The newly released, star-studded British movie Operation Mincemeat is, on one level, about the invasion of Sicily in July 1943. On another, more profound level, it is about how people deceive one another. In its opening commentary, the film announces that ‘in every story there is what is seen… and what is hidden.’ And the film tells one of the most extraordinary deception stories of the Second World War. A story, as the commentary relates, of ‘a wilderness of mirrors… in which the truth is protected by a mirror of lies.’
The intention of the operation was to deceive the Germans into believing that, after the fall of North Africa in spring 1943, the next Allied operation would not be the obvious one, to invade Sicily, but would instead be an invasion of Greece. The hope was that battle-hardened German troops would be withdrawn from Sicily and transferred to Greece.
Operation Mincemeat is not the first time this remarkable story has been told. In 1956, Ronald Neame directed one of the finest of British 1950s war films, The Man Who Never Was (see MHM September 2013). It starred Clifton Webb as Lieutenant Commander Ewen Montagu, who, in this telling of the story, was the central figure in the deception.
A new world of communication