MINCEMEAT

WITH NORTH AFRICA CLEARED OF Axis opposition, the Allies planned their next step. At the Casablanca Conference in January 1943 the Allies had agreed that Sicily would be the next target and since then plans for Operation Husky had been underway. At the same time Barclay — a cover plan for Husky — was plotted by A Force within a framework set by the LCS and approved by Eisenhower on 10 April 1943.

On first glance, formulating an effective cover plan was no easy task. From the Allied point of view, Sicily was an obvious target. Convoys passing to the eastern Mediterranean and the Suez Canal came under constant air attack from Axis bases on the island. If they ignored Sicily and attacked elsewhere, for instance Sardinia or the south of France, the presence of Sicily would be like a dagger held to their back. This very same thinking led the German and Italians to come to the same conclusion. As Churchill is alleged to have said: ‘Everyone but a bloody fool would know that it’s Sicily.’1

The Allies knew they had little chance of surprising the Axis as they had done with Torch. The plan called for a combined force of 160,000 American, British and Commonwealth troops to be landed by a fleet of 3,200 ships. With such large numbers involved it was unlikely enemy air reconnaissance would miss the convoy once it put to sea. Their only chance therefore would be to try to indicate an objective other than Sicily, or to indicate that more than one operation would be mounted. Such then were the objectives of Plan Barclay, the cover story for Husky.2

The existing A Force channels would indicate that the main thrust of Allied operations would come through the eastern end of the Mediterranean, through Greece and into the Balkans. A Force had long been feeding information about Crete. To keep German attention focused there, from January 1943 A Force began feeding its agents with Plan Withstand, a notional move against Turkey. The story was that the Allies were so concerned the Germans were preparing to invade Turkey they were contemplating a pre-emptive strike against the Dodecanese via Crete. To support this rumour, British armoured units were moved to Syria, their ranks swelled by the provision of dummy vehicles.

The outline of the plan was as follows: the notional British Twelfth Army in Egypt was planning to invade the Balkans through Greece. Hopefully

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Turkey would join the war with the Allies and together they would push up through Bulgaria and link up with Soviet forces advancing into southern Russia. The attack on Greece would be preceded by a diversionary attack on western Crete. Moreover, to prevent the Germans from moving reinforcements from western Europe, diversionary assaults would be launched against the south coast of France by General Alexander and a French army gathering in North Africa. At the same time as these assaults, General Patton would attack Corsica and Sardinia with US forces. From these islands the Allies could come down on Sicily from the northern side, or attack Rome, or take a short cut into northern Italy and up into the underbelly of the Reich. In any case, Axis positions in Sicily and Italy would be subjected to heavy air bombardment. The Allies — or so the cover plan said — did not want to get bogged down in a long and arduous slog up the mountainous Italian peninsula in face of a hostile reception by the locals.

Lending credence to these ruses, beach raids were mounted around the Mediterranean and amphibious training was carried out by Greek troops in Egypt and French troops in Algeria. There were appeals for Greek interpreters and French fisherman who knew the south coast of France well. As the operation approached, all leave was cancelled and then suddenly allowed again. Conferences called for senior commanders were put off and then put on again, all to keep the Germans guessing about when the invasion was scheduled. To conceal the date of D-Day for Husky, which was 10 July, local port workers were given a completion date for work two weeks after D-Day, and Tobruk was filled with dummy landing craft.

For the Sicily cover plan the Deuxieme Bureau utilized a new ‘intoxication’ agent: Gilbert — a man who would become the cream of French double cross operations. According to Paillole, Gilbert was, from the German point of view, the head of the Abwehr’s best ever agent network in North Africa. The day after the liberation ofTunis, Gilbert unexpectedly presented himself to the French authorities and offered his agent network to the Deuxieme Bureau for double cross purposes. Although Paillole was not normally well disposed to ‘walk in’ agents, in Gilbert’s case he made an exception. Paillole had actually met Gilbert in France towards the end of 1941 and was quite sure of his loyalty.

