In April 1943, a month before the Allied victory in North Africa, German agents recovered the body of a British Royal Marine pilot from the waters off a Spanish beach. The invasion was assisted by some subterfuge. The stepping stone to its mainland would be the island of Sicily, in part because the Allies could depend on fighter cover from air bases on British Malta, 60 miles south of Sicily and recently freed from a siege by Axis forces.ĭid you know? British Lieutenant Commander Ewen Montagu (1901-1985), mastermind of Operation Mincemeat, described the ingenious counterintelligence operation in his 1954 book "The Man Who Never Was." A 1957 film of the same name featured Montagu in a cameo as a British intelligence officer critical of the plan. With the huge Allied army and navy in the southern Mediterranean now freed for further action, British and American strategists faced two options: Transfer these forces north for the impending invasion of Europe from the English Channel, or remain in theater to strike at southern Italy, which British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (1874-1965) called “the soft underbelly of Europe.” At this crossroads, the Allies, after some dissension, decided to press north into Italy. When the Allies won the North African Campaign on May 13, 1943, a quarter-million German and Italian troops surrendered at Tunisia, on the north coast of Africa.
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