans were caught substantially wrong-footed. The campaign that should have been among the bloodiest in the Mediterranean theater succeeded far faster than Allied planners had dared hope.
Glyndwr Michael is buried in the cemetery at Huelva, Spain, under the name Major William Martin, Royal Marines. His grave still exists. The Spanish town of Huelva maintains it. It reads: "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" — "It is sweet and proper to die for one's country." The name on the stone is not his own.
Sources & Further Reading
Ewen Montagu, "The Man Who Never Was" (Evans Brothers, 1953); Ben Macintyre, "Operation Mincemeat" (Bloomsbury, 2010); National Archives UK, ADM 223/794.
