In Operation Mincemeat, in 1943, British Military intelligence dressed up a dead tramp as a Marine officer, floated his body carrying details of a planned invasion of Greece onto the Spanish coast knowing that the bogus plans would find their way to the Germans. The Germans fell for it and diverted tanks, boats and men from Sicily, where the allies really were going to land, to Greece. It was a triumph. There are two books written about the operation and both mention the underpants placed on the body but only in Ben Macintyre’s 2010 account, on which the Colin Firth film is based, is there real detail. Unfortunately, Macintyre engages in dramatic conceit and gets it all wrong. I start, once again, with those 4 young girls photographed in the late 1880s.
They were four of the five daughters of Sr Courtenay Ilbert, of Ilbert Bill fame. One of them, Margaret, was my great grandmother. And that is where my direct involvement ends. The eldest daughter Lettice was a formidable academic and married Herbert Fisher (HAL Fisher) a Liberal MP and minister and academic and warden of New College Oxford. Their only child was a daughter, the academic Mary Bennet.
A third daughter, Jessie married the Diplomat, Intelligence officer and bastion of the establishment, Sir George Young whose “diplomacy” on another family matter I covered here. They had four children. The eldest, George Peregrine (an Ilbert family name) Young married Elisabeth Knatchbull-Hugessen whose father Hughe was a diplomat. Hughe’s Kosovan valet, Elyesa Bazna, stole and copied numerous documents including one referencing Operation Overlord and passed them to the Germans while Hughe took his morning bath or went into town in the afternoon to play the piano.. Thankfully the Germans doubted the man, codenamed Cicero. James Mason plays the valet in “5 Fingers” a wonderful black and white movie about this episode. Amazingly Hughe’s career survived this scandal.
GP Young was the father of Sir George (now Lord) Young the Tory politician and also of my step mother Helen. But it is his younger brother Lieutenant Colonel Courtenay Trevelyan Young who is critical to Mincemeat.
Macintyre addresses the issue of the underpants on page 67 of his book. For the fake officer Captain William Martin to fool the Germans he had to be dressed like an officer and that meant expensive woolen underpants. But times were tough in the war and nobody in Military Intelligence planning the operation seemed keen to hand over their pants. Eventually the pants were found and they were those of HAL Fisher who had been killed by a lorry in the blackout in April 1940, three years prior to Mincemeat.
According to Macintyre, to obtain the underpants the folks at Military Intelligence consulted John Masterman an Oxford Academic who also chaired XX Committee, the senior committee within the unit. Masterman hated HAL Fisher, the two were bitter rivals and he was said to have been enraged by the glowing obituaries that his old sparring partner had received. So according to MacIntyre
“Putting the great man’s underclothes on a dead body and floating it into German hands was just the sort of hoke that appealed to his (JM’s) odd sense of humour. Masterman described the underwear as a “gift”; it is far more likely that he simply arranged for the dead don’s drawers to be pressed into military service.”
Really? Is it really likely that Masterman would have arranged for someone to go and see Lettice Fisher and say “can I have a pair of underpants belonging to your husband who died almost three years ago, can’t say why, it’s all terribly hush hush.” This is the sort of fantasy one associates with Monty Python as the British upper classes go to war. It is nonsense.
HAL Fisher was known for his clothing. If a mere blemish appeared in a suit his tailor in Oxford would make a new suit for him and the old one would be thrown away. But the advnt of his wife changed that. Lettice was a “mend and do” sort of person, a lady who grew her own vegetables and as Britain headed into war such an approach was all the rage.
On the demise of HAL Fisher, Lettice would not have wanted any of his clothes to go to waste. According to the daughter of Courtenay Trevelyan Young, her grandparents Jessie and George Young assisted Lettice in clearing the clothes. Fisher was a tall man as are all the Youngs and thus most of them went to the younger son of Jessie and George, that is to say Courtenay. Whilst his elder brother had started work in 1929 and so was well established and probablyalready had an extensive wardrobe, Courtenay had only let Cambridge in the mid thirties. Though he was a high flier eventually heading up the Russian section of British Intelligence in the era of the Cambridge spies, in 1940 he was still a very junior officer and so could do with additional clothes.
But he was an officer working, until 1943 when he was posted to Ceylon, at what his daughter terms “the office”, that is to say British Military Intelligence where Mincemeat was planned. And thus when it became known within the office that a pair of underpants was needed Courtenay was able to serve up a pair belonging to his late uncle.
I am afraid that while the Macintyre version of events may have dramatic flair it is just fiction. The truth is rather more prosaic.