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historychannel .com.
The History Channel Original Podcast. Hey History This Week listeners, Tali here.
Today, we are bringing back an episode we covered in 2020, but with something new.
We are not the only ones who loved this story.
And in spring of this year, Operation Mincemeat hit the Broadway stage.
It brings to life the strange but true story of a World War II spy mission that helped the Allied forces gain a crucial foothold in Nazi -occupied Europe I am actually joined in the studio today by the show's co -creator and star Natasha Hodgson Natasha welcome to history this week oh my gosh I'm so happy to be here thanks for having me we're so happy to have you I hear that you actually got the idea for this musical from a podcast is that right that's true podcast rule you know that's the source of all information a podcast yes um I was in Norway on a holiday with my family we had this really long
train journey from Bergen to Oslo it's this beautiful train journey and I needed something to listen to whilst I was watching the mountains go by and my brother suggested I listen to a stuff you should know podcast about Operation Mincemeat.
It wasn't ours. I'm so sorry.
I don't think ours was out yet.
It was a long time ago yeah you know guys I would never cheat on you it's just it's just a little thing on the side don't even worry about it.
It's a chronology thing yeah.
Exactly in a different universe and with every new fact that I learned about this story it just became crazier and and crazier and I think for me particularly for theatre I always look for stories that it's just surprising all the way through and that every new thing that happens feels like a crazy twist in the tale but also had this amazing heart and had these sort of five central characters that really just captured my imagination and captured my heart and so yeah I literally couldn't get off that beautiful train fast enough I was like I need to have a conversation I've just found this amazing
story and I really think it would make an amazing musical and so yeah I texted my my collaborators and said, guys, I know we don't necessarily want to do a World War II story, but I really think this is an amazing World War II story.
And thank God they agreed with me.
All right. Well, we're going to play the episode and afterwards you and I will be back to talk about what it was like to bring this historical story to life and to music.
Let's do it. History This Week, July 10th, 1943.
I'm Sally Helm. It's a few hours before dawn on Sicily's southern coast. The Italian island sits between the toe of the boot on Italy's mainland and the northeast tip of Africa.
There's no moon tonight, and on the Mediterranean Sea, a storm is raging.
In the dark waters, there is a fleet of about 2500 Allied ships speeding towards Sicily, armed to attack.
It's World War II. Sicily is axis territory because Italy is fighting alongside Germany in the war.
And this will be the first Allied invasion into German -controlled Europe.
If the American and British troops can pull it off, Sicily will become a vital stepping stone for them to enter mainland Italy and then the rest of the continent.
Italian and German troops man the island.
But the Allies think, maybe they won't expect us to attack in the middle of this huge storm.
And they're right. The Axis powers are not ready for the assault.
When the attack begins, 150 ,000 men storm the beaches.
Paratroopers, ground troops, airmen, 600 tanks, hundreds of planes raining down air support.
And they meet little resistance.
The Italian forces start retreating, and everyone's thinking, where are the Germans?
By the end of the day, British troops have taken the shoreline, and they're pushing inland.
Over the next two months, the Allies, led by US General George Patton and British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, push the Axis forces back and back, up the island towards the Italian mainland.
On August 17, General Patton and his troops reach Messina in northern Sicily.
They're expecting a final showdown.
But the Axis troops are gone.
They'd evacuated at the last minute.
The invasion is officially a success.
Sicily, the gateway to Europe, is now firmly in the hands of the Allied forces.
For such a pivotal battle in World War Two, Sicily went down pretty easy.
They expected 10 ,000 casualties in the first week and 300 of the Allied ships would be sunk in the first two days.
In fact, the casualties was just a tenth of that number.
And they lost 12 ships.
All those lives and ships were saved for one simple reason.
Most of the Germans had already left just a few weeks before the Allies attacked.
And it wasn't luck that drew them away from the island.
It was a planned deception pulled off by a small group of British intelligence agents, including a man who would become best known for creating the most famous British spy in history.
Today, Operation Mincemeat.
How did a deception involving a corpse, a false identity, and a single eyelash save thousands of lives and change the course of World War II?
