The corpse that fooled the Nazis: William Maryngton and Operation Mincemeat

Talk about ‘being more useful dead than alive’. It seems this is William Maryngton’s fate. Having hoped to fight for his country all his life – and having been unable to do so because he was too young to go to the trenches before the end of the First World War and too old to be on the front line in the Second – it is, in fact, as a corpse that he will succeed in serving it, his remains being used by the British intelligence services to carry out the most famous misdirection of the Axis forces.

Duff Cooper, First Lord of the Admiralty under Neville Chamberlain (a post from which he resigned in protest against the Munich Agreement), Minister of Information from May 1940 to July 1941, and biographer of Talleyrand and Field Marshal Haig, had heard of Operation Mincemeat, literally ‘minced meat’, in 1943, from Churchill himself, “in one of his moments of post-prandial expansiveness”. Conceived from an idea by the future creator of James Bond, Ian Fleming – at the time a naval commander highly regarded by the Prime Minister – and developed by Ewen Montagu and Charles Cholmondeley, the operation – reconstructed years ago by the historian and journalist Ben Macintyre in a successful book, from which John Madden adapted a decent film in 2021, and more recently brought to the stage in a musical written and performed by the SpitLip collective (currently at the Fortune Theatre, in London’s West End) – involved misleading the Germans by dumping, not too far off the coast of Franco’s Spain – which was not at war at the time but aligned with the Axis powers – a corpse dressed in a Royal Marines uniform, carrying top-secret documents stating that the Allied landings would take place not in Sicily, where they actually occurred, but in Sardinia and Greece.

In 1950, Cooper, with a skilful narrative touch, transformed the historical event into his only novel, Operation Heartbreak (now republished by AGO Editions, in Elena Canino’s translation, which had previously appeared in 1951 through Casini Editions), replacing the homeless man Glyndwr Michael – whose body was actually used to throw investigators off the trail – with the character of William Maryngton: a man ‘not particularly intelligent’ and lacking any experience other than military service, but of ‘good character’ and with ‘a serene smile that would spontaneously appear on his face’. These qualities, however, were not enough to win the hearts of women, and in particular that of the fickle and capricious Felicity Osborne, who would also play a part in the story: William’s body, once discovered by the Spanish, would be identified by the Nazis through a belated love letter of his.

Just as in times of war, so too in matters of the heart, William seems destined to be caught off guard by events that are always already behind him. A condition that imbues his life story with a gentle, even sweet melancholy, prompting us to reflect on how in our lives there is not a single time, but rather – as Montale’s poem Tempo e tempi puts it – “many ribbons / that slide in parallel / often in opposite directions and rarely / intersect”, and it is then that we find ourselves “saying goodbye, not see you later”. A novel of missed opportunities, Operation Heartbreak combines, in a particularly apt blend, the spy story, the romantic tale and a certain historical epic—dear to the English—whilst never failing to suggest, with elegant grace, that time precedes us, accompanies us, overtakes us, so that perhaps only by being late can we tie it up – just as one ties a knot in a rope to shorten it, or ties the fabric of a half-empty sack round itself to close it – and thus push it towards its interior, towards its end.