Speaker 1: Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
Speaker 1: back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
Speaker 1: so much for tuning in. We have a very special
Speaker 1: episode today, and who better to produce that than our
Speaker 1: number one super producer, Mr Max Williams. Uh yeah, nol
Speaker 1: Uh you're no, I'm Ben and uh you you and
Speaker 1: I recently watched the film on Netflix called Operation Mincemeat. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I I initially thought it was going to be some
Speaker 1: sort of British baking kind of show situation, but it
Speaker 1: turns out it was British. But there's very little baking,
Speaker 1: precious little baking in Operation mince Meat. But you know
Speaker 1: what mince meat is, Yeah, mince meat is a well
Speaker 1: you know me, man, I'm a walking garbage can when
Speaker 1: it comes to food. I eat all sorts of stuff. Basically,
Speaker 1: it's like, it's weird to call it meat. It always
Speaker 1: has been to me because it's suet. But then a
Speaker 1: lot of dried fruit and uh spices, and I think
Speaker 1: they distill some spirits of some sort, some kind of
Speaker 1: boozy thing that cooks down and doesn't have a lot
Speaker 1: of alcohol in it, do the cooking process, and then
Speaker 1: you put it in like a pastry, Sue, isn't that
Speaker 1: as like beef juice, like like like beef slime? Basically,
Speaker 1: uh yeah, it's fat, pretty sure, And suet doesn't always
Speaker 1: have to be beef. It can come from like lamb
Speaker 1: as well. It's it's specifically I thought someone checked me
Speaker 1: on this. I thought was kind of fat around the
Speaker 1: loyal and the kidneys of the anoma. It's not that
Speaker 1: far off from the consistency of aspec. You've ever had
Speaker 1: any weird gelatinous seventies kind of dishes with things preserved
Speaker 1: in jelly or whatever aspect is? Uh? You know, there
Speaker 1: are some really good if you get like I fear
Speaker 1: into the stuff, which I know it's controversial. There's different
Speaker 1: ways to make it that are more humane than goose pette.
Speaker 1: But there are different types of pette that sometimes we'll
Speaker 1: have a layer of like a ginger kind of like
Speaker 1: fruited aspect on top and beef. So it is not
Speaker 1: too far from that. But we're not talking about the
Speaker 1: actual dish, MINS mean, which would be usually served in
Speaker 1: a pie crust of some kind of mince meat pie.
Speaker 1: We are, in fact talking about an operation carried out
Speaker 1: by British intelligence that may well have been one of
Speaker 1: the prime movers in swinging the tide of World War two. Yeah,
Speaker 1: absolutely correct, and funny story they came up with the
Speaker 1: name because British intelligence at the time had kind of
Speaker 1: this list of common name aims that you would pull from.
Speaker 1: That was really interesting to me, the idea that maybe
Speaker 1: there were a bunch of guys kind of brainstorming in
Speaker 1: a room and they said, Okay, where are we gonna
Speaker 1: call this next one? And someone said, you know, maybe
Speaker 1: they skipped lunch, and someone's like, I don't call it
Speaker 1: mince meat, you know, but they did apparently have a
Speaker 1: list of approved names. You're right. No, this was a big,
Speaker 1: big deal and it happened in utter secrecy. So we
Speaker 1: want to talk a little bit today about the real
Speaker 1: life events that informed the film you can see on
Speaker 1: Netflix today. This operation was a result of intelligence agencies
Speaker 1: always trying to fake each other out. So the British
Speaker 1: invented a ghoulishly creative way of delivering fake intel in Spain,
Speaker 1: which was neutral at this time in nine and they
Speaker 1: wanted it to end up with the German forces, and
Speaker 1: you know, always thinking, man, we're channeling a bit of
Speaker 1: stuff they don't want you to know. Today another show
Speaker 1: that we do, and this one is a real life
Speaker 1: conspiracy weirdly enough, and you can go back and forth
Speaker 1: on how far they should have leaned into this with
Speaker 1: the film weirdly Enough, the entire idea starts with fly fishing,
Speaker 1: not a euphemism straight up like cast in the real
Speaker 1: little fake fly on there. Yeah, but it also, like
Speaker 1: you know, it was used as a metaphor, right like
Speaker 1: in this document called the Trout Memo I believe um
Speaker 1: that was then presented to a committee called the twenty
Speaker 1: Committee or the Committee of twenties. And it just shows
Speaker 1: how deep some of these very clever British quips go
Speaker 1: with some of these project names and code names, because
Speaker 1: you know, twenty was not referring to the number of
Speaker 1: members in the Council or whatever you wanna call it.
Speaker 1: It was not referring to the number twenty exactly. It
Speaker 1: was referring to the Roman numeral twenty x x, meaning
Speaker 1: double crosses. So it was a organization, though specifically designed
Speaker 1: to do exactly what you said, Ben to fake out
Speaker 1: other intelligence agencies and governments through elaborate russ UH and
Speaker 1: ultimately deception, and that is very much what went into
Speaker 1: the thinking behind Operation Mincemeat. It was a way to
Speaker 1: send faulty information to the Germans so that they would
Speaker 1: act on that information believing that it was true, giving
Speaker 1: the Americans or the Allied forces the advantage. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: we owe a big debt to historian Ben McIntyre. Actually,
Speaker 1: the film Operation Mincemeat is based primarily on on his work.
Speaker 1: It's nuts. It's nuts because there's a There are parts
Speaker 1: of the film where people are saying with all sincerity
Speaker 1: and there's a real thing. They're saying, yes, I know
Speaker 1: sow and show he thought I was a double agent
Speaker 1: when I was a triple agent. To keep your eye
Speaker 1: on that one. And it's like how many times do
Speaker 1: you go with this song and dance and this weird
Speaker 1: tango of who's who's betraying whom? Uh? This guy named
Speaker 1: Rear Admiral John Godfrey. Here's why it starts with fly fishing.
