November 11, 2010

Thursday, November 11, 2010 – 5:00 pm for 5:30 pm presentation

 

Where: Simon Fraser University – Harbour Centre Campus, Labatt Hall, 515 W. Hastings St.

 

2024 International Churchill Conference

Join us for the 41st International Churchill Conference. London | October 2024
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A joint presentation by Simon Fraser University (Professor Andre Gerolymatos) and The Rt. Hon. Winston Spencer Churchill Society of B.C.

 

This is a free event

 

To Register: To confirm attendance, please contact Brooke Campbell preferably [email protected] or 604 926 5696

 

I urge you to attend. Denis Smyth’s book Deadly Deception: The Real Story of Operation Mincemeat was reviewed most favourably in the New Yorker magazine earlier this year. The operation itself was one of Britain’s major spy successes during WW II which operation was approved by Winston Churchill. Many of you may be familiar with the story as The Man Who Never Was, which was initially a book and then made into a movie. The book is by The Hon Ewen Montague, a British Naval Officer and the main protagonist which part was played by Clifton Webb. Gloria Graham is the girlfriend. Stephen Boyd is the German spy who came over from Ireland to check things out.

 

Biography for Denis Smyth

 

Denis Smyth studied for his Ph.D. in History at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Sir Harry Hinsley, official historian of British Intelligence in the Second World War. He has been a Professor in the Department of History and the International Relations Programme at the University of Toronto since 1985. He holds Fellowships from the Royal Historical Society (United Kingdom) and Trinity College, University of Toronto. His publications have dealt with the diplomacy and strategy of the Great Powers during the twentieth century, addressing such themes as international neutrality in time of war, European integration and secret intelligence. He has edited thirty-five volumes (some of them with Professor Andre Gerolymatos of Simon Fraser University as co-editor) of the British Foreign Office’s Confidential Print, in the series British Documents on Foreign Affairs (University Publications of America, 1998 – 2003). His latest book deals with what the sometime secret warrior and eminent historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper, called “the most spectacular single episode in the history of deception”.

In this work, entitled Deathly Deception: The Real Story of Operation Mincemeat, Denis Smyth explains how British deception planners managed to persuade the German High Command that the Allies were about to attack Greece, rather than Sicily in the summer of 1943. To this end, they adopted the macabre scheme of equipping a dead body with a new military identity as a Royal Marine Major, a new private personality as the fiancé of a young woman named “Pam” and a government briefcase containing forged documents. The British “deceptioneers” then planted the corpse in Spanish coastal waters via a stealthy submarine operation and carefully monitored how the Nazi intelligence services and the German High Command proceeded to swallow Operation Mincemeat’s misleading message whole. Moreover when, during the weeks immediately preceding the Anglo-American landings in Sicily on July 10th, the Allies’ actual preparations for the real assault threatened to undermine their notional attack on Greece, they launched a carefully-timed campaign of sabotage there which revived all the Germans’ fears about the vulnerability of their Balkan Achilles’ Heel.

 

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