Andy

18th Mar 2007

General questions

What is the name of the movie where a British army officer asks a nurse in an army hospital to write a love letter to a fictitious soldier that, along with a satchel of other documents, this officer later deliberately drops while being pursued on camel back in the African desert. It is intended to make the Germans believe the WW II invasion of Europe will occur somewhere other than Normandy.

Answer: Although the plot you describe is slightly different, this sounds to me like "The Man Who Never Was", made in 1956. Operation 'Mincemeat' involved the acquisition of a human cadaver, dressing it 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 suggesting that the Allied attack would be against Sardinia and Greece. When the body was found, pro-German Spaniards passed the papers to the German Intelligence Service who 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. The film starred Clifton Webb as Lt. Cmdr. Ewen Montagu, Gloria Grahame as Lucy Sherwood, Robert Flemyng as Lt. George Acres, Josephine Griffin as Pam, Stephen Boyd as Patrick O'Reilly, Laurence Naismith as Adml. Cross, Geoffrey Keen as Gen. Nye, André Morell as Sir Bernard Spilsbury, Michael Hordern as Gen. Coburn and William Squire as submarine commander Bill Jewell. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Never_Was.

Andy

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