Speaker 1: He digs fly fishing. He's super into this trout memo
Speaker 1: and it's some sun Zoo art of war stuff. Because
Speaker 1: the metaphor is, you know, just like you said, they
Speaker 1: love a metaphor. So the metaphor is that you can
Speaker 1: deceive your enemy the way that someone fishing can deceive
Speaker 1: a fish. We pulled a quote here just to give
Speaker 1: you a sense of it. The trout fisher cast patiently
Speaker 1: all day. He frequently changes his venue and his lures.
Speaker 1: If he has frightened to fish, he may give the
Speaker 1: water arrest for half an hour. But his main endeavors
Speaker 1: to attract fish by something he sends out from his boot.
Speaker 1: He's insistant, incessant. I love that. There's a great scene
Speaker 1: in the movie be Where. Um, this guy presents the
Speaker 1: trout memo to Winston Churchill. I remember the I didn't
Speaker 1: know the actor who was playing Churchill. It's obviously like
Speaker 1: a really you know, sought after a role of you know,
Speaker 1: some of the best actors have portrayed Churchill, so specifically
Speaker 1: h Gary oldman, you know, and like an unrecognizable amount
Speaker 1: of prosthetics. Um, but this dude did a really kind
Speaker 1: of not over the top. It's an easy one to
Speaker 1: like chew the scenery with because Churchill was a real
Speaker 1: character and known for these fiery speeches and turns of phrase.
Speaker 1: But the guy said, he I forget who was it
Speaker 1: was because one of I think his assistant or one
Speaker 1: of the guys who was in this kind of cadre
Speaker 1: of of military brass that we're walking around with Churchill
Speaker 1: was Ian Fleming, the author of you know, the James
Speaker 1: Bond novels, and he based his James Bond characters on
Speaker 1: people that he actually knew and some of the operations
Speaker 1: that he actually participated in. But the point is, the
Speaker 1: guy says to uh, Churchill, have you heard of the
Speaker 1: Trout memo? Church because I despise fish And then and
Speaker 1: then he walks away, and then he says something like,
Speaker 1: they're describing the Trout Memo as describing these very fantastic
Speaker 1: and elaborate methods of deception, and Churchill replies, like, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm fond of the the elaborage and fantastic, much
Speaker 1: better than the mundane. Yes, like and then he says,
Speaker 1: but you know, in order to pull off something elaborate,
Speaker 1: it has to be beyond fool proof. Yeah, that's the thing.
Speaker 1: And this this paper, this memo, builds on this fly
Speaker 1: fishing metaphor. It lists all in all, fifty four different
Speaker 1: what if ways that the United Kingdom could try to
Speaker 1: deceive their enemies. The axis forces just the same way
Speaker 1: of fly Fisher could like they lean into it, is
Speaker 1: what we're saying. Uh, wouldn't this have been kind of
Speaker 1: an early codification of like spycraft, like in the UK,
Speaker 1: the Great Game had been continuing a pace for a while.
Speaker 1: I would say it's fair to call all this kind
Speaker 1: of part of the dawn of modern tradecraft or spycraft. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so they're they're deep in stuff there, as Corporate America says,
Speaker 1: they're building the plane while they fly it. Today's story
Speaker 1: is not about the entirety of the Trout memo. You
Speaker 1: basically got the gist, folks. It's about the twenty eighth
Speaker 1: suggestion in that weird paper, the idea of getting a
Speaker 1: dead body, planting fake intel on that dead body, and
Speaker 1: then just sort of dropping it somewhere where German intelligence
Speaker 1: will find it. And they didn't make up this idea,
Speaker 1: by the way, they got it from a novel. Because
Speaker 1: Admiral Godfrey and Ian Fleming we're working together. Godfrey loved fishing,
Speaker 1: Fleming loved fiction. And you know, I think about it
Speaker 1: sometimes like general's admiral's are very very busy people the
Speaker 1: top brass. So how do you communicate with someone like that,
Speaker 1: you make it something relatable to them. So instead of saying,
Speaker 1: instead of saying, hey, man, let's let's start using dead
Speaker 1: bodies the trick people he opened with you know what
Speaker 1: wars a lot like Admiral It's like fishing, and he's like, oh,
Speaker 1: I like fishing, Yeah I can, I can. I can
Speaker 1: grab my around that, I can get behind that. It's
Speaker 1: interesting though. We were talking about this on our group
Speaker 1: text thread. There is a kind of a running gag
Speaker 1: in the in the movie where basically, like everyone is
Speaker 1: a writer, everyone's working on a novel. It's pretty funny. Um,
Speaker 1: several of the of the top brass type characters are
Speaker 1: in fact working on novels, and it becomes this kind
Speaker 1: of like fun running joke in the movie. But yeah,
Speaker 1: it's true. They got the idea from a novel. I
Speaker 1: don't recall which one. I don't know if that comes
Speaker 1: up necessarily in the movie, but um, it is. Maybe
Speaker 1: it sounds like the kind of deception you would see
Speaker 1: as the twist and like a detective novel like Paro
Speaker 1: or like you know, Sherlock Holmes or something like that. Right,
Speaker 1: So think about it. The idea is to pass off
Speaker 1: this body as a genuine soldier, a genuine you know,
Speaker 1: human being who died in the um you know, course
Speaker 1: of serving their country, and you know, planting false information
Speaker 1: on them so that the Germans would find it in
Speaker 1: the hopes that they would believe it to be true.
Speaker 1: They knew that they would do an autopsy and make
Speaker 1: sure that the body was in fact, you know, because
Speaker 1: there's all this all this paranoia at the time, you know,
Speaker 1: they would not accept anything at face value. So they
Speaker 1: had to go about this in the most meticulous way
Speaker 1: you could imagine, like they created a backstory for this person.
