Captain Bill Jewell; true story of "The Man Who Never Was"
Hyfler/Rosner
fantastic.
Captain Bill Jewell
(Filed: 24/08/2004) Telegraph
Captain Bill Jewell, who has died aged 90, planted a corpse
off the Spanish coast in 1943 as part of the deception plan
which was later filmed as The Man Who Never Was.
As captain of the submarine Seraph, Jewell had the grim task
of launching into the sea a dead body, which was dressed as
a Royal Marines officer and handcuffed to a brief-case
containing fake plans and letters. The ruse was part of
Operation Mincemeat, an attempt to deceive the Germans about
preparations for the Allied landings in southern Europe.
Jewell had brought the body from the Clyde in a sealed
canister packed with dry ice; as he ordered his crew to
leave him alone on the casing of Seraph, he told them that
it contained a secret weather-device.
Then, once he was on his own, he read the 39th Psalm - "I
said, I will take heed to my ways, that I sin not with my
tongue" - as he pushed the body into the deep.
It was duly washed up at Huevla, on the Spanish coast. The
fictitiously named "Major Martin" was buried in the town a
few days later with full military honours and a wreath from
his supposedly heartbroken girlfriend in London. The
brief-case was then returned to the British authorities,
apparently unopened; however, the Spanish had copied the
papers for the Germans.
Hitler swallowed the bait whole, ordering the strengthening
of fortifications in Corsica, and sending a Waffen SS
brigade to Sardinia. He dispatched Rommel to Athens to
inspect plans for the defence of Greece, and - perhaps most
damaging of all to the Germans - he ordered two Panzer
divisions to prepare to move from Russia to Greece just as
the great tank battle at Kursk was reaching its climax.
Operation Mincemeat was a closely guarded secret even after
the Second World War, though eventually Seraph was the
subject of several books and of the film The Man Who Never
Was (1955), in which Jewell was played by William Squire.
In Jewell's own book, Secret Mission (1944), he never
mentioned this particular operation. However, the politician
and diplomat Duff Cooper's novel, Operation Heartbreak
(1950), dealt loosely with the affair; and Ian Colvin, later
a distinguished Daily Telegraph journalist, linked it to a
footnote in a memoir by General Westphal, formerly
Kesselring's Chief of Staff.
Colvin proceeded to locate the dead man's grave, and wrote
The Unknown Courier (1953), which was so close to the truth
that the authorities had little choice but to allow Ewen
Montagu, who had organised the deception, to publish his own
version of what was the most important strategic deception
of the war. Nevertheless, Montagu's book, The Man Who Never
Was (1954), failed to reveal the true identity of the body,
which was probably that of either a down-and-out in London
or a sailor lost from the carrier Dasher.
Norman Limbury Auchinleck Jewell was born on October 24 1913
in the Seychelles, where his father, a doctor of Ulster
stock, was serving as a colonial officer. Young Jewell was
educated at Oundle before joining the Navy. He became a
submariner in 1936 and passed his "perisher" course in 1941.
On taking command of Seraph, Jewell made his first patrol in
July 1942 off Norway, where his baptism of fire came
courtesy of the RAF, which opened fire on the submarine but
failed to score a hit. The boat was then sent to Gibraltar
to join the 8th Submarine Squadron during the build-up to
Operation Torch, the Allied landings in North Africa.
Seraph was chosen to take the American General Mark Clark
and his staff to talks with French officers in Algeria. On
October 19 Jewell landed Clark's party in small collapsible
boats about 50 miles west of Algiers, with a close
protection squad of three British marines.
Seraph spent a day lying submerged in deep water but, after
dark, Jewell took her in until there was less than 10 ft of
water under the keel; but the sea was too rough to recover
the boats from the beach. Meanwhile, Clark had been
betrayed, and Jewell took Seraph in until she was almost
aground. Clark and his party then dashed for the boats,
paddled hard through the surf, and were hauled on board;
Seraph reached Gibraltar on October 25.
Clark had been told that the only man who could unite the
French forces in North Africa was General Henri Honoré
Giraud, who had escaped from German internment and was
hiding in Vichy France. Jewell and Seraph were sent to pick
him up, but Giraud refused to be rescued by the British - so
an American, Captain Jerauld Wright, was placed nominally in
command of Seraph; Jewell commissioned Wright as a Royal
Navy officer using a rolled-up picture of a voluptuous nude
torn from a magazine.
