Heritage Hunters

Join me and genealogist Barbara Jean May, host of the Heritage Hunters Podcast in a Twitter Spaces live discussion today Sunday 4 June at 10:00 CST. Find the link in her Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/bjm19047. 

We’ll be talking about my great-grandfather Guiseppe Amato who murdered two people in Hartford, CT, in 1912. He escaped a manhunt and was never seen again.

Yep. True story.

Your indie bookstore

I’m lucky enough to have a super indie bookstore where I live. Do you?

Reply to this email and tell me about a bookstore that should stock the Galliano Club and Detective Emilia Cruz series!

#excerpt

OPERATION MINCEMEAT by Ben Macintyre

Eighty years ago, a dead British naval officer named Bill Martin washed up on a Spanish beach. He was a landing craft expert with a fiancée named Pam. They'd gone to the theater in London a few days before his plane crashed in the Atlantic with no survivors.

Based on the contents of a briefcase tethered to his waist, Martin was carrying secret letters to a British general in North Africa.

The letters wound up in the hands of supposedly neutral Spanish authorities who shared them with representatives of Hitler's Nazi government. Photographs of the letters were rushed to Berlin.

In this way, Hitler learned that the Allies planned to attack via Greece and the Balkans, with a false feint at Sicily and a minor diversion in Sardinia. Reports from other sources soon trickled in, verifying the Allied plan for Greece. In response, Hitler fortified forces there rather than Sicily.

But Bill Martin never existed

The body that washed ashore in Spain with top secret information was the product of Operation Mincemeat, a British naval intelligence operation designed to trick Germany into diverting military forces away from Sicily before the Allied invasion of the Italian island in July 1943.

The ruse worked.

Thousands of lives were saved when US and UK forces landed on the beaches of the Mediterranean island. Although the remaining German troops fought hard, the Allies successfully took Sicily and drove north up the boot of Italy. The Germans conducted a running retreat as the Italian army collapsed, taking Mussolini and the Pact of Steel between Rome and Berlin with it.

The body that became Bill Martin was that of Glyndwr Michael, a Welsh vagrant who'd died of accidental phosphorus poisoning. Michael's body was preserved in a morgue, then dressed in a naval uniform, carried in a special capsule aboard a British submarine, and deposited on the Spanish coast at Huelva.

Ben Macintyre’s book details the months of painstaking research and preparation, the two officers who were instrumental in pulling it off and the amazing way multiple intelligence assets were used to reinforce the deception. 

OPERATION MINCEMEAT is a fascinating account of a little-known intelligence success, written like an unputdownable thriller.

Highly recommended. 

As this is a long newsletter, I'm trying to make it easier on the eye with a larger, more readable font. 

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 All the best, 

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