Category Archives: military

by | 27 February 2026 · 6:56 pm

Pressure on Adm. Horthy, 1944

From The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, by Jonathan Freedland (HarperCollins, 2022), Kindle pp. 298-300:

The pope had not been able to utter the word ‘Jews’, or to make his plea public, but his meaning was clear enough. The American president, meanwhile, was not quite so squeamish. The very next day, 26 June, and just as the truth of Auschwitz was becoming ever more public thanks to the press coverage coming out of Switzerland, Roosevelt had his secretary of state deliver a message to Horthy:

The United States demands to know whether the Hungarian authorities intend . . . to deport Jews to Poland or to any other place, or to employ any measures that would in the end result in their mass execution. Moreover, the United States wishes to remind the Hungarian authorities that all those responsible for carrying out those kind of injustices will be dealt with . . .

The pressure, unleashed by the publication of the Vrba–Wetzler Report, was unremitting. On 30 June, the king of Sweden, Gustav V, wrote to Horthy with a warning that, if the deportations did not stop, Hungary would become a ‘pariah among other nations’. But it was that US warning, that war criminals would be held to account, that seemed to concentrate the regent’s mind.

‘I shall not tolerate this any further!’ Horthy told a council of his ministers the day Roosevelt’s message arrived. ‘The deportation of the Jews of Budapest must cease!’ Tellingly, that exhortation did not apply to the deportations outside Budapest. Those continued. The next day, 27 June, would see 12,421 Jews shipped to Auschwitz in four separate transports. The deportations would continue the next day and the next.

Despite his royal title, Horthy was not the master of his kingdom: issuing a command did not make it happen. There now ensued a power struggle inside the Hungarian government, as those bent on continuing to do the Nazis’ bidding, collaborating in the effort to rid the country of its Jews, sought to resist the regent’s edict. The security forces themselves were split: there was a tank division loyal to the regent, battalions of provincial gendarmes loyal to the Final Solution.

If Horthy was to prevail, he would have to move fast. Adolf Eichmann and his local fascist allies had drawn up a plan to ensnare the last major Jewish community still untouched by the hand of the SS: the 200,000 Jews of Budapest who were the last Jews of Hungary – and, in effect, the last Jews of Europe.

This is how it would work. On 2 July, thousands of Hungarian armed police would gather in Budapest’s Heroes Square on a pretext designed to arouse minimal suspicion: a flag ceremony to honour their comrades. Then, once the formalities were over, the gendarmes would quietly spend their three days of supposed leave making themselves familiar with the locations of the single-building mini-ghettos known as ‘yellow-star houses’, in particular working out how to block off potential escape routes for any Jews minded to flee. The trains carrying Budapest’s Jews to the gas chambers were scheduled for departure on 10 July.

Except events did not run to plan. On 2 July, the 15th Air Force of the United States dropped 1,200 tons of bombs in or near Budapest, killing 136 people and destroying 370 buildings. The bombs’ targets were, in fact, factories south of the capital, but that was not how it looked from inside Hungary’s ruling circles. To them, it seemed as if Roosevelt was making good his threat to hold the Hungarian political leadership responsible for the slaughter of the country’s Jews. Those at the top trembled at the prospect.

By 5 July, Horthy had installed a loyalist as the chief military commander in the capital and instructed him to take ‘all measures necessary to prevent the deportation of the Budapest Jews’. That same night, he sent in the tanks. As the army moved in, the provincial police, there to round up Jews, were pushed out.

In the clash of wills, the regent had won. To be clear, his prime motive was self-preservation and the assertion of his own authority, rather than the saving of Jews. The deportation of the Jews of Hungary had not especially troubled him until that moment. Indeed, it would continue for the next three days, at the same intense pace as it had throughout May and June: there were five transports from the provinces on 9 July alone. There was one more on 20 July.

But the rest were stopped. One train bound for Auschwitz was even turned around and sent back, on Horthy’s orders. Eichmann was livid: ‘In all my long experience, such a thing has never happened to me before,’ he raged. ‘It cannot be tolerated!’ Under Horthy, there would be no deportations from Budapest.

The Jews of the capital city were saved, for now. There were many explanations – starting with the shifting calculus of Hungarian politics, as Germany began to look like the losing side in the war – but a crucial role was played by a thirty-two-page document, written by two men, one of them a teenager, who had done what no Jews had ever done before and escaped from Auschwitz. They had crossed mountains and rivers, they had hidden and starved, they had defied death and the most vicious enemy the world had ever seen. Their word had been doubted, it had been ignored and it had been suppressed. But now, at last, it had made the breakthrough they had longed for. Rudolf Vrba and Fred Wetzler had saved 200,000 lives.

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by | 26 February 2026 · 8:18 pm

Publicizing the Auschwitz Report

From The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, by Jonathan Freedland (HarperCollins, 2022), Kindle pp. 272-275:

NATURALLY, THE WORKING Group always hoped that the escapees’ testimony would reach the Allied nations fighting the Third Reich. They had no clear idea how exactly it would get there; instead they cast the document upon the waters, hoping it would land on the right shore. The Auschwitz Report would be a message in a bottle.

One early copy fell into exactly the wrong hands. Oskar Krasňanský sent it to Jewish officials based in Istanbul through a courier who he had been assured was ‘reliable’. But it never arrived. Krasňanský later concluded that the messenger had been a paid spy who took the report to Hungary, only to hand it to the Gestapo in Budapest.

Another copy, also originally destined for Istanbul, followed an especially circuitous path. A Jewish employee of the Turkish legation in Budapest passed it to the head of the city’s Palestine office – representing those who were determined to turn that country into a refuge for Jews – who, keen to get the information to neutral Switzerland, passed it to a contact in the Romanian legation in Bern who, in turn, handed it to a businessman from Transylvania who had once been known as György Mandel but who had now, however improbably, become the unpaid first secretary of the consulate of El Salvador in Geneva, under the name of George Mantello.

