Mincemeat revisited

SIR – The film Operation Mincemeat (Letters, April 21) – like the book The Man Who Never Was (1953) by Ewen Montagu, who devised the deception – asserts that it “was swallowed whole”, saved thousands of lives and changed the course of the war.

In fact, the Germans had decided long before that the defence of Sicily would not be on the beaches, but by mobile units inland. Operation Mincemeat simply reinforced their belief that our strength was twice what it actually was, the result of a much bigger deception operation over many years – Operation Barclay by Dudley Clarke’s “A” Force in Cairo.

It was this deception, which remained classified until the 1970s, that saved the thousands of lives and changed the course of the war.

Roger J Morgan

London W10