Transcript
In The Flesh - Operation Mincemeat Part III
In The Flesh - The Twenty Committee wrote a story that could fool Hitler. Now they just need to make it real. Brian explores the disgusting gulf between the fantasy of a fake solider and the reality of a discarded corpse.
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00:00This is World's Greatest Con. I'm Brian Brushwood. Story is labor.
00:10And telling a good one requires an honest-to-God amount of work that nobody wants to do.
00:17Whether it's setting up craft service at 5am so the Avengers can fight Thanos on a full stomach.
00:24Laying out the mic so Lady Gaga can record her next single.
00:28Securing spotlights to make sure that Jim Gaffigan is perfectly lit when he goes into his Hot Pockets routine.
00:36No good story is told without a bit of labor tied to it.
00:45What's the line on that labor?
00:48What's reasonable for the sake of story? Food, mics, lights.
00:55These seem like fair game.
00:58But what if your story needs more?
01:04What if your story is so important, it needs a lot more? I do magic.
01:17I fell in love with the idea of a routine.
01:20I wanted to shove a skewer through my tongue. Sever my tongue.
01:25Cut it right off on stage.
01:27Hand this gross meat flesh on a stick to an audience member.
01:31And then yes, reveal that I still have a tongue.
01:35But there was a problem.
01:37All of the fake tongues I knew how to get looked cheesy as hell.
01:42It wasn't easy to get high-end prosthetics.
01:44So I did what seemed logical at the time.
01:47Picked up the phone book.
01:49Before you judge, this was the late 90s.
01:52Phone books were still a thing.
01:53Did a bit of searching.
01:55And I found a deer processing plant 90 minutes outside of town. Drove down there. Walked in.
02:02Asked the guys, hey, I need some deer tongues.
02:06But don't worry, it's for a magic trick.
02:09I'm almost certain I did not finish my sentence before they were already severing the tongue out of the mouth of a processed deer.
02:19Turns out people don't ask a lot of questions at a deer processing plant.
02:27Long story short, I went home with seven severed deer tongues. I get home.
02:33I start unbundling things.
02:34I figure out real fast, deer tongues look weird.
02:37They do not look like human tongues.
02:39They're not the right color.
02:40They're not exactly the right shape.
02:42Oh my God, this is real meat that was inside the mouth of a deer just a few minutes ago.
02:48But I have to figure out how to sell them as my tongue, live on stage.
02:52Because this bit lives or dies based on how realistic it looks.
02:56That's why I'm using real deer tongues for it.
03:00It also hits me that nobody is going to swoop in and give me advice here.
03:05I'm going to have to figure this out on my own.
03:08I tried boiling one and it turned white and puffy.
03:13Microwaving was a disaster. Hard pass.
03:15Turns out when you pan fry a deer tongue, it looks like bad steak.
03:22I eventually figured out that if I thawed one of the tongues to raw and added just the right amount of red food coloring, it looked enough like a human tongue that I could pull this off.
03:33I was down to two tongues for two performances.
03:37I took the first one out of the freezer, put it in the fridge, and crossed my fingers that it would be raw by the next day when on stage I could put it in my mouth. Nerve wracking.
03:52Live on stage, I palm it, reach up into my mouth, bite down on one side, pull it out the other, and I get to the part of the routine where the instructions say, now jab the skewer through the tongue.
04:12This is the part I hadn't thought of.
04:16I bit down as hard as I could on one side, and I pushed down with the skewer into the deer meat tongue in my mouth, and it was at that moment, live on stage, in front of my first sold-out magic show that I realized it's going to be a bit harder to punch a skewer through a dead deer's tongue than I thought, like a lot harder.
04:40I'm on stage having a low-grade panic attack, while meanwhile the people in the front row are realizing that's real gristle and fat and muscle he's punching through.
04:51That human being is actually skewering flesh right in front of me.
04:58That moment the skewer punctures through, good God, the real gasps of astonishment rippling through the crowd, and then we get to the part of the routine where I cut the tongue out of my skull with scissors.