The route was bizarre, but at last the report had found the right person. Mantello was a man ready to flout convention, and if necessary the law, if that’s what it took to rescue Jews from the Nazis. And for him, the Auschwitz Report had a bleakly personal significance. As he read it, he knew that his own extended family in Hungary had already been deported. The words of Vrba and Wetzler, reinforced by Mordowicz and Rosin, confirmed that all of those relatives, some 200 people, were almost certainly dead. He resolved immediately to do what he could to spread the word.

Mantello’s copy was a five-page summary in Hungarian, produced at an earlier stage of the report’s convoluted journey by an orthodox rabbi in Slovakia, so he now enlisted the help of assorted students and expats to make immediate translations of this abridged version into Spanish, French, German and English. On 22 June 1944 he handed the document to a British journalist, Walter Garrett, who was in Zurich for the Exchange Telegraph news agency. Garrett saw the news value immediately, but he also recognised that, even in its pared down form, the Auschwitz Report was still too lengthy for easy newspaper consumption. He had his British–Hungarian secretary, one Blanche Lucas, produce a fresh translation and he then distilled the core points into four arresting press releases.

Garrett made a break from the reporters’ unwritten code, which would forbid a journalist from receiving financial help from a source: doubtless for the sake of speed, he allowed Mantello to pay for those four texts to be sent to London by telegram, costly as that was. Still, despite that departure from traditional Fleet Street practice, and in welcome contrast with Krasňanský, Garrett understood the grammar of news. His telegram despatch, wired on the night of 23 June 1944, led with what was his most stunning revelation:

FOLLOWING DRAMATIC ACCOUNT ONE DARKEST CHAPTERS MODERN HISTORY REVEALING HOW ONE MILLION 715 THOUSAND JEWS PUT DEATH ANNIHILATION CAMP AUSCHWITZ BIRKENAU . . . REPORT COME EX TWO JEWS WHO ESCAPED BIRKENAU CORRECTNESS WHEREOF CONFIRMED . . . FROM THE BEGINNING JUNE 1943 NINETY PERCENT INCOMING JEWS GASSED DEATH STOP . . . THREE GAS-CHAMBERS FOUR CREMATORIUMS BIRKENAU-AUSCHWITZ STOP EACH CREMATORIUM . . . TWO THOUSAND CORPSE DAILY STOP GARRETT ADDS ABSOLUTE EXACTNESS ABOVE REPORT UNQUESTIONABLE . . . END

As soon as those words were humming along the telegraph cables to London, Garrett acted to ensure that his story – surely one of the scoops of the century – would get the widest possible distribution. The technology of 1944 allowed for few short cuts. And so, in the early hours of 24 June, Walter Garrett rode his bike through the streets of Zurich, pushing copies of his despatch by hand into the mailboxes of the city’s newspapers. Attached was a covering letter of endorsement, supplied by Mantello, from a quartet of senior Swiss theologians and clerics, all apparently vouching for the gravity of the revelations. (In fact, none of the four had seen the report: in a typical Mantello flourish, he had put their names to the letter but had dispensed with the formality of asking their permission first.) And so the first newspaper story based on what would become known as the Vrba–Wetzler Report appeared in Switzerland’s Neue Zürcher Zeitung later that same day.

Mantello’s efforts had worked. Thanks to those ‘two Jews who escaped Birkenau, correctness whereof confirmed’, the word was out. Breaking the dam of censorship, the following eighteen days saw the publication in the Swiss press of no fewer than 383 articles laying bare the truth of the Auschwitz death camp, even if, by accidentally omitting the estimated 50,000 Lithuanian dead, Garrett had revised down Vrba–Wetzler’s death toll. Put another way, between 24 June and 11 July more articles appeared about Auschwitz in the Swiss press than had been published about the wider Final Solution throughout the entire course of the war in The Times, Daily Telegraph, Manchester Guardian and the whole of the British popular press put together.

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by | 23 February 2026 · 8:07 am

Planning Escape from Auschwitz

From The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, by Jonathan Freedland (HarperCollins, 2022), Kindle pp. 183-187:

And so by the early spring of 1944 there was a double urgency to Walter’s determination to escape. Those 5,000 or so Czechs who had entered the family camp in the second wave, arriving on 20 December 1943, would be put to death exactly six months later on 20 June. That was beyond doubt; it was the hardest of deadlines. But now there was the prospect of an even more imminent, and much larger, slaughter: hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews would board trains for Auschwitz in a matter of weeks, trains that would take them to the very gates of the gas chambers.

Walter had his motive and now he acquired a mentor. After the Poles, the most successful escapees from Auschwitz were Soviet prisoners of war. Many thousands had been brought to the camp at the start, dying in the cold and dirt as they worked as slaves to build Birkenau. But there was another group, Walter estimated there were about a hundred of them, known to the Auschwitz veterans as the ‘second-hand prisoners of war’. Captured in battle, they had been sent initially to regular PoW camps but then despatched to Auschwitz as punishment for bad behaviour, including attempted escape. Among them was one Dmitri Volkov.

Not for the first time, Walter had reason to be grateful for the Russian he had taught himself back in Trnava. It meant he could talk with the second-hand PoWs as he registered them, even those whose appearance was forbidding. To Walter, Volkov was a bear of a man from the land of the Cossacks, Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine. Enormous and with dark, deep-set eyes, and still in his Red Army uniform, he looked like someone to be approached with care.

