Word: montagues
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...NEVER WAS (160 pp.) -Ewen Montagu-Lippincott...
...central figure of The Man Who Never Was, one of the most astonishing stories to come out of World War II. Ordinarily, the Martin story might induce more raised eyebrows than belief. But documented as it is, written by Britain's present Judge Advocate of the Fleet, Ewen Montagu, and coming with the imprimatur of Churchill's wartime Chief of Staff Lord Ismay, it can be enjoyed as one of the most bizarre stories of deception in recent military history...
...Damn Fools. Montagu, then a naval intelligence officer, had what seemed to him a brilliant idea. Why not drop a body dressed as a British officer off the coast of Spain where it would wash ashore? Let the officer carry papers indicating that an attack on Sicily would not be the real thing, that the real blows would fall on Sardinia and Greece. How would the Germans hear about it? Well, trust the Spaniards to tip them...
Then the practical difficulties began. Getting a body was not easy. It had to be someone recently dead, someone whose family would not object, someone who looked like an officer. Just as Montagu had decided that he might have to snatch a body from a graveyard, he found his corpse: a young man who had just died of pneumonia and whose relatives gave their permission on condition that his name never be divulged...
Intelligence Officer Montagu had complete respect for his German opposite numbers. To fool them, the bluff would have to be consummately prepared. "Major William Martin" got not only a foolproof identity card. He carried a picture of "Pam," the girl he was "engaged" to, her last touching love letters, stubs of theater tickets, a dunning letter from a bank, a letter from his "father" and the usual pocket impedimenta. His identity-card photograph was that of a man who looked like him. The letters he was os tensibly to have carried to North Africa in a plane that crashed were...