Operation Mincemeat - Ben Macintyre

[troisoiseaux]

I recently got around to listening to the cast album for Operation Mincemeat, a new-ish musical about the 1943 British deception operation to disguise the planned Allied invasion of Sicily by planting false documents on a corpse, which I can only describe as "what if Team Starkid wrote a British version of Hamilton?" (Which I don't mean in a bad way! It's not going into my Spotify rotation, but I'd like to see it at some point during its Broadway run.) Obviously, after that, I had to read Ben Macintyre's nonfiction account Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory— it's a doozy of a spy story, stranger than fiction at every turn, from the sheer bonkers Rube Goldberg Trojan Horse of the whole idea to the farcical period where German spies in Spain were trying to get their hands on the documents and the British were pretending like it was of utmost important that they didn't, while also trying to make sure that they did - since that was, you know, the entire point - to the fact that operation mastermind Ewen Montagu's own brother was a Russian spy. (Which explains a subplot of the musical I couldn't quite piece together from the cast album.) I'd actually first encountered this particular bit of spy history during my middle school spy phase, and I remember being enchanted by how they'd conjured up this whole fictional persona down to the stuff in his pockets; it occurred to me this time that they'd essentially reverse-engineered a mystery, with puzzle pieces laid out to be pieced together into the intended misinformation: one of the carefully drafted letters sent by the doomed courier was included solely for a passing reference to sardines as A Clue that the second choice for the planned invasion discussed in the other letters was Sardinia (and definitely not Sicily). It is completely wild that this actually worked.

Anyway! While the plot and characters of the musical Operation Mincemeat appear to be a particularly tongue-in-cheek fictionalization of the actual events and people involved, 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."

Comments

[sovay]

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.

[troisoiseaux]

if anyone were unwise enough to commission me to dramatize the story, probably what I'd build its emotional structure around

First of all, I would love to watch that dramatization. Second, it seems from Wikipedia like the 2021 movie with Colin Firth and Matthew Macfayden does, but overeggs the pudding and turns it into a love triangle with Cholmondeley. (As in, Cholmondeley is also in love with Jean.) So, yeah, I think I'd prefer to see your version.

(Speaking of dramatizations, I learned from Wikipedia that there were apparently two other musicals about Operation Mincemeat before the one that's taken off on Broadway - one was in Welsh and focused on Glyndwr Michael, who posthumously served as the body of the operation's doomed courier - which is kind of wild.)

[sovay]

So, yeah, I think I'd prefer to see your version.

Thank you! The love triangle is one of the least interesting dramatic structures I know. Netflix, where are my millions.

(Speaking of dramatizations, I learned from Wikipedia that there were apparently two other musicals about Operation Mincemeat before the one that's taken off on Broadway - one was in Welsh and focused on Glyndwr Michael, who posthumously served as the body of the operation's doomed courier - which is kind of wild.)

I had no idea!