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The Man Who Never Was AND Operation Heartbreak
Operation Heartbreak/The Man Who Never Was Spellmount are proud to present these two accounts, fictional and factual, of one of the greatest intelligence operations ever undertaken, with an introduction by Duff Cooper's son, John Julius Norwich. 'Operation Heartbreak is a work of jewel-like brevity and intensity.' New York Herald Tribune Full description
- GenresHistoryNonfictionWar
324 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 15, 2006
About the author
Duff Cooper
30 books12 followersAlfred Duff Cooper, 1st Viscount Norwich, GCMG, DSO, PC
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
March 16, 2015
A little background first. It was during my bike trip to Laddakh two years ago and I was lucky to have company of one of the most interesting person I have ever met Mr. Bijoy Chatterjee. He had mentioned this book and ever since I was hunting for it both in shops and online. It was either not available or too expensive. Finally I got it on kindle store. So on a personal level it was a long journey reaching its destination.
Coming to the book, the edition I got had two books .The first" Operation Heartbreak" authored by Duff Cooper is written as a fiction but drops enough hints to relate it to famous yet intriguing Operation Mincemeat that tricked the axis power and facilitated victory for Allied forces on strategically vital Sicily. Anticipating the speculative frenzy that may follow after the book is published, Government authorities hurriedly commissioned one of the chief curator of the secret operation Ewen Montagu to write a true account of the events . And thus came the aptly titled second book " The man who never was".
Sounds interesting..doesn't it? Well the book is even better. I chose to read the second book only,and just skimmed through the first one, It was kind of instinctive decision.
Montagu narrates the event as it happened ,revealing all but what was not safe and necessary. He turns out to be a brilliant narrator as the readers effortlessly dive into the world war era and the feel the tensions around it. Things are explained in acute military precision, yet keeps you glued. Many a times the reader gets awestruck with the kind of detail that these men behind the operation go through. Development of phases of operation and challenges around it are interestingly explained. I almost started to fall in love with the character of the dead soldier when they were weaving a personality around him especially his love interest and family tussles. The enormity of the operation , the kind of attention to minutest detail that were taken care of were awe-inspiring. The fact that even after such precision planning the success of the operation depended so much upon acclaimed astuteness of German was aptly conveyed.And at last you get a familiar good feeling when "the mincemeat is swallowed whole" and allied forces reap the fruit of the brilliant plan.
So the book does stand upto its reputation. Though It has the potential of a great read on the strength of the plot alone,The brilliant narration by Montagu works as icing on the cake.Do go for it.
Coming to the book, the edition I got had two books .The first" Operation Heartbreak" authored by Duff Cooper is written as a fiction but drops enough hints to relate it to famous yet intriguing Operation Mincemeat that tricked the axis power and facilitated victory for Allied forces on strategically vital Sicily. Anticipating the speculative frenzy that may follow after the book is published, Government authorities hurriedly commissioned one of the chief curator of the secret operation Ewen Montagu to write a true account of the events . And thus came the aptly titled second book " The man who never was".
Sounds interesting..doesn't it? Well the book is even better. I chose to read the second book only,and just skimmed through the first one, It was kind of instinctive decision.
Montagu narrates the event as it happened ,revealing all but what was not safe and necessary. He turns out to be a brilliant narrator as the readers effortlessly dive into the world war era and the feel the tensions around it. Things are explained in acute military precision, yet keeps you glued. Many a times the reader gets awestruck with the kind of detail that these men behind the operation go through. Development of phases of operation and challenges around it are interestingly explained. I almost started to fall in love with the character of the dead soldier when they were weaving a personality around him especially his love interest and family tussles. The enormity of the operation , the kind of attention to minutest detail that were taken care of were awe-inspiring. The fact that even after such precision planning the success of the operation depended so much upon acclaimed astuteness of German was aptly conveyed.And at last you get a familiar good feeling when "the mincemeat is swallowed whole" and allied forces reap the fruit of the brilliant plan.
So the book does stand upto its reputation. Though It has the potential of a great read on the strength of the plot alone,The brilliant narration by Montagu works as icing on the cake.Do go for it.
