3-072-431 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

Operation 'Mincemeat'; body on a stretcher, World War II, 1943. The corpse of Glyndwr Michael. Operation 'Mincemeat' was mounted by British intelligence in order to deceive the German military into believing that the Allies intended to launch an invasion of Greece and Sardinia rather than their true objective, Sicily. Fake top secret documents were attached to a corpse, supposedly of a Royal Marines officer, which was released to wash up on a Spanish beach. A complex background history for the dead man was built up by the British. The documents duly came into the hands of German military intelligence, the Abwehr, who accepted them as genuine. The success of the deception had a later, unexpected, effect, when genuine top secret documents relating to the D-Day landings and Operation 'Market Garden', the mission to capture strategic bridges in the Netherlands in 1944, fell into German hands but were treated as fake.