05:17And there dangling from a skewer is real flesh. It was beautiful. It was gruesome. It was awful. It was horrifying. It was funny. It was electric.
05:35It was everything I ever hoped this moment could be. Mainly gross.
05:39I don't think I broke any laws with that routine, but I definitely immediately learned how to make high-quality prosthetics.
05:55They traveled better, didn't have to freeze them, best of all, didn't have to shove a dead deer's tongue in my mouth every night.
06:04But what if the stakes were higher than just getting a good return on investment on a four-wall theater for a punk rock magic show, right?
06:15What if the stakes of your story involved the sanctity of the free world?
06:20How far would you go to protect that?
06:23How gross, how dirty would you let your hands get?
06:27Would you, I don't know, handle a fresh, rotting human corpse in order to trick Hitler into moving troops somewhere where he shouldn't?
06:37For two episodes, we've been talking about an almost romantic story about how the good guys beat the bad through nothing but pure chutzpah.
06:46They have to bring their story direct from conception to afterlife.
06:50If this was Hollywood, they'd spare you the nitty-gritty, but we're going to get our hands dirty for a very good story.
07:00Cons don't fool us because we're stupid.
07:03They fool us because we're human.
07:07And this, this may just be the world's greatest con. So picture this.
07:34The British air, thick with sweat, anxious worry.
08:07Because on this night, four bodies are speeding over 400 miles of terrain.
08:14All in an effort to pull one over on the greatest villain humanity has ever faced.
08:21Four bodies, three of which are still breathing.
08:25Ewan Montague and Charles Chumley, they could hear the sloshing of their cargo in the backseat of what could best be described as a morgue on wheels with a race car driver barreling northward in the dead of night.
08:43I don't know if you'd try to get some sleep in the middle of all this.
08:48It's hard to get some Zs in the backseat of a car that's transporting a rotting human corpse in an airtight canister built for the sole purpose of being dumped into the sea.
08:58Yeah, I'm going to bet that nobody can sleep in that situation.
09:04Before a corpse is a corpse, it's a person.
09:12A human being with a name, a birthday, a personality, a soul.
09:17Before it's a thing dropped on a beach for Nazis to find.
09:23Before it's a thing to be transported hundreds of miles through sketchy terrain.
09:27Before it's a thing dressed in somebody else's clothes and packed full of a soap opera in all the pockets.
09:34The thing was a person.
09:35A person with a story of their own.
09:39A birthday of their own.
09:41A name of their own.
09:43A name like Glendower Michael.
09:45Glendower Michael's story is one of tragedy.
09:51Begins in 1909 and ends a short 34 years later.
09:57Not happily, not peacefully, but painfully.
10:00In a way none of us would ever want to live or die.
10:09Part of me wonders if you guys even need to hear this part.
10:13But the bigger part of me realizes that without knowing how hard this man's world was to bear in life, we can't really appreciate how important he got to be in death.
10:25Because that random corpse we keep referring to at one point was a kid who spent his ages from 10 to 15 watching his father slowly deteriorate from the effects of syphilis.
10:41I mean, how hard must it have been to watch those wart-like skin patches form on his father's body over the course of five years.
10:52What we do know is that the right side of his father's face sank inward leading to the kind of trauma that caused him to stab himself in the neck while Glendower was still a boy.
11:05It's amazing that what ultimately took the man out wasn't even the syphilis but rather a case of the flu that turned into pneumonia.
11:14That was the last straw.
11:16His mother passed in a far less tragic way laying in bed without warning from a heart attack and an aortic aneurysm. Glendower was 31.
11:26Watching one parent pass so painfully is hard enough.
11:31I can't imagine what it's like to lose two.
11:35We know for sure that the dad had syphilis.
11:38We know that Glendower had it.
11:40And it is the kind of disease you could be born with.
11:43Untreated syphilis is awful.
11:45If so, then that's the best explanation for why from the winter of 1942 to the end of his life Glendower lived in depressing solitude floating between treatments at a lunatic asylum sleeping in abandoned buildings.