February 12, 2026
Fact vs fiction in the story of an outrageous WWII operation to fool the Nazis
When we think of Allied operations in World War II designed to fool the Nazis, most of us think “Normandy.” After all, the elaborate efforts to conceal the time and place of D-Day famously included a fake army and hundreds of inflatable tanks, airplanes, and artillery pieces. Not to mention all the Abwehr spies the British had turned in the Double Cross System.
But two years earlier the British mounted a brilliant deception to shield the invasion of Sicily. In Operation Mincemeat, British military intelligence persuaded the Germans that Allied forces would invade Greece and Sardinia instead. The story first broke in 1950 when Duff Cooper, the man in charge of the effort, told a version in a novel called Operation Heartbreak. Three years later, a naval officer, Ewen Montagu, revealed in detail in The Man Who Never Was how he and his colleagues had pulled off the operation.
Three books tell different versions of the story
More than 70 years have passed since the publication of Montagu’s book. Long-classified British intelligence files, memoirs, and journals have appeared with additional detail. And much of it contradicts what Cooper and Montagu wrote. It’s all laid out in WWII historian Ben MacIntyre’s jaw-dropping 2010 book, Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured Allied Victory.
What follows here is a master class in historiography. We’ll compare two books written seven decades ago about a single extraordinary event with what historians have since learned about that event. In this way, we’ll gain insight into how history is written—and how it can evolve over the years.
How “facts” can evolve
Operation Heartbreak
Duff Cooper’s Operation Heartbreak is fiction, pure and simple. It ignores or glosses over the extraordinary complications and frustrations that plagued Ewen Montagu and his colleagues. The novel is the story of a frustrated British career soldier named Willie Maryngton whose only ambition in life is to fight the Germans in battle. He had enrolled at Sandhurst, the British military academy, only in August 1917 and left far too late to fight in France before the Armistice.
Worse is to come for Willie. By the time war breaks out again in 1939, he is too old for active service. Now a captain in the reserves, he struggles in vain to obtain a waiver and enter the fighting. Then he dies of pneumonia. And his ambition is fulfilled only as a corpse when military intelligence fits him up with fake correspondence to misdirect the Germans about the invasion of Sicily. Cooper devotes little space and only spare details about Operation Mincemeat, which he calls Operation Heartbreak. But he breaks the government’s silence about the deception. This paves the way for Montagu to write his own “factual” account.
The Man Who Never Was
Ewen Montagu’s account of Operation Mincemeat is mostly true. He writes about a colleague named “George” in a brainstorming session who suggests dropping a corpse behind the lines in France with a radio transmitter. “This was not one of his better inspirations,” Montagu notes, ” and we rapidly demolished it.” But that off-the-wall idea later comes back to life in a new iteration. The result is, of course, to drop a corpse dressed like a British army major with a briefcase attached containing top-secret letters. The most important one is from the Deputy Chief of the Imperial General Staff to a senior commander in the Mediterranean. And that letter indicates that the Allies will attack Greece and Sardinia instead of the more obvious target of Sicily, with only a diversionary attack there.
Montagu describes in exhaustive detail all the work to find a suitable corpse, obtain permission to use it, write the many letters the corpse would be carrying (including a photo and love letter from the man’s fiancée, “Pam”), and then persuade—with great difficulty—the military and political leadership to approve the operation. But once he has the green light, Montagu gives elaborate instructions to the captain of the submarine who will release the body off the coast of Spain. He’s selected a spot where a German spy is active. And he knows the Spaniards will turn the briefcase over to him.
Montagu’s post-war research
Because the invasion of Sicily goes off without a hitch, it’s abundantly clear that the deception has worked. The Nazis had redirected forces from the island to Sardinia in the north and Greece in the east. But he learns after the war, just how effective the operation had truly been. German intelligence files make it clear that the Nazi military leadership—and Adolf Hitler himself—had bought the story. In fact, it was two days after the July 10, 1943 invasion that they finally began to realize the truth.