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And we host a podcast called the Severance Podcast, where we used to break down every episode of the TV show Severance.
Severance isn't back just yet, but the podcast is.
Each week, we'll discuss the movies, TV shows, and ideas that influenced the making of Severance.
We're going to talk to the incredible artists who inspire us to do what we do.
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We heard the story of Operation Mincemeat from Nicholas Reed.
He's a historian and the author of the book Spy Runner, which is about deception during World War II.
He said it's a little bit of a departure for him.
I'm mainly an art historian and have written 10 books now about art history.
But he wrote about Operation Mincemeat for a very personal reason.
Where my father became involved was a bit later.
That story starts in 1943, about three years into World War II.
Germany controls Poland, Denmark, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, France, Yugoslavia, and Greece.
Basically, almost all of Western Europe.
And Italy has joined the Axis powers.
Great Britain, though, has sided with the Allies.
They're essentially surrounded by German -occupied Europe, separated from their nearest allies, Russia, by almost a thousand miles of Nazi -occupied territory.
German forces are in control just across the English Channel in France, less than 50 miles away.
way. So the British are thinking.
So at some point, we'd have to invade Europe.
But the Germans had really built up enormous fortresses with guns inside to fight off any possible attack.
If we try landing on the beaches, the army is likely to be slaughtered.
German forces are making it tough for the British to attack Europe via France.
And the Axis powers are using their submarines.
Marines, the German U -Boats, to take down any help coming across the Atlantic.
The so -called Battle of the Atlantic has been slowly draining Allied supplies and forces since 1939.
We were doing pretty badly in the Atlantic.
The German Navy was sinking a lot of the ships which were bringing us supplies, troops, everything else from America to England.
But early in 1943, another option opens up.
The Allies successfully defeat Axis forces in northern Africa, which means...
We could have invaded at what they call the soft underbelly of the Mediterranean.
The soft underbelly.
That's the term British and American forces are using to describe the islands of the Mediterranean Sea.
Those islands are another way to get into Nazi -controlled continental Europe.
So American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill have a decision to make.
They are in charge of the Allied front in Western Europe, while Russia is busy fighting the Germans in Eastern Europe.
And Churchill and FDR have to decide whether to invade via France, across the Channel, taking on the full strength of the German army, Or if it's better to go through Italy in the south, where a mix of German and Italian troops occupy the Mediterranean.
And far at sea, the work of fighting a war goes on, with weighty decisions to be wireless to far -flung fronts.
Anchors drop off the North American coast and two nations' leaders prepare to shake hands with each other and with history.
The decision is pretty fraught.
Some of the Allied generals think, well, maybe we should just full -on invade France, face the Germans outright.
But Churchill eventually convinces them that the islands of the Mediterranean, the soft underbelly, are the better way to go.
But where exactly? We could have invaded Greece in the east, then Corsica and Sardinia, two islands in the west. And then there was Sicily.
And the interesting point about Sicily was that it was occupied by the Germans, fine, but it was quite close to where our army was in Africa.
Sicily is just 60 miles from a British -controlled airbase.
So the island becomes the obvious choice.
The problem is, it's obvious to the Axis powers too.
Meaning they're prepared to put up a fight.
So, a few members of British intelligence start thinking.
Is there some way in which we can mislead the Germans to get them to think not that we're going to invade Sicily, which seems the obvious point, but to invent a story saying, well, we don't really want to invade Sicily, and instead we're going to invade Greece and also Sardinia.
British intelligence officers Charles Chumley and Ewan Montague are working on a plan.
Chumley has been reading something called the Trout Memo.
It's a military document that had circulated a few years back in 1939.
It basically lists ways to trick an enemy army, like catching a trout with a worm on a hook.
In just a few years, the memo's co -author will become famous in his own right as a spy novelist. He's a young officer in the Royal Navy named Ian Fleming.
In 1953, he'll write his first novel about James Bond.
Item number 28 in the Trout Memo bears this title.
A suggestion, not a very nice one.
The suggestion is this.
Quote, A corpse dressed as an airman with dispatches in his pockets could be dropped on the coast. And Chumley thinks, yes, we could plant a body in the sea for the Germans to find, make it look like a British officer who died in a plane crash.
