Patricia Davies was the last of the team behind Operation Mincemeat, the subterfuge which allowed the Allies to invade Sicily.
Patricia Davies: 'We were all in on the plot. We were enthralled by the whole idea'
Patricia Davies, who has died aged 93, was the last surviving member of the clandestine group in Naval Intelligence that in 1943 launched Operation Mincemeat, a brilliant subterfuge that significantly altered the course of the Second World War.
The plan of Operation Mincemeat, as told by Ben Macintyre in his book of the same name and in a BBC documentary, was to drop a dead body in the Mediterranean off the coast of Spain and hope the Nazis would find it. The body was dressed as a Royal Marines officer, and was attached to a briefcase containing a series of official-looking but faked letters indicating an Allied plan to push back against Axis forces in southern Europe by invading Greece and Sardinia — and not, as expected, Sicily.
The Nazis took the bait: believing the false information to be true, they diverted massive forces to Greece, enabling a successful Allied invasion of Sicily.
Patricia Davies (née Trehearne) was 18 when the war started and had just left Roedean, the private girls’ school near Brighton, when a friend of her father’s, a Royal Marines colonel, recruited her to work for Naval Intelligence.
She worked in the Admiralty, first for Ian Fleming (author of the James Bond novels), who was assistant to the Director, and later in a secret division called 17M, located in a small stuffy room in the basement of the Admiralty building.
Patricia Davies
The idea for Operation Mincemeat originated with Ian Fleming (who got the idea from a 1937 detective novel called The Milliner’s Hat Mystery, by Basil Thomson). Fleming elaborated the ruse in a memo which lay dormant until it was taken up by the head of 17M, Commander Ewen Montagu.
The plan required finding a suitably unmarked corpse and kitting it out to look like a Royal Marines officer on a secret mission. The corpse of a vagrant was found, and work began on creating a complete identity and life story for it. It was given the name Major William Martin, and put into a uniform, and into the pockets of the uniform were placed the painstakingly forged ephemera of a real person’s life: theatre ticket stubs, bus tickets, a letter from a bank manager and even an engagement ring for a fictitious fiancée.
“We were all in on the plot,” Patricia Davies recalled in one of the interviews she gave in later life. “We were enthralled by the whole idea, and did everything we could to elaborate it.”
The required veil of secrecy was never penetrated. “We were all terrified by the Official Secrets Act, and thought we’d end up in the Tower of London if we gave anything away,” she said. Her parents thought she was working as a filing clerk. The secrecy lasted only as long as necessary: a few years after the war ended, Montagu published his own account of Operation Mincemeat and it was made into a film, The Man Who Never Was (1956). “Churchill was kept informed, but he did rather dine out on it, which was another reason the story began to come out,” Patricia Davies recalled.
Her personal contribution to the preparation of Major William Martin was to address, in her fine handwriting, the envelope (to General Sir Harold Alexander, C-in-C, Middle East) containing the false Allied invasion plan.
On April 30 1943 the body of William Martin was deposited in the sea off the east coast of Spain from a naval submarine. It was intercepted by a fisherman, brought to Spanish authorities, and before long Nazi intelligence became interested. After an agonisingly long wait (mainly due to the ineptitude of Nazi spies), the contents of William Martin’s briefcase became known to the Nazi command, even allegedly reaching Hitler’s desk. Eight divisions were diverted to Greece, leaving Sicily barely defended.
The Allies invaded Sicily in July. One of the British officers involved in the successful invasion was Lieutenant Denis “Paddy” Davies. He and Patricia became engaged on VE-Day, May 8 1945 — Davies proposed to her in the thick of the euphoric crowds that were swarming around Buckingham Palace to celebrate the victory. They married in July that year.
Patricia Davies (back row, second from right) with members of the Operation Mincemeat team
Patricia Helen Trehearne was born in London on July 18 1921, the eldest of three children, and grew up in Surrey, Sussex and Devon. Her father, Edward Trehearne, was a lawyer; her mother, Nell George, was an amateur opera singer. Patricia’s younger sister, Anne, was evacuated to Canada during the war, and in adulthood was fashion editor of Queen . Their brother, John, was a farmer .
After the war, Paddy Davies was chairman of the cosmetics companies Lenthéric, Yardley, Momy and Germaine Monteil. He and Patricia had three children: Charlotte MacKean, a psychotherapist; Annabel Merullo, a literary agent; and Mark, a banker. Paddy Davies died in 2010.
They lived in West Sussex . Although for much of her life post-war she talked little about Operation Mincemeat, she was in demand as an interviewee before and after the publication of Macintyre’s book. Asked by a German television interviewer what she did during the war, she replied, with characteristic sharpness: “Well, I tried to ensure that as many of you were killed as possible.”
Patricia Davies, born July 18 1921, died July 22 2014