But with time they got to know each other, eventually striking an unspoken bargain not dissimilar to the high-school deal that had seen Walter trade lessons in Slovak for tuition in High German. Volkov allowed Walter to practise his Russian. In return, the young pen-pusher handed over his allocation of bread and quasi-margarine, honouring a vow he had made to himself much earlier: that he would not take his official ration so long as he had access to food from elsewhere. He noticed that Volkov did not eat even that meagre portion, instead cutting it into quarters, to be shared with his comrades.

They began talking. Not, at first, about the camp, but about the great Russian literary masters Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, moving on to the Soviet writers Gorky, Ehrenburg and Blok. Eventually, Volkov began to lower his guard.

He revealed that he was no mere conscript but a captain in the Red Army. In making this admission, Volkov was taking a huge risk: it was Nazi practice to shoot all Soviet officers. But he had decided to trust Walter, and not only with that information. He also told him of his own experience of escape, for the captain had once broken out of the Nazi concentration camp of Sachsenhausen. As his teenage pupil listened, and over several days, Volkov proceeded to give Walter a crash course in escapology.

Some lessons were intensely practical. He told him what to carry and what not to carry. In the second category was money. Kanada might be overflowing with the stuff, but it was dangerous. If you had money, you would be tempted to buy food from a shop or a market, and that meant contact with people which was always to be avoided. Better to live off the land, stealing from fields and remote farms. Also not to be carried, at least when making the initial escape, was meat: the SS Alsatians would sniff it out immediately.

So: no money, no meat. As for what he would need, that category was larger, starting with a knife for hunting or self-defence, and a razor blade in case of imminent capture. That was a cardinal rule for Volkov: ‘Don’t let them take you alive.’ Also: matches, to cook the food you had stolen. And salt: a man could live on salt and potatoes for months. A watch was essential, not least because it could double as a compass.

The tips kept coming. All movement was to be done at night; no walking in daylight. It was vital to be invisible. If they could see you, they could shoot you. Don’t imagine you could run away; a bullet would always be faster.

Keep an eye on the time, hence the watch. Don’t be looking for a place to sleep when dawn breaks; make sure you’ve found a hiding place while it’s still dark.

But some of the advice belonged in the realm of psychology. Trust no one; share your plans with no one, including me. If your friends know nothing, they’ll have nothing to reveal when they’re tortured once you’re gone. That advice fitted with what Walter already knew for himself: that there were others eager to give up your secrets. The Politische Abteilung, the Political Department of the SS, had built up quite a network of informers among the prisoners, always listening out for talk of escape and revolt. (They were recruited by a threat from the SS that, if they refused to betray their fellow prisoners, their relatives back home would be murdered.) You never knew who you were really talking to. Best to say little.

Volkov had more wisdom to impart. Have no fear, even of the Germans. In Auschwitz, in their uniforms and with their guns, they look invincible. But each one of them, on his own, is just as small and fragile as any other human being. ‘I know they can die as quickly as anybody because I’ve killed enough of them.’ Above all: remember that the fight only starts when you’ve broken out of the camp. No euphoria, no elation. You cannot relax while you are on Nazi-ruled soil, not even for a second.

Walter did his best to take it all in, to remember it along with the mountain of numbers and dates that was piling ever higher in his mind. But there was one last bit of advice, for the escape itself.

The Nazis’ tracker dogs were trained to detect even the faintest odour of human life. If there was a single bead of sweat on your brow, they would find you. There was only one thing that defeated them.

Tobacco, soaked in petrol and then dried. And not just any tobacco. It had to be Soviet tobacco. Volkov must have seen the gleam of scepticism in Walter’s eye. ‘I’m not being patriotic,’ he said. ‘I just know machorka. It’s the only stuff that works.’

Volkov let Walter know that he had his own plans for escape and that he would not be sharing them with Walter or anyone else. He was happy to serve as the younger man’s teacher. But he would not be his partner.

For that role, there could only ever be one person. Someone whom Walter trusted wholly and who trusted him, someone whom he had known before he was in this other, darker universe, someone who, for that very reason, had an existence in Walter’s mind independent of Auschwitz: Fred Wetzler.

More than 600 Jewish men from Trnava had been sent to Auschwitz in 1942. By the spring of 1944, only two were still alive: Walter Rosenberg and Alfréd Wetzler. All the rest had either been swiftly murdered, like Fred’s brothers, or suffered the slow death in which Auschwitz-Birkenau specialised, worn down by disease, starvation and arbitrary violence, a group that almost certainly included Fred’s father. Fred and Walter had grown up with those 600 boys and men – as teachers and schoolmates, family friends and acquaintances, playground enemies and romantic rivals – and now every last one of them was gone. From the world they had both known, only Fred and Walter were left.

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by | 21 February 2026 · 5:34 am

Mincemeat and Mussolini

From Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory, by Ben Macintyre (Crown, 2010), Kindle pp. 291-293:

The most significant victim in the fallout on the Axis side was Mussolini himself. From the first Allied footfall in Sicily, Il Duce was doomed, though he refused to acknowledge it. Goebbels noted: “The only thing certain in this war is that Italy will lose it.” The Pact of Steel was cracking up. By July 18, the Allied front line had moved halfway up Sicily. That day, Mussolini sent an almost defiant cable to Hitler: “The sacrifice of my country cannot have as its principal purpose that of delaying a direct attack on Germany.” The Führer summoned him to an urgent meeting. Il Duce did not care to be summoned anywhere but went meekly. The two fascist leaders met in Feltre, fifty miles from Venice, where Hitler launched into a long harangue, lambasting the “inept and cowardly” Italian troops in Sicily and insisting: “What has happened now in Sicily must not be allowed to happen again.” In the midst of the tirade, an aide interrupted to inform Mussolini that Rome was under massive air attack, the first time the capital had been targeted. Mussolini sat impassively through the two-hour monologue. The great Italian bull seemed to be fatally gored, diminished, and distant. At the end of the excruciating meeting, he said simply: “We are fighting for a common cause, Führer.” It sounded more like an epitaph than a statement of solidarity. On July 22, Palermo fell to Patton’s American troops. Three days later, Mussolini was outvoted by the Fascist Grand Council, summoned by King Victor Emmanuel III to a private audience, and toppled. “It can’t go on any longer,” said the king: Mussolini must resign at once, to be replaced by Marshal Pietro Badoglio, the former chief of the armed forces. Italy’s deposed dictator left the royal Villa Savoia hidden in an ambulance, and the new government in Rome began the secret task of extracting Italy from the war and Hitler’s poisonous embrace. In Badoglio’s words: “Fascism fell, as was fitting, like a rotten pear.” The next day, Rommel was recalled from Greece to defend northern Italy.