And on the body, we could plant false dispatches about the war.
A letter detailing a fake plan of attack.
The letter was going to say, we felt we should explain what we're actually going to do in the Mediterranean.
We are going to invade half in Greece and half in Sardinia.
But we've got a cover plan, which we want to mislead the Germans with.
And so we'll try and make it look as if we're going to invade in Sicily.
The Germans are expecting the Allies to invade Sicily.
And the idea is to convince them that they're being played.
that the real invasion won't be in Sicily after all.
Chun -Li and Montague decide this is worth a shot.
And they start putting together one of the most bizarre deception plans in history.
Operation Mincemeat.
First, they need a dead body.
Finding the right one is a grim task.
They need an unclaimed body that looks like a drowning victim.
They start contacting local morgues in London, and they find someone.
The body was actually found in a warehouse, found dead.
And in fact, they think he probably ate some bread, which he found in the warehouse where he was sleeping the night, I suppose.
And the bread had been poisoned to get rid of rats.
And that's thought that that's probably what killed him.
This was likely the body of Glyndwr Michael, a Welsh man who had been living on the streets.
He had no known relations and was in about his early 40s when he died.
Montague talks to a pathologist who says this could work.
The poisoning probably won't show up on an autopsy.
It could look like this man drowned.
So they've completed grim task number one.
Now it is up to Montague and Chumley to create a false identity for the corpse.
German intelligence is pretty wily, so the story has to be airtight.
They decide the fictional officer will be named Captain William Martin of the Royal Marines.
There are a bunch of real William Martins in the British military, so if the Germans go looking, they won't get suspicious.
Then, British intelligence has to invent the last two weeks of Martin's life—all on paper to be stuffed into his pockets.
They decided to make him more human.
They would invent a girlfriend for him.
They would write two letters to him from a fictitious girlfriend.
One of the clues she gives in her letters is, I hear rumors that you might be sent off somewhere.
I do hope that's not true.
We've only just found each other.
We don't want to lose each other now.
In addition to that, they then got a photograph of one of the women in the MI5 office.
And as they had just got engaged, they then had a bill from the jewelers for the engagement ring.
It cost several hundred pounds and details of the inscription on the ring, which made it cost even more.
In espionage circles, this stuff is called pocket litter.
And Captain Martin is loaded with it.
Theater ticket stubs, bank statements, a receipt for clothing he supposedly bought, a book of stamps, pencil stubs, cigarettes, keys.
They also plant a silver cross and a medallion of St. Christopher on the body to signal that Martin is Roman Catholic, a faith that doesn't believe in tampering with corpses, a .k .a.
autopsies. And, of course, they plant false letters saying that the allied attack is coming for Sardinia and Greece, not Sicily.
The final piece of the puzzle is an ID card. If the Germans are going to recognize Martin as a high -ranking British officer who would have this information about the attack, they need the ID card to confirm it.
This turns out to be very difficult.
I had the body, but there was no known photograph of him.
And you've got to have a photograph of somebody if you've got to produce an identity card. So for some time, Montague was absolutely stumped.
He really couldn't find anyone who looked anything like the body that they'd got.
They tried taking a photograph of the dead man, and he really did look very dead.
This roadblock is holding up the operation.
And there's a clock ticking.
after all they're dealing with a corpse wait too long and it'll decompose they think maybe we can just blur the photo but that might tip off the germans that something isn't quite right and then something sort of miraculous happens montague was at a meeting to discuss a double agent called agent zigzag and my father was in charge of agent zigzag for 18 months Reed's father worked at MI5 managing German double agents And so he's in this totally unrelated meeting with Montague And as soon as Montague saw my father Well, I can quote exactly what he said As he said And then we had a stroke of luck
Sitting opposite me at a meeting to deal with quite a different matter I saw someone who might have been the twin brother of the corpse He was readily persuaded to let us photograph him And that dealt with that difficulty And that's why my father's photo appears on the identity card. And that's how my father became involved in the whole plot.
Reed wouldn't find out his father had been involved until he just randomly stumbled across the ID photo in a book about Operation Mincemeat.
