Operation Mincemeat is a story about how the British used a dead body to fool the Germans into believing they wouldn’t be invading Sicily. Ha – stupid Germans! Okay, it was a little more complicated than that.
Operation Mincemeat, an elaborate Trojan horse-like plan (that is if the horse were a dead, three-months on ice corpse) to use a dead body carrying fake military information to fool the Germans into believing the Allied forces wouldn’t be invading Sicily, helped make the invasion of Italy a success and made a mysterious Welsh man, along with the creators of his made up life, famous.
The plan was simple enough on paper – a downed Naval officer carrying a briefcase of sensitive military information washes ashore in neutral-in-theory Spain. Spanish officials allow the Germans access to the body and papers and the Germans believe the information and alter their plans to protect the fake invasion location thereby leaving Sicily, the real invasion location, with scant protection.
It turned out though, to be a little more complicated than that. For one thing, getting a dead body was apparently not as easy as one would think it would be in war time Europe. The question of the body and its genesis was also the reason given for the continued secrecy of the operation, even after the war. The official story is that a Glyndwr Michael, a destitute Welshman who had been found after apparently ingesting rat poison in an attempt to end his life.
It’s hard to believe that such a ruse could be successful these days with that many people involved. It seems like it would only be a matter of time before the “Tricked Nazis today with dead body – can’t wait to find out if invasion will be a success!” post appeared on Facebook.
More difficult to digest than the questionable acquisition of the body though, is the writing. The books seems filled with extraneous material that never seems to lead anywhere and never seems to delve beneath the surface of the characters. The writing comes off as sort of an overstuffed, though capably written, official report.
Since the book got a very favorable review in the New York Times, I went and read through some of the reviews on Amazon just to see if there were others that thought that the book didn’t live up to its NY Times hype. And among the reviews, there was the suggestion, that if one wanted to read a good WW II book, to get Every Man Dies Alone. Which leads us to the second book of our double feature.
Even though Every Man Dies Alone (*I guess women get to cuddle together or something), is fiction it somehow rings truer than Operation Mincemeat. Technically, I guess it’s fiction-ish, as it is based on the true story of a couple who distributed anti-Nazi postcards after the wife’s brother died. In EMDA, it is the couple’s son who has been lost in the war. The resulting postcards that are painstakingly made every Sunday by the couple, are of questionable efficacy. Most of the those who come across the postcards are too terrified to take them and pass them on as the Quangels hope, and instead almost immediately turn them in. In Nazi Germany, it seems that one of the most powerful weapons the Nazi’s have is the myriad ways in which one can be found to have violated the law. Nearly everyone is guilty of something and therefore is afraid to take any action, as their own law-breaking may come to notice and endanger their lives and the lives of their family. A good tyrant knows that to control a population, you must first make everyone guilty.
The title of the book of course, begs the question– did the Quangels die alone?
But before that can be answered, the question of what is “alone” needs to be answered. And here, the alone is literal – we each must endure the view at the end alone, no one else can share it, even if we are surrounded by loved ones. But we are more than flesh and bones, we are acts, we are hand-drawn postcards dropped in a stairwell, we are impossible hope that does not die with us and gets carried with those who knew us, occasionally coming to life again in a book that can still move people and cause them to question whether their own acts are worthy of enduring.