Would it have fallen so fast, or rotted so quickly, without Operation Mincemeat? The invasion of Sicily was a far from perfect military operation, bedeviled by poor planning and personal rivalries between selfish and powerful men. A relatively small contingent of German troops successfully held up the advance of an Allied host seven times larger and then evacuated the island to continue the battle up mainland Italy. The fight for Sicily was grim, bitter, and costly. But how much worse would it have been had the Nazi high command been prepared for it? What if, say, the full-strength, battle-tempered First Panzer Division, instead of being dispatched to Greece to await an imaginary invasion, had been deployed along the coast at Gela?

It is impossible to calculate how many lives, on both sides of the conflict, were saved by Operation Mincemeat, or exactly how much it contributed to hastening the end of the war and the defeat of Hitler. The Allies had expected it would take ninety days to conquer Sicily. The occupation was completed on August 17, thirty-eight days after the invasion began. Looking back after the war, Professor Percy Ernst Schramm, keeper of the OKW war diary, left no doubt that the fake documents had played a critical role: “It is well known that under the influence of the letters, Hitler moved troops to Sardinia and southern Greece, thereby preventing them from taking part in the defence against [Husky].” In September, Italy formally surrendered, although the war in Italy would not end until May 1945.

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by | 20 February 2026 · 3:02 am

Nazi Intelligence Failure in 1943?

From Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory, by Ben Macintyre (Crown, 2010), Kindle pp. 229-232:

The first full German intelligence assessment of the documents was written on May 11 and signed by Baron von Roenne himself. It was addressed to the OKW Operations Staff, or Wehrmachtführungsstab, headed by General Alfred Jodl, and entitled, portentously, “Discovery of the English Courier.” It began: “On the corpse of an English courier which was found on the Spanish coast, were three letters from senior British Officers to high Allied Officers in North Africa. … They give information concerning the decisions taken on the 23rd April, 1943, regarding Anglo-American strategy for the conduct of the war in the Mediterranean after the conclusion of the Tunisian campaign.” Major Martin is described as “an experienced specialist in amphibious operations.”

Von Roenne went on to lay out, point by point, the misinformation prepared by Cholmondeley and Montagu. “Large scale amphibious operations in both the Western and Eastern Mediterranean are intended. The proposed operation in the eastern Mediterranean, under the command of General Wilson, is to be made on the coast round Kalamata, and the section of the coast south of Cape Araxos. The code name for the landings on the Peloponnesus is ‘Husky.’ … The operation to be conducted in the Western Mediterranean by General Alexander was mentioned, but without naming any objective.” Von Roenne, however, had picked up on the reference to sardines. “A jocular remark in this letter refers to Sardinia,” he wrote. “The code name for this operation is ‘Brimstone.’” The attack on Sardinia, he surmised, must be “a minor ‘commando type’ since Mountbatten had requested the return of Major Martin after the operation. This indication points to the invasion of an island rather than of a major undertaking. … This is another point in favour of Sardinia.”

Just as important, Von Roenne relayed the news that Sicily was not a real target for the Allies, but a decoy: “The proposed cover operation for ‘Brimstone’ is Sicily.” That lie would sit, immovably, at the center of German strategic thinking over the coming months: the attacks would come in the east, in Greece, and in the west, most probably in Sardinia; evidence of any planned assault on Sicily could safely be dismissed as a hoax. The only uncertainty, von Roenne warned, was that of timing. If the two divisions identified in Nye’s letter—the Fifty-sixth Infantry attacking Kalamata and the Fifth Infantry Division aimed at Cape Araxos—were deployed at less than full strength, then the “operation could be mounted immediately” and the offensive might start at any time. However, the Fifty-sixth Division, von Roenne noted, had two brigades “still in action” at Enfidaville. If the entire division was to be used in the assault, these troops “must first be rested and then embarked. This possibility, which necessitates a certain time lag before the launching of the operation, is, judging by the form of the letters, the most likely.” In von Roenne’s mature estimation, Germany still had “at least two or three weeks” to reinforce the Greek coast before the attack.

That was also enough time for the British to change their plans, which they might well do if they knew the information had reached the Germans. Von Roenne now turned to this important consideration. “It is known to the British Staff that the courier’s despatches to [sic] Major Martin fell into Spanish hands,” he wrote, but “it is not perhaps known to the British General Staff that these letters came to our notice, since an English Consul was present at the examination of the letters by Spanish officials.” The letters had been reinserted in the envelopes and returned to the British, and a senior officer of the Madrid Abwehr station had personally inspected the resealed envelopes before they were returned to Alan Hillgarth. The British might suspect but would have no proof that the letters had been read, let alone passed to the Germans and copied. “It is, therefore, to be hoped that the British General Staff will continue with these projected operations and thereby make possible a resounding Abwehr success.” In order to convince the British that their secrets were still safe, von Roenne suggested that the Germans mount their own deception: they should give no indication that they feared simultaneous attacks in the eastern and western Mediterranean and instead “initiate a misleading plan of action which will deceive the enemy by painting a picture of growing Axis concern regarding Sicily.” The Germans should pretend to reinforce Sicily, while doing nothing of the sort.

