The corpse that fooled Hitler had a name: Operation Mincemeat

Glyndwr Michael never joined the Royal Marines, but he is buried as one. In 1943 British intelligence dressed a dead homeless man from the Welsh coalfield as a Royal Marines officer, floated him onto a Spanish beach with a briefcase of forged letters, and let the Germans read them. The letters said Greece and Sardinia; the Allies landed in Sicily. This is the story told from the man outward: who he was, how the body was found and used, how "Major Martin" was built document by document, the night off Huelva, what Berlin did with the letters and how much that is disputed, and how the famous version came from one man's book, with the dead man's name left out for more than fifty years. Drawn with our own tools. Drawings are ours. Sources are listed below. Chapters 0:00 A grave in Spain with the wrong name on it 0:31 Part 1: A suggestion, not a very nice one 2:32 Part 2: The body 4:12 Part 3: Building a man 6:33 Part 4: The sea off Huelva 8:55 Part 5: What Berlin believed 11:07 Part 6: Two names on a stone Sources - Ben Macintyre, Operation Mincemeat (2010), and Denis Smyth, Deathly Deception (2010), through the works that cite them - Michael Howard, Strategic Deception in the Second World War (1990) - Ewen Montagu, The Man Who Never Was (1953) and Beyond Top Secret U (1977), through the works that cite them - The National Archives files opened in the 1990s; Roger Morgan's identification (1996) - The Imperial War Museum's documents and postagrams; the Commonwealth War Graves Commission record for Huelva The full list of claims and references for this episode is kept with the script (01_scripts/mincemeat/sources.md). Music: "Soundbed" by Blue Saga, licensed through Epidemic Sound; effects licensed through Epidemic Sound.