11:59I wonder what would have happened if everything had gone differently for Glendower.
12:07Maybe his dad didn't happen to have the disease.
12:10Didn't pass it on to the mother.
12:13Or if he never got it.
12:14Or if the treatments at the asylum had worked.
12:16If any of those things were different would he join that collective idea we have of Britain during World War II?
12:23Would he do the stiff upper lip thing?
12:26Would he join the military?
12:27Would he charge hills? We don't know.
12:29Because in our reality he died alone from eating rat poison.
12:35It's unclear to this day if Glendower intentionally ate rat poison or just accidentally swallowed it because it was often spread on stale bread to attract rats to their doom.
12:48God, what an awful thought.
12:50Being so hungry that you're eating dirt bread. Poisoned dirt bread.
12:55No one deserves to go out like that.
13:01Because Glendower Michael wasn't a rat.
13:04He was a person.
13:06A person that got dealt one of the worst hands in the history of life. A tragic hand.
13:11As unlucky as his entire life was his death would be at just the right place at just the right time and give him a chance to have in death to have the one thing he never got in life.
13:25An opportunity to be somebody.
13:26So if Glenn's coming back from the dead to enlist in the military I suppose his recruiter is Bentley Purchase a mortuary operator who is one of Ewan's sources on the street.
13:39He informed the 20 committee when quote-unquote a candidate was identified for the secret mission.
13:44In fact, it's thanks to Bentley that Glendower's body was saved from an autopsy that would have made his corpse totally useless.
13:52In life, Glendower Michael had no one that saw potential in him.
13:56In death, he had plenty.
13:58And now, it was time for his real work to begin.
14:03Right, so the thing about a corpse is that it's not like a piece of chuck roast that you got at Costco because it was on sale you just throw it in the freezer and forget about it.
14:35If you do that, all of the liquids crystallize. They freeze.
14:38And when they freeze, these little jagged edges slice and dice all of the organs and damage them.
14:45And none of that is going to fool anybody even at a casual glance into believing this is a real body that fell out of the sky.
14:52When Charles Cholmondeley and Ewan Montague get a hold of the body of a corpse Glendower Michael.
14:58They find out real fast that there is a ticking clock on this operation. Three months.
15:02If the body of Glendower Michael wasn't dressed, packaged, approved for shipment and disposal within three months of January 28th, 1943, he won't get an opportunity to be anything more than just another lost soul found on the streets of London in wartime.
15:17In other words, once mincemeat got going, there was no turning back.
15:21The bell could not be unwrung.
15:23This all becomes super clear when Chumley and Montague show up to St. Pancras Mortuary to grab a photo for the ever-evolving fake personality of Bill Martin.
15:32I mean, the plan was simple, right?
15:35You prop up Glendower's corpse, snap a quick picture for the ID card, but they got a problem.
15:41They quickly learned that flesh rots fast, and even after only a few days at near freezing temperatures, Glendower's face had already started to look like the full day of the dead, sunken eyes.
15:54The boys, they go out and they find a lookalike, hoping that'll be close enough.
15:58I mean, it's got to feel like they took an L on this one, right?
16:02This has to be perfect.
16:03As big as this story is, we went all over it last episode.
16:07There's no room for error on this one.
16:10The corpse has to be perfect.
16:12The ID, the briefcase, the uniform. Oh, yeah.
16:15How do you give a dead man a uniform that doesn't look like it's fresh out of the bag?
16:22You don't want to do all this work, dump Bill Martin in Hitler's lap just to have the whole thing ruined because somebody sees a tag still attached.
16:30Somebody's going to have to wear Bill Martin's clothes, wear him in every single day leading up to the launch, right down to the underwear.
16:40That responsibility falls to Charles Chumley, the 25-year-old intelligence phenomenon.
16:4625 is a weird age.
16:48It's like you're old enough to have great ideas, but too young for anybody to seem to listen.
