WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

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It's not often that you see a gravestone with
a correction on it.

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But then, it's not often that you find a story
as strange as this one.

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I'm just outside Huelva, in southern Spain,

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and a little distance away is the grave of
the Man Who Never Was.

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In 1943, as the Second World War raged on,

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the body of Major William Martin, of the British
Royal Marines,

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was discovered floating off the coast here.

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Chained to him was a briefcase, and in it:
a letter with details about

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the Allied armies' plans to attack Greece
across the Mediterranean Sea.

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It wasn't 'here are all our secret war plans',

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but it was close; it was a friendly letter
between generals

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that gave away all the necessary details.

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British Intelligence raced to recover the
briefcase

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before German spies could look through it,

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but they were too late.

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Yes, Britain got its documents back:

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but not before a copy of them was on its way
to Hitler,

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who then moved huge numbers of troops, tanks
and boats to Greece,

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ready to repel the British attack.

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Hitler was probably quite surprised, then,

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when the Allies attacked Sicily,

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off the southern coast of Italy, and not Greece.

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And won, with a fraction of the losses that
they could have suffered.

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There never was any Major William Martin.

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He was fictional.

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But there was a man called Glyndwr Michael.

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He was a Welshman in London in World War 2,

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homeless, penniless, friendless.

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He died on the streets after eating poison;

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perhaps deliberately, perhaps by desperately
eating food that was left out for rats.

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We'll never know.

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According to official records,

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his body was "removed out of England", and
well, that's true:

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his body was held in a mortuary for a while,

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then dressed in the correct uniform and given
painstakingly forged personal documents:

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a receipt for a wedding ring, a photo and
love letter from a fiancée,

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a bus ticket, some keys, some other paperwork.

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Then the body was put onboard a submarine
which sailed to the coast of Spain.

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And quietly, on a dark night in April 1943,

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the boat's crew let the body drift with the
currents.

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The plan was called, rather gruesomely, Operation
Mincemeat.

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British Intelligence had chosen their target
well.

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Spain had plenty of German spies,

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and the Spanish head of intelligence was the
sort of man

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who would claim the discovery as his own,

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and then travel to Berlin to deliver copies
personally,

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and perhaps even embellish the story of how
it was found

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to make himself look better and the tip a
bit seem more credible.

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Which he did.

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And of course, all the desperate British efforts
to recover the documents were a sham.

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And by 1943, the team at Bletchley Park had
cracked the Enigma cypher

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and were listening to German communications:

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less than a month after Glyndwr's body had
been released,

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the codebreakers intercepted a signal that
showed that the scheme had worked perfectly.

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Britain took Sicily, used it as a beachhead
to get to Italy,

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and German war plans were in tatters.

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Major Martin, by then, had been buried with
full military honours and an appropriate gravestone.

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The truth was still top secret.

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It wasn't until decades later that his real
identity was revealed:

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and so the grave was corrected.

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Glyndwr Michael, served as Major William Martin.

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Rest in peace.