Operation Mincemeat
In his book, MacIntyre contradicts the convenient untruths and obfuscations of Montagu’s own account. For example:
** It was not Montagu alone who managed the case but Montagu working with a Royal Air Force officer named Charles Cholmondeley (pronounced “Chumley”; don’t you just love the English?). And the original idea for the plot had been cooked up several years earlier by a certain naval commander, Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, then a Naval Intelligence officer. Montagu conflates the two and refers to them both as “George.”
** The dead body washed onto the Spanish shore to launch the plot was far from the wholly fictional British army captain Willie Maryngton whom Cooper imagines. It was that of Glyndwr Michael, a Welsh homeless man who died from ingesting rat poison containing phosphorus. It was not, as Montagu had asserted, a middle-class Scotsman who died an honorable death in a hospital. And he never asked the Welshman’s family for permission to use his body.
** The famous English pathologist who assured Montagu and Cholmondeley that no one would discover the true cause of death of the man now rechristened “Major William Martin” was clearly mistaken. Glyndwr Michael had died from phosphorus poisoning, which leaves distinctive traces in the body that a competent pathologist could detect. However, the eminent British pathologist had told Montagu that there were no pathologists in Spain who could match his expertise.
Montagu misunderstood the Germans’ reactions
Montagu writes that the Nazis “swallowed Mincemeat whole.” In truth, they didn’t. Because MacIntyre turned up a host of surprising facts about the Germans’ reaction to the deception.
** For instance, the Abwehr agent in Spain who examined the phony papers on “Major Martin’s” body and declared them genuine might well have had his doubts. But no matter. He was desperate to prove he could deliver high-value intelligence to Berlin. So he was strongly inclined to pass along the documents in “Major Martin’s” briefcase no matter what he thought of their authenticity. He himself was one-quarter Jewish and feared being sent back home.
** A “German spy” sent to England to investigate the bona fides of “Major Martin” was a figment of the Nazis’ imagination. British intelligence had captured, turned, or executed every single Abwehr agent infiltrated into Britain—a fact that was still a secret when Montagu wrote his book in the early 1950s.
** The Abwehr officer in Berlin who was the ultimate authority on the authenticity of the documents and was Hitler’s favorite intelligence analyst was easily able to detect the phoniness of “Martin’s” papers. But he chose to reassure Hitler because he was a dedicated anti-Nazi. He was prepared to do anything to help the Allies win the war. In fact, many in the Abwehr were anti-Nazi. The boss, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, was later executed in the wake of the failed von Stauffenberg assassination plot.)
In other words, the Germans knew perfectly well that “the man who never was” was a hoax. But those who knew refused to pass the truth up the chain of command.
About the authors
Duff Cooper, Ist Viscount Norwich (1890-1954) was a Conservative British politician and diplomat who served in the Cabinet in the years both before and during World War II. He famously resigned as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1938 in protest against Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s capitulation to Adolf Hitler at Munich. Chamberlain’s successor, Winston Churchill, brought him back to the Cabinet in a series of senior posts. But he was a member of Churchill’s inner circle and understood to be a close advisor of the Prime Minister. He wrote a memoir as well as Operation Heartbreak, his only novel.
Ewen Montagu (1901-85) was a British judge, Naval intelligence officer, and author of three books, including The Man Who Never Was. Born into an aristocratic Jewish family, he served in the First World War before studying at Trinity College, Cambridge and Harvard University. He worked as a barrister for many years, enlisting in the Naval Reserve in 1938.
Montagu served in the Naval Intelligence Division of the British Admiralty, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Commander. He was the Naval Representative on the XX Committee, which oversaw the running of double agents. Operation Mincemeat was one of the committee’s most celebrated successes. And it was Montagu who codeveloped the idea with another officer for the operation. One of the junior officers who also played a role in the deception was Ian Fleming, later the author of the James Bond novels.
When we think of Allied operations in World War II designed to fool the Nazis, most of us think “Normandy.” After all, the elaborate efforts to conceal the time and place of D-Day famously included a fake army and hundreds of inflatable tanks, airplanes, and artillery pieces. Not to mention all the Abwehr spies the British had turned in the Double Cross System.
