In the spring of 1943, on the eve of the Allied invasion of Sicily, British intelligence staged one of the most audacious deceptions of the Second World War. Hoping to convince Adolf Hitler and German military leadership that the planned target was the Balkans, not Sicily, the British created a fictitious character who would carry false invasion plans intended to fall into German hands. The British created an entire persona—an officer in the Royal Marines, complete with a full biography, official papers, and pictures of a “sweetheart”—and arranged for a corpse to be dumped off the coast of Spain. Documents describing a purported Allied offensive in the Balkans filled a briefcase chained to the corpse’s wrist. A Spanish fisherman recovered the body of “William Martin” and turned it over to German intelligence, who were left to make sense of a find that seemed almost too good to be true. Hitler, already inclined to believe that the Allies were planning to strike in Greece, moved reinforcements to the Balkans rather than to Sicily.
The story of this elaborate wartime ruse has been the subject of the 1953 book The Man Who Never Was, two big-budget films, and a West End musical now running on Broadway. Christopher Hamner, associate professor of history at George Mason University, examines the background, planning, and execution of this daring plan using original documents from 1943. He also explores some other examples of World War II intelligence and counterintelligence, including the American “Ghost Army” and the British ULTRA decryption program.
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