Mailbox Monday

Mailbox Monday is a weekly meme created by Marcia at A Girl and Her Books and is being hosted all this month by Cindy of Cindy's Love of Books.

I heard about Operation Mincement, by Ben Macintyre a few weeks ago on another book blog, and it sounded so good that I had to order it right away. It arrived last week, and I'm eager to get started with it.

The subtitle is How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory.

Here's the Amazon blurb:

Ben Macintyre’s Agent Zigzag was hailed as “rollicking, spellbinding” (New York Times), “wildly improbable but entirely true” (Entertainment Weekly), and, quite simply, “the best book ever written” (Boston Globe). In his new book, Operation Mincemeat, he tells an extraordinary story that will delight his legions of fans.

In 1943, from a windowless basement office in London, two brilliant intelligence officers conceived a plan that was both simple and complicated— Operation Mincemeat. The purpose? To deceive the Nazis into thinking that Allied forces were planning to attack southern Europe by way of Greece or Sardinia, rather than Sicily, as the Nazis had assumed, and the Allies ultimately chose.

Charles Cholmondeley of MI5 and the British naval intelligence officer Ewen Montagu could not have been more different. Cholmondeley was a dreamer seeking adventure. Montagu was an aristocratic, detail-oriented barrister. But together they were the perfect team and created an ingenious plan: Get a corpse, equip it with secret (but false and misleading) papers concerning the invasion, then drop it off the coast of Spain where German spies would, they hoped, take the bait. The idea was approved by British intelligence officials, including Ian Fleming (creator of James Bond). Winston Churchill believed it might ring true to the Axis and help bring victory to the Allies.

I've been reading up on WWII a fair amount over the past year, and like reading about intelligence and counter-intelligence aspects of the year. Should be a real treat.