For five nights the boat patrolled the southern coast of
France until Seraph drifted slowly shoreward to rendezvous
with Giraud, who was waiting in a small dinghy. Seraph flew
the stars and stripes and, for several days, its ship's
company practised their best movie American, with cockney
accents. Giraud was too proud to notice the ruse de guerre,
though he thanked them all politely in English as he and his
staff were transferred to a Catalina flying boat.
During this period Jewell rammed and badly damaged a U-boat;
and, in more conventional patrols, sank 7,000 tons of enemy
shipping and damaged a further 10,000 tons. He was appointed
MBE; later he was awarded the US Legion of Merit for his
part in Operation Husky, when Seraph acted as a beacon for
Allied landings on Sicily. Jewell also received the DSC for
his successful patrols and, after the war, the Croix de
Guerre with palm.
Although Seraph was scrapped in 1963, her periscope and
other items were presented by the British government to the
Military College of South Carolina, where General Clark was
the president for some years and where the Seraph Monument
commemorates Anglo-American co-operation during the Second
World War; it is the only place in the United States
permitted to fly the White Ensign.
Jewell commanded several submarines and, in 1948, became
Captain 3rd Submarine Flotilla. He was a director of the RN
Staff College at Greenwich and also worked on Mountbatten's
staff, where he took pride in having predicted Iraqi threats
to Kuwait in the early 1960s, persuading the Navy to send
ships to the Gulf to forestall an invasion. Mountbatten told
him that he had been too precocious, and should have waited
until he was an admiral before proving himself so right.
Jewell retired in 1963, and worked for the Mitchell and
Butler brewery in Birmingham, where he was also life
president of the Submarine Old Comrades' Association.
In 1945 a doctor found that Jewell had broken two vertebrae
when he had fallen down a hatch four years earlier, which
meant that he had fought the rest of the war with a broken
neck. In 1998 Jewell fell again, but this time he was not so
lucky: he was paralysed from the neck down, and was confined
to a wheelchair at the Royal Star and Garter Home, Richmond.
Bill Jewell, who died on August 18, married Rosemary
Patricia Galloway in 1944: she died in 1996, and he is
survived by two sons and a daughter.
Bill Schenley
> It's fantastic.
You're right. Terrific story. *Very* cool guy ...
> Captain Bill Jewell
According to World War II Magazine, Jewell was a Lt. Commander ... and
at the time of his retirement ... he was ... *Admiral* Jewell.
From WWII Magazine ... This is the story of "Operation Mincemeat" ...
http://africanhistory.about.com/library/prm/blmanwhoneverwas1.htm
The 'man who never was' pulled off one of the greatest deceptions in
military history--after his death.
By David T. Zabecki for World War II Magazine.
When the campaign in North Africa was drawing to a successful close,
the Allies' next strategic target was painfully obvious to anyone who
could read a map. "Everyone but a bloody fool would know it's Sicily,"
said Winston Churchill. Sitting in the middle of the choke point of
the Mediterranean, Sicily was the shortest route from North Africa to
Adolf Hitler's Europe. It was also the base from which the Luftwaffe
had pounded Malta for many months, as well as any convoy that tried to
reach the beleaguered island. Sicily had to be taken, but its rough
terrain favored the defender. Any attack against a well-entrenched
force would be very costly, or might even fail. If the enemy only
could be misled as to where the Allies intended to strike next, the
attacking force might encounter something less than a fully manned
defense. But how were the German general staff and intelligence
service to be duped on such a grand scale?
The solution to that problem came from two relatively junior British
officers: Lt. Cmdr. Ewen Montagu, a reservist who represented naval
intelligence on the interservice XX Committee (XX for double cross),
and Squadron Leader Sir Archibald Cholmondley, Montagu's Air Ministry
counterpart. It was Cholmondley who first suggested planting false
Allied documents on a dead body and letting it fall into German hands.
The XX Committee was initially skeptical of the bizarre plan, but in
the end Montagu made it work.
