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→Assembling the plan: a little more
===Assembling the plan===
===Assembling the plan===
In 1943 the Allies were by then firmly-established in North Africa. [[Operation Torch]] had been a success, and British General [[Bernard Law Montgomery|Montgomery]] was poised to remove the [[Afrika Corps]] under [[Erwin Rommel]] at El Alamein. In the meantime, plans were being readied for the invasion of southern Europe, and to both sides of the conflict it was obvious that the invasion would first go through Sicily. The Germans had already augmented their forces on the island in expectation; what the Allies needed to do was to have some or all of those units removed for the invasion to succeed.
Ewen Montagu and Charles Cholmondeley, two officers working in the Intelligence Division, were also aware of the Sicily plans, and knew that the invasion could possibly fail if German reserves were not removed from the island in some degree. Thinking back to the "trout memo", Cholmondeley suggested an air drop of a corpse wearing a radio; this plan was shelved as not feasable. But the corpse idea remained, and Montague took it up with a bolder plan: Cholmondeley's idea of the radio was replaced with documents, and the corpse was to be dumped at sea, complete with the identity of a British officer who may have been the victim of a plane crash. The corpse would be near-enough to be recovered and taken to a neutral country, but one that was known to harbor German spies; the plan being that the documents would be opened and read.
[[Spain]] was chosen as the recovery site. Although neutral during the war, Spain had as its leader a pro-Nazi dictator, Fransico Franco; further, its Atlantic coastline between British-controlled Gibraltar and the Portuguese border had cities which were swarming with German spies. A submarine, it was suggested, could get near the shoreline, place the corpse in the water at night, and leave without being detected; the body would be taken to shore by the currents within hours.
==References==
==References==