Speaker 1: We'll get into the details of that, but first before
Speaker 1: any of that fun stuff, which all involves like make
Speaker 1: basically like writing stories. It's like a story bible. You're creating,
Speaker 1: you know, a living, breathing human being that is actually
Speaker 1: entirely fictionalized. You got to find a body first, a
Speaker 1: viable specimen that isn't too old, that hasn't been mutilated
Speaker 1: in any kind of way that like, you know, it
Speaker 1: looks like it was someone that just went down with
Speaker 1: their plane and drowned up, and you have to do
Speaker 1: an utter secrecy. So you're playing that Goldilocks game for
Speaker 1: the perfect perfect corpse basically, and you have to do
Speaker 1: this without letting too many people in on the plan.
Speaker 1: So Admiral Godfrey is pretty hot to try about this
Speaker 1: trout memo thing because he needs a solution and fast.
Speaker 1: He is aware of an upcoming plan, a different operation
Speaker 1: called Operation Husky. The Allied forces are planning to invade
Speaker 1: the island of Sicily, you know, off of Italy, and
Speaker 1: they were worried that it would be tough to pull
Speaker 1: this off. They said, Okay, we could invade Greece, we
Speaker 1: could invade the Balkans. What what should we do? I
Speaker 1: think the issue with Sicily was that it was just
Speaker 1: a no duck kind of move right where it was
Speaker 1: just the obvious weakness or the obvious you know, point
Speaker 1: of entry and anyone that they said a couple of times,
Speaker 1: like anyone with a could tell you that, so they
Speaker 1: were going to be expected it would have been the
Speaker 1: most obvious place. So that's the problem because it's like,
Speaker 1: even if it makes the most sense, you're enemy also
Speaker 1: knows that and they're going to act accordingly. So the
Speaker 1: point is they they needed to figure out a way
Speaker 1: to make the Germans believe they weren't going to do
Speaker 1: the thing. The Germans knew they definitely were going to do.
Speaker 1: How do you do that? Right? Right? Exactly? And that's
Speaker 1: a good way to put it, man, So they already
Speaker 1: kind of knew, and history would prove this. They already
Speaker 1: kind of knew that Access Powers have pretty insidious intelligence capabilities.
Speaker 1: There were tons of spies embedded in any agency you
Speaker 1: can imagine. And they knew that if Access Powers anticipated
Speaker 1: the obvious thing, Operation Husky, because they already did the
Speaker 1: North Africa campaign, so it's not too far to for
Speaker 1: their resources to move. They knew that if the Germans
Speaker 1: were anticipating this, it would become a blood bath, it
Speaker 1: would probably fail. Winston Churchill, it was basically drunk off
Speaker 1: the success of the North African campaign. Loki possibly also
Speaker 1: actually drunk too. Yeah, I was gonna say Loki just
Speaker 1: in general kind of drunk, and he knew, he knew
Speaker 1: in his calculus that Britain could probably not invade and
Speaker 1: retake France at this time. They needed a more runway,
Speaker 1: and he said, okay, look we can maybe He was
Speaker 1: skeptical at first, but he said, we can maybe take
Speaker 1: these North African forces through the Mediterranean into Italy, which
Speaker 1: they loved, calling the soft underbelly of Europe. Like they
Speaker 1: keep calling it that. It's weird, you know how it
Speaker 1: is like when you're hanging with your friends and you
Speaker 1: make up a catchphrase and everybody sort of gets into it.
Speaker 1: Is that sort of a ding against the Italian people,
Speaker 1: implying that they're somehow like soft and and uh and
Speaker 1: and you know, luxuriating in their fine wines and cheeses.
Speaker 1: I don't know, I'm still trying to figure that part out,
Speaker 1: but yeah, they lead, they leaned into that as well.
Speaker 1: So everybody's like, fly fishing is war, soft underbellies, Let's
Speaker 1: invade Sicily and to do this. They they're not sure
Speaker 1: if it's actually gonna happen yet. This story hinges on
Speaker 1: three people. We're gonna introduce two of them now, military officers,
Speaker 1: Charles Cholmley and you and Montague not spells. Not spells
Speaker 1: the way it sounds Charle Mandalay reminds me of some
Speaker 1: counties in Georgia. We've got one called Tomeless. Looks like
Speaker 1: on paper Talia Faroh, but it's apparently pronounced Tolliver or
Speaker 1: something like that. For the law. I mean until I
Speaker 1: heard them stay in the movie. When I was reading
Speaker 1: about this, in my mind, I'm saying out loud, Jarl Mandalay.
Speaker 1: And then when in the movie they start calling this
Speaker 1: dude Cholmley, and I'm like, where's Charl Mandalay? I was
Speaker 1: right there with you. It's kind of like and and
Speaker 1: no offense to our good friends in Massachusetts. It's kind
Speaker 1: of like Worcester. You can't get mad at people for
Speaker 1: guessing wrong on that one. But here we are the
Speaker 1: twenty eight suggestion. Chom Lee and Montague run with it.