So when I was about 20, I'd been reading it.
And when I saw that photo, I could easily recognize my father in it and said, that's you, isn't it?
and he hummed it hard and wouldn't quite say yes and wouldn't quite say no. But I may say since then there have been a couple of books published on this and they all say very clearly that he was the man in the photo.
The ID problem is finally solved.
The last hurdle is convincing the British military to go forward with the plan.
Montague makes the proposal.
The high -ups were really quite divided on this.
Some of them thought it was a very good idea, they might as well try it out, and the other half thought, no, it's far too dangerous to try anything like that.
Eventually, the question goes to Churchill.
He'll make the final call.
And Churchill is supposed to have said, well, anybody but a damn fool would know we are invading Sicily anyway.
In other words, the Germans expected us to invade in Sicily and we knew there was going to be a bloodbath.
But if this deception plan worked, If we could get the Germans to distract their forces, then we'll have far smaller casualties.
It's decided. Operation Mincemeat is a go.
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In the early hours of April 17th, this complicated operation begins.
The agents dress the body as Captain William Martin, Plant the two weeks worth of pocket litter on him and chain a briefcase to his wrist. Inside the briefcase are top -secret documents about the plans for Sardinia and Greece.
As a final touch, the agents place a single eyelash among the documents so that if they're returned to British authorities, they'll know right away whether the envelope has been opened and the documents read.
read. With that, Captain Martin is ready to go.
He's packed in dry ice and ...
They put it in a large metal container, which they marked medical instruments, and then loaded aboard a submarine.
The submarine, the HMS Seraph, is bound for Spanish waters.
Spain is officially neutral in World War II.
But unofficially, a lot of Spanish authorities are Nazi sympathizers.
They were just as fascist as the Nazis and the Germans were.
And therefore, we knew that if a body with secret British plans landed in Spain, there was a very good chance the Spaniards in charge would let the Germans have all those details as soon as they could, their fellow fascists at work.
On April 30th, the HMS Seraph surfaces just off the southwest coast of Spain.
The commander opens the canister and pushes the top -secret cargo into the waves.
Almost two weeks later, British intelligence hears that a Spanish fishing boat has picked up the body and delivered it to the authorities.
They hoped and waited, and then eventually, within a couple of weeks, or perhaps it was three weeks, they got the briefcase and the letters back.
Spain is maintaining its official neutrality.
And so, under the unwritten rules of sportsmanlike warfare, be expected to turn something like this over to the British.
And they do. But the eyelash is missing.
Six days after the briefcase is returned, a German communication is decrypted by ally codebreakers.
It's a warning that the allied invasion is coming for Greece.
That is the confirmation they've been waiting for.
British Brigadier Leslie Hollis sends a message to Churchill.
Mincemeat swallowed hook, line and sinker.
The cryptic message is a reference to the Trout Memo, that list of deceptions co -authored by Ian Fleming.
Germany thinks they have this secret communication, the real ally plan.
And so they start quietly moving troops off of Sicily, Clearing the way for an invasion that comes just a few weeks later.
When the Allied troops land on Sicily, the Italian forces surrender pretty quickly.
Though Prime Minister Benito Mussolini is a strong Nazi ally, many regular Italian soldiers have reservations.
So they don't put up a super strong fight.
That leaves just two German divisions to try and fend off 150 ,000 advancing men.
The Allied invasion of Sicily is the largest invasion in the war to date.
It'll be eclipsed only by the invasion of Normandy a year later.
Even before Sicily is securely in the hands of the Allies, Mussolini is voted out and arrested by his own Grand Council.
Many of the German troops manage to evacuate before they can be captured.
Still, the victory in Sicily opens up Italy and the rest of Nazi -occupied Europe to later invasions.
From Sicily, it then meant we could cross the mile -wide channel between Sicily and Italy.
And then there was a whole series of landings in Italy and the Allied Army sort of moved up on the coast. The Allied invasion of Italy won't be easy.
It's a long struggle.
But it does, in the end, knock Italy out of World War II.
Losing Italy is a huge hit to Axis morale and to Axis military might.
One year later, the invasion of Normandy on D -Day is a success, ushering in the end of the war and the Allied victory.
