THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WHY NOT
A series of films devoted to the Second World War, old and monstrous baderne with unsuspected resources, had won our screens for a few months. Canceled due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Cunning, directed by English veteran John Madden, who has no highlights in his book except a fairly flat Shakespeare in Love (1998), arrives, so to speak, at the end of the operation.
This title makes us hear the Anglo-Saxon voice on the subject, in the form of a war film ceding its prerogatives to the spy film. Another English director, Alfred Hitchcock, of more certain notability, signed a few serious films in the genre, such as Correspondent 17 (1940), Fifth column (1942) or The Chained (1946).
The affair which concerns us is one of the finest blows of the clandestine war. It is linked to the landing of the Allies in Sicily in 1943 which, under the code name Husky, aimed to open a second front on the European continent, but whose prospects, given the importance of the German forces stationed on this strategic island , were particularly lethal. It is here, of course, that the secret services came into play, masters of intelligence gathering, but also of disinformation and the manipulation of enemy forces. At the maneuver, the famous English MI5, which had developed the very effective counterintelligence system called “Double Cross”, consisting of turning enemy agents around to make them deliver false information to their dealing officers.
This is how the “Mincemeat” (“minced meat”) operation convinced the German general staff that the Allied landings would take place in Greece rather than in Sicily. Two officers, Ewen Montagu and Charles Cholmondeley, devised the schemes: letting the corpse of a pseudo-British Royal Marines officer, Major William Martin, drift near a Spanish beach, with a bundle of information in his pockets. attesting to its existence, as well as the bogus invasion plan. The poor guy acting as an officer, buried since then in the aptly named cemetery of Our Lady of Solitude in Huelva, will have to wait until 1997 for his truth to be inscribed on his grave!
In the meantime, hard at work, as expected at Franco, the Nazi spies who get their hands on the corpse send the information to whom it may concern. German espionage checks the trail of this ghost in London, where all the proofs of its existence have been laid out for them. The English, whose insignia of perfidy we know on this side of the Channel, did not skimp in this case. Theater tickets, bank overdraft reminder letter, and even a fiancée named Pam who was none other than an MI5 agent.
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