Speaker 1: The lure in this case is a corpse, not too fresh,
Speaker 1: not too stale, I guess, but Goldilocks corpse, right, And
Speaker 1: it has to be dressed as you're kind of average
Speaker 1: everyday soldier with that intel, and the originally wanted to
Speaker 1: fake intel to just be in the guy's pockets. The
Speaker 1: whole bit, the whole trick is their idea will be
Speaker 1: that German intelligence in Spain finds these papers and take
Speaker 1: them as gospel. If everything works out, enemy forces are
Speaker 1: gonna find this dead guy, They're gonna act on that
Speaker 1: secret info, and they're gonna move their forces away from
Speaker 1: Sicily and this all takes time, right, they can't just
Speaker 1: you know, pop back over. They're gonna move a significant
Speaker 1: amount of the German military and access military forces away
Speaker 1: from Sicily. Then that exposes the soft underbelly of Europe
Speaker 1: and there you know, from then on it's just like
Speaker 1: God save the Queen, great job everywhere. Oh way, I
Speaker 1: think I get it. So there's a soft underbelly is
Speaker 1: a point of weakness, right like in the Hobbit, you
Speaker 1: know how like small had that one little area that
Speaker 1: like was like what they call it, like naked as
Speaker 1: a snail without a shell or something like that. I
Speaker 1: think maybe that's what they're referring to Sicily as like
Speaker 1: just a weak point, so a soft underbelly, implying that
Speaker 1: like even if everything else is armored, you know that
Speaker 1: that if that soft underbelly is exposed, and that could
Speaker 1: be like a kill shot for all of Europe. And
Speaker 1: did you kind of jump in here? I mean you
Speaker 1: gotta think about this point in nine, Like Germany is
Speaker 1: still kind of like an unstoppable machine, while like Italy
Speaker 1: and all their operations are just like tripping over themselves
Speaker 1: and faith planning and eating cheeses. Fine, cheeses and wines. Yes,
Speaker 1: like they were not doing very well this war. No,
Speaker 1: they were. That's that's very, very true. And this, this
Speaker 1: fake out itself, is not a super original idea, just
Speaker 1: the idea of faking people with bad intel. It's happened before.
Speaker 1: It's happened so often in the world of intelligence that
Speaker 1: by this point I had a street name. It was
Speaker 1: known as the Haversack Ruse. But charm Lee and our
Speaker 1: boy Montague they need a fresh body. And charm Lee
Speaker 1: has his own spin on the trout memo. He calls
Speaker 1: it the Trojan Horse. Shout out to Dennis Smith, authored
Speaker 1: Deathly Deception, The Real Story of Operation Minced Meat. Thanks
Speaker 1: to Smith, we have chom Lee's real life description of this. Noal,
Speaker 1: I know we both love leaning into a real a
Speaker 1: real chewy British accent. You want to give this one
Speaker 1: a shot, man? Oh? Why not? Let's see. A body
Speaker 1: is obtained from one of the London hospitals. The lungs
Speaker 1: are filled with Walter and documents are disposed in an
Speaker 1: inside pocket. The party is then dropped by a Coastal
Speaker 1: Command aircraft. On being found, the supposition in the enemy's
Speaker 1: mind may well be that one of our aircraft has
Speaker 1: either been shot or falced down, and that this is
Speaker 1: one of their passengers. Love it. All the Brits down
Speaker 1: the audience are cringing right now, and I am here
Speaker 1: for it. I'm here for I love all of you
Speaker 1: so much. Yeah, and you know we would love to
Speaker 1: We would love to do our own adaptation of Operation
Speaker 1: Mincemeat and Maxnell. Maybe at the end we can we
Speaker 1: can figure out who we're going to cast as ourselves.
Speaker 1: Well as speaking of cast, I got I gotta stay
Speaker 1: in point now. Um, this movie really great. Cast Charles
Speaker 1: McFadden or mcfaddion who I think we all who plays Charmley.
Speaker 1: I think we all know him as Tom Walms Gams
Speaker 1: from Succession. Fabulous and he's another one of these British
Speaker 1: actors who, like I just would never have thought was British.
Speaker 1: I mean, I have no reason to worry about her,
Speaker 1: to think about it, but he just pulls off that
Speaker 1: American accent so well. That does not always go the
Speaker 1: other way around when it comes to American actors doing
Speaker 1: British voices. I would not call myself nor I think
Speaker 1: you uh an actor per se, You've don't know you've
Speaker 1: done more acting than I, but as evidence by our
Speaker 1: our butchery of the of the English accent. But it's
Speaker 1: really funny when you have, like you know, Kevin Costner
Speaker 1: or something vaguely attempting to phone in the slightest of
Speaker 1: British accents that sort of comes and goes, you know,
Speaker 1: the first ten minutes of Robin Hood Princesses slap. I
Speaker 1: don't really it's great. Yeah, that's dope. But yeah, I
Speaker 1: know exactly what you're talking about. And I would also
Speaker 1: say just to uh to throw a uh an olive
Speaker 1: branch slash bone to our fellow British ridiculous historians. Yes,
Speaker 1: we know. Americans are the ones with the accent. You
Speaker 1: guys were there first. Everybody gets it. Even Max is
Speaker 1: nodding solemnly. He's like, I'll allow it, okay, So I
Speaker 1: want to just I just want to bait the picture here,
Speaker 1: So Max, I want to put you on spot it.
Speaker 1: Max thought about it when I said that, and then
Speaker 1: lean forward towards his mike and then kind of give
Speaker 1: a little smile like lean back like not yet, not yet. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Sometimes I just like, am I do I have the
Speaker 1: energy for this fight right now? Do I really have
Speaker 1: the energy for this banet? And this was one of
Speaker 1: the moments I leaned back. I was just like, no,
Speaker 1: I don't, I don't. I will not die on this
Speaker 1: hill today, my friends. I will live to fight another
Speaker 1: But Ben didn't they have like a special hook up
Speaker 1: like to get these bodies, like they had like a
Speaker 1: body guy, right, yeah, yeah, they have a body guy eventually,
Speaker 1: because first Cholmley pitches this to his buds Am I
Speaker 1: five and it's any committee who are running all this
Speaker 1: double agents, and they're not super convinced. It's like November
Speaker 1: two and they essentially tell him, dude, there's absolutely no
Speaker 1: way this will work that. I like where your heads at.
Speaker 1: I like the way you think about things, and we
Speaker 1: need to attach this, you know, keep go back to
Speaker 1: the drawing board, keep your original idea. Let's punch it up.