But two years earlier the British mounted a brilliant deception to shield the invasion of Sicily. In Operation Mincemeat, British military intelligence persuaded the Germans that Allied forces would invade Greece and Sardinia instead. The story first broke in 1950 when Duff Cooper, the man in charge of the effort, told a version in a novel called Operation Heartbreak. Three years later, a naval officer, Ewen Montagu, revealed in detail in The Man Who Never Was how he and his colleagues had pulled off the operation.
Three books tell different versions of the story
More than 70 years have passed since the publication of Montagu’s book. Long-classified British intelligence files, memoirs, and journals have appeared with additional detail. And much of it contradicts what Cooper and Montagu wrote. It’s all laid out in WWII historian Ben MacIntyre’s jaw-dropping 2010 book, Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured Allied Victory.
What follows here is a master class in historiography. We’ll compare two books written seven decades ago about a single extraordinary event with what historians have since learned about that event. In this way, we’ll gain insight into how history is written—and how it can evolve over the years.
How “facts” can evolve
Operation Heartbreak
Duff Cooper’s Operation Heartbreak is fiction, pure and simple. It ignores or glosses over the extraordinary complications and frustrations that plagued Ewen Montagu and his colleagues. The novel is the story of a frustrated British career soldier named Willie Maryngton whose only ambition in life is to fight the Germans in battle. He had enrolled at Sandhurst, the British military academy, only in August 1917 and left far too late to fight in France before the Armistice.
Worse is to come for Willie. By the time war breaks out again in 1939, he is too old for active service. Now a captain in the reserves, he struggles in vain to obtain a waiver and enter the fighting. Then he dies of pneumonia. And his ambition is fulfilled only as a corpse when military intelligence fits him up with fake correspondence to misdirect the Germans about the invasion of Sicily. Cooper devotes little space and only spare details about Operation Mincemeat, which he calls Operation Heartbreak. But he breaks the government’s silence about the deception. This paves the way for Montagu to write his own “factual” account.
The Man Who Never Was
Ewen Montagu’s account of Operation Mincemeat is mostly true. He writes about a colleague named “George” in a brainstorming session who suggests dropping a corpse behind the lines in France with a radio transmitter. “This was not one of his better inspirations,” Montagu notes, ” and we rapidly demolished it.” But that off-the-wall idea later comes back to life in a new iteration. The result is, of course, to drop a corpse dressed like a British army major with a briefcase attached containing top-secret letters. The most important one is from the Deputy Chief of the Imperial General Staff to a senior commander in the Mediterranean. And that letter indicates that the Allies will attack Greece and Sardinia instead of the more obvious target of Sicily, with only a diversionary attack there.
Montagu describes in exhaustive detail all the work to find a suitable corpse, obtain permission to use it, write the many letters the corpse would be carrying (including a photo and love letter from the man’s fiancée, “Pam”), and then persuade—with great difficulty—the military and political leadership to approve the operation. But once he has the green light, Montagu gives elaborate instructions to the captain of the submarine who will release the body off the coast of Spain. He’s selected a spot where a German spy is active. And he knows the Spaniards will turn the briefcase over to him.
Montagu’s post-war research
Because the invasion of Sicily goes off without a hitch, it’s abundantly clear that the deception has worked. The Nazis had redirected forces from the island to Sardinia in the north and Greece in the east. But he learns after the war, just how effective the operation had truly been. German intelligence files make it clear that the Nazi military leadership—and Adolf Hitler himself—had bought the story. In fact, it was two days after the July 10, 1943 invasion that they finally began to realize the truth.
Operation Mincemeat
In his book, MacIntyre contradicts the convenient untruths and obfuscations of Montagu’s own account. For example:
** It was not Montagu alone who managed the case but Montagu working with a Royal Air Force officer named Charles Cholmondeley (pronounced “Chumley”; don’t you just love the English?). And the original idea for the plot had been cooked up several years earlier by a certain naval commander, Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, then a Naval Intelligence officer. Montagu conflates the two and refers to them both as “George.”
** The dead body washed onto the Spanish shore to launch the plot was far from the wholly fictional British army captain Willie Maryngton whom Cooper imagines. It was that of Glyndwr Michael, a Welsh homeless man who died from ingesting rat poison containing phosphorus. It was not, as Montagu had asserted, a middle-class Scotsman who died an honorable death in a hospital. And he never asked the Welshman’s family for permission to use his body.
