Operation Mincemeat – Ben Macintyre

Operation Mincemeat was the codename of the Second World War deception plan that misled the Axis forces into believing the Allied thrust from North Africa would be aimed at Sardinia and Greece rather than the more obvious Sicily. By diverting German and Italian forces away from Sicily, the invasion met with limited resistance and rapid success.

The scheme was dreamed up in room 13 in the basement of the Admiralty by intelligence officers Charles Cholmondeley and Ewan Montagu. The plan was to float ashore in Spain the body of an officer, carrying fake secret messages to Allied commanders. Franco’s Spain, though technically neutral, could be relied upon to allow the German intelligence services access to the documents before returning them, seemingly unmolested, to the British. The British would then pretend to believe their secrets were safe and the plan (fake plan) was still going ahead.

Macintyre is a leisurely guide through the two months of planning and execution, from getting the idea approved, through acquiring a suitable corpse, creating an identity, faking documents (not only the secret messages but also the ‘wallet litter’ that created family, a fiancée, debts, and a social life), transportation of the body by submarine, its discovery by Spanish fishermen, to the diplomatic and intelligence responses to the dead body in Spain and Germany.

It is all clearly explained and enlivened by pen portraits of the key players along the way, many eccentric – Cholmondeley, Montagu, and their team; the coroner, pathologist, and undertaker; the submariner; and various diplomats, spies, and military personnel.

Although told many times since the end of the war, this 2010 volume benefits from newly declassified files and recently discovered archives to provide a fuller picture, both comprehensive and entertaining.

The Nightingale – Kristin Hannah

In Oregon, USA, in 1995 an old lady, terminally ill, is found scrabbling in her attic by her son. She has an open trunk of memorabilia among which is a French identity card from the Second World War in the name of Juliette Gervaise. Her son asks, who is she?

Rewind to France, 1939, in Carriveau, somewhere in the Loire Valley, where Vianne Mauriac lives. After a difficult adolescence – her mother died when Vianne was 14, her father returned from the First World War an emotional wreck, and her ten-years-younger sister, Isabelle, is a tearaway – she has found happiness with husband Antoine and eight-year-old daughter, Sophie. Of course it cannot last much longer, it is 1939 and Antoine is called up to defend France from the Nazis.

As for Isabelle, now a teenager, she has just been expelled from her latest school and is determined to live in Paris with her father. No chance. As ever, he rejects her and packs her off to her sister in Carriveau.

So much for the set-up; Vianne (26), Isabelle (16), and Sophie (8) become the household at Carriveau at the start  of the war. What follows - invasion, occupation, rationing, privation, persecution of Jews and other undesirables, billeting of German officers, resistance, reprisals, death, destruction, bravery, betrayal, torture, executions, and eventually liberation – forms the guts of the next 400 pages.

Told mainly from the point of view of the two sisters, it provides a rare female perspective on the wartime experience. And as the sisters have polar opposite personalities, it highlights the dilemma for the occupied population – grudgingly collaborate and survive, or resist at the risk death, and not merely your own.

The prose flows well enough and the narrative never stalls, but somehow I never felt immersed, it was always a story I was reading rather than living. Maybe a female reader would empathise more with the sisters’ plight.

Nevertheless, a book worth the reading.

In the Heart of the Sea – Nathaniel Philbrick

This is the true story of the Essex, a whaler out of Nantucket, and its crew of 21, which set sail in August 1819. By this time, the sperm whale population of the adjacent Atlantic had been pretty much wiped out so, for the rich pickings demanded by the ship owners, a long voyage to the Pacific via Cape Horn is needed.

There are mishaps along the way but nothing they can’t cope with, and by the spring of 1820 they are hunting off the coast of Chile. But there is word of better catches north and west, beyond the Galapagos Islands. They reach their destination in the autumn and soon commence work – routinely deploying three whaleboats each manned by six men, leaving three to mind the Essex.

On 20 November a feisty whale bites a chunk out of one whaleboat, forcing it back to the Essex. Back on board, they just have time to fix the damaged boat before they sight a huge whale heading straight for them. Unbelievably, it rams the Essex and water pours in. The men take to the mended whaleboat, and the other two boats abandon their slaughter and race back to the mother ship to join in frantic efforts to salvage food, water, navigational equipment, canvas wood and nails before the ship sinks below the water.

This leaves the men in three small boats thousands of miles from land at the mercy of unhelpful winds and currents which push them south and west further into the vast ocean. The privations they suffer and how they fare is related in grim detail. Some survive to tell the tale, and it is these first-hand accounts that Philbrick picks through to create a gripping narrative interspersed with personal details of the crew and contextual background on Nantucket and the whaling industry.

It is an approach that works well, ensuring the narrative does not become too wearing and the history is delivered in small chunks, providing the reader some respite while the men linger on, day by long day.

It was the sinking of the Essex that inspired Herman Melville to write Moby Dick, but here there is no thought of revenge for Captain Pollard, just a question of survival for himself and as many of his crew as possible.