Speaker 1: And that's when you and Montague comes in. He's naval intelligence,
Speaker 1: he's in charge of counter espionage and he's gonna work
Speaker 1: with Chomley. They go through the details and then they
Speaker 1: get a do date. The top brass says this invasion
Speaker 1: of Sicily, Operation Husky has to happen by July of
Speaker 1: ninety three. So TikTok, TikTok, TikTok, find us a dead body.
Speaker 1: And uh, it's weird because everybody kind of knew that
Speaker 1: everyone was spying on each other. They didn't even kind
Speaker 1: of know this. This is the only way they were
Speaker 1: able to pull this off. But they were trying to
Speaker 1: figure out what Adolf Hitler thought. Adolf Hitler was never
Speaker 1: a particularly talented strategist, and he was really really focused
Speaker 1: not so much on Sicily, but on the Balkans because
Speaker 1: Germany was not a resource rich country. If the war
Speaker 1: machine that was running through Europe was to continue, then
Speaker 1: they needed copper, oil, you name it, all sorts of
Speaker 1: resources from the Balkans. Without it, their war effort would collapse.
Speaker 1: So so the Allies go through this whole dog and
Speaker 1: pony show. They invent another fake operation called Operation Barclay.
Speaker 1: It's meant to convince Germany that the Allies are going
Speaker 1: towards the Balkans. They made up a fictional military formation,
Speaker 1: They did a bunch of fake operations in Syria's like really,
Speaker 1: look at me stuff and just like you said no
Speaker 1: the whole time, our guys chom Lee and Montague are
Speaker 1: like the Resurrection men of the Middle Ages. They're searching
Speaker 1: for that body. They said, okay, yeah, no, we've decided
Speaker 1: it's fine to steal a body, dress it up, and
Speaker 1: throw it somewhere. We don't have a lot of time
Speaker 1: to wax philosophic. Let's make the corpse look convincing. You
Speaker 1: gotta work on a back story. But also, these guys
Speaker 1: are not experts what death looks like. And like you said,
Speaker 1: they're not the type of guys who walk around saying, oh,
Speaker 1: you need a body, I'll get your body. Wait, you
Speaker 1: need it by four. They don't know, No, they don't know.
Speaker 1: They end up connected with somebody at like a morgue
Speaker 1: of some kind I believe right like they have direct
Speaker 1: access to. So they had to make the scenario you know,
Speaker 1: under which this person's body was found believable. So it
Speaker 1: couldn't be like some sort of you know, grizzly death.
Speaker 1: You know that where where there was like mingling or
Speaker 1: mutilation of any kind needed to be a body with
Speaker 1: very few marks on it would have been someone that
Speaker 1: had gone down on a plane, presumably crashed into the
Speaker 1: ocean in the open ocean, uh, and then drowned. And
Speaker 1: then you know, I was wondering would they have then
Speaker 1: you know, looked for the plane to confirm, But Max
Speaker 1: and and then off air pointed out that which would
Speaker 1: have been too much, too too many resources would have
Speaker 1: been required to do that. There were other ways they
Speaker 1: could have confirmed the validity of this this person's you know,
Speaker 1: credentials and if this was a real British soldier. So
Speaker 1: the body they got was a guy who had recently
Speaker 1: been discovered um dead of from ingesting rat poison in
Speaker 1: a warehouse. Um presumably a suicide. Um. There certainly are
Speaker 1: scenarios or maybe it was accidents, you know, he accidentally
Speaker 1: rat poison or would already got mixed into his rations.
Speaker 1: Because this was a time of super austerity. I kind
Speaker 1: of forgot about that until watching this and this film,
Speaker 1: remembering that, like you know, the blitz was was just
Speaker 1: over the horizon every single day, so it was like
Speaker 1: there there was power outages, you know, people life did
Speaker 1: go on. There certainly were high society things that took place,
Speaker 1: but in general, the general pop reulation was eating like
Speaker 1: you know, spam and like rations and like you know, um,
Speaker 1: what do you call those things? M R E s
Speaker 1: and stuff? Right, Yeah, food was being rationed. It was
Speaker 1: a serious concern and a lot of people were dying.
Speaker 1: So it's weird. Then from Cholmley and Montague's perspective, we'll
Speaker 1: call him the Chomster and Monty. Yeah, okay, So so
Speaker 1: the Chomster and Monty are in a weird situation because
Speaker 1: they're saying, this is a huge war, their bodies everywhere.
Speaker 1: How come, how come we have to search so so
Speaker 1: ardently for the right one. They get helped by with
Speaker 1: two people. One is a pathologist named Sir Bernard Spillsbury,
Speaker 1: and he says, all right, here's how you make it
Speaker 1: look like someone died the right way. He pointed out,
Speaker 1: and I didn't know this, that people when they die
Speaker 1: in plane crashes over water are often going to die
Speaker 1: of shock instead of drowning, and that means their lungs
Speaker 1: might not necessarily fill up with water. And then he
Speaker 1: had a hot take. I'm not I'm not a pathologist myself.
Speaker 1: Here's what he said. He said, you know, if we're
Speaker 1: talking about Spanish people finding him, Spanish folks are all Catholic,
Speaker 1: and Catholics don't like doing post mortems unless it's a
Speaker 1: really big deal. So we can kind of get away
Speaker 1: with a body that's died in any number of fashions,
Speaker 1: and you know, it could be anybody's guest, especially if
Speaker 1: the body has been in the ocean for a few days.
Speaker 1: So that's what leads them to hook up with their
Speaker 1: resurrection man, their corpsman. He's a quarter named Bentley Purchase January. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the britishness of these names just characters and Toast of
Speaker 1: London or something Bentley oh, Ray purchase. That's why Ray
Speaker 1: bloody purchase, Bentley Purchase. If anyone is I'm sure British
Speaker 1: listeners are instantly familiar. But the new season of Toast
Speaker 1: is uh. He goes stateside Toast of Tinseltown and it's
Speaker 1: just a delight with Matt Berry's one of my favorite
Speaker 1: human beings in the world. So this His music is great.
