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Operation ''Mincemeat'' was a successful British disinformation plan during the Second World War. As part of Operation Barclay, the widespread deception intended to cover the invasion of Italy from North Africa, ''Mincemeat'' helped to convince the German high command that the Allies planned to invade Greece and Sardinia in 1943 instead of Sicily, the actual objective. This was accomplished by persuading the Germans that they had, by accident, intercepted "top secret" documents giving details of Allied war plans. The documents were attached to a corpse deliberately left to wash up on a beach in Punta Umbría in Spain.〔Gladwell, Malcolm, ''(Pandora's Briefcase )'', The New Yorker, 10 May 2010, reprised 26 July 2015 by Henry Finder in a New Yorker newsletter〕 The success of the planting of false documents was confirmed through Ultra decrypts of German messages. Coincidentally, a similar story was used as a plot device by Duff Cooper in his 1950 novel ''Operation Heartbreak''. The true story was revealed in 1953, in the book ''The Man Who Never Was''. A film of the same name was made in 1956. ==Background== In September 1942, a PBY Catalina, flying from England to Gibraltar, crashed off Cadiz. All aboard were killed, including Paymaster-Lt. James Hadden Turner, a courier carrying top secret documents and a French agent. Turner's documents included a letter from General Mark Clark, the American Deputy Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, to General Noel Mason-MacFarlane, British Governor and Commander in Chief of Gibraltar, informing him that General Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander, would arrive in Gibraltar on the eve of the "target date" of "4 November".〔Smyth, Denis (2010) (''Deathly Deception: The Real Story of Operation Mincemeat''. Oxford University Press ) at Googlebooks. Retrieved 5 August 2013.〕 Turner's body washed up on the beach near Tarifa and was recovered by the Spanish authorities. When the body was returned to the British, the letter was still on it, and technicians determined that the letter had not been opened. The Germans had the means to read the letter without opening the envelope, but if they did, they apparently decided the letter was "planted" and the information was bogus, so they ignored it.〔 This near catastrophe, which had seriously jeopardised the operation, sparked the idea for Operation Mincemeat. In late 1942, Operation Torch, the invasion of French North Africa, was imminent; victory in that campaign was expected. Following the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, Allied planners decided to continue the offensive in the Mediterranean, Middle East and African theatres. From North Africa, attacks could be made either into Italy or through the Balkans, trapping the German forces there between the Western Allies and the Soviets. Control of Sicily would open the Mediterranean to Allied shipping and allow the invasion of continental Europe, making Sicily an obvious strategic objective. German planners saw this as well; Winston Churchill commented: "Everyone but a bloody fool would ''know'' that it's Sicily ()." The massive Allied buildup of resources for the invasion (code-named Operation Husky), would be detected. The Germans would know that some large attack was coming. However, if the Allies could deceive the Germans about where that attack was going, the Germans might disperse or divert some significant part of their forces, which would help the invasion succeed. This had already been practised by the British in the fighting in North Africa; they had established a competent system for deception of the enemy, able to give the appearance of fake formations and to feed misinformation through double agents and diplomatic rumour. Several months previously, Flight Lieutenant Charles Cholmondeley〔Cholmondeley is pronounced (/ˈtʃʌmli/ Chum-li)〕 RAF of Section B1(a) of MI5,〔Not Sir Archibald Cholmondeley as in (The About.com account of Operation Mincemeat ) by Robert W. Martin.〕 suggested dropping a dead man attached to a malfunctioning parachute in France with a radio set for the Germans to find. The idea was for the Germans to think that the Allies did not know the set was captured, and pretend to be friendly agents operating it, thus allowing the Allies to feed them misinformation. This was dismissed as unworkable; however the idea was subsequently taken up by the Twenty Committee (from the Roman numeral XX "double cross"), the small inter-service, inter-departmental intelligence team in charge of double agents. Cholmondeley was on the Twenty Committee, as was Lieutenant Commander Ewen Montagu, a Royal Navy intelligence officer. Montagu and Cholmondeley developed Cholmondeley's idea into a workable plan, using documents instead of a radio. The Committee thought of planting the documents on a body with a defective parachute. However, the Germans knew that it was Allied policy never to send sensitive documents over enemy territory, so they decided to make the man a victim of a plane crash at sea. That would explain how the man would be several days dead and how he could be carrying secret documents. The body would drift ashore in Spain, whose nominally neutral government was known to cooperate with the ''Abwehr'' (German intelligence). The British were sure that the Spanish authorities would allow German agents to examine anything found. Montagu gave the operation the code name of ''Mincemeat'', just restored to the list of available names after its use for another successful mission.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Operation Mincemeat – The Man Who Never Was in BBC's h2g2 )〕 The deliberate planting of fake documents on the enemy was not new. Known as the "Haversack Ruse", it had been practised by the British and others in World War I. Also, in August 1942 in North Africa, before the Battle of Alam el Halfa a corpse was placed in a blown-up scout car, in a minefield facing the German 90th Light Division just south of Qaret el Abd. With the corpse was a map showing the locations of non-existent British minefields. The Germans fell for the ruse, and Rommel's panzers were routed to areas of soft sand where they bogged down.〔Although the use of the corpse was disputed in some accounts, Smith gives a more detailed account on how Freddie de Guingand concocted the deception. However, there is still some question whether the map actually affected Rommel's decisions.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Operation Mincemeat」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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