Operation Mincemeat - Background - Major William Martin, Royal Marines

Major William Martin, Royal Marines

With the help of the renowned pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury, Montagu and his team determined what kind of body they needed: a man who appeared to have died at sea by hypothermia and drowning, and then floated ashore after several days. However, finding a usable body seemed almost impossible, as indiscreet inquiries would cause talk, and it was impossible to tell a dead man's next of kin what the body was wanted for. Under quiet pressure, Bentley Purchase, coroner of St. Pancras District in London, obtained the body of a 34-year old Welsh man named Glyndwr Michael, on the condition that the man's real identity would never be revealed. The man had died after taking in rat poison which contained phosphorus. After being ingested, the phosphide reacts with hydrochloric acid in the human stomach, generating phosphine, a highly toxic gas. Coroner Purchase explained, “This dose was not sufficient to kill him outright, and its only effect was so to impair the functioning of the liver that he died a little time afterwards”, leaving few clues to the cause of death. Montagu later claimed the man died from pneumonia, and that the family had been contacted and permission obtained, but none of this was true. The dead man's parents had died and no known relatives were found.

The next step was creating a "legend" - a synthetic identity for the dead man. He became "Captain (Acting Major) William "Bill" Martin, Royal Marines", born 1907, in Cardiff, (Wales), and assigned to Headquarters, Combined Operations. As a Royal Marine, Major Martin came under Admiralty authority, and it would be easy to ensure that all official inquiries and messages about his death would be routed to the Naval Intelligence Division. The Army's arrangements were different and much harder to control. Also, he could wear battledress rather than a naval uniform (uniforms were tailor-made by Gieves & Hawkes of Savile Row, and they could not have Gieves's tailor measure a corpse.) The rank of acting Major made him senior enough to be entrusted with sensitive documents, but not so prominent that anyone would expect to know him. The name "Martin" was chosen because there were several Martins of about that rank in the Royal Marines.

To build up the legend, they provided a fiancée named "Pam". Major Martin carried a snapshot of "Pam", who was actually a clerk in MI5 named Nancy Jean Leslie and later known as Jean Gerard Leigh (20 November 1923 – 3 April 2012), two love letters and a jeweller's bill, dated 19 April 1943, from the exclusive S J Phillips Ltd of 113 New Bond Street, for a diamond engagement ring costing £53, 10s 6d - a ring that would cost £1,800 today. The ring was described on the invoice as being a single diamond ring, small diamond shoulders with an engraving to Pam from WM 14.4.43. The author of the love letters was reportedly Hester Leggett, the head of Leslie's department at MI5, and not Paddy Bennett, later Lady Ridsdale, the only woman working in Room 39 under the command of Admiral John Henry Godfrey. Ian Fleming also worked in Room 39; he later modeled the characters of Miss Moneypenny and M on Bennett and Admiral Godfrey, respectively. In keeping with his rank, he was given some good quality underwear, at the time extremely difficult to obtain due to rationing. Items of woollen underwear owned by the late Herbert Fisher, the Master of New College Oxford, who had been run over and killed by a lorry, were secured and used to underpin the verisimilitude of the body.

He also had a pompous letter from his father, a letter from the family solicitor, and a letter from Ernest Whitley Jones, joint general manager of Lloyds Bank, demanding payment of an overdraft of £79 19s 2d (£79.96). There were a book of stamps, a silver cross and a St Christopher’s medallion, a pencil stub, keys, a used twopenny bus ticket, ticket stubs from a London theatre, a bill for four nights' lodging at the Naval and Military Club, and a receipt from Gieves & Hawkes for a new shirt (this last was an error: it was for cash, and officers never paid cash at Gieves; but the Germans did not catch it). All these documents were on authentic stationery or billheads. The dates of the ticket stubs and lodging bill indicated that Major Martin had left London on 24 April. If his body washed ashore on 30 April, presumably after several days at sea, then he must have flown from Britain and crashed at sea.

To make the Major even more believable, Montagu and his team decided to suggest that he was a bit careless. His ID card was marked as a replacement for one that had been lost, and his pass to Combined Operations HQ had expired a few weeks before his departure and not been renewed. This last touch carried an element of risk, as the Abwehr might be suspicious of a careless man having been entrusted with sensitive documents.