The Man Who Never Was is a 1956 British espionage thriller film produced by André Hakim and directed by Ronald Neame. It stars Clifton Webb and Gloria Grahame and features Robert Flemyng, Josephine Griffin and Stephen Boyd. It is based on the book of the same name by Lt. Cmdr. Ewen Montagu and chronicles Operation Mincemeat, a 1943 British intelligence plan to deceive the Axis powers into thinking the Allied invasion of Sicily would take place elsewhere in the Mediterranean. Montagu led a small group of ingenious British planners who managed to put false documents on a corpse (“the man who never was”) that drifted ashore in southern Spain and gave the Germans every good reason to think that the phony invasion plans were real.

The BBC's radio comedy show, The Goon Show, made a send-up of the story of The Man Who Never Was (based on the book) and incorporated most of the regular Goon Show characters. Written by Spike Milligan and Larry Stephens, the first version of the script formed two-thirds of the episode broadcast on 31 March 1953, before the film's release, with the first third comprising a separate sketch. Like most of these early episodes, this no longer exists.

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This one doesn't disappoint. The book follows a little known bit of espionage during the Mediterranean campaign of WWII. Essentially, the Brits float a body ashore to Spain, knowing that the Germans will get it and, more importantly, the letters he's carrying which are rife with misdirection. Seems like a simple plan, but it proves to be much more difficult than originally imagined. Chapman, J. (2022). The Money Behind the Screen: A History of British Film Finance, 1945-1985. Edinburgh University Press p 359

Operation Mincemeat, an elaborate and sucessful ruse by British naval intelligence to conceal from the Germans preparations to invade Sicily in 1943, has been some time in coming to light. In the early hours of 30 April 1943, a corpse, wearing the uniform of an officer in the Royal Marines, was slipped into the waters off the south-west coast of Spain. With it was a briefcase, in which were papers detailing an imminent Allied invasion of Greece. As the British had anticipated, the supposedly neutral government of Fascist Spain turned the papers over to the Nazi High Command, who swallowed the story whole. Montagu himself expresses, seemingly in typical British unemotional remarks, how wildly happy he and his crew were that Operation Mincemeat was a spectacular success. Lots of Allied veterans who fought on Sicily, and their families, can be thankful for that. In the summer of 1943, the Allies were planning to invade Sicily. The job of the British counterintelligence division was to convince Germany that they weren't. The idea of "Operation Mincemeat" was born out of a long-shot idea that slowly turned into a plausible and ultimately successful con of the highest levels of the German miliary. In January 1943, with Allied victory in North Africa fast approaching, Allied planners decided on the Italian island of Sicily as the next target for operations, with the invasion earmarked for no later than July that year. However, Sicily was an obvious target and so British intelligence set about deceiving Hitler and Nazi High Command into thinking that the next Allied targets were Greece and the islands of Sardinia and Corsica. The tale of Major MartinIs that an effort to dissuade us from parting with our hard-earned shekels? After all, Ewen Montagu’s account is incomplete and written at the behest of the Government [to hide the truth from the plebeian].