The Man Who Never Was

Tonight's Mudville Movie: The Man Who Never Was - a real life espionage drama from World War Two.

In 1942, Operation Torch was imminent, and victory in the North African Campaign was expected. Allied planners considered the next step in the war. They decided to continue attacks in the Mediterranean theatre. Control of Sicily would open the Mediterranean to Allied shipping and allow invasion of continental Europe, making Sicily an obvious strategic objective. German planners saw this too, of course. (Winston Churchill commented "Everyone but a bloody fool would know that it's Sicily.") Furthermore, there would be a massive Allied buildup for the invasion (code-named Operation Husky) that would surely be detected. The Germans would know that some large attack was coming. But if the Allies could deceive the Germans about where that attack was going, the Germans might disperse or divert some significant part of their forces, which would help the invasion succeed.

Several months before, Flight Lt. Charles Cholmondeley of Section B1(a) of MI5[1], suggested dropping a dead man attached to a badly-opened parachute in France with a radio set for the Germans to find. The idea was for the Germans to think that the Allies did not know the set was captured, and pretend to be Allied agents operating it, thus allowing the Allies to feed them misinformation. This was dismissed as unworkable; however the idea was taken up later by the Twenty Committee, the small inter-service, inter-departmental intelligence team in charge of double agents. Cholmondeley was on the Twenty Committee, as was Lt. Cmdr. Ewen Montagu, a Royal Navy intelligence officer.

Montagu and Cholmondeley developed Cholmondeley's idea into a workable plan...

And a few copies of the book (written by Ewen Montagu, one of the men who developed the plot) are still available at Amazon.