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Edited on Thu Sep-02-04 06:32 PM by HawkerHurricane
Last month, a British former submarine commander died aged 90 in the relative anonymity of an armed forces care home in suburban London. with him went perhaps the last direct link to one of the most astonishing stories of World War II.
Captain Bill Jewell, whose obituary took more than a week to make the British newspapers, was at the centre of an audacious plan which completely wrongfooted the Germans about planned Allied landings in southern Europe.
Jewell was the commander of submarine HMS Seraph when in 1943 he was chosen to carry out Operation Mincemeat, a plan so secret that even his own crew knew nothing about it until long after the war was finished.
Jewell's gruesome task, as his vessel floated off the coast of southern Spain, was to launch a man's body dressed up as a Royal Marines officer, wearing a life jacket and with a briefcase chained to its wrist.
Inside the case were carefully faked plans and letters detailing the proposed invasions of Corsica and Sardinia, whereas in fact the Allies had set Sicily as the real objective.
The body of "Major Martin" -- the real identity of the corpse remains unknown to this day -- was washed up on the Spanish coast.
Authorities in nominally neutral Madrid buried him with full military honours and sent the seemingly unopened case back to London.
However the papers had been copied for the Germans, who beefed up defences in the places mentioned in the plans, even pulling tank divisions out of Russia to reinforce troops.
The stunningly successful ruse was undertaken in complete secrecy, with Jewell even ordering his men below decks as he jettisoned what he told them was a secret weather device.
The commander's own wartime memoirs failed to mention the plan, and it was only in the 1950s that investigative reporters uncovered the story, swiftly made into 1955 film "The Man Who Never Was".
The escapade was just one of a number of astonishing wartime tales for Jewell, who was born in the Seychelles to a colonial officer father and joined the Royal Navy in 1936.
Among the more unorthodox war missions recounted in newspaper obituaries of Jewell was the time he was ordered to fetch General Henri Honore Giraud, supposedly the only man who could unite French forces in North Africa, after he escaped German internment.
Giraud was waiting to be picked up by submarine from the coast of southern France, but there was one snag -- he violently disliked the British and refused to be rescued by them.
To get around this, HMS Seraph was transformed into USS Seraph, an American ship 'commanded' by a specially-installed US officer, reputedly commissioned as a Royal Navy officer by Jewell wielding a rolled-up picture of a nude woman torn from a magazine.
The charade saw Seraph fly the Stars and Stripes as Giraud was quietly picked up, and for the several days the French general was aboard, the submarine's sailors valiantly tried to mimic American accents heard in films.
Another notable mission came when Jewell was forced to almost beach his submarine off the coast of Algeria to pick up US officers fleeing from the enemy following talks with French commanders.
Jewell additionally sank or damaged a number of enemy ships, one of which was a German U-boat which he opted to ram.
His heroism brought Jewell honours from Britain, the United States and France.
More amazingly still, in 1945 a doctor found Jewell had broken two vertebrae when he had fallen down a hatch four years earlier -- meaning he had fought the bulk of the war with a broken neck.
extra note -
Dear world:
Jewell is a liar. He broke his own neck to get more medals, and to try to get out of the war. He never saved anybody--or if he did, we were on our way to pick them up, too. Note that he never faced actual enemy fire.
Jewell never went near Spain; that would have been punishable by court-martial.
Oh, and that body Jewell threw overboard was a mannequin, because he was too much of a coward to touch dead bodies. It didn't fool anybody; in fact, it almost cost us the war.
Jewell was also a traitor. The fact that he turned his British submarine over to an American proves this. And all those naval records that say otherwise were either faked, or written by Jewell himself.
This is all based on our personal knowledge, except for those of us who weren't actually on Jewell's submarine (which is all of us), for whom this is based on personal belief.
Sincerely,
Submarine Veterans For Truth
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