16:56We all know a guy like Chumley.
16:58Hell, some of us are a guy like Chumley, somebody who desperately wants to achieve greatness.
17:03In some cases, they can even see how to get there.
17:06If somebody would just take them seriously, just take the time to listen.
17:10You ever have that killer thought that just opens up your entire worldview and makes you realize there's a whole better way to go about living? That's perpetually Chumley.
17:20It was all about the idea, which explains why he was eventually hired as an ideas man for the B1A, the division of British intelligence, the one that ran double agents during the war.
17:33So it's not at all shocking that a guy like that is all in on the insane story of dropping a corpse on the beach to trick the Nazis.
17:41But for Chumley, this moment has even more significance.
17:43He's truly gifted in the spy world, but it's not where he wanted to be.
17:50He wanted to be on the front line.
17:52Both of his brothers served in active combat.
17:54One of them died at Dunkirk.
17:56You've seen the movie.
17:57Chumley, though, he washed out of the Royal Air Force multiple times.
18:03Too tall for the cockpit.
18:05His eyes were bad.
18:07It's got to be moments like these when he's looking at himself wearing a fake dead man's clothes.
18:13Ask yourself, is all this worth it?
18:15Is this what a hero looks like?
18:17I mean, I'm sure he's proud of his plan, but this ain't active combat.
18:24He's not dying for the cause. He's wearing underwear.
18:27And if you are going to have that thought, it's never going to be more clear than when you have a shocking realization in a morgue freezer on transport night.
19:28They were going to be dressing the corpse of Glendower Michael.
19:36And as they're getting him ready for his transformation into Bill Martin, they dress the corpse in the uniform that Chumlee had been wearing in over the last few months.
19:51And before you ask, yes, somebody had to draw straws to do the whole underwear part.
19:55You'd imagine that would be the worst part of it.
19:58Until you decided to do it.
20:00You discover there's a problem with boots.
20:02See, spending months in near freezing temperatures doesn't totally stop a body from freezing solid on at least a few parts.
20:11I don't know if you've given this much thought, but putting on a pair of boots without bending your ankle is just not possible.
20:19And you can't do something clever like sew on the boots around the feet because that'll be obvious, right?
20:26So the question is, how do you bend the ankle of a frozen corpse without breaking that already fragile foot off of the leg? That'd be disastrous.
20:36That'd be the end of the whole operation.
20:41And keep in mind, you don't have time for any clever shenanigans.
20:45You don't have resources.
20:46It's just Montague and Chumlee.
20:48They're alone in that room with the corpse.
20:51They got to get that foot inside a boot.
20:54And that ankle is not bending.
20:56The fate of the whole operation is getting hung up right at this moment.
21:00And they need a simple solution that they could do right now.
21:03That solution, you grab a space heater, and you eyeball it.
21:07Get it close, but not too close. Ignore the smell.
21:12You've got to defrost the frozen foot of this corpse just enough so it can bend and slide into this military issue boot.
21:24Can you imagine the tension in the air in that moment?
21:30Wiggling back and forth.
21:32How are we doing?
21:34Oh, it's getting softer.
21:36Okay, I think I can move it.
21:38Bend it forward just enough.
21:39What do you think was going on through their head during this?
21:42I'll tell you this much.
21:44I'll bet he never even thought about frozen feet when you're writing your initial clever Trojan horse pitch to the 20 committee.
21:50Oh yeah, tricking the enemy with a corpse.
21:53It twisting it to get it into a frickin boot. Ah, test. Twist. Push. Flex. Try again. Gentle.
22:03One bit at a time.
22:06Oh, yeah, obviously they got the foot in there. That was Chumlee.
22:19He had a dream.
22:23He stuck to his guns to achieve it, even if it meant getting his hands dirty.
22:31And as they finally get the foot all the way in, lace up the boot.
22:36Bill Martin is finally ready to go to war.
22:40At this point, I feel gross.
22:45And I bet you do too.
22:53I mean, how can you not right?