Before the war Montagu had been a successful barrister, and after the
war he would become judge advocate of the fleet and one of England's
greatest jurists. In the early months of 1943 he used his lawyer
skills to blend an intricate and massive hoax into one of the most
phenomenally successful deception operations in the history of modern
warfare.
The basic stratagem was simple enough; making it believable was
another thing entirely. In the first place, the massive buildup
required for the Sicily invasion (Operation Husky) would be impossible
to conceal. And then there were the consequences of failure. If the
German high command saw through the ruse, they might easily read the
evidence in reverse as conclusive proof the Allies were going for
Sicily. Looking back on the operation, Montagu noted that convincing
the Allied chiefs it would work was more difficult than convincing
their German counterparts it was for real.
It was a complex undertaking. First there was the problem of how to
deliver a body to the Germans. The plotters originally considered
something involving a partially opened parachute. They quickly
abandoned that scheme for a number of reasons. For one thing, an
Allied agent or air crewman would not be carrying the sort of
high-level documents necessary to make the whole thing believable. The
body could not be passed off as an Allied courier either, because
couriers were not allowed to fly over enemy-held territory. Finally,
there was the problem that even the most cursory autopsy would detect
that the body had been dead long before it hit the ground. A body
floating in the sea, on the other hand, could easily be expected to
have been dead for several days before its recovery. A delivery from
the sea would also eliminate the problem with transporting allegedly
high-level documents over enemy territory.
With that, Montagu's team decided their body would be an Allied
courier who had died in a plane crash at sea and whose corpse had
washed ashore. For the actual means of delivery, they favored a
submarine because it could deposit the body closer in without being
detected as could a ship or a flying boat. Spain was selected as the
point of delivery because of the efficient Abwehr (German military
intelligence) network in place there, and the confidence Allied
intelligence had in the Spanish government's willingness to cooperate
with the Germans.
Then came the problem of finding a body. There was no shortage of dead
bodies in wartime London, of course, but the difficulty was finding
one of the right age, appearance and cause of death. Their search had
to be very low-key to avoid arousing gossip. Securing permission to
use a body from the next of kin with little or no explanation would
also be a bit ticklish. Montagu's team was almost ready to give up on
the whole thing when they learned about a man in his early 30s who had
just died of pneumonia. The cause of death was just about right, and
the fluid in the body's lungs might help reinforce the notion that it
had been floating at sea for several days. Montagu quickly consulted
Sir Bernard Spillsbury, a noted pathologist, for verification. To
Montagu's relief, he learned there would be very little difference
between the fluid already in the body's lungs and what could be
expected to accumulate there from several days of floating in a Mae
West in rough seas. Spillsbury said, "You have nothing to fear from a
Spanish post-mortem; to detect that this young man had not died after
an aircraft had been lost at sea would require a pathologist of my
experience--and there aren't any in Spain."
Montagu then very discreetly contacted the dead man's family. He
assured them the body was needed for a worthy cause and that it would
eventually receive a proper burial, although under another name. The
family consented on the condition that the corpse's true identity
never be divulged. Since the operation now appeared to be a viable
one, it needed a code name. In a streak of typically macabre British
humor, Montagu selected "Mincemeat."
Next came the problem of building an identity for their courier. At
first Montagu's team wanted to make him an army officer. But the
army's system of communications routing made it impossible to head off
a casualty report before it got into official channels, and the report
of the death of a nonexistent officer was bound to cause unwanted
gossip. They could not put their courier in the navy, either, because
naval officers did not wear battle dress at that time, and getting a
dead body measured for a tailor-made uniform was out of the question.
So the corpse joined the Royal Marines. The main problem with that
cover was that the man who previously inhabited the body had been in
poor health for a long time before his death, and it showed. When one
of the team's superiors raised the point, Montagu responded, "He
doesn't have to look like an officer--only like a staff officer."
There was still an element of risk in the whole thing. The Royal
Marines were, even in wartime, a small and closely knit service where
everyone knew everyone else. So the corpse became Captain (acting
Major) William Martin, because that was one of the most common names
on the Navy List. When the death of a Major Martin was listed in the
newspapers--a necessary follow-through because the Abwehr was sure to
check--the dead man might easily be mistaken for any of the other
William Martins.
