Dead Was the Hero

THE MAN WHO NEVER WAS (160 pp.) --Ewen Montagu--Lippincott ($2.75).

The career of Major William Martin of Britain's Royal Marines was as spectacular as it was brief. Although he was unknown when he entered service and had never before been a marine, he was commissioned on the spot. Within a few short weeks in the spring of 1943, he was the key figure in a scheme which convinced the Germans that the attack on Sicily was to be only a feint, led them to weaken Sicily's defenses and so save any number of Allied lives. The odd part of it was that William Martin accomplished all this without lifting a finger. Major Martin, in fact, was dead when he was commissioned.

Martin was not even the real name of the corpse that is the grisly central figure of The Man Who Never Was, one of the most astonishing stories to come out of World War II. Ordinarily, the Martin story might induce more raised eyebrows than belief. But documented as it is, written by Britain's present Judge Advocate of the Fleet, Ewen Montagu, and coming with the imprimatur of Churchill's wartime Chief of Staff Lord Ismay, it can be enjoyed as one of the most bizarre stories of deception in recent military history.

A Tip for Damn Fools. Montagu, then a naval intelligence officer, had what seemed to him a brilliant idea. Why not drop a body dressed as a British officer off the coast of Spain where it would wash ashore? Let the officer carry papers indicating that an attack on Sicily would not be the real thing, that the real blows would fall on Sardinia and Greece. How would the Germans hear about it? Well, trust the Spaniards to tip them off.

It was not easy to get approval (Lord Ismay admits that he was dubious), but Winston Churchill was for it. When someone objected that the stunt might misfire and only call attention to the impending invasion of Sicily, Churchill replied, "I don't see that that matters. Anybody but a damn fool would know it is Sicily."

Then the practical difficulties began. Getting a body was not easy. It had to be someone recently dead, someone whose family would not object, someone who looked like an officer. Just as Montagu had decided that he might have to snatch a body from a graveyard, he found his corpse: a young man who had just died of pneumonia and whose relatives gave their permission on condition that his name never be divulged.

Intelligence Officer Montagu had complete respect for his German opposite numbers. To fool them, the bluff would have to be consummately prepared. "Major William Martin" got not only a foolproof identity card. He carried a picture of "Pam," the girl he was "engaged" to, her last touching love letters, stubs of theater tickets, a dunning letter from a bank, a letter from his "father" and the usual pocket impedimenta. His identity-card photograph was that of a man who looked like him. The letters he was os tensibly to have carried to North Africa in a plane that crashed were actually signed by high officials, two of them by Lord Louis Mountbatten. To keep the body from deteriorating on the trip to Spain, famed British Pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury prescribed that it be packed in a large canister of dry ice.

At 4:30 on the morning of April 30, the submarine Seraph, Lieut. N. A. Jewell commanding, surfaced about a mile off the estuary of the Huelva River. Out of his canister came Major Martin. The officers on deck bowed their heads as Lieut. Jewell spoke the words of the burial service, then Martin was gently pushed into the water and was picked up by the ingoing tide.

A Grave in Huelva. Montagu had given his scheme the gruesome code name of Mincemeat. One day, not long after Martin's body had floated ashore at Huelva, Prime Minister Churchill, then in Washington, got a message from his chiefs of staff: "Mincemeat swallowed whole." But how gullible the Germans were was learned only after the war from captured documents. The Spaniards, behaving just as Montagu had expected, turned the papers over to a German, agent. Then, from echelon to echelon of command, went the German intelligence report: "The genuineness of the captured documents is above suspicion." Hitler himself believed it for nearly two weeks after the invasion of Sicily began, actually sent Marshal Rommel to Greece, where he expected the real attack to come. From Sicily to Greece had gone so many torpedo boato that the German patrols were ineffective. All the way across Europe went the ist Panzer Division to meet the expected invasion of Greece. In Sicily itself, Axis forces were shifted from the south, where the attack came, to the north.

Major Martin had done his job and done it well. His body still lies in the cemetery at Huelva, where burial was arranged by the British vice consul. The inscription on his gravestone bears the name "William Martin." There is no mention of his rank.

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