Von Roenne ended with a security warning. “News of this discovery will be treated with the greatest secrecy, and knowledge of it confined to as few as possible.” The baron’s assessment was remarkable in many ways: it hauled on board every single aspect of the deception and even launched a corresponding deception plan to reinforce it. But perhaps most astonishing of all was the ringing endorsement that accompanied the appraisal: “The circumstances of the discovery, together with the form and contents of the despatches, are absolutely convincing proof of the reliability of the letters.” The army’s chief intelligence analyst, from the outset, utterly dismissed the possibility of a plant.

This was, to say the least, strange. The analysts of FHW usually distrusted uncorroborated information emanating directly from the Abwehr, knowing the inefficiency and corruption of that organization, and tended to be skeptical of Abwehr revelations “unless these were clearly corroborated by more tangible evidence.” Von Roenne’s natural caution seems to have deserted him. He knew only what the Madrid Abwehr station had told him about the discovery of the body, which was secondhand information derived through Adolf Clauss. The report detailing the results of the second meeting with Pardo on May 10 had not yet reached Berlin. No additional checks had been made, the body had not been examined, and the original documents had remained in German hands for only one hour, far too short a time for forensic testing. And yet he chose to describe the documents as incontrovertibly genuine.

Deception is a sort of seduction. In love and war, adultery and espionage, deceit can only succeed if the deceived party is willing, in some way, to be deceived. The betrayed lover sees only the signs of love and blocks out the evidence of faithlessness, however glaring. This unconscious willingness to see the lie as truth—“wishfulness” was Admiral Godfrey’s word for it—comes in many forms: Adolf Clauss in Huelva wanted to believe the false documents because his reputation depended on believing them; for Karl-Erich Kühlenthal, any intelligence breakthrough to his credit, no matter how fantastic, made him safer, a Jew among anti-Semitic killers. Von Roenne, however, may have chosen to believe in the fake documents for an entirely different reason: because he loathed Hitler, wanted to undermine the Nazi war effort, and was intent on passing false information to the high command in the certain knowledge that it was wholly false and extremely damaging.

It is quite possible that Lieutenant Colonel Alexis Baron von Roenne did not believe the Mincemeat deception for an instant.

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by | 16 February 2026 · 1:08 am

Royal Navy Asset in Spain, 1943

From Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory, by Ben Macintyre (Crown, 2010), Kindle pp. 102-104:

A cable was sent to Captain Alan Hillgarth, the naval attaché at the Madrid embassy and Churchill’s intelligence chief in Spain, asking him to send a trusted lieutenant to London for an urgent conference. Salvador Augustus Gómez-Beare, assistant naval attaché at the British Embassy in Madrid, duly presented himself at the Admiralty, fresh off the plane from Madrid, and was ushered into Room 13.

Gómez-Beare, universally known by his nickname “Don,” was an Anglo-Spaniard from Gibraltar who perfectly straddled the two cultures. He was a British citizen, enjoyed a large private income, spoke pure upper-class English, and displayed impeccable English manners and habits as only someone who is not English can. He played bridge with Ian Fleming at the Portland Club and golf all year round. But in Spain he was Spanish and brown-skinned, spoke with a southern accent, and was invisible. In 1914, as a medical student in Philadelphia, he had volunteered to join the British army, and spent two years in the trenches before joining the Royal Flying Corps. During the Spanish civil war he had “worked in military intelligence for Franco’s army.” Gómez-Beare could reach places no Englishman could penetrate, “a Spaniard to Spaniards and an Englishman to the English, who served England with an intensity and thoroughness that no mere Anglo-Saxon could attain.” Hillgarth had recruited him in 1939, initially suggesting he be given the rank of captain in the Royal Marines “because of his enormous RAF moustache.” He was given the rank of lieutenant commander in the RNVR on condition he shave and despite having “no more than a smattering of sea experience,” but from the start of the war, Gómez-Beare could be found “padding about Madrid, driving up to San Sebastian, flitting over to Barcelona, hovering about Gibraltar, and smuggling British airmen out of France.” When Airey Neave escaped from Colditz in 1942, it was Gómez-Beare who smuggled him across the border to Gibraltar. He had a villa in Seville, a flat in Madrid, and spies in every corner of Spain. Gómez-Beare was Hillgarth’s primary recruiter and runner of secret agents.

Alan Hillgarth, as a senior member of the embassy staff in a neutral country, could not be seen to engage directly in espionage or recruit spies, but Gómez-Beare was under no such constraints. In Hillgarth’s words, he was “exceptionally favoured by character40 and linguistic attainments to cultivate such people, and in the majority of cases his contacts would not have agreed to work with anyone else.” Gómez-Beare’s spies ran through the Spanish bureaucracy like veins through marble: he had agents in the Spanish police, the security service, the Ministry of the Interior, the General Staff, and every branch of the military. He had informants in high society and low, from the salons of Madrid to the docks of Cádiz. These spies never met one another and only ever made contact through Gómez-Beare himself. “He was invaluable,” said Hillgarth. “It was he who handled our special contacts. His loyalty and discretion are unequalled and the Spaniards, particularly the Spanish Navy, love him.”