Gilbert was described in his case file as ‘athletic, middle-aged with greying hair and a military moustache’. He was a bachelor from a good family and had been a career soldier. A graduate of the Saint-Cyr academy, he had fought in both World Wars and had been decorated with the Legion d’Honneur. When Paillole first met Gilbert the former soldier was working as the

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Apprentice police commissioner in Lyons. He was forced to resign from this post in 1942 because of ‘ideological differences’ with his superiors. Gilbert was a rabid anti-communist, so much so that he joined the LVF (Legion des Volontaires Franpais), a French volunteer regiment in the German Army recruited to fight against the Soviet Union. He quickly fell into intelligence work through the French fascist Parti Populaire Franpais (PPF) and set up a front business cover in Paris for sending PPF members to carry out sabotage, propaganda and secret intelligence missions in North Africa. Receiving financial backing for his activities from the Abwehr, Gilbert volunteered to lead a secret ‘stay behind’ mission into Algeria codenamed Atlas. The idea was that Gilbert and four sub-agents would allow the Allied advance to roll over them after which they would spring up and begin transmitting. Accordingly he reached Tunis with four men on 25 April. He was given a cover story to show he had in fact been living an an address in Tunis since the previous December and that he was a refugee escaping from the Germans after they occupied Vichy France in 1942 to protect the southern coast. After arriving Gilbert quickly established contact with local Muslim officials and PPF sympathizers, all of whom would provide him and his team with intelligence once the Allies took control.

When Gilbert gave himself up, he explained how he had planned the whole mission deliberately to deceive the Germans. He knew the Axis was finished and he saw this mission as a chance to wipe the slate clean with the Free French. Of his four companions, Gilbert could vouch for only one of them: Le Duc, his second in command, whom he had personally recruited. Le Duc was the nom de guerre of Duthey Harispe, an apparently idle man in love with gambling and horseracing. Accepting Gilbert’s decision to work for the Allies, Le Duc was given a posting in French Headquarters.

The Atlas team’s radio operator Albert was an altogether different story. Known by the name Blondeau, Albert had been recruited by the PPF and was assigned by them to Atlas. The Abwehr had made a recording of his Morse style and so it was going to be difficult to mimic him. It was decided that Albert never needed to know that Gilbert had gone over to the Allies; as far as he was concerned his mission was to tap out the messages Gilbert provided. For that reason, Albert was left in a state of ignorant bliss, happily serving the new world order. He found a job working as an electrician for a man in Tunis, never realizing that his employer was a Deuxieme Bureau informant who had offered him the job in order to keep tabs on him. The third member of the team, Falcon the radio mechanic, was also left in the dark and found an innocuous job at a repair depot.

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The fourth member of the team was a problem. Hired as the team’s expert in sabotage, Duteil was incorruptible from the Allied point of view. The alias of Joseph Delpierre, a 26-year-old former Parisian pimp, Duteil was a fully fledged member of the PPF and had been sent along to keep an eye on Gilbert, with orders to liquidate him if he betrayed the mission. As he was surplus to Gilbert’s requirements in terms of using the radio transmitter, it was decided that a very speedy end should be arranged for him.3 Gilbert introduced Duteil to an officer friend of his who had a deep Gallic dislike of his Anglo-Saxon counterparts. As Gilbert suspected, the two got on like a house on fire. One night after dinner Duteil visited his new friend’s office at the local divisional HQ. While the pair were rifling through a stack of papers they were discovered by some unusually alert sentries, who roughly dragged them, kicking and screaming, off to the cells.

Isolated from his companion, Duteil was confronted with a list of his crimes. The depth of knowledge of his interrogators must have frightened the wits out of him. In the face of such omnipotence, there was no use trying to deny anything so Duteil blabbed... and blabbed some more. As a direct result of his confession, about a hundred Vichyist collaborators and sympathizers were rounded up along with a number of Abwehr and SIM informants, a police superintendent included. Duteil betrayed Gilbert and the rest of the team, never thinking for a moment that it was his chief who had betrayed him. He also revealed the whereabouts of a frighteningly large stash of sabotage equipment that he had buried without Gilbert’s knowledge. Clearly Duteil was too hot a potato to be allowed to stay in the region. If he escaped it would bring an end to Gilbert and throw suspicion on many other double cross cases that the Deuxieme Bureau were running. The last Paillole heard about Duteil was that he had been sent to England. According to Ronald Wingate he was executed. As far as the PPF ever knew, he had fled North Africa trying to find a route home through Spain.4

On the same day that Duteil was arrested, 10 June 1943, Albert established radio contact with the Abwehr. Gilbert claimed to have reacquainted himself with several old colleagues who were now high up in Tunis and were proving excellent sources of information. Gilbert explained that the Allies were collecting a large quantity of invasion barges at the port of Bizerte. A Force backed this up with the usual show of dummies and the Germans obliged them by sending photo-reconnaissance aircraft overhead. With only token flak sent up to prevent the Nazi airplanes accomplishing their mission, it was not long before Bizerte was visited by a large force of bombers. The dummy invasion fleet took a hammering while the real preparations continued at Sousse 90 miles (150km) to the south east.

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