Summer read - Operation Mincemeat

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Baiting Guru Joined: 07 Jul 2006 Posts: 5727

Since I now have a one hour round trip to and from work I have started listening to audio books (In case you are curious, Under the Dome is a 3 month listen) Right now I about done with Operation Mincemeat, by Ben McIntyre, a book that only a baiter could truly appreciate.

Often hilarious, sometimes off track (they really could have used a better editor), always fascinating, Operation Mincemeat tells the true story of how a deceased vagrant gardener played a vital role in the Allies invasion of Italy in WWII.

The book tells the story of Operation Mincemeat, a British WWII disinformation campaign where the British convinced the Germans that the invasion of Italy was going to take place through Greece and Sardinia, rather than through the logical location of Sicily. The Brits got hold of a transient Gardener who had died by ingesting rat poison, created a fake identity for him and dropped him off the coast of Spain with supposedly top secret papers concerning the planned Allies invasion of Italy through Greece. The plan had lots of holes. To be honest, I can think of at least a half dozen baiters on this site who could have done a better job, but it did the desired job. Many top Nazis, including Goebbels, were skeptical of the plan, but Hitler bought it hook line and sinker. It makes me think that somewhere there is a pic of a shirtless Hitler with "RAF" or "DsW" tattooed across his chest. At the very least I'm sure somewhere there is a pic of Hitler holding a sign reading 1D10T.

There honestly were times I had to pull the car over, I was laughing so hard listening to this sucker. Give it a listen/read. As a baiter I promise there are parts that will hit home.

Posted: Fri Jul 22, 2016 11:32 am

You'd agree, I'm sure, that Agent Garbo would have made a top-class baiter, and that Karl-Erich Kuhlenthal was a veritable maga!

And getting large chunks of the Wehrmacht to safari to Sardinia and Greece was one hell of an effort!

Baiting Guru Joined: 07 Jul 2006 Posts: 5727

The sad thing is that I was thinking of those very things while listening to the book. When the bulk of the army was moved out of Sicily I thought "pith helmets for everyone involved."

Posted: Fri Jul 22, 2016 2:25 pm

+1 on this most excellent book. I read it a couple of years ago, the old-fashioned way: a physical book with actual pages. (Do they still make those? Wink

)

Wyoming Double Glazed Joined: 11 Mar 2016 Posts: 367

Did you read about he BLOW UP TANKS that helped convince them too.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/ghost-army-the-inflatable-tanks-that-fooled-hitler/276137/

ALSO interesting General Patton SLAPPED a soldier, that he thought was faking his injury to keep from going back to his unit.. Patton was sidelined and brought home over the affair. However hitler thought it was a trick to deceive him .. So they put Patton in charge of the Ghost army! and that pushed hilter to move Troops to repel the Ghost ARMY! Laughing

[img]http://www.americainwwii.com/articles/pattons-ghost-army/[/img]

Posted: Fri Jul 22, 2016 5:34 pm

As another long commuter as well as someone who walks a lot, I'd encourage you to check out https://librivox.org/.

They're closing in on 11,000 public domain books, sourced from the Gutenberg Project, read entirely but volunteers. All can be downloaded for free and played on your phone or tablet.

I just finished "Robinson Crusoe" and am starting a collection of old science fiction stories (great fun). This past spring was an H.G. Wells marathon and I'm going to have a crack at Sherlock Holmes later this summer.

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