I genuinely got a little choked up to discover that one of the lines from its song Dear Bill - And why did we meet in the middle of a war? / What a silly thing for anyone to do - is a line from the actual letter the actual Hester Leggett wrote to "Bill" from his fiancée "Pam."

No shade to the historical letters of Hester Leggatt, the thing where Ewen Montagu and Jean Leslie went all in on cosplaying a fictional romance well beyond the necessary minimum of wallet litter may actually be the most interesting part of Operation Mincemeat to me and if anyone were unwise enough to commission me to dramatize the story, probably what I'd build its emotional structure around. Everyone got in on it. It worked like sympathetic magic.