22:58How on earth is everybody supposed to feel okay about the things that these guys did to this poor body?
23:05This once living soul, the devaluing of his existence, the willingness to make it a prop for the service of the greater good? I don't know.
23:16And then I remember.
23:17The only reason anything we're doing right now is possible is because it's all happened before.
23:26Like it or not, the dead have stood in service of the living for as long as there have been dead people.
23:34Now I'm not just talking about using animals for meat or clothing, or even a magic show.
23:39Not just talking about heads on pikes to scare away would be enemies.
23:44Do you like the fact that your lifespan doesn't average out to about 35 years?
23:53Well, the only reason we have the lives that we do, and that we live as long as we do, and that we have the comforts that we have, is because of the things that people before us have done to the dead to benefit the living.
24:09There's a grade school myth we've all heard.
24:12Leonardo da Vinci, the old scamp.
24:14He had to do all of his dissections in secret so as to avoid tipping off the Catholic Church.
24:20But truth is stranger than fiction here, because it turns out it was the Catholic Church that sanctioned human dissection on the regular back in those days. Mostly women.
24:29They had the goal of wanting to understand the genesis of life.
24:33And it's those practices of dissection that led to the modern concept of the autopsy.
24:40By understanding all the ways in which we die, it gives us the gift, those of us who are still breathing, to do so far longer than our ancestors would ever have dreamt of.
24:52If we understand how we die, we learn how to better live.
24:57We've got it pretty good these days.
25:02And I think it's worthy to take a moment to consider just how much of what we understand about our hearts, our minds, our bones, ourselves, was accomplished by doing unthinkable things to the dead in order to unlock the secrets hidden within us.
25:21As gross as it sounds, an autopsy, the cutting apart of corpses, is the final gift of all the generations that came before us.
25:36I understand the sentiment that some of you out there might have, that you and Chumlee and the entire 20 Committee were being gross monsters for doing what they're doing to poor Glendower Michael.
25:50But man, the more I think about it, the more I come to understand that they're just another link in a long chain.
25:58They've joined an elite line of humans that are doing what needs to be done to the dead in order to protect the living.
26:06As horrifying as everything about the Third Reich and the Holocaust is, we know it ends.
26:12Chumlee and Montague, they don't.
26:15And that's why they're getting their hands dirty.
26:19We've all had those moments during a long road trip, where the chatter stops, everyone just starts looking out the window, a little bit of personal time, some self reflection.
26:44There's that moment when you bear witness to the whizzing trees and the streetlights and the distance, contemplating every moment of your life that brought you to this one moment and asking yourself, was it worth it?
27:00I wonder if that was the case for Ewan and Chumlee.
27:06As they took the scenic route, the back roads, to their final destination, to drop off the body of the newly minted Bill Martin.
27:16Personally, I would have the urge to constantly check the cargo, make sure everything is good to go.
27:24I want to double check every suitcase to make sure it was packed with everything I needed.
27:28But for them, that option wasn't on the table.
27:31Transporting a body from London to Spain sounds so easy, you might underwrite that part of your story.
27:38I mean, how many problems could there be, right?
27:41Let's go through our options.
27:43Let's run down the list.
27:44Take the body, just dunk it in the water, right? No, too risky.
27:50The ship could be spotted, your whole cover blown, that would ruin everything.
27:55Ah, we drop it from an airplane.
27:58It's supposed to have surfaced from a plane crash, right?
28:02Unfortunately, physics is pretty clear on that one.
28:06It's not the fall that kills you, it's the stopping.
28:10I mean, you drop something from high enough, even into water, it's just going to shatter into a million pieces, especially if it's an already decaying, half frozen corpse.
28:18No, it's got to be something covert and deadly that can deliver the body precisely where you need it, when you need it, without ever being detected.
28:30You need something extra, something secret.
28:35How are you going to get a rotting corpse on board without arousing suspicion?
29:12Our idea guy, Chumley, he didn't exactly have an answer to that one.
29:19But someone else did.
