Deathly Deception retells the story of the classic World War Two intelligence plan to pass misleading strategic information to Hitler and his Generals that was immortalized in the 1956 Hollywood film The Man Who Never Was.

Drawing on a wealth of recently available documentation, Denis Smyth shows how British deceptioneers solved a multitude of medical, technical, and logistical problems to implement their deceptive design. The aim of their covert plan was to persuade the German High Command that the Allies were going to attack Greece, rather than Sicily in the summer of 1943. To achieve this, they equipped a dead body with a new military identity as a Royal Marine Major, a new private personality as the fiance of an attractive young woman named 'Pam', and a government briefcase containing deceptive documents. They then planted the corpse in south-western Spanish coastal waters via a stealthy submarine operation, and carefully monitored (through their codebreakers and spies) how the Nazi intelligence services and their warlords proceeded to 'swallow Mincemeat whole'.

The result was a stunning success. The German mis-deployment of their forces to meet the notional Anglo-American threat to Greece materially contributed to the Allied victory in Sicily - which, in its turn, drove Mussolini from power in Italy and inflicted irreparable damage on the German war effort.

From Booklist: *Starred Review* This superlative and almost unexpurgated account of Operation Mincemeat will enthrall serious students of WWII. Ewen Montague told the tale first in The Man Who Never Was (1953), the classic account of planting deceptive documents on a dead body and releasing it off the Spanish coast in 1943 so they would fall into German hands and mislead them about the planned invasion of Sicily. He appears here as a vital creative and coordinating force, but he was not the only vital member of a large cast, all portrayed with a novelist's skill and a narrative historian's eye for the context of their roles. We find RAF officers, submarine captains, forensic pathologists, coroners, two female intelligence officers simulating the deceased's fiancee, a racing driver who carried the body across Britain, and higher-ups including Lord Mountbatten and the vice chief of the Imperial General Staff. Then there is the whole network of British agents and diplomats in Spain, who steered the documents around pro-Allied elements in the Spanish navy into hands that would pass them along to Hitler. After that come British and Greek saboteurs, who made sure that German troops deployed to Greece to meet the imagined invasion stayed there! Finally, there is the indigent Welshman, whose body was presented as Major William Martin. Readers are likely to find this book impossible to put down once started and impossible to forget once finished. -- Roland Green

Denis Smyth's profile page

Denis Smyth studied for his Ph.D. in History at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Sir Harry Hinsley, official historian of British intelligence in the Second World War. He lectured in Modern European History at University College, Cork from 1976 to 1985, and has been a Professor in the Department of History, and in the International Relations Programme, at the University of Toronto since 1985. His previous publications have dealt with the diplomacy and strategy of the Great Powers during the twentieth century and he has edited a number of volumes in the British Documents on Foreign Affairs series.