D -Day itself is a success in part because the Allies deceived the Germans again, convincing them to send tanks to a dummy location north of Normandy.
Reed told us, The importance of Operation Mincemeat is in part the lives and resources that it saved.
Those troops, ships, planes and tanks.
They went on to fight in Italy and beyond.
but another part of the operation's legacy is how we think about deception in warfare a hundred years ago if you tried to deceive the enemy the enemy would say well that's not cricket you know we're an army we're here to fight we want the fight it's the only way to win spying has been around forever but even that was supposed to be sort of sportsmanlike gentlemanly Deception is really rather sneaky.
If you're going to deceive, you're going to be telling lies to people.
That's not a very good example to set to anyone.
But Operation Mincemeat, and dozens of other World War Two deception plans, proved that deception could save thousands of lives in battle.
And deception can work in deceiving the enemy, and defeating a much bigger enemy.
It might not have been sportsmanlike, but it worked.
So well that trickery is now a regular part of military operations.
Operation Mincemeat changed geopolitical history and heralded a major change in warfare.
The most important soldier in the operation was already dead.
A man from Wales who had accidentally eaten a poisoned piece of bread.
It's a surreal turn of events, one you'd only expect from, well, a James Bond movie.
Okay, that was our episode from 2020.
We hope you enjoyed it.
When we come back, we'll have our full interview with Natasha Hodgson, who turned the story that you just heard into a musical.
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Terms apply. I am back in the studio with Natasha Hodgson, the co -creator and star of the Broadway musical Operation Mincemeat.
So Natasha, can you tell us a little bit about your research process?
I know that many of the details in the show are totally true, things that we covered in our version of the story, too.
How did you go about turning this historical narrative into a musical narrative with songs?
blogs i started off obviously listening to the podcast that i mentioned earlier and then i dove straight into ewan montague's book the man that never was and this is where my obsession with ewan montague began and continues to this day he's obviously the character that i play in the broadway version of operation mincemeat and i was really struck by his mix of obvious cleverness amazing wit and also overwhelming arrogance that comes through as you're reading his book about his sort of captaining this this mission just despair and like abysmalness about his the collaborators around him he hated
john bevan so much he thought he was such a sort of ordinary man and i think you know i don't want to say this to my darling ewan but i think your privilege is showing you and but he has such love for the people that were around him you know charles chumley and jean leslie he dedicates a book to the team that's what it says at the front it says to the team and i think that really stayed and how it continues to stay with me that like Like even Ewan, even the guy at the top of the tree realises that no one does anything alone.
And even for him, the man who believes himself to be the greatest, you know, mind who ever lived.
He has to acknowledge that this is a mission that was done by many people.
And I think that is really the heart of our show, as well as hopefully the heart of the mission at large.
So, yes, we read his book and we also watched the movie.
It was sort of inspired by his book, The Man Who Never Was.
Ewan Montague features in that movie.
I don't know if you...
He's in it. Oh, yes.
He insisted on having a part in the movie because, of course, he did.
Of course he did. It's not a big part.
He plays one of the generals who at the very start of the adventure go, this will never work.
This is crazy. It was like such a thing that he would do.
I love him. Whereas Charles Cholmondeley, the retiring type, never even wanted to be named.
He's named in the book as George because he was so insistent that his name be kept out of it.
So yeah, you couldn't get more different guys, which is one of the things we love so much about it.
And then yeah, we just sort of did deep dives into anything we could read online.
We read Ben McIntyre's book, book, Operation Mincemeat.
And then it was a case of just going through the story as a team of four of us who wrote it and pinpointing out every single moment that we were just like, oh my God, and can you believe?
And beginning to kind of take that string of little pearls and try and turn them into a musical necklace.
Do you remember any particular detail that you came across as you were researching that made you go, oh, this should be a song?
Something that really struck you?
Oh my gosh, so many things.