The Germans, by contrast, did not love Don Gómez-Beare. Britain’s assistant naval attaché narrowly escaped being blown up by a car bomb during a clandestine visit to Lisbon. Madrid was a festering nest of espionage and counterespionage, and for four years a fierce war had raged between British spies and German spies in Spain, undeclared, unofficial, and unrelenting. Both sides deployed bribery and corruption on a lavish scale. Abwehr agents spied on their British counterparts, who responded in kind; the Spaniards spied on both sides, rather inefficiently. At first, the odds seemed stacked against the British. The Germans simply had too many advantages, with numerous “privileges and facilities (of course unofficially)” provided by willing Spanish collaborators. The Abwehr infiltrated all branches of the civil service, police, government, and even business. But with time, the contest leveled out, as Hillgarth and Gómez-Beare extended their web of informants through a combination of charm, bribery, and skulduggery. “Spain contained a large number of German agents and plenty of Spaniards in German pay,” wrote Hillgarth. “They had some ingenious ideas. We did our best to learn their plans, and to some extent succeeded.” In this febrile atmosphere, it was impossible to be sure who was spying for whom. “Madrid was full of spies,” wrote Hillgarth. “No one is watched all the time, but everyone is watched some of the time.”

And no one was watched more closely, or better at watching, than Don Gómez-Beare.

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by | 15 February 2026 · 12:18 am

Montagu vs. Montagu

From Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory, by Ben Macintyre (Crown, 2010), Kindle pp. 84-87:

Montagu and Cholmondeley were blasé about the danger of being found out by an enemy agent in Britain, for the simple reason that they did not believe there were any. “There was almost complete security,” wrote Montagu. “We were able to put over what we liked to the enemy.” True, of the several hundred enemy spies dropped, floated, or smuggled into Britain, all but one was picked up and arrested: the exception was found dead in a bunker after committing suicide.

…

Montagu would cycle home every evening, his briefcase full of secrets, complacent that he was “the only deceptioneer in daily contact with the whole of special intelligence” and that his secrets were perfectly safe. Yet there were numerous spies living in London from supposedly neutral countries happy to furnish information to the Axis powers. Ewen Montagu never knew it, but there was one spy operating under his nose, a man with whom he shared a taste for exotic cheese, a love of table tennis, and both parents.

Ivor Montagu was addicted to founding, and joining, different clubs. From the Cheese Eaters League and the English Table Tennis Association, he had graduated to the Association of Cine Technicians, the Zoological Society, Marylebone Cricket Club, the editorial board of Labour Monthly, the World Council of Peace, the Friends of the Soviet Union, Southampton United Football Club, the Society for Cultural Relations with Soviet Russia, and chairmanship of the Woolwich-Plumstead branch of the Anti-war Congress.

He had also joined a less public and even more exclusive club, as an agent for Soviet military intelligence.

In part to antagonize his patrician parents, Ivor Montagu had from an early age displayed a keen “enthusiasm for all things Russian” and a penchant for radical politics. In 1927, the twenty-three-year-old Ivor was contacted by Bob Stewart, a founding member of the British Communist Party and a recruiter of Soviet agents in Britain. Stewart told Ivor, “We have had a request from the Communist International for you to go at once to Moscow. How soon can you leave?” In Moscow, Ivor was feted and flattered: he played table tennis in the Comintern building with “the keenest players in Moscow,” went to the Bolshoi, and watched the revolutionary parade from a VIP stand in Red Square. Someone in the upper reaches of the Soviet state was taking good care of Ivor Montagu.

Back in Europe, Ivor’s film career blossomed, as did his interests in table tennis, small rodents, and Soviet movies. At the same time, his commitment to communism deepened. In 1929, he began to correspond with Leon Trotsky, the Bolshevik revolutionary expelled from the Communist Party and now living in exile on the Turkish island of Prinkipo.

…

The meeting with Trotsky marked a turning point. Ivor Montagu was attracted to this “fascinating and commanding personality” but “repelled by his self-admiration,” the raw ambition of the revolutionary in exile: “I felt I understood now why he was impossible in a party, that his personality swamped his judgement.” Ivor was not yet thirty, but he was already a party disciplinarian and a fully committed Stalinist. Trotsky knew that Ivor was a willing tool of the Soviet regime. In 1932, he wrote: “Ivor Montagu has, or had, some personal sympathy for me, but now he is even on that small scale paralysed by his adherence to the party.”

That adherence was now absolute and permanent: he gave speeches, wrote pamphlets, and made films in support of communism. The more covert, and more dangerous, manifestations of that party obedience remained secret for the rest of his life.

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by | 14 February 2026 · 8:26 am

Creating Secret Agents, 1943

From Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory, by Ben Macintyre (Crown, 2010), Kindle pp. 61-64:

MONTAGU AND CHOLMONDELEY had spent much of the previous three years nurturing, molding, and deploying spies who did not exist. The Twenty Committee and Section B1A of MI5 had turned the playing of double agents into an art form, but as the Double Cross System developed and expanded, more and more of the agents reporting back to Germany were purely fictional: Agent A (real) would notionally employ Agent B (unreal), who would in turn recruit other agents, C to Z (all equally imaginary). Juan Pujol García, Agent “Garbo,” the most famous double agent of them all, was eventually equipped with no fewer than twenty-seven subagents, each with a distinct character, friends, jobs, tastes, homes, and lovers. Garbo’s “active and well-distributed team of imaginary assistants” were a motley lot, including a Welsh Aryan supremacist, a communist, a Greek waiter, a wealthy Venezuelan student, a disaffected South African serviceman, and several crooks. In the words of John Masterman, the thriller-writing chairman of the Twenty Committee: “The one man band of Lisbon developed into an orchestra, and an orchestra which played a more and more ambitious programme.” Graham Greene, a wartime intelligence officer in West Africa, based his novel Our Man in Havana, about a spy who invents an entire network of bogus informants, on the Garbo story.

Masterman, writing after the war, declared that “for deception, ‘notional’ or imaginary agents were on the whole preferable” to living ones. Real agents tended to become truculent and demanding; they needed feeding, pampering, and paying. An imaginary agent, however, was infinitely pliable and willing to do the bidding of his German handlers at once and without question: “The Germans could seldom resist such a fly if it was accurately and skilfully cast,” wrote Masterman, who was also handy with a fly-fishing rod.

