those tricksters…

Book review:

The Man Who Never Was

by Ewen Montagu

Philadelphia, PA: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1954

This is the original first-hand account of “Operation Mincemeat,” the classic World War II intelligence caper that duped Hitler and his military commanders into believing that the Allies would not attack Sicily in July 1943. You know how it all turned out: the Allies captured Sicily after extended combat with about 23,000 Allied casualties and about 165,000 German and Italian casualties.

Montagu led a small group of ingenious British planners who managed to put false documents on a corpse (“the man who never was”) that drifted ashore in southern Spain and gave the Germans every good reason to think that the phony invasion plans were real.

The true identity of the fictitious “Major William Martin” is not revealed in this book, and later there was some dispute about it. Montagu himself wrote that the real man who served his country in death was Glyndwr Michael, a homeless man from Wales.

The Man Who Never Was is a simply written account that reports the meticulous planning and the insightful intelligence assessments of how the Germans would react to the false documents planted on the corpse.

Montagu frankly expresses, seemingly in typical British unemotional remarks, how wildly happy he and his crew were that Operation Mincemeat was a spectacular success. Lots of Allied veterans who fought on Sicily, and their families, can be thankful for that.

* * * * * *

“Many waters cannot quench love.”

Love will rise to meet you…

(what you hear is poetry)

Book review: St. Ives

by Robert Louis Stevenson

click here

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As with another eye: Poems of exactitude with 55 free verse and haiku poems,

and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)

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