The very first song we ever wrote for the musical is a song called god that's brilliant we'll trade them for poland god that's brilliant which is about a fact that we came across really early on and all screamed about which was there was a operation in mi5 which was explicitly about how could we murder hitler could we just solve the war by murdering hitler they sat in a room and brainstormed ideas to kill him as he was on his train journey there was something about that that was just like oh my god like we have have these grand ideals of what the men in charge of war sit in their rooms and do
and yet what they're actually doing is having cups of coffee and going could we just knife him would we knifed him would this all go away we'll shoot him en route our pursuit will be fruitful and the furor is out cold and the fact that ian fleming of obviously james bond fame the james bond author was in these rooms which is what we found out trying to brainstorm these ideas if this is a a man in a fancy suit all that we need is a swanky tuxedo i think that was the very first little scene that we came across that was real that really just lit a fire and we're like god this is a sketch this can't
be real but to be honest i would say take any song in this musical and it has been inspired by something that's real bernard spillsbury celebrity sort of pathologist to the stars who helps them find the body for the mission indeed yes he helps them find the body there was so much about this one particular character that we dedicated an entire song to him because we fell in love with this character who was essentially a man who believed he could smell murder that was his big thing he believed that he had the capacity to sniff a dead body and tell you how that person had died i mean obviously you're
going to write a song about that that's the best thing you've ever heard in your entire life he did help the operation management team find the body but but unfortunately his murder sniffing abilities were not really relevant in this particular scenario right but but we had to we put it in and our producers were like listen we love the murder sniffing guy song but it's nothing to do with it to the side it's simply nothing to do so we're like but he he sniffs murder that's real it's real it happened um and so no we had to take we unfortunately had to take that out so this is the thing is you know
that the facts were so crazy that we couldn't even put them all in.
So yeah and then the American pilot crashing in.
I was gonna say that's actually something that we didn't put in our initial episode and it's a key incident in your musical.
So tell me this is a incident with an American pilot Willie Watkins.
He gets his own song introduction.
Oh yes. Yeah tell us that story how does it fit in?
I would say learning about Willie Watkins was the moment I knew this had to be a musical.
For me it was such a key so so yes, I'll take you through it, so the body is out in the sea, it's in Spain, they're waiting for it to wash up, everyone back home, Chamberlain, Montague, Levin, they're on tenterhooks the whole time, they're waiting for the phone call to come in, either the body's washed up or it hasn't, and then they do get a call, but it is not the call that they're hoping for, they get a call, and the embassy in Spain says, well, a body's arrived, and they're like, oh my god, thank goodness, it's an Allied soldier, oh, fantastic, his name is William, and the name they gave him
couldn't be better he's an American pilot and he's still alive and the whole team just goes what are you talking about and it just happens to be that in the same week an American pilot crashes into Spain and somehow survives the plane crash is in Huelva with the rest of our team and he is there for when our body Will Martin washes up and not only that and this is one of of those crazy things that we couldn't put in he goes to the autopsy with haseldon what this is absolutely true he goes to the autopsy of the body that is used in operation minstrel because he's just kicking around his plane's
crashed he has nothing else to do so he's like sure i've just survived a plane crash oh yeah then autopsy that sounds really fun so this pain in the ass this man who could derail the whole thing comes to the autopsy so whilst poor old haseldon is there going listen we need to make sure they keep the briefcase it's really important but he can't say say why, Willie Watkins, a cheerful American pilot, is saying to Houselden, it seems like you really guys should take this briefcase back.
Like, why don't you just take it?
It's British property.
And Houselden's like, please, you don't, I can't, I can't.
We need the Germans to take it.
As with all these sort of things that we wanted to take the inspiration of the style of music from the event that was happening.
So this Willie Watkins song is a very like croonery sort of fun US vibe.
And he's just having a time of life as all of our heroes wish he had never existed, which is the perfect thing for comedy.
One thing that's so fun about your musical is that you really make us feel the lives and personalities of people who are side characters in the history.
These people who don't have as much historical record. I mean, even Willie Watkins or like the Navy men who dropped the body.
You zero in on Glendore Michael, who is the Welshman whose body was key to pulling this off.
Yes. I guess one of the reasons I'm curious to ask you about that is because when we're making historical narratives on this show, obviously we don't get to use imagination.
We have to go with the historical record. So I'm like a little jealous, I guess, that you sort of get to read between the lines and then bring those things to life.
