Operation Mincemeat

2022 - 5 - 12

Post cover — Image courtesy of "Den of Geek"

Operation Mincemeat: The Real WW2 History of Netflix Spy Movie (Den of Geek)

We examine with director John Madden the real World War II history that inspired Netflix's Operation Mincemeat.

As with the routes taken by the film’s many double and triple agents, this is a path shrouded in shadow and ambiguity. Otherwise, in the grander scheme of Operation Mincemeat, their story is done after the body of “William Martin” is jettisoned out of a submarine and washes up on a Spanish beach. It’s true that Hitler was intensely paranoid at that point because the war machine had been completely built on materials he was getting from the Balkans, and obviously having no idea how long that conflict was going to last, that was a very, very essential factor to him. It’s true [the British] were pushing on an open door with the idea that the attack was going to come through Greece and Sardinia. And the cover plan of that supposed attack was Sicily, which is a lovely inversion. “Once you’re into this part of the story, there are a number of theories, and you’ll find different ones,” says Madden. But what is inarguable is varying heads of German military intelligence and the army at large participated in the July 20, 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler’s life. That was something that was not known and didn’t become clear until [after the war]. Unsurprisingly, it was not in the first account of the story!” Inevitably, if you’re going to follow the story where it goes, then you’re going to somehow end up in the Abwehr, and that’s obviously a very difficult shape for the story.” Von Witzleben was Hitler’s most trusted confidant on military matters, according to Madden, “and for his betrayal he was hung on a meat hook and left to die in that state for three days or something like that. Indeed, Ivor Goldsmid Samuel Montagu was born the younger brother to Ewen and was a well-known British filmmaker, critic, and, strangely enough, ping-pong player after his time at Cambridge. All of which—including the then-foreign game of ping-pong—made him a person of interest to MI5 following his outspoken sympathies for communism in the 1930s. “[Montagu] invented a complete fiction of how they arrived at the body,” Madden says of the 1956 film. Says Madden, “When Ben came to approach the material, he benefited from the fact that in the mid-1990s, the Mincemeat files alongside dozens of others from wartime intelligence were declassified… Says Madden, “The interesting breakthrough for [screenwriter Michelle Ashford] and I was the idea of framing the story around a novel Fleming had not yet written.

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But Cerruti was able to convince Admiral Moreno to hand over the documents to Kühlenthal. The letter had reached the Germans, and the briefcase was handed to the British Embassy. The team waited for news as the British troupe was on their way to Sicily. While intelligence indicated that the Germans were moving toward Greece and did buy into their story, they were still not entirely convinced, especially after the Teddy incident. While the rest of the team rejoiced in the fact that their plan had worked, Jean had to face an unexpected revelation. Jean Leslie married a soldier who was among the first wave of the Sicilian invasion, a year after the war. Adolf Clauss, the German agent and member of Abwehr, requested the Spanish officials for the documents, but it was too late since the briefcase had already traveled to Madrid. After Clauss failed to procure it, the senior agent of the Abwehr, Karl-Erich Kühlenthal, made attempts to get hold of the letter; they were convinced that it had information that would expose the British invasion plan. The body was submerged on April 29th and was recovered by the Spanish fisherman on April 30th. Along with that, they also had to keep in mind to keep the letter from Sir Nye in a briefcase to attract more attention. It was this factor that brought Jean closer to the case and Ewen. Along with the picture, they wrote a love letter that could be used as a part of the pocket litter. While there was no dearth of bodies, it was important to find one that was unclaimed. The corpse was the primary element that they had to find to execute the operation. His wife was not in favor of this separation, but he had no other way to deal with the crisis. They were half Jewish, and he knew that if they lost the war, his family would have to face the consequences.

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I mean, it's not relevant to us at all, as the filmmakers, but of course, it's of interest to other people, I realize that. I'd always felt Colin Firth was the perfect actor to play Montagu but was held up for a while because Colin is technically older than Montagu was at the time of the film. Actually, that's kind of irrelevant because a man of 41, which is what Montagu was at the time, looked more like 61 at that point." "I think it was probably pointed out to me by Colin's agent," says the filmmaker. I shot the script around to him, and he came back very, very quickly, like the day after he'd read it, and that was a slam dunk." Then it wasn't set in stone, and suddenly, it opened up.

Movie Review: Operation Mincemeat | Pittsburgh Magazine (Pittsburgh Magazine)

This handsome but dull film isn't nearly as fascinating as the true story on which it's based.

That’s the one that the Brits went with, oddly enough, and a recently deceased Briton was conscripted to serve as the decoy. These men and (very infrequently) women will discuss, with stiff-upper-lip stoicism, how the fate of the world is in their hands. More often, however, slightly less good directors will choose to explore the men and (rarely) women behind the war — generals, politicians, spies and overwhelmed government functionaries.

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"And so I began to look into the MI5 files, and they really are the most extraordinary cornucopia of detail because they’re written by and for people who never expected them to be made public. The British army then released the body on the Southern coast of Spain, and it was discovered by fisherman. On the dead body were documents for the Nazis to find, which suggested there was an invasion of Greece and Sardinia.

'Operation Mincemeat' true story explained: Fact vs. fiction (Los Angeles Times)

The Netflix drama 'Operation Mincemeat,' starring Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen, is based on the unbelievable true story of a macabre espionage mission.

“The idea of planting a false story with the enemy is as old as war — that goes back to the Trojan Horse,” Macintyre adds. “[It was important] to really try and find in the movie the messiness of war,” Ashford notes. It was that meta aspect of the story that most attracted Madden. “They took a fictional idea and tried their very best to make it into an idea that appeared to be absolutely real,” the director adds. For Madden, it was useful to have these emotional, human undercurrents in the film because it might be easy to get bogged down in technical detail. But it wasn’t until 1996 that Michael’s true identity was revealed, and an inscription was added to his tombstone in 1998. I loved that part of the story because I found it complicated and poignant and curious. The sister showing up was a fictionalized element of the story. “The story of Operation Mincemeat is true,” explains Macintyre, who was involved in the process of making the film. “One of the things that Fleming did was to draw up, with Godfrey, a memo called the Trout Memo, [which is] now quite famous in intelligence studies. So that element of [the story] has been given a life that we’ll never really know how true it was to life. According to Ashford, it is true that Montagu and Leslie wrote each other a series of letters as fictitious characters and they did sometimes go out. I love the idea that it comes from a novel and it’s picked up by another novelist.”