Dead body of "Major"

This is a memoir experienced and written by Ivan Montagu, a British secret agent during World War II.

In the fall of 1943, as the Allied advance into North Africa was inching toward victory, a tentative decision had been made to attack Sicily in Italy next. The Germans were bound to estimate that Sicily would be the next target. What could be done to change the Germans' judgment and lure them into a trap so that they could gather their forces?

A member of the British naval spy team came up with an idea. Beforehand, the Germans already knew that our officers were constantly flying in planes along the Spanish coast around North Africa. Why not arrange for a corpse, with specially concocted papers on him, to drift to the coast of Spain and look as if he had died in a plane crash overboard? If this corpse floats to the coast, you can bet that the documents will fall into the hands of German secret service agents.

But a dead man cannot breathe, and if he is put in the sea, his lungs will be empty - so the autopsy will confirm that the body is already dead when it falls into the sea. Thus, the person who found the dead body would suspect that this was a deliberately arranged strategy.

The British naval spy team quietly worked within the military medical unit, hoping to get a body whose cause of death would be the same as that of drowning. Eventually, a report was received that a man had just died of pneumonia, a death that left fluid in the lungs. Some of the relatives of this deceased were still alive. We got their approval without giving details - on the condition that the real name of the corpse would remain secret forever. From this time on, the dead man became "Major William Martin, Royal Marine", and his body was immediately put into cold storage.

The document was concocted to deceive the enemy and had to be signed by the junior leader. I arranged for a letter to be written by the Deputy Chief of Staff of the Imperial Staff Headquarters to General Alexander, who had gone to Africa in advance to command the 18th Integral Army. The letter was a non-announced document explaining why General Alexander did not get everything he needed from the staff headquarters as he had hoped. One can infer from this that the target we are planning to attack in the Western Mediterranean is not Sicily.

In this letter, two false targets were deliberately created as possible targets for an Allied attack: one was Greece, and the other did not specify a specific location, but only referred to a place in the Western Mediterranean in general. The letter also made it clear that we wanted to make the Germans believe that we were going to land in Sicily - and that we were using Sicily as a "cover" for our real target. Therefore, if the Germans believed this, then when any real news of the attack on Sicily was leaked to them, they would think that it was a part of our attempt.

In addition, it was decided that "Major Martin" would carry a communiqué from Lord Louis Mountbatten to Andrew Cunningham, Commander of the Royal Mediterranean Fleet and Marine Marshal. The communiqué explained Major Martin's mission and concluded: "I think you will find that 'Martin' is just the man you need. Please have him come back to me as soon as the attack is over. He can take a little sardine with him - they are rationed here!" I think this rather elaborate sardine joke would have appealed to the Germans - meant to indicate that Sardinia would be a target for attack.

The next problem was the identity card of "Major Martin". Any photograph taken of the dead man would have been a dead portrait with nothing to show for it. Then one day, in the middle of a meeting, I suddenly realized that the man sitting across the table was simply the reincarnation of "Major Martin" and we convinced him to take a picture.

Now we had to give the corpse some kind of personality. We identified "Martin" as a landing craft specialist, which is exactly why he flew to North Africa. He was a bit of a waster, and in his pocket was a letter from the Bank of Rauch dated April 14, 1943, asking him to pay back the 80 pounds he had overdrawn.

Every young officer has an affair, and "Major Martin" recently met a charming girl named Pam. He carried a picture of her and two letters in his wallet. The two letters were constantly folded and opened, making it look as if they had been read over and over again. There is a high probability that he overdrew the bank because of the engagement. Because in his pocket there was another bill for £50 to buy an engagement ring. Of course, "Martin" must also carry some daily personal items and odds and ends, such as engraved bracelets, watches, cigarettes, used bus tickets, some scraps of paper, keys, etc. We also decided to arrange a detail: he likely ended up spending the night in London with his fiancée at the theater. Therefore, before leaving by submarine on April 19, we also put two tickets for a play on April 22, "The New Airs", half torn into his pocket.

We decided to leave the body in the waters outside a small port called Huelva, near the Portuguese border. When the Spaniards found the body, they were bound to hand it over to the British vice-consul to bury it. In the meantime, we felt certain that the local German intelligence agents would surely get a copy of the document on the dead body.

Fortunately, the submarine Angel, commanded by Seaman Captain Ern E. Jowell, was heading for Malta on the day we had hoped. Jowell had brought General Mark Clark in and out of North Africa frequently and secretly in 1942 before the Allies landed there.

