Movie Review: Operation Mincemeat (2021). On Netflix.

This interesting recent movie on Netflix is a good docudrama about one of the more audacious Allied intelligence operations and victories of World War II.  It's about Operation Mincemeat, a real plan created by the British Naval Intelligence Division (NID), to confuse the Nazis with false information about the location of the planned 1943 Allied invasion of southern Europe (which ultimately was launched against Sicily).

The story begins with the development of proposals for the British military on how to create confusion and doubt among the German military authorities about the impending invasion. Ewen Montagu (played well by Colin Firth), a commanding officer within the NID, and his team members, are considering different ways they might feed credible-sounding fake intelligence to the Germans. They ultimately make the controversial decision to try to float a dead body ashore off the coast of Spain, disguised as a British military courier, with false plans for the invasion.

The group realizes they needed to create a completely fictional backstory for the body. But first, they need to find a fresh dead man’s body of the right age, sufficiently anonymous that it can be “repurposed” with a different identity, and well preserved enough to appear to have died recently. Once they overcome that challenge, they have to create a convincing history for this person who didn’t really exist, by forging public documentation and a discoverable history, and also figuring out how to put convincing corroborating evidence on the body itself.

Finally, they need to find a way to deliver the body, in the guise of a courier who apparently had been shot down over the ocean, so that it would float ashore and be found and accepted as real by the Spanish authorities, then passed along to a German agent, who they hope will send the information on to the always suspicious and sophisticated German intelligence apparatus, and ultimately to Hitler himself.

It's a far-fetched but well-crafted cinematic tale of this unlikely plan that not only happened, but even more amazingly appears to have succeeded in fooling the Germans about the location of the invasion. It also nicely depicts the lives and interactions of the team of seemingly ordinary men and women in an obscure London NID office, who worked together to assemble all the elements of this elaborate deception scheme, and see the whole fraud through to the end.

One of the movie’s noteworthy characters is Lt. Commander Ian Fleming (played by Johnny Flynn), Montagu’s personal assistant, who later became famous (in real life) as the creator and writer of the original James Bond spy novels. Fleming is believed to have played an important role in this secret operation.

It’s worth noting that this story has been told several times before in books and films, including in the book The Man Who Never Was (1953) by Ewen Montagu himself (which I remember reading and enjoying long ago); a popular movie of the same name, based on Montagu's book, from 1956; and the more recent book Operation Mincemeat (2010) by Ben McIntyre, which was the basis for this recent film.

However factually accurate and complete it may or may not be, it’s an enjoyable and dramatic portrayal of one of the high points of British spying and information warfare against the Germans in World War II. Recommended.