Glyndwr Michael’s name was not on the headstone in Huelva for more than fifty years after his death. The headstone read “Major William Martin.” His role in one of the most significant deception operations in military history was secret. The man himself, his Welsh childhood, his father’s death, his years of poverty, his death in a London hospital, was entirely absent from the public record of the operation he made possible.
In 1996, an amateur historian named Roger Morgan, working in what was then called the Public Record Office, found documentary evidence identifying Glyndwr Michael as the body used in Operation Mincemeat. The British government formally confirmed the identification in 1998. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission added a second line to the Huelva headstone: “Glyndwr Michael served as Major William Martin R.M.”
He had been waiting fifty-three years for his name to be restored.
E. CONSTRUCTING MAJOR WILLIAM MARTIN
The practical problems involved in constructing a credible identity for a dead body in 1943 were formidable, and it is worth tracing them systematically, because each solution reveals something about the sophistication of the operation’s planners and about the intelligence systems they were trying to deceive.
The first problem was rank. The documents in the briefcase needed to be plausibly carried by an officer of sufficient seniority to be trusted with sensitive planning information, but not so senior that German intelligence would expect to know his name or be able to verify his assignment through other channels. A junior officer would not have access to the kind of documents being planted. A very senior officer would be a prominent public figure whose movements and assignments were documentable from other sources.