Maintaining a small army of fake people required concerted attention to detail. “How difficult it was,” wrote Montagu, “to remember the characteristics and life pattern of each one of a mass of completely non-existent notional sub-agents.” These imaginary individuals had to suffer all the vagaries of normal life, such as getting ill, celebrating birthdays, and running out of money. They had to remain perfectly consistent in their behavior, attitudes, and emotions. As Montagu put it, the imaginary agent “must never step out of character.” The network of fake agents enabled British intelligence to supply the Germans with a steady stream of untruths and half-truths, and it lulled the Abwehr into believing it had a large and efficient espionage network in Britain, when it had nothing of the sort.

Creating a personality to go with the corpse in the St. Pancras Morgue would require imaginative effort on an even greater scale. In his novel The Case of the Four Friends, Masterman’s sleuth, Ernest Brendel, observes that the key to detective work is anticipating the actions of the criminal: “To work out the crime before it is committed, to foresee how it will be arranged, and then to prevent it! That’s a triumph indeed.” With Masterman’s help, Montagu and Cholmondeley would now lay out the clues to a life that had never happened and frame a new death for a dead man.

The fictitious agents so far invented by the Double Cross team all spoke for themselves, or rather through others, in wireless messages and letters to their handlers, but they were never seen; in the case of Operation Mincemeat, the fraudulent individual could communicate only through the clothes on his back, the contents of his pockets, and, most important, the letters in his possession. He would carry official typed letters to convey the core deception, but also handwritten personal letters to put across his personality. “The more real he appeared, the more convincing the whole affair would be,” reflected Montagu, since “every little detail would be studied by the Germans.”

The information he carried would have to be credible, but also legible. “Would the ink of the manuscript letters, and the signatures on the others, not run so as to make the documents illegible?” Montagu wondered. Waterproof ink might be used, but that would “give the game away.” They turned to MI5’s scientists, and numerous tests were carried out by using different inks and typewriters and then immersing the letters in seawater for varying periods to test the effects. The results were encouraging: “Many inks on a freshly written letter will run at once if the surface is wetted. On the other hand, a lot of quite usual inks, if thoroughly dried, will stand a fair amount of wetting even if exposed directly to the water. When a document is inside an envelope, or inside a wallet which is itself inside a pocket, well dried inks of some quite normal types will often remain legible for a surprising length of time—quite long enough for our purpose.”

The precise form of the deception would be decided in time: first they needed to create a credible courier.

It is no accident that Montagu and Cholmondeley were both enthusiastic novel readers. The greatest writers of spy fiction have, in almost every case, worked in intelligence before turning to writing. W. Somerset Maugham, John Buchan, Ian Fleming, Graham Greene, John le Carré: all had experienced the world of espionage firsthand. For the task of the spy is not so very different from that of the novelist: to create an imaginary, credible world and then lure others into it by words and artifice.

As if constructing a character in a novel, Montagu and Cholmondeley, with the help of Joan Saunders in Section 17M, set about creating a personality with which to clothe their dead body. Hour after hour, in the Admiralty basement, they discussed and refined this imaginary person, his likes and dislikes, his habits and hobbies, his talents and weaknesses. In the evening, they repaired to the Gargoyle Club, a glamorous Soho dive of which Montagu was a member, to continue the odd process of creating a man from scratch. The project reflected all the possibilities and pitfalls of fiction: if they painted his personality too brightly or were inconsistent in the portrait, then the Germans would surely detect a hoax. But if the enemy could be made to believe in this British officer, then they were that much more likely to credit the documents he carried. Eventually, they came to believe in him themselves. “We talked about him until we did feel that he was an old friend,” wrote Montagu. “He became completely real to us.” They gave him a middle name, a nicotine habit, and a place of birth. They gave him a hometown, a rank, a regiment, and a love of fishing. He would be furnished with a watch, a bank manager, a solicitor, and cuff links. They gave him all the things that Glyndwr Michael had lacked in his luckless life, including a supportive family, money, friends, and love.

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by | 13 February 2026 · 7:07 pm

Bentley Purchase, Royal Coroner, 1943

From Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory, by Ben Macintyre (Crown, 2010), Kindle pp. 44-47:

UNDER ENGLISH LAW, the coroner, a post dating back to the eleventh century, is the government official responsible for investigating deaths, particularly those that occur under unusual circumstances, and determining their causes. When a death is unexpected, violent, or unnatural, the coroner is responsible for deciding whether to hold a postmortem and, if necessary, an inquest. Bentley Purchase was a friend and colleague of Spilsbury in the death business, but Purchase was as cheery as Sir Bernard was grim. Indeed, for a man who spent his life with the dead, the coroner was the life and soul of every occasion. He found death not only fascinating but extremely funny, which, of course, it is. No form of violent or mysterious mortality surprised or upset him. “A depressing job?” he once said. “Far from it. I can’t imagine it getting me down.” He would offer slightly damp chocolates to guests in his private chambers and joke: “They were found in Auntie’s bag when she was fished out of the Round Pond at Hampstead last night.” A farmer by birth, Purchase was “rugged in appearance and character,” with “an impish sense of humour” and a finely calibrated sense of the ridiculous: he loved Gilbert and Sullivan operas, toy trains, boiled eggs, and his model piggery in Ipswich. He never wore a hat and laughed loudly and often.

Montagu knew Purchase as “an old friend from my barrister days” and dropped him a note asking if they might meet to discuss a confidential matter. Purchase replied with directions to the St. Pancras Coroner’s Court and a typically jovial postscript: “An alternative means of getting here is, of course, to get run over.”