29:22No, not James Bond again.
29:25Number one, he's not real.
29:29Number two, Ian Fleming has already left this story.
29:33But remember Q, the guy that gives James Bond all of his real life super sneaky spy supplies in the movies?
29:40That department, the Q branch is real.
29:43And during World War Two, one of its key players is a guy named Charles Frazier Smith.
29:53And it was Mr. Frazier Smith.
29:55who had the brilliant idea for our friend Chumlee.
29:58Why not build a custom box for the corpse that would conceal it from everybody not in the know, but also make it precious cargo?
30:07Now that's an idea.
30:09And just like that, he got underway on a six-foot canister that body included will weigh about 400 pounds with an airtight seal to prevent the body from, you know, further decay while being lined with 22-gauge steel on the outside as the interior was stuffed with a layer of wool and a skin the actual body would be set on top of.
30:33After that, the whole thing would be sealed shut with welding on one end, rubber gasket on the other, 16 bolts and a big old fat label that said, Handle with care, optical instruments for special FOS shipment.
30:45The case, the design, even the genius lie on the label.
30:51All of that gets us from the UK to Spain.
30:56How the hell do you get that corpse from its freezer to the freaking submarine?
31:01I mean, I was going to make up a Hollywood script.
31:06I'd say hire a race car driver.
31:11St. John Ratcliffe Stewart Horsfall, or Jock, as he was known.
31:22He was a racing legend in Europe.
31:27He won multiple trophies on the circuit, found notoriety for his unique racing attire.
31:33He'd wear a shirt and a tie or a bomber jacket and sleeveless sweaters, depending on his mood.
31:40He was a dude that lived for the racing thrill.
31:44Somebody who got the attention of MI5, who recruited him at the start of World War Two.
31:50They asked him to shepherd agents and enemies from one place to another faster than you could say Operation Mincemeat.
31:57He was a man that did his part to serve his country the only way he knew how.
32:02Which, of course, was by racing like a badass and looking awesome doing it.
32:07He was the one that Montague and Chumlee turned to for the night of the transport.
32:14In a customized Fordson van with a V8 engine.
32:17It's a weird looking car that seems oddly fitting for body transportation. Google it. Worth the trip.
32:23Imagine you're one of the country's most popular race car drivers.
32:27You are at the top of your game.
32:30You do nothing but move high performance automobiles at a speed that other people can't even conceive of.
32:36You're told that you have a chance to help save the world by moving precious cargo from London to the coast of Scotland.
32:43You show up and what's your sweet ride?
32:46Looks an awful lot like a U-Haul.
32:49As you might imagine, carrying out a covert mission with a race car driver as your chauffeur is exactly as insane as it sounds.
32:59One of the craziest moments came when Jock missed the turn for a roundabout, ended up driving over the freaking grass center like he was in a Michael Bay movie.
33:10Oh, also, did I mention that all of this was happening without headlights?
33:15Because it was happening without headlights.
33:17When we say covert, we mean covert.
33:19And think about this.
33:20Montague and Chumlee have been living with this idea who they made into a real person.
33:28And this is the only road trip they'll ever take with him.
33:34This is the end of their tale.
33:38How do you let go of this moment?
33:42Why would you not stay awake?
33:46Once they get to that submarine, their part of this story is over.
33:50And like in all good Hollywood adventures, the good guys did eventually make it to Greenock Dock just in time to meet up with Lieutenant Bill Jewell of the HMS Serif.
34:06It's an S-class submarine operated by the Royal Navy.
34:10And for the first time in three months, the body of Glendower Michael, who we now know as Major Bill Martin, would be left in the hands of someone who wasn't Ewan Montague and or Charles Chumlee.
34:24What do you do?
34:25You tip your hat, give a little half salute, put your hand over your heart, you whisper a prayer.
34:36They created this guy.
34:37And now they're saying goodbye as he performs the most important mission of his afterlife.
34:44You think they lit up on the dock that night?
34:49I mean, it was the 40s.
34:51They had to have, right?