Speaker 1: He makes these very non ironic kind of mean maybe
Speaker 1: they're a little ironic, but I would say pretty straight,
Speaker 1: kind of like sixties psychedelic folk records that are like
Speaker 1: super good. He's what I got one called Kill the
Speaker 1: Wolf and another one um. And the covers are great.
Speaker 1: They're like him posing with like a you know, so
Speaker 1: so good. But in any case, yeah, they like to
Speaker 1: your point bend. They found this corpseman who was the
Speaker 1: corner at a medical you know, government morgue essentially, and
Speaker 1: he's like, I got the guy for you. The dude
Speaker 1: I was talking about, who was a not well off
Speaker 1: person who has just suffered from some mental illness, had
Speaker 1: been on the streets. In the film, we later see
Speaker 1: a family member of his kind of surface. This is
Speaker 1: a guy named Glendware Michael, another fabulously British and that
Speaker 1: actually sounds almost like well doesn't glindwere with the with
Speaker 1: the W and the R. But his body looked good.
Speaker 1: There are some really fun macab bits in the film though,
Speaker 1: because you do see them trying to pose this dead
Speaker 1: body in like his military garb for like they need
Speaker 1: to do like an I D. Badge photo. Uh, and
Speaker 1: you know a corpse, A corpse doesn't really pose, you know.
Speaker 1: And there's some one particularly amazingly Macab shot where they
Speaker 1: try to make him smile and it just it looks great.
Speaker 1: Whatever they did to make I don't know how they
Speaker 1: did that exactly with the way the body moves. It
Speaker 1: must be prosthetics, but it looked like something out of
Speaker 1: Night Living Dead. Um. But it was just you know,
Speaker 1: they're kind of just like fumbling with it, and his
Speaker 1: head keeps flopping over and stuff. So they realized, okay,
Speaker 1: this is a good work. We need to Now we've
Speaker 1: found a body that fits the bill. Now we have
Speaker 1: to find a live body that somewhat resembles this man
Speaker 1: so we can get a photo to have, you know,
Speaker 1: on him as his military idea. By the way, they
Speaker 1: dubbed this character this creation Major William Martin. Right earlier,
Speaker 1: I said, they're kind of three main characters of this story.
Speaker 1: Glindware Michael, known as Major William Martin is our third man.
Speaker 1: It feels like a noir reference. You can find a
Speaker 1: photo just what you're describing on online if you wish.
Speaker 1: Ridiculous historians, it is grizzly be warned, but it's off
Speaker 1: to the races. They've got the documents, they've they've you know,
Speaker 1: happiest corpuses. They have the body, and on April they
Speaker 1: take action because Bentley Purchase has told them, look, I
Speaker 1: can keep this guy on ice, but at best I
Speaker 1: can give you three months, or else he will have
Speaker 1: just decayed too far to be useful. So that's why
Speaker 1: they ship him off. Then in April, and they still
Speaker 1: got that July taking time bomb there that deadline. The
Speaker 1: cap into a submarine called h M. S. Sarah has
Speaker 1: his crew pushed this body into the sea and they
Speaker 1: push it in the direction of the tide and they
Speaker 1: actually used the submarines propellers to help move the body
Speaker 1: and what they hope is the right direction. I want
Speaker 1: to shout out the captain of that sub Lieutenant Norman Jewel,
Speaker 1: who had the decency to stage something like a funeral service.
Speaker 1: He read the thirty ninth Psalm, which begins talking about
Speaker 1: the power of silence, and that's the only funeral that
Speaker 1: Michael actually gets. The body washes ashore on the Spanish
Speaker 1: coast near a city called Huilva, and this is exactly
Speaker 1: where they wanted it to go because they knew, right
Speaker 1: even though Spain was like quote unquote neutral, everybody knew
Speaker 1: the British spies were their allied spies. German spies are there,
Speaker 1: and they said, okay, just like preserve this so that
Speaker 1: the papers are still legible. We can't put it in
Speaker 1: the stud pockets. We have to put it in a briefcase.
Speaker 1: So they attach a briefcase to him and it's what's
Speaker 1: the amazing term they used for pocket trash. I think
Speaker 1: it's like wallet litter, like, like, I really like it.
Speaker 1: There's so many of these bespoke, little kind of like
Speaker 1: niche terms that they throw around and in this film
Speaker 1: that that are a lot of fun. I'm I'm serious,
Speaker 1: you know, Just just to just to put this out there.
Speaker 1: Netflix did not sponsor this episode. We just genuinely liked
Speaker 1: the movie and thought it was worth talking about, and
Speaker 1: it gave us a topic that we hadn't really thought
Speaker 1: about that we hadn't done. So definitely go check out
Speaker 1: the movie. I don't think we're spoiling too much of it.
Speaker 1: Even if you know the story, it's still the dramatization.
Speaker 1: There's definitely a lot of schmaltzing all this stuff up
Speaker 1: for the purposes of of of cinema, and I honestly
Speaker 1: they don't ever go too terribly far. A couple of
Speaker 1: things made me cringe a little bit, like a bit
Speaker 1: of a overdone love story angle, But in general, I
Speaker 1: think we all three to enjoy the film. Jason Isaacs
Speaker 1: is amazing. We were talking about that off air. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I love I love Colin first to call it
Speaker 1: if you're hearing this, man, Great job, Great job dude.
Speaker 1: And Jason Isaacs, you're hearing this. I love you. He's dreaming. Man.
Speaker 1: Look at those big baby blues. God, you can just
Speaker 1: swim in them. They're so piercing. As a man with
Speaker 1: piercing blue eyes, I can appreciate piercing blue eyes. Regnize me.