Now we just had to wait for Prime Minister Churchill's final approval. We had no choice but to draw his attention to the fact that if the Germans saw through our strategy, they would certainly make Sicily an Allied target for attack. Churchill agreed and informed General Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, who had been in command of the attack on Sicily.

"The submarine Angel set sail at 6 p.m. on April 19, 1943. On the deck lay "Major William Martin" in a six-foot metal container filled with ice. For 10 days, the Angel only surfaced at night, and on April 30, the submarine was only 1,600 yards from Werf, having arrived on time and undetected by anyone. At 4:30 a.m., at the start of the war, the metal container was raised high and Martin slid out of it. Jowell pumped air into the major's life jacket. Four young officers took off their hats and raised their heads in salute as the commander read the funeral service. Then, with a gentle push, Major Martin was off to fight. Half a mile away, Jowell lowered a rubber raft from our front with only a lead paddleboard on it, to give the illusion of rushed time.

On the morning of April 30, 1943, a Spanish fisherman found the body near the shore. The local authorities later seized it, examined it, and concluded that it was "suffocated by the sinking sea. The British vice-consul was informed in time and on May 2, 1943, Major Martin was buried with military honors.

Up until then, everything was in good condition. The body was returned to us, but we were not informed about the documents, and on May 4 we received a "most urgent and confidential" signal stating that we had been informed that Major William Martin was carrying documents, some of which was "to the point of being essential and confidential" and should be forwarded to a neutral party. "and that a formal request should be made to the neutral Spanish Government for the return of these documents.

In the meantime, the German agent at Werfar did not disappoint us. He had learned of the existence of some of the letters and the distinguished identity of the recipients and senders. From what happened later, there is no doubt that he had reported all this to his superiors. It was only on May 13 that the Chief of the General Staff of the Spanish Navy handed over the documents to our military attaché and informed him that "everything was intact."

After that, we asked for a monument to be placed on the grave of the deceased, which is still there (Pam also laid a wreath). Eventually, we added the name of "Major Martin" to the list of war casualties announced in The Times of London on June 4, 1943.

The victorious Allied landings in Sicily in July were effective proof of our strategic success. But even stronger evidence was the enemy documents captured afterward. One day after World War II, a British officer in charge of clearing captured German naval archives reported in a discomfited voice to the Director of Royal Marine Intelligence that a very junior Army officer had recovered some highly classified correspondence through irregular channels, and that it had all fallen into German hands.

It was clear that these highly classified letters were the documents that "Major Martin" was carrying. In the German archives, there are reproduced photos of these letters and translated German translations and reports of intelligence agencies. One of the files was dedicated to Admiral Dunnitz of the German Navy. Fourteen days after the body floated to the Spanish coast, the war log of the German naval staff recorded that the army staff had concluded that "the documents were genuine" and that they judged that the main target of the Allied attack was not Sicily but the island of Pontine and that there would be a coordinated landing in Greece.

The German High Command moved a complete panzer division from France to the Peloponnese in Greece, controlling access to the beaches of Cape Arrakos and Cape Kalamata. These two positions were mentioned in the documents carried by "Martin". This major movement made it impossible for the division to fight for some time. The High Command also ordered the mining of the Greek coast, the deployment of coastal artillery batteries, the preparation of bases for R-I boats (German motor torpedo boats), and the creation of command stations and sea patrols. The Germans moved a fleet of Sicilian R-I boats to Greece in June.

Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, commander of the German Western Front, signed an order in the name of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces to "support the island of Predynia". Thus a large armored force was moved to Corsica, France, and the defense of the northern tip of Sicily was reinforced (in reality the Allies did not land) to prevent "a holding attack in the event of an Allied advance on Sardinia.

Even after the Allies had attacked Sicily, the German High Command asked the troops to be especially wary of Allied convoys attacking Corsica and Sardinia in the Straits of Gibraltar. In some documents, it was also mentioned some complaints that the transfer of the R-boat fleet to Greece had left a fatal gap in the defense of Sicily.

"The success of Major Martin's "mission" is also confirmed by the words of German Field Marshal Rommel, who revealed in his private correspondence that when the Allies invaded Sicily, the German defense was led down an evil path - "This was the result of the discovery of the floating bodies of diplomatic couriers on the Spanish coast."

Hitler must have seen these documents, too. Admiral Dönitz of the Marine Division wrote in his diary, "The Führer disapproves ...... of the fact that the most likely place for an Allied advance is Sicily. He believed that the British instructions of which the Germans had been informed confirmed that the main target of the Allied attack was the island of Pulau Sardinia and the Peloponnese."