** The famous English pathologist who assured Montagu and Cholmondeley that no one would discover the true cause of death of the man now rechristened “Major William Martin” was clearly mistaken. Glyndwr Michael had died from phosphorus poisoning, which leaves distinctive traces in the body that a competent pathologist could detect. However, the eminent British pathologist had told Montagu that there were no pathologists in Spain who could match his expertise.
Montagu misunderstood the Germans’ reactions
Montagu writes that the Nazis “swallowed Mincemeat whole.” In truth, they didn’t. Because MacIntyre turned up a host of surprising facts about the Germans’ reaction to the deception.
** For instance, the Abwehr agent in Spain who examined the phony papers on “Major Martin’s” body and declared them genuine might well have had his doubts. But no matter. He was desperate to prove he could deliver high-value intelligence to Berlin. So he was strongly inclined to pass along the documents in “Major Martin’s” briefcase no matter what he thought of their authenticity. He himself was one-quarter Jewish and feared being sent back home.
** A “German spy” sent to England to investigate the bona fides of “Major Martin” was a figment of the Nazis’ imagination. British intelligence had captured, turned, or executed every single Abwehr agent infiltrated into Britain—a fact that was still a secret when Montagu wrote his book in the early 1950s.
** The Abwehr officer in Berlin who was the ultimate authority on the authenticity of the documents and was Hitler’s favorite intelligence analyst was easily able to detect the phoniness of “Martin’s” papers. But he chose to reassure Hitler because he was a dedicated anti-Nazi. He was prepared to do anything to help the Allies win the war. In fact, many in the Abwehr were anti-Nazi. The boss, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, was later executed in the wake of the failed von Stauffenberg assassination plot.)
In other words, the Germans knew perfectly well that “the man who never was” was a hoax. But those who knew refused to pass the truth up the chain of command.
About the authors
Duff Cooper, Ist Viscount Norwich (1890-1954) was a Conservative British politician and diplomat who served in the Cabinet in the years both before and during World War II. He famously resigned as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1938 in protest against Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s capitulation to Adolf Hitler at Munich. Chamberlain’s successor, Winston Churchill, brought him back to the Cabinet in a series of senior posts. But he was a member of Churchill’s inner circle and understood to be a close advisor of the Prime Minister. He wrote a memoir as well as Operation Heartbreak, his only novel.
Ewen Montagu (1901-85) was a British judge, Naval intelligence officer, and author of three books, including The Man Who Never Was. Born into an aristocratic Jewish family, he served in the First World War before studying at Trinity College, Cambridge and Harvard University. He worked as a barrister for many years, enlisting in the Naval Reserve in 1938.
Montagu served in the Naval Intelligence Division of the British Admiralty, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Commander. He was the Naval Representative on the XX Committee, which oversaw the running of double agents. Operation Mincemeat was one of the committee’s most celebrated successes. And it was Montagu who codeveloped the idea with another officer for the operation. One of the junior officers who also played a role in the deception was Ian Fleming, later the author of the James Bond novels.
August 3, 2012
I only read The Man Who Never Was part of this book, I wasn't interested in the fictional account. I know Montagu wrote this in a weekend and no doubt his hands were tied regarding how much he could reveal but I found his telling of the story of Operation Mincemeat to be disappointing, if you want to read about Operation Mincemeat then I would recommend Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory by Ben MacIntyre.
Read
January 28, 2010True account of WWII British intelligence's effort to dupe Germans. The basis for the film of the same name (which was highly entertaining). Enjoyable dosage of Brit humor.
