WAR ON FILM – Operation Mincemeat

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 wo