Once they had a name and a service, Montagu's team then had to go
through the painstaking process of building a believable identity for
Major Martin and turning him into a real person. The plotters provided
their phantom major with a fiancée, complete with a picture and love
letters, all of which were supplied by secretaries in Montagu's
office. As a bit of corroborating detail for a genuine personality,
the team decided to make Major Martin somewhat on the careless side in
the management of his personal affairs. Hence they produced some
overdue bills and a stern letter from the Major's father. They also
assembled a collection of keys, matches, coins, theater ticket stubs
and all the other junk that accumulates in a man's pockets. The dates
on the ticket stubs, bills and letters were all carefully coordinated
to present an interlocking picture of Major Martin's activities in the
days just prior to his departure from England. Finally, the team found
a living person whose appearance was reasonably similar to the dead
man's to pose for an official I.D. card photo. To reinforce the
careless side of Martin's personality, Montagu supplied him with a
replacement I.D. card, issued "in lieu of No. 09650 lost." The serial
number of the supposed original was that of Montagu's own naval I.D.
card.
Lying in cold storage, Major Martin was almost ready to go to war. The
only things he needed now were the false documents that were the
purpose of the entire operation. With the impossibility of concealing
the massive buildup for the Husky invasion, the XX Committee decided
they would have to try to convince the Germans that those preparations
were actually part of an elaborate cover for an attack on another
target. They felt they had the best chance of making them believe the
Allies would go for Sardinia first and then use that island to mount a
follow-up attack against Sicily from two directions.
They also decided to indicate a second major Allied thrust at Greece
and the Balkans. In a beautiful bit of logic the plotters reasoned
that Hitler would not be able to resist the temptation to believe
Churchill was behind such a strategy as part of his "soft underbelly"
theory--and also as a way of vindicating himself for the Gallipoli
debacle of World War I.
Rather than attempting something as clumsy as feeding the Germans a
bogus operations plan, the plotters decided on the more subtle
approach of using an unofficial personal letter between two
top-ranking officers. The letter would only talk around what they
wanted the Germans to believe, but it had to be done in such a way
that no one could fail to interpret the meaning. For the key false
letter, Montagu got General Sir Archibald Nye, vice chief of the
Imperial General Staff, to write to General Sir Harold Alexander, the
British commander in North Africa under American General Dwight D.
Eisenhower. In the letter, Nye explained to Alexander why Eisenhower's
request for a cover operation centered on the eastern Greek islands
was being denied. That cover was already assigned to the operation
scheduled to be launched from Egypt by Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson,
the commander in chief in the Middle East. Eisenhower, therefore,
would have to make do with Sicily as a cover for his own operation.
The phony letter did two things. It suggested two operations would be
launched in the Mediterranean (one in the east and one in the west).
It also clearly identified Sicily as the cover for the true target in
the west. That only left Sardinia in the west, and strongly suggested
the Greek mainland and the Balkans for the target in the east.
To corroborate the letter from Nye, Major Martin also carried a second
letter from Lord Louis Mountbatten, chief of Combined Operations, to
Admiral Andrew Cunningham, British naval commander in the
Mediterranean. That letter established the purpose for Martin's trip;
he was an expert on landing craft on loan from Mountbatten's staff for
the planning of the Mediterranean operations. By way of introducing
Martin, Mountbatten noted he had been right about the Dieppe raid when
most of the Combined Operations staff had been wrong. Since this was
the first admission by the British that Dieppe had been something less
than a success, it gave the entire ruse an additional shot of
credibility. The Mountbatten letter also contained a side comment
about sardines being rationed in England. It was a crude joke by
British standards, but Montagu correctly guessed the Germans would not
be able to resist that piece of bait either.
Major Martin left England for the last time on April 19, 1943. He
traveled in a special canister packed with dry ice aboard the
submarine HMS Seraph, commanded by Lt. Cmdr. (later Admiral) N.A.
Jewell. Several days out, the operation almost ended in disaster when
Seraph was mistakenly attacked by RAF aircraft while on the surface.
Just before dawn on the 30th, Seraph surfaced about a mile off the
Spanish coast near Huelva. After crewmen brought the canister up on
deck, Jewell sent them back down into the boat, leaving only the
officers topside. Up to that point only Jewell knew what the canister
contained. He quickly briefed his officers, and then they prepared the
body for launch. They blew up the major's Mae West and made sure the
briefcase was securely attached to its chain. Then Jewell said a short
prayer from the Navy Burial Service, and they slipped Major Martin
over the side. The wash from the submarine's screws pushed the body
toward shore. A few hours later a fishing boat picked up the dead
marine and brought him into port. The local Abwehr agent did the rest.