Speaker 1: There we go. Thelled it all right, Max. We're gonna
Speaker 1: see if we can get you and Jason to hang
Speaker 1: out together. You know. Oh. He was in the Death
Speaker 1: of Stalin, which is another movie that I think ridiculous
Speaker 1: historians would absolutely love. If you haven't seen it, that
Speaker 1: is a cool movie and another really fun dramatization of
Speaker 1: some really heavy historical stuff but played completely straight, where
Speaker 1: it's like nobody has a Russian accent in the movie.
Speaker 1: It's all just like everyone themselves and it's Steve. It's
Speaker 1: just Steve. It's right. That's that's American acting, you know.
Speaker 1: But if you were a German spy there in Spain
Speaker 1: and you saw this, these papers, then they would look
Speaker 1: legit because it's a very clever counterfeiting move. The people
Speaker 1: who made the fake papers are the same people who
Speaker 1: make the real papers, so they're making their own counterfeits.
Speaker 1: You would not be able to tell the difference without
Speaker 1: more information. A fisherman finds and retrieves quote unquote Martin's body,
Speaker 1: and then of course it makes it to German intelligence
Speaker 1: in the city. They look at this and they say,
Speaker 1: holy smokes, that's where the Brits are going. They're faking
Speaker 1: us out. You know, Sicily's too obvious. They're coming for
Speaker 1: Greece and Sardinia. We gotta get moving. I mean, I
Speaker 1: also want to make sure we give credit to the
Speaker 1: other members of the twenty who you know, trumped up
Speaker 1: all of this incredibly detailed backstory for this man. It
Speaker 1: was really like, you know, writer's room. It was no
Speaker 1: wonder the writing and you know, being novelists such a
Speaker 1: theme in the movie because these people were responsible for
Speaker 1: creating believable fictions. They gave him a love interest named
Speaker 1: what was it, guys, Pam Pam. There's a snapshot of
Speaker 1: his fiance on his person and they make a point
Speaker 1: to like, no, no, no. The picture of Pam goes
Speaker 1: in his breast pocket because he keeps it close to
Speaker 1: his heart, you know what I mean, stuff like that.
Speaker 1: You know, there's a love letter that he keeps on
Speaker 1: him as well, and also I believe a receipt for
Speaker 1: a wedding ring. Yeah, you know, so like it was
Speaker 1: one of these things where it's like, i'll you know,
Speaker 1: the love letters says that in like it was it
Speaker 1: was such a shame that we were to meet during
Speaker 1: the war or else would surely be married by now.
Speaker 1: And it's all really it goes through all these revisions too,
Speaker 1: where like you know, all of the m I six
Speaker 1: and MY five, Churchill's Office and all of that, they
Speaker 1: all get their hands in the pie kind of rewriting
Speaker 1: and and second guessing everything. At the end of the day,
Speaker 1: all of this stuff is found along with these documents
Speaker 1: in this case that tell this tale right in the
Speaker 1: most kind of obfuscating ways. It wasn't it would. It
Speaker 1: would have taken them a minute to kind of have
Speaker 1: to figure out what was going on. And not only that,
Speaker 1: they then continued the ruse by using unsecured lines they
Speaker 1: knew were being monitored by German intelligence and saying how
Speaker 1: worried they were that their man had been found and
Speaker 1: of of the sensitive nature of the papers that he
Speaker 1: was carrying. Right, Yeah, it was. It was a huge deal.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of acting there too, because they he
Speaker 1: also has like a letter from his father, ticket stubs,
Speaker 1: you can tell he bought a fancy shirt recently, a
Speaker 1: hotel bill, all this stuff, and they really really really
Speaker 1: put some work into making it plausible. And I would
Speaker 1: argue that the communications that were, you know, being monitored.
Speaker 1: We're probably the clincher for German forces, right because if
Speaker 1: this guy was carrying secret papers he's this important, then
Speaker 1: of course British intelligence will worry about them. If they
Speaker 1: hadn't done that little part of the song and dance,
Speaker 1: then Germany may have figured out the bruise. But it worked,
Speaker 1: it seemed successful. Invasion of Sicily began on July nine.
Speaker 1: It went until August. The German military, because they fell
Speaker 1: for this con game, had already moved a big part
Speaker 1: of their forces degrease. This would prove to be the
Speaker 1: first foray in The Italian Campaign, also known as the
Speaker 1: Liberation of Italy, continued till leading to the death of
Speaker 1: Benito Mussolini, which is still kind of mystery. Historians will
Speaker 1: debate the official narrative about that. You remember, Benito Mussolini
Speaker 1: felt ridiculous historians, he was that guy who, among other things,
Speaker 1: was super into the idea of wearing milk. I'm sorry
Speaker 1: wearing milk, Benito Mussolini, He's the wearable milk. It was
Speaker 1: like it was like a more sustainable kind of plastic essentially,
Speaker 1: would like it almost was like think of craft singles
Speaker 1: or something that you could, like, you know, stitch together
Speaker 1: and cover your body with. Yes, So check out that episode.
Speaker 1: I think we all had a blast on that one.
Speaker 1: And at this point we have to ask what can
Speaker 1: we learn from this? I mean, Operation Mincemeat shows us
Speaker 1: kind of the ethical quandaries of the greater good and
Speaker 1: also Glindware Michael had no informed consent, He didn't have
Speaker 1: any say in his second posthumous identity. Yeah, and the film,
Speaker 1: I I don't know how dramatized this was. But his
Speaker 1: sister I don't remember how she gets wind of it
Speaker 1: exactly because it was so hush hush, But she comes
Speaker 1: into the office and like, you know, makes a big
Speaker 1: fuss and says, you know, uh, I think she went
Speaker 1: to the corner because you know, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: people like who didn't understand where the body went. That
Speaker 1: makes sense somehow she ended up in the presence of
Speaker 1: our our main characters, you know, doing a shame on
Speaker 1: you type situation and like how poor you know, Glendware
Speaker 1: never had a say in this and all the you know,
Speaker 1: because I mean, these are deeply religious people, and like,
Speaker 1: you know, the idea of what they're doing is desecrating
Speaker 1: a corpse, you know, like uh, I mean, there's a
Speaker 1: scene in the movie when the when the the Spanish
Speaker 1: do get ahold of the body and they do do
Speaker 1: that autopsy. It is foul, like they're like pulling his
Speaker 1: guts out. It looked like freaking you know, sausages. It's
Speaker 1: a really and then like one of the reasons they
Speaker 1: didn't go deeper into conducting the autopsy to see the
Speaker 1: cause of death was because it was just so foul smelling.