Purchase had fought in the First World War as a doctor attached to the field artillery, winning the Military Cross for “conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty” and fighting on until 1918, when a shell splinter removed most of his left hand. By the time war broke out again, he was nearly fifty, too old to wear a uniform but “aching to get into the war.” Indeed, he had already demonstrated a willingness to help the intelligence services and, if necessary, “distort the truth in the service of security.” When an Abwehr spy named William Rolph killed himself by putting his head in a gas oven in 1940, Purchase obliged with a verdict of “heart attack.” In the same month that he received Montagu’s note, Purchase had been called in to deliberate on the case of Paul Manoel, an agent of the Free French Intelligence Service who had been found hanging in a London basement following interrogation as a suspected enemy agent. Purchase’s inquest was “cursory in the extreme.”

The coroner was initially dubious when Montagu explained that he needed to find a male corpse for “a warlike operation” but “did not wish to disclose why a body was needed.”

“You can’t get bodies just for the asking, you know,” Purchase told him, grinning. “I should think bodies are the only commodities not in short supply at the moment [but] even with bodies all over the place, each one has to be accounted for.”

Montagu would say only that the scheme required a fresh cadaver that might appear to have drowned or died in an air accident. The matter, he added gravely, was “of national importance.”

Still Purchase hesitated, pointing out that if word got out that the legal system for disposing of the dead was being circumvented, “public confidence in coroners of the country would be shaken.”

“At what level has this scheme been given approval?” the coroner asked.

Montagu paused before replying, not entirely truthfully: “The prime minister’s.”

That was enough for Bentley Purchase, whose “well developed sense of comedy” was now thoroughly aroused. Chortling, he explained that, as a coroner, he had “absolute discretion” over the paperwork and that in certain circumstances a death could be concealed, and a body obtained, without getting official permission from anyone. “A coroner,” he explained, “could, in fact, always get rid of a corpse by a certificate that it was going to be buried outside the country—it would then be assumed that a relative was taking it home (i.e. to Ireland) for burial and the coroner could then do what he liked with it without let, hindrance or trace.” Bodies were pouring into London morgues at an unprecedented rate: in the previous year Purchase had dealt with 1,855 cases and held inquests into 726 sudden deaths. Many of the bodies “remained unidentified and were in the end buried as unknowns.” One of these would surely fit the bill. The St. Pancras mortuary was attached to the coroner’s court, so Purchase offered to give Montagu a tour of the bodies currently in cold storage. “After one or two possible corpses had been inspected and for various reasons rejected,” the two men shook hands and parted, with Purchase promising to keep a lookout for a suitable candidate.

The St. Pancras mortuary was without doubt the most unpleasant place Montagu had ever been; but then, his had been a life almost entirely free of unpleasant places and upsetting sights.

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by | 12 February 2026 · 11:52 pm

Royal Navy Intel Dept., 1943

From Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory, by Ben Macintyre (Crown, 2010), Kindle pp. 29-31:

At thirty-eight, Ewen [Montagu] was too old for active service, but he had already volunteered for the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. With the outbreak of war, he was commissioned as lieutenant (acting lieutenant commander) and swiftly came to the attention of Admiral John Godfrey, the head of Naval Intelligence. “It is quite useless, and in fact dangerous to employ people of medium intelligence,” wrote Godfrey. “Only men with first class brains should be allowed to touch this stuff. If the right sort of people can’t be found, better keep out altogether.” In Montagu he knew he had the right sort of person.

Godfrey’s Naval Intelligence Department was an eclectic and unconventional body. In addition to Ian Fleming, his personal assistant, Godfrey employed “two stockbrokers, a schoolmaster, a journalist, a collector of books on original thought, an Oxford classical don, a barrister’s clerk, an insurance agent, two regular naval officers and several women assistants and typists.” This heterogeneous crew was crammed into Room 39, the Admiralty, which was permanently wreathed in tobacco smoke and frequently echoed with the sounds of Admiral Godfrey shouting and swearing. Fleming awarded Godfrey the heavily ironic nickname “Uncle John,” for seldom has there been a less avuncular boss. “The permanent inhabitants who finally settled in this cave,” he wrote, “were people of very different temperaments, ambitions, social status and home life, all with their particular irritabilities, hopes, fears, anguishes, loves, hates, animosities and blank spots.” Any and every item of intelligence relevant to the war at sea passed through Room 39, and though the atmosphere inside was often tense, Godfrey’s team “worked like ants, and their combined output was prodigious.” The ants under Godfrey were responsible not merely for gathering and disseminating secret intelligence but for running agents and double agents, as well as developing deception and counterespionage operations.

Godfrey had identified Montagu as a natural for this sort for work, and he was swiftly promoted. Soon, he not only represented the Naval Intelligence Department on most of the important intelligence bodies, including the Twenty Committee, but ran his own subsection of the department: the top secret Section 17M (for Montagu). Housed in Room 13, a low-ceilinged cavern twenty feet square, Section 17M was responsible for dealing with all “special intelligence” relating to naval matters, principally the “Ultra” intercepts, the enemy communications deciphered by the cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park following the breaking of the German cipher machine Enigma. In the early days of 17M, the Ultra signals came in dribbles, but gradually the volume of secret information swelled to a torrent, with more than two hundred messages arriving every day, some a few words long but others covering pages. The work of understanding, collating, and disseminating this huge volume of information was like “learning a new language,” according to Montagu, whose task it was to decide which items of intelligence should pass to other intelligence agencies and which merited inclusion in the Special Intelligence Summaries, “the cream of all intelligence,” while coordinating with MI5, Bletchley Park, the intelligence departments of the other services, and the prime minister. Montagu became fluent at reading this traffic, which, even after decoding, could be impossibly opaque. “The Germans have a passion for cross-references and for abbreviations, and they have an even greater passion (only equalled by their ineptitude in practice) for the use of code-names.”

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