After some delay and diplomatic shuffling, the Spanish government
eventually returned Martin's briefcase, apparently unopened. Once the
documents returned to London, however, microscopic examination of the
paper revealed they had indeed been opened, and presumably
photocopied. The body, meanwhile, received a quick post-mortem that
confirmed Spillsbury's predictions. Major Martin was buried a few days
later in Huelva with full military honors, surrounded by floral
tributes from his heartbroken fiancée and family. Back in London, the
June 4 edition of The Times noted Martin's death in the casualty
lists. The Abwehr, of course, took note of all this.
The German intelligence services bought Mincemeat whole. "The
authenticity of the captured documents is beyond doubt," they
reported. The German general staff bought it, too. When it finally got
to Hitler, he played his part perfectly. On May 12, 1943, he issued an
order summarizing his estimate of the situation in the Mediterranean.
The order concluded, "Measures regarding Sardinia and the Peloponnese
take precedence over everything else." Hitler ordered the
strengthening of fortifications on Sardinia and Corsica, and he sent
an additional Waffen SS brigade to Sardinia. He sent his favorite
commander, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, to Athens to form an army
group. He sent one panzer division to Greece all the way from France.
Perhaps most damaging to the German situation, he ordered two
additional panzer divisions to prepare to move to Greece from
Russia--at the same time the Germans were getting ready for history's
greatest tank showdown at Kursk.
When the Allies stormed ashore on Sicily they caught the German and
Italian defenders almost completely flatfooted. On July 7, 1943, only
two days before the start of the landings, the war diary of the German
high command did not even have an entry for the western end of the
Mediterranean. The Allies assaulted the southern tip of Sicily, but
the bulk of the island's defenses were oriented along the north coast,
facing Sardinia. Many of the Italian divisions in Sicily folded
immediately. The Germans, under Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, put
up a determined resistance and conducted a classic withdrawal to
Messina. By August 17, however, General George S. Patton's Seventh and
Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery's Eighth armies had taken the island.
Operation Mincemeat had been an unqualified success.
Over the last 40 years there has been a great deal of speculation as
to who "the man who never was" really was; but Ewen Montagu stuck to
his end of the agreement with the family. Writing in 1977, Montagu did
go so far as to say: "He was a bit of a ne'er-do-well, and...the only
worthwhile thing that he ever did he did after his death."
---
Photographs of "William Martin" ... "the man who never was" (also, the
canister he was transported in):
http://www.thepeoplenews.com/November03/page18.html
Photographs of Lt. Commander Jewell and the HMS/M Seraph and its crew:
http://web.ukonline.co.uk/chalcraft/sm/seraph.html
Hyfler/Rosner
"Bill Schenley" <stra...@ma.rr.com> wrote in message
news:d1yWc.33503$cT6....@fe2.columbus.rr.com...
> > If you read no other obit this week, read this one.
> > It's fantastic.
>
> You're right. Terrific story. *Very* cool guy ...
>
> ---
> Photographs of "William Martin" ... "the man who never
was" (also, the
> canister he was transported in):
>
> http://www.thepeoplenews.com/November03/page18.html
>
> Photographs of Lt. Commander Jewell and the HMS/M Seraph
and its crew:
>
> http://web.ukonline.co.uk/chalcraft/sm/seraph.html
>
>
Thank you so much for adding to the story. This is why we
love AO, right?
April Cool
<rel...@rcn.com> wrote:
> Nevertheless, Montagu's book, The Man Who Never
> Was (1954), failed to reveal the true identity of the body,
> which was probably that of either a down-and-out in London
> or a sailor lost from the carrier Dasher.
I've never read the book, but the movie has it that Major Martin was an
in-hospital pneumonia fatality whose father gave permission for the
body to be used, with the proviso that his son's identity never be
revealed.
