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The Pentagon’s Plan to Fight Zombies and Other Unusual Military Schemes

Khalid Elhassan August 7, 2021 36 min

The US military has a plan to deal with zombies. AMC Studios

The chain that secured the briefcase to the drowned Major Martins, and other items recovered from his body. NPR

21. The Germans Swallowed Mincemeat

On April 19, 1943, a sealed canister that contained the corpse of “Major Williams Martin” was loaded into a British submarine, the HMS Seraph, that sailed for Spain. After surviving two bombings en route, the submarine made it to the Spanish coast. Early on the morning of April 30^th, the body, with an attached briefcase, was dumped overboard, at a spot where it was known that tide and current would carry it to shore. The briefcase contained fake letters from British generals, that identified the Balkans as the Allies’ next invasion target.

The letters also contained hints of subsidiary operations that would target the island of Sardinia. The Germans swallowed Operation Mincemeat’s deception, hook, line, and sinker. It helped that Hitler was already obsessed with the Balkans, and suspected that it was the Allies’ next target. The briefcase’s contents reinforced that belief. The Fuhrer wrote Mussolini, to inform him that Greece and Sardinia should be reinforced “at all costs“. Accordingly, rather than send available reinforcement to Sicily, Hitler had them sent to the Balkans and Sardinia instead.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.