34:58Either in glorious victory of making it to the end of their leg of the journey or out of anxious worry that all of this hard work had been for nothing.
35:06Do you think they talked about the failed photo attempt?
35:09The weird sunken face?
35:11How close things got with the boot?
35:13Or maybe in the moment, everything's just too traumatic to think about.
35:17Having done everything they could to get their creation ready for the big bad world, knowing that from this point forward, it was out of their hands.
35:30Just hoping it could survive on its own.
35:33Because really, that's all the two could hope for.
35:36That the operation would go off without a hitch.
35:42Three days have passed.
35:49The Seraph is now off the Spanish coast.
36:02The trip went about as well as a clandestine mission can go, although some of the crew might have been getting a little bit suspicious about the thing sloshing around the 400 pound container that was most definitely not, quote, optical equipment.
36:23Lieutenant Bill Jewell and a few of his closest crew take the container out to the ocean. They open it.
36:34First thing they see is a corpse way more decomposed than it should be.
36:38Whatever, who's going to be an expert on corpse decomposition after you grab it out of the water?
36:44Who knows how long it's been there? This is it. No more hesitation.
36:47From Ian Fleming's first note to Chumley's pitch, Montague's story work, the personal approval of Winston Churchill himself.
36:54It is now time for Bill Martin to go to war.
36:59His fight is in the minds of his enemies on the shore.
37:04His march will be slow, but his impact could save thousands of lives and possibly win the war.
37:11Martin is removed from the container.
37:13He's dropped into a current to make sure that it floats all the way to the coast. Good luck, soldier.
37:23Just one last thing to do.
37:24Orders say we got to sink this box he came in.
37:33Can't have no evidence floating around, right?
37:36I mean, this is going to be the fun part.
37:39Your job is to fire 200 plus rounds of ammunition in a box with the purpose of getting it to sink.
37:44That's got to be the highlight of your week, right?
37:47So they go for it. They rain hellfire.
37:50A hailstorm of bullets starts piercing.
37:52It turns the whole thing into Swiss cheese.
37:54It's a bit weird it's not sinking, though.
37:59That's that's a lot of holes.
38:04I mean, how many?
38:06Maybe a few more. Huh.
38:08Those nerds over at Cube Branch. Look at that.
38:11They did too good of a job. Didn't even sink. Eh, no worries. I mean, whatever.
38:19We were just blowing off steam anyway.
38:21Hey, let's let's take this one, you know, up the chain. Excuse me, officers.
38:26Would you like to use your service revolvers for the job?
38:31Uh, why, yes, of course I would.
38:33That seems like the responsible thing to do as we play shooty guns before sunrise.
38:38So at this point, the officers are taking terms with their service revolvers, and they're assuming every one shot will be the one that finally take this thing down.
38:48How many holes can this thing?
38:50Wow, that's a lot of holes.
38:52Yeah, that's a lot of holes and it still hasn't sunk. OK. All right.
38:59Now we have a problem.
39:02Because remember, our plan leads the Nazis to believe that Bill Martin went down in a plane crash, right?
39:11That's not the end of the world because planes are heavy and they sink, right?
39:15A little bit weird that there is no plane parts that wash ashore. But that's forgivable.
39:19What isn't forgivable is a floating corpse box with English on the side, shot up like Swiss cheese, bopping up to the shore.
39:27Guys, this would be a disaster.
39:30And they can't just bring it back into the boat.
39:35This is top secret.
39:36Sun is about to peak over the horizon.
39:40They need to plan right this minute.
39:43Otherwise, Lieutenant Bill Jewell's lack of basic physics understanding is going to take this intricate months long plan and blow it to smithereens. Wait a minute.
39:52Wait, did I just do the thing?
39:55Yes, of course I did.
39:57I just said the exact solution.
40:02That's what we do.
40:05We blow it to smithereens.
40:07Let's just tow the case farther out to sea.
40:09We're going to pack it full of plastic explosives.
40:12We're going to push it out.
