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Operation Mincemeat

• Message 1.Β 

  Posted by Sambista (U4068266) on Sunday, 5th December 2010

  Just been watching this - and one quibble comes immediately to mind.
  
  The narrator describes "Mincemeat" as the greatest deception of the war. Surely Fortitude and Double Cross were both of them more significant?

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  Posted by MB (U177470) on Sunday, 5th December 2010

  I suppose they were both not a single deception but a whole series of operations but the whole programme was a bit too theatrical. It's a pity because there were some interesting interviews with people who were involved or their relatives.
  
  Little things were annoying too like the van with unmasked headlights, it does not take much knowledge of WWII to know that vehicles had masks on their headlights.
  
  

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  Posted by Mike Alexander (U1706714) on Monday, 6th December 2010

  Didn't see the prog, but have read a few articles online about it, including ones that claim the Allies knew German High Command was fooled because of Enigma decrypts. I'm pretty sure this is inaccurate; communications at that sort of level would more likely have been encoded using the more complex Lorenz teleprinter machines, known at Bletchley Park as "fish". It was the need to rapidly decrypt "fish" cyphers that led to the development of Colossus, the first digital computer.

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  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Monday, 6th December 2010

  It looked like Mr McYntre had a lot of fun making the programme.. I really enjoyed the interviews with those grand old relics
  
  Cass

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  Posted by Pete- Weatherman (U14670985) on Monday, 6th December 2010

  I saw the prog on I player and have to agree it was a very well made documentry. As to wether it was the most importent? Well I think that is subjective as there were so meny importent deseption in the war and all in there way were importent. Its as they said in the program Britten had a nack of thinking round corners. Some of the best storys to come out of the war were about deseption in one form or another.

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  Posted by Allan D (U1791739) on Monday, 6th December 2010

  Yes, I agree. It was an interesting programme but obviously designed to plug Mr Macintyre's book of the same name. The strategic importance of the Sicily landings to the Allies was nullified by an equally significant intelligence coup on the German side when a U-boat was able to tap the (unscrambled) transatlantic cable between 10 Downing Street and the White House and Churchill revealed the date of the invasion of the Italian mainland in a conversation with Roosevelt. This enabled Hitler to order the immediate occupation of the Italian peninsula and turned it from a 'soft underbelly' to a 'tough old gut' relegating it in importance in the course of the war.

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