Today is St. Patrick’s Day. The calendar says March 17. And it snowed late this afternoon. Yep. More snow. It didn’t stick very long, but it actually had the audacity to snow! So typical of this winter!
Over the weekend I watched a two WWII movies. One was awful and one was OK with a wonderful history. The awful movie was The Eagle Has Landed. I picked it up at the library along with a few other WWII movies and went over to a friend’s house. I thought a movie starring Robert Duvall and Michael Caine couldn’t be too bad…I was wrong. Then the credits ran and included Larry Hagman and Treat Williams…I knew we picked the wrong movie! Duvall was decent, I’ve never seen Caine worse, Hagman was awful, and Williams was worthless. Oh, and Donald Sutherland was an embarrassment to the acting profession. This was supposed to a drama/action/adventure, but it played more like a comedy gone sour. My friend kept saying it couldn’t be a comedy because there were too many dead bodies. I wanted to fast forward to the end to just to see how it ended, but my friend left it play, but took great advantage of the Mute button so we could talk freely over the phlegm.
I also watched The Man Who Never Was. This is the story of Major William Martin…a man that really didn’t exist, but had a huge impact on WWII. After pushing the Nazis out of most of Africa the Allies needed to invade Europe, and Sicily was the obvious entry route. Unfortunately, both the Allies and the Nazis knew this, and that meant high casualties for the invading Allies. They needed a diversion…a way to get the Nazis to pull troops out of Sicily and move them to Greece. They decided to send in Major William Martin to lead the diversion…only Martin didn’t exist. Instead, the British suited up a corpse with a fake history, a
fiancée, an overdraft statement from the bank, a temporary promotion, and a briefcase containing personal letters from high ranking officers making detailed, but sketchy references to the Greece invasion. They needed the body to float ashore in Spain so that it looked like Martin was the victim of a plane crash. To do this they had a submarine take the corpse out to sea where the currents would carry it to Spain…a neutral country with strong Nazi connections. The plan worked better than they expected. The Nazis couldn’t find a hole in the story the British created and removed troops from Sicily and were so convinced that Greece was going to be the main invasion, that the Allies were in Sicily for two weeks before the Nazis finally realized they had too many troops in the wrong location! A few years later, when accurate papers did fall into Nazi possession about other Allied activities…the Nazis thought it was another ruse and ignored the information. The effort was code named Operation Mincement…"Mincemeat swallowed whole." Read more about Major William Martin and Operation Mincement here…it’s fascinating!
The movie The Man Who Never Was was made in the 1950s, when some of this information was still top secret. Clifton Webb, always worth watching, stars in the lead as Lt. Cmdr. Ewen Montagu, the plot’s mastermind. By today’s standards the movie is a little slow, but it is intriguing to watch the effort the British put in to make this work. Too bad the movie didn’t stay with this part of the story longer, but they eventually switched to the Nazis efforts to verify William Martin and his letters. This should have been interesting in the movie, but was a bit flat. The break down of the film was the huge coincidence that leads Gloria Grahame’s character to inadvertently convince the Nazi spy that the story was true. (I can’t find any information on whether this part of the story is real or not.) It was worth watching, but not a great movie.
And who was Major William Martin before he was the all important corpse? Well the two links above come to different conclusions. Who ever he was, he saved the lives of a lot of Allied military personnel.
*The DVD cover, shown above, is oddly from the last scene of the movie. The rest of the movie Clifton Webb is in his Naval uniform.