Yeah. It's the privilege of our lives, honestly.
It's so magical to me that we got to do that.
And I think the most resonant example of that is the character of Hester Leggett.
She is the assistant to Colonel Bevan.
She was known as the spin, the spinster of MI5 because she was just an older middle -aged woman.
She wasn't married and she was known as the dragon of the typing pool.
She was frightening to the girls who worked at MI5.
And all we knew about her from historical record, because obviously there really wasn't much because no one wanted to talk about her.
she was not interesting to the men giving this history voice.
But we really found her fascinating because she was the one who wrote the letter.
The fiancé letter. The fiancé letter.
Exactly. So Bill Martin, to make this corpse for fantasy into reality, they wanted to give him a fiancé and they wanted him to have on his person a letter from his fiancé.
And from the research we did, we found out that a few girls from the typing pool had attempted this letter, but they'd been been rejected they were too fanciful and they didn't feel like they had enough resonance and then Hester Leggett this sort of you know we were not sure what her actual age was but certainly older than the girls that she would have been around said that she would give it a go and the letter that she produced was the letter that was used in the body and you can read the letter it's really beautiful but the one line that stood out to us we read it together as the writers was the line
oh darling why did we go and meet in the middle of a war what a silly thing for anyone to do and we were so moved so moved by that line because it just if it felt like it summed up so perfectly like both the lightness of like wanting something lovely you know it's a joke well why do we go meet in the middle of war what a silly thing for anyone to do and yet at the same time so perfectly captures the the sort of tumultuousness of no one being able to pick their present no one being able to have what they wanted or no power over their decisions right now or their future they everyone is trapped
in this war and their loved ones are far away and anyway so yeah we we really loved that sentence and so we started thinking about like you know it was a mystery to us how come this woman who was not a young woman in this war how could she write this in such a beautiful way you know was she a natural author and then we started talking about the fact that actually if she was a middle -aged woman she had already lived through one war she had probably lived she was young during world war one and then the idea that war is finished and everyone believing that you know maybe they'd have some time of peace
and then the second world war coming crashing in and it was just so obviously that's just a hideous fact and tragic and so we as you say sort of invented whether or not it's true we'll never know but the idea that maybe she did have this experience already in world war one maybe someone that she loved went far away from her and never came home and we like the idea that she was able to pour this grief and this tragedy tragedy into making this fiction of this new soldier this bill martin because we're writers that's what we do we take our lived experience we take our pain and we take our happiness
and we put it into writing and we transform those feelings into something that is tangible for other people and and gives other people either joy or catharsis or whatever it is and so yeah that sort of experiment became the song dear bill and why did we meet in the middle of a war oh what a silly thing for anyone to do did you hear from descendants of Hester of people who who knew her like were you able to kind of like learn any more about the real Hester as this all went on yeah actually it's kind of an amazing story we put this show on and it went to the West End and the community that got built
around the show the fans of the show really obviously fell in love with Hester which obviously is so wonderful and as you say the privilege that we we get to do which is kind of soften the edges of history and make it into something more more sort of emotional and more fantasy and when they would ask us so but who is she where is she now like who were her descendants we had to say we don't know she drops out of history in the research that we read no one could find her where she grew up where she was born what she went on to do and there was no particular effort to try and do that and our fans
said that that's not good good enough.
They went on a mission to try and figure out who Hester actually was.
And they went to British archives, they did the research, they dove deep into like the deep files with my five, and they managed to find her, which is crazy.
So you know, this is historians in action.
This is how speech present, and it transpired that the reason no one could find her is because when Ewan Montague, God love him, was writing this story, he spelled her name wrong.
I mean, isn't Wasn't that a symbol of the whole Blumen thing?
He spelled it Leggett.
And in fact, it is Leggett.
So once the guys kind of figured that out, they wrote to MI5 and said, we have a feeling that this woman, because they found there was a different Hester Leggett who had worked in MI5 around the right time, but there was no confirmation that she worked on Operation Minns Mee because it was a secret mission.
And so the fans of the show wrote to MI5 and said, please, could you confirm?
We've done all this research. We love this person.