Speaker 1: You've got like one Spanish officer like vomiting, and the
Speaker 1: scene another Macaw piece of you know, cinema. There's there's
Speaker 1: a couple of moments like that in the movie, but
Speaker 1: it is one of those weighing kind of situations where yeah,
Speaker 1: they know what they're doing isn't great, but it was
Speaker 1: it was like the only thing they thought would actually
Speaker 1: you know, for lack of a better way of putting
Speaker 1: it saved the world. It was World War two. And
Speaker 1: you're right, Max, I mean the Nazis were killing machine.
Speaker 1: They were a precision engineered killing machine, just like ripping
Speaker 1: their way across Europe. And if Hitler had had his way,
Speaker 1: he would have taken it even further than that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and also you know there's so many conundrums with
Speaker 1: this ethical philosophical conundrums. Yes, mince Meat played a role
Speaker 1: in the ultimate Allied victory of World War Two, but
Speaker 1: it's also important to remember that when the invasion of
Speaker 1: Sicily happened successfully, Allied forces were committing war crimes against
Speaker 1: innocent Sicilian citizens. And that's that's a story that doesn't
Speaker 1: often get told. But what we're seeing is creativity under
Speaker 1: desperate circumstances. Not for nothing is necessity called the mother
Speaker 1: of invention. And when driven to extreme means, people who
Speaker 1: consider themselves the good guys will do very shady things.
Speaker 1: So check out Operation Mincemeat. We thought it was a
Speaker 1: fantastic adaptation again, and it's based on some great work
Speaker 1: by the historian Ben McIntyre. Ian Fleming plays a role
Speaker 1: and still went on to create the James Bond novels
Speaker 1: as you said, nol pulling a lot from real life.
Speaker 1: This is just a wild one. I can't wait to
Speaker 1: I can't wait to hear more about obscure weird operations completely.
Speaker 1: And then we we sort of scratched the stores of
Speaker 1: this earlier. But um, it was in fact Ian Fleming
Speaker 1: who wrote the trout memo and the idea for you know,
Speaker 1: the body came from you know, a detective novel like again,
Speaker 1: we don't know exactly which one, but it was specifically
Speaker 1: a Noirrish type detective novel where you know, this would
Speaker 1: have been like a ruse of some kind perpetrated by
Speaker 1: a criminal to cover their tracks, you know, or like
Speaker 1: a twist in like a drawing room murder mystery. You know,
Speaker 1: yeah it was. It was a book by a guy
Speaker 1: named Basil Thompson. But yes, we saw fiction become fact.
Speaker 1: This is such an nuts story. And you know, I
Speaker 1: don't know, are you guys world War two history buffs
Speaker 1: at all? I'm a fan. I wouldn't say I'm enough
Speaker 1: to consider myself abuff, but I know enough to be dangerous,
Speaker 1: I guess. But I definitely find it fascinating because I mean,
Speaker 1: it was such an all encompassing conflict that really just
Speaker 1: you know, kind of came on the tales of World
Speaker 1: War One and so many things that connected to and uh,
Speaker 1: it really was something that could have absolutely just changed
Speaker 1: the course of civilization, you know. Um, so this was
Speaker 1: a kind of like winner take all kind of gambit
Speaker 1: and they won because it worked. Yeah. No, I I
Speaker 1: consider myself a World War two fan, not abuff. I
Speaker 1: mean most of it comes from you know, watching banda
Speaker 1: Brothers repeat from like aged twelve to age seven, So
Speaker 1: I'd probably say that's where my love World War two,
Speaker 1: okay from, But to north Point, I mean it's just
Speaker 1: such a I don't just massive part of history, especially
Speaker 1: like the culmination of things before and to what we
Speaker 1: are still going through nowadays. So I like looking at
Speaker 1: it in that way. Totally agreed, and we hope that
Speaker 1: you enjoyed this exploration as well. Fellow ridiculous historians. Let
Speaker 1: us know what some of your favorite strange stories from
Speaker 1: times of war are. We can't wait to hear from
Speaker 1: you in the meantime. Thanks so much to our super producer,
Speaker 1: Mr Max Williams. Thinks as well to Alex Williams, who
Speaker 1: can pose this slapping Bob Christophrostodas, who actually is the
Speaker 1: one that brought us this idea in the first place,
Speaker 1: in niptops to this movie here in Spirit soon to
Speaker 1: be here in the Digital Flesh. That sounds weird, that
Speaker 1: sounds like some kinky Stephen King. It's like a nineties
Speaker 1: Sci five film, exactly digital. Long live the Digital Flesh.
Speaker 1: Who else? He's Jeff Codes, also your spirit, Miss Eves.
Speaker 1: She's the best And thanks to you, Ben, This one
Speaker 1: could have been a real downer, but I think we
Speaker 1: we navigated these these choppy international waters um with with
Speaker 1: grace and humor and terrible British accents. Yeah, man, agreed,
Speaker 1: back at it, And what would this show be without
Speaker 1: terrible accents. It certainly wouldn't be ridiculous, which is the
Speaker 1: whole reason we started this crazy thing in the first place.
Speaker 1: It's true and we'll see you next time. Flixed. For
Speaker 1: more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your
Speaker 1: favorite shows.