Monday 6 February 2012

The Advert That Never Was




Many readers will have seen the 1956 movie, "The Man Who Never Was" which was about the true story of a British attempt to trick the enemy into weakening Sicily's defenses before the 1943 attack, using a dead man with faked papers. 

Operation 'Mincemeat' involved the acquisition and dressing up of a human cadaver as a "Major William Martin, R.M." and putting it into the sea near Huelva, Spain. Attached to the corpse was a brief-case containing fake letters falsely stating that the Allied attack would be against Sardinia and Greece rather than Sicily, the actual point of invasion.

When the body was found, the Spanish Intelligence Service passed copies of the papers to the German Intelligence Service which passed them on to their High Command. The ruse was so successful that the Germans still believed that Sardinia and Greece were the intended objectives, weeks after the landings in Sicily had begun.

At the JPC Council meeting on 6th, February Cllr Nicholas Haycock produced a picture of a simulated advert (reproduced above); "The Advert That Never Was". Both Cllr Haycock and Cllr Les Goodman expressed their strong condemnation for the Henley Independents and the spoof advert. 

Clearly, the English still have the ingenuity to mislead political adversaries.

No comments:

Post a Comment