Could you confirm that this Hester Leggett is the actual woman who helped Operation Minns Mee?
and mi5 wrote them an official letter back and said yes we can confirm this is her actual identity and so now we have as a result of those people the facts of where she was born where she went to school where she grew up and and we were able to get in touch with her descendants and they came and saw the show and on the night they came to see the show a plaque was put up at the fortune theatre in london in our western venue that is dedicated to her and her service to operation minnsmith so she will never ever be forgotten now she she will live on in history and even if when When the show fades
away, she has a plaque because of brilliant historical work that those people did.
As you say, the wonderful thing about fiction and historical fiction and historical research is that when they all work together, you don't just get the facts, you get the passion to go and find out more and more and more.
And so that these people that are forgotten in history get lifted up.
Honestly, I cry every time I think about it.
I think I'm doing very well right now.
But it's just such a miracle to me that they went and they did that.
They're such heroes.
It's amazing. Yeah.
And what an amazing concrete legacy of the show.
It sounds like modern audiences have really, really responded.
I mean, going and doing all of this historical legwork on behalf of this character that they met through your show.
What else do you think this incident has to say to audiences of 2025?
What should they take away from this moment and these characters?
that's such a good question so there's a couple of things I think in the midst of writing this show the pandemic happened before that time we were sort of going round and round about how to unlock the kind of emotional heart of this story we were comedy writers it's a comedy musical and so we were very comfortable with the kind of funny amazing adventure of it all but we were struggling because we were so worried that we didn't have the lived experience obviously of a world war to feel like we were allowed to put these emotions into this show and then I think we We all went through what that pandemic
was, and suddenly all of us were confronted with that horrible thing of being away from our loved ones, feeling so powerless, and feeling like nothing that we did could make any sort of difference at all, and that we were completely at the behest of the people, the men in charge who were, I mean, certainly in our country, and I'm sure here too, by all accounts, having the time of their lives, they were partying while people were dying.
And it really lit an anger in us and a desire in us to tell a story where a small group of people can and do make a difference and even though it's a story that's a lot about still those those men at the top of power doing these things the fact remains that like it is a group of people using nothing but their imaginations and their love for each other and their dedication to a real cause which is trying to beat fascism or whatever the cause is that you can move the needle of history without being at the top of the ladder and I feel like that message feels galvanizing to audiences right now particularly
with the rise of fascism and that rise of the alt -right I think it's very easy and understandable that people feel totally powerless to do anything about these huge things and we really wanted to and we hope that this story goes some way to saying like the weapons that you have of being brave and smart and kind and working as a team are weapons that can change the world and obviously you know we're dramatic because that's our remit and it's not as easy as that but I think it being a true story and being like these events happened and these people changed things I hope does go some way to making
that reality. Natasha Hodgson thank you for coming on History this week.
Thank you. Operation Mincemeat is on Broadway right now and it won't be there forever so if you can I highly recommend you take a trip to the John Golden Theatre in New York City to see how Natasha Natasha and her crew set this odd piece of history to song.
The music you heard in our interview was written by Split Lip, which is made up of Natasha Hodgson, David Cumming, Felix Hagen, and Zoe Roberts.
The songs we played were performed by Natasha Hodgson, David Cumming, Zoe Roberts, Jack Malone, and Claire Marie Hall.
The revisited version of this episode was produced by Phoebe Lett.
It was mixed by Ben Dickstein, and also produced by me, Sally Helm.
Okay, la la la, episode plays.
La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, to beat the Nazis, good, good, good.
The original episode was produced by McKamey Lynn.
Emma Frederick was our researcher, and our sound designer was Chris Boniello.
Executive producers were Jesse Katz and Ted Butler.
History This Week is a Backpocket Studios production in partnership with The History Channel.
To stay updated on all things History This Week, sign up at historythisweekpodcast .com.
And if you have any thoughts or questions, send us an email at historythisweekathistory .com.
For BackPocket Studios, our executive producer is Ben Dickstein.
From the History Channel, our executive producers are Eli Lehrer and Liv Fidler.
Don't forget to follow, rate, and review History This Week wherever you get your podcasts.
And we'll see you next week.