Bob Feigel
His name revealed In a movie? Looks like they didn't keep their word
to the Major's father. b
"When weaving nets, all threads count." - Charlie Chan
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Wax-up and drop-in of Surfing's Golden Years: <http://www.surfwriter.net>
April Cool
<b...@surfwriter.net.not> wrote:
> On Mon, 23 Aug 2004 23:08:45 -0400, April Cool
> <firsto...@fools.com.invalid> wrote:
>
> >In article <412a9551$0$21758$61fe...@news.rcn.com>, Hyfler/Rosner
> ><rel...@rcn.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Nevertheless, Montagu's book, The Man Who Never
> >> Was (1954), failed to reveal the true identity of the body,
> >> which was probably that of either a down-and-out in London
> >> or a sailor lost from the carrier Dasher.
> >
> >I've never read the book, but the movie has it that Major Martin was an
> >in-hospital pneumonia fatality whose father gave permission for the
> >body to be used, with the proviso that his son's identity never be
> >revealed.
>
> His name revealed In a movie? Looks like they didn't keep their word
> to the Major's father. b
I didn't say that. The name is not revealed. They show Clifton Webb's
Montagu and the saddened father in a hospital room, talking. There's
an awkward moment when Montagu says something like "This will be for
England," and the father says, "Britain, sir. We are Welsh." (Might
have been Scots, so don't hold me to it.) I don't know if that's
authentic or not. There's also a whole subplot where Stephen Boyd, as
an Irish Nazi agent, is sent to check out the Major Martin story. It
doesn't seem that such a thing actually happened.
As far as I know, the identity of Major Martin has never been revealed
anywhere.
Hyfler/Rosner
"April Cool" <firsto...@fools.com.invalid> wrote in
message >
>
> I didn't say that. The name is not revealed. They show
Clifton Webb's
> Montagu and the saddened father in a hospital room,
talking. There's
> an awkward moment when Montagu says something like "This
will be for
> England," and the father says, "Britain, sir. We are
Welsh." (Might
> have been Scots, so don't hold me to it.) I don't know if
that's
> authentic or not. There's also a whole subplot where
Stephen Boyd, as
> an Irish Nazi agent, is sent to check out the Major Martin
story. It
> doesn't seem that such a thing actually happened.
>
> As far as I know, the identity of Major Martin has never
been revealed
> anywhere.
I have to admit. I never knew this story and I can't wait
to see the film.
Iceman
<240820040828223352%firsto...@fools.com.invalid>:
>I didn't say that. The name is not revealed. They show Clifton Webb's
>Montagu and the saddened father in a hospital room, talking. There's
>an awkward moment when Montagu says something like "This will be for
>England," and the father says, "Britain, sir. We are Welsh." (Might
>have been Scots, so don't hold me to it.) I don't know if that's
>authentic or not. There's also a whole subplot where Stephen Boyd, as
>an Irish Nazi agent, is sent to check out the Major Martin story. It
>doesn't seem that such a thing actually happened.
>
>As far as I know, the identity of Major Martin has never been revealed
>anywhere.
In the early 1980s his identity was finally revealed as Glyndwr
Michael, a Welshman as alleged in the movie scene quoted.
http://www.marciniak.com/mincemeat/mincemeat.html
http://www.newsoftheodd.com/article1022_2.html
Edwin King
Colleen
news:412ab5c8$0$21753$61fe...@news.rcn.com...
>
>
> Thank you so much for adding to the story. This is why we
> love AO, right?
>
>
Amen! Thanks, again, to all of you who share these wonderful life stories
with us!
Reid
Texas
Hyfler/Rosner
"Baker, Jane Baker" wrote:
> Hyfler/Rosner:
Call me Amelia.
>
> I don't know if anyone ever thanks you for posting these
fantastic
> obituaries... so THANK YOU.
>
> I wish you'd take over the Life In Legacy site.
>
People thank me all the time, not to worry. But the best
way to thank me is to add to the thread, as Bill did with
those great links that filled out the story and inspired
others to add their own insights and information. Like
April Cool remembering the dialogue from the film!
As for Life in Legacy, would that I could. It's a lot of
work. And life intervenes.
April Cool
<isma...@hotmail.com> wrote:
Well, I'll be. Many thanks, Iceman! From what I see here, it does
seem likely that Michael was Martin. That his death was due to cyanide
poisoning, though, is a big surprise to me.