@DizzKneeLand33:
(G40 Editor’s note: the man was probably alive until Churchill realized that a sub alone does not stop the Italian Mediterranean NO… Â :lol: )
All kidding aside, the corpse actually had been dead for a few weeks, most of which time it had spent in a London morgue’s refrigeration facility until the deception operation was ready to go. The body belonged to a man called, I believe, Glendawr Michael, a homeless man who had died from accidentally or deliberately ingesting a form of rat poison. Naval Intelligence officer Owen Montague (who worked down the hall from the future James Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming) convinced a coroner to discretely release the body to him for unspecified national security purposes. The corpse was given false identity papers, and fabricated letters suggesting that the Allies would invade Greece and Sardinia rather than Sicily were planted on him. The Germans fell for it. They didn’t leave Sicily totally undefended (and indeed Montague wasn’t aiming for them to go that far), but they did thin their defenses there somewhat to reinforce Greece.
An odd footnote to this story is that Montague’s brother (whose name I forget) was a spy working in wartime Britain for Soviet Intelligence. Montague never suspected it then or at any later point in his life, but during the war MI6 (unbeknownst to Montague) had its suspicions about his brother (who made no secret of his Communist sympathies) and was very nervous about the fact that a possible Soviet agent was closely related to a naval intelligence officer who was authorized to view the highly classified ULTRA decrypts. It was only much later, when the VENONA transcripts came into the light, that Montague’s brother was exposed as a spy who’d worked for the Soviets.