40:14And then one final exclamation mark on this whole adventure. Detonate it.
40:17And that's exactly what they do.
40:20Just like that, the last bit of evidence that Operation Mincemeat ever happened is no more.
40:32Oh, and by the way, Bill Jewell never really got around to putting a note about the plastic explosives in his final report.
40:44Can't say I blame him. We're all storytellers.
40:47But not all storytellers are created equal.
40:50Most are happy to just sit around the campfire with a couple of brewskis, spinning tales out of true life experiences, maybe jazzed up to get a laugh or a gasp.
41:07Tell a joke you heard the other day.
41:11Share a tale that maybe didn't technically happen to you.
41:14Others take it a step further and they spin story from nothing to get a shock or a scare.
41:22A few, a very special few, know the true depth of labor that is crafting a story that will be remembered long after the fire goes out.
41:36These special few, they understand the term blood, sweat, and tears isn't just a metaphor.
41:44Sometimes, for a really good story, it's real blood, real sweat, and real tears.
41:51It's race car drivers.
41:53It's slow, careful, plotting effort to get a dead foot into a boot.
42:03It's plastic explosives to explode the evidence.
42:08That's what goes into a story so good that there's no choice but to believe it.
42:20I want to believe that I can live in their shadows.
42:25That I can be a pale echo of what these master storytellers can do.
42:31But I don't know that I could have gotten that foot into that boot that night.
42:38And of course, just because you do your job right doesn't mean that it's going to work.
42:46Sure, you can find the body, build the identity, dress it up, drop it off where it's supposed to go.
42:51Now you're relying on human beings, the marks, people who are not you, people out of your control.
42:55The ones who have to do their part to see this thing through.
43:01At this point, the story no longer belongs to us.
43:07Doesn't belong to the 20 committee.
43:09Doesn't belong to Ian Fleming.
43:11Doesn't even belong to the Allies.
43:13At this point, the story belongs to the Nazis.
43:17And only the Nazis can convince the Nazis.
43:20Every step of this journey so far has been built on a foundation of guesses.
43:32As to what the Nazis want to hear and what they will believe. And guess what?
43:42It's in their hands now.
43:44And there's nothing the Allies can do.
43:47The marks are in charge.
43:48And we'll find out whether or not they take the bait.
43:54In our season finale of World's Greatest Con.
44:01This episode of World's Greatest Con was written by Meryl Barr and me, Brian Brushwood, your humble host.
44:20Produced by Dog & Pony Show Audio.
44:22Special credit goes to Operation Mincemeat by Ben McIntyre, the source of most of the material we have.
44:27By the way, of course, you've got questions.
44:30We want to give you answers.
44:32So send them in right now to worldsgreatestcon at gmail. com.
44:34We are now one week into releasing this show.
44:37And I've never experienced anything like this.
44:40If you know our story, you know that there have been a few times that we've kissed the top of various charts.
44:51But there's always a very quick regression to the.
44:54And this time it's not happening.
44:56As I record this, it's been nearly a week and we are still the number one trending podcast on Pocket Casts.
45:05And it leads me to the uncomfortable possibility that maybe we're doing a pretty good show.
45:12And if that's the case, I have one humble request of every single one of you.
45:21Pick up the phone and call somebody who you think would like the show.
45:26Don't forward a link.
45:28Don't post it to your Insta, Facebook, whatever's.
45:31Actually speak to another human being and explain what it is you're digging about the show so far.
45:40Because I don't know about you guys, but this feels pretty special to me.
45:47And speaking on behalf of Justin and Meryl, we'd really like to keep this momentum going.
45:54In the next episode of World's Greatest Con, this is it.
45:59The moment of surrender.
46:01When you've done all the work and you have none of the power.
46:06And it's entirely up to the mark to fool themselves.
46:09Does their plan work?
46:10Where does the information go? Who believes it? Who doesn't?
46:14All of that in the next episode of World's Greatest Con.
46:19Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this broker.
46:21Dog and Pony Show Audio.