Operation Mincemeat

Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory by Ben MacIntyre

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I love it when nonfiction reads better than fiction. Who could make this up? Borrowed from a little-known mystery story, British spies take a body and plant false documentation on it to convince the Germans they are attacking Sardinia instead of Sicily. It's amazing the amount of work it takes to make the documents and the story believeable. It's amazing how the Germans retrieved the information, and how the British were able to tell they had opened it--(ah! the importance of an eyelash!). It's amazing the group of creative, smart people that were employed in espionage--Ian Flemming, le Carre,--and the characters--guys who went undercover as women, the brother of the inventor of ping-pong, a guy that hunted locusts in Africa after the war. It's really a fascinating story and made even more readable by MacIntyre's telling--it reads like the best of novels.



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