February 4, 2024
Lt Commander Ewen Montagu was the operations officer behind one of the biggest rues during WWII. It saved thousands of Allied lives during the invasion of Italy. He recounts the minute detail of the plan and how it deceived even the highest officers in 1943, including Hitler. As Montagu points out in his book, "The German high command swallowed 'Operation Mincemeat' whole." His staff had to plan how to enter Italy at the time Germany occupied Italy just before its collapse. That was 1943. I believe every officer and staff personnel in an S-2 Intell section of any branch of the US armed forces should read this book just to become familiar with the minute detail needed to pull off such deception. "The Art of War" by Sun Tzu explains how to get into the "head" of the enemy so he becomes his own worst enemy of his defeat. This book refines how that has to be done, the thought process needed to pull off such an operation and how to keep it from other fall out with other staff and spies. It is an amazing book. It was written in 1953. Montagu was given permission to clarify in detail what happened as there was still fallout from documents captured at the end of WWII. Any military historian would be fascinated by this true tale. It should be read before seeing the movie, as the movie doesn't give a lot of the detailed history behind the planning.
September 29, 2025
I've known this story well through films, documentaries and other readings but interesting to read from one of the people directly involved. Still an incredible story and act that ultimately saved potentially thousands of lives.
The fiction book was not what I expected and touches less on the operation but rather the lead up to it from a first person view. Easy, quick read, so still worth it.
The fiction book was not what I expected and touches less on the operation but rather the lead up to it from a first person view. Easy, quick read, so still worth it.
September 15, 2025
Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction, and this is one of those times. The first part of this book is "Operation Heartbreak," a diverting and competently written short novel by Duff Cooper. Its subject is an orphaned army officer, who ends up playing an unwitting part in an ingenious deception operation during the Second World War. Cooper's story, of course, is based on his exposure to Operation Mincemeat in the lead-up to the Allied invasion of Sicily, and the novel caused something of a stir when it was first released.
In response, the security services permitted Ewen Montagu, a barrister and Royal Naval Reserve officer who served in Naval Intelligence during the war, to write an official account of Mincemeat in 1953. Montagu and a small group of other intelligence officers conceived and led the implementation of Mincemeat, and this is recounted in fascinating detail. Montagu is a decent writer, and his lawyer's eye for detail and clarity of expression make "The Man Who Never Was" an enjoyable read. Amazingly, he wrote the book over the course of a single weekend!
As well as the planning and execution of Mincemeat, Montagu gives an assessment of its impact based on the captured German naval archives. Mincemeat may be a small footnote in the larger context of the Allied victory in the West (as Montagu himself acknowledges), but it is undoubtedly a remarkable and intriguing one.
In response, the security services permitted Ewen Montagu, a barrister and Royal Naval Reserve officer who served in Naval Intelligence during the war, to write an official account of Mincemeat in 1953. Montagu and a small group of other intelligence officers conceived and led the implementation of Mincemeat, and this is recounted in fascinating detail. Montagu is a decent writer, and his lawyer's eye for detail and clarity of expression make "The Man Who Never Was" an enjoyable read. Amazingly, he wrote the book over the course of a single weekend!
As well as the planning and execution of Mincemeat, Montagu gives an assessment of its impact based on the captured German naval archives. Mincemeat may be a small footnote in the larger context of the Allied victory in the West (as Montagu himself acknowledges), but it is undoubtedly a remarkable and intriguing one.
May 3, 2018
Two very short books in one; both related to Operation Mincemeat (a British intelligence operation to fool the Germans into thinking that the invasion of Sicily was not going to happen). The Man Who Never Was is the vastly superior of the two books. It is a straightforward retelling of the planning and execution of the operation; thorough, detailed and fascinating. Operation Heartbreak on the other hand is a novel; only one chapter of which deals with the operation. The others detail the life of a pretty uninteresting man and is written in an extremely stiff and dull style.
March 15, 2018
After reading Ben Macintyre's book "Operation Mincemeat" it was interesting to read these two versions back to back. The fictional story with a seed of truth at the end which caused the second to be rushed out to stop rumours from twisting the truth in a damaging way and exposing agents that were still at work after WWII.
July 17, 2019
Brilliant idea to put the novel first, which takes you to the 'launch' and then the actual account that fills in all the missing bits. An enjoyable and interesting (if you like this sort of thing) read.
February 4, 2008
given to me by a dj at a house party in highland park, los angeles
November 1, 2015
Montagu's writing was a bit stiff (but he was British) but the plot (just the facts) was amazing. No one could ever pull this off today.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews