Operation Mincemeat

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a wave on a Spanish beach, and a briefcase chain)
Nineteen forty-three. The plan is to lie to the Germans with a corpse.

[Verse 1]
They needed the Germans to believe the invasion was Greece,
when everybody sensible knew the invasion had to be Sicily,
so they took a body, and they gave it a rank, and a name,
and a fiancée called Pam with a photograph and two love letters,
theatre-ticket stubs, a bill from a shirtmaker, a cross around the neck,
a whole man, invented backward from a wallet, and floated him ashore.

[Chorus]
Major William Martin, Royal Marines, who never existed —
carrying documents in a locked case chained to his wrist
that were designed to be found, and read, and believed, and were,
and Hitler moved divisions to Greece, and Sicily was thinner.
Operation Mincemeat. It worked. It genuinely worked.
Thousands are alive because of a body in the water.

[Verse 2]
The body was a man called Glyndwr Michael. That is his name.
A Welsh labourer, homeless in London, dead at thirty-four
of phosphorus poisoning from rat paste, possibly deliberate,
with no family who came forward, which is precisely why he was chosen —
because nobody would ask. That was the selection criterion.
Nobody would ask where he had gone.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
He is buried in Huelva under the invented name,
and in nineteen ninety-eight they added a line to the stone:
"Glyndwr Michael served as Major William Martin, RM."
Fifty-five years to get his own name onto his own grave,
and it is there now, underneath the other one, in smaller letters.
He did more than most of us will and he was not asked.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the wave again)
Glyndwr Michael.
Say that one. That's the one to say.