Roamer: Plot for smash-hit West End musical hoodwinked Hitler

The body and dud plans were floated off the Spanish coast and handed to the Germans by a sardine fisherman.

Hoodwinked by the plans, the Nazis shrank Sicily’s defences, leaving the island susceptible to Allied attacks.

Code-named Operation Mincemeat, it was so top-secret that 21-year-old RAF Radio Operator Ted Ross didn’t know he’d participated until he saw the 1956 movie about the hoax in Belfast called ‘The Man Who Never Was’.

Even Winston Churchill wasn’t informed till several weeks beforehand.

When he was told Spain might return the corpse to Britian with the documents unread by the Nazis, Churchill apparently replied, “in that case we shall have to give it another swim.”

Early morning on 24 April 1943, in his Gibraltar Radio HQ, Ted sent and received the key radio signals vital to the hoax.

He remembered it “as clearly as if it was yesterday”, he told Roamer in 2013.

Sadly, 98-year-old Ted died in March 2020 but was mentioned here again several months ago when the smash-hit musical about Operation Mincemeat in London’s Fortune Theatre was given an extended run.

An important part of the plot - in 1943 and on the West End stage - is the bogus pilot’s girlfriend, Pam.

Her fake photo and love-letters to ‘Dear Bill’ were deposited in the corpse’s pockets, along with hoax ID for Captain (Acting Major) William Martin.

One of the musical’s showstopper songs - ‘Dear Bill’ - is inspired by the heartrending poignancy of Pam’s love-letters - “Darling, why did we go and meet in the middle of a war, such a silly thing for anybody to do.”

The actual letter writer was MI5 secretary Hester Leggatt, who became the focus of much research by the musical’s fans.

They discovered that Hester was a lonely, so-called ‘spinster’.

Born in India, they sourced her baptism, school and piano exams, which she passed. And there’s also much more to know about Operation Mincemeat’s young radio operator.

“I knew Ted Ross very well,” Aidan Campbell emailed Roamer, adding: “I visited him regularly where he lived in Gilnahirk and we often talked about his wartime experiences behind enemy lines.”

Author and historian Aidan Campbell has penned numerous books about Belfast, including ‘Gilnahirk Updated’ which is dedicated to Ted.

Aside from his central role in Operation Mincemeat, Aidan has compiled a number of Ted’s wartime tales of courage, heroism and intrigue, including his work in Yugoslavia with Tito’s partisans. As WWII ended the partisans were “chasing the Germans out and settling scores on the way”, Ted told Aidan, describing “heaps and piles of dead German soldiers stacked around a farmyard.”

Extremely shocked, Ted “went closer to the bodies and on examination he saw that each one had a bullet hole in the back of the neck - in other words, executed at close range, and their boots had been taken too.”

Ted asked a partisan about it and the partisan replied: “Well the Germans came into our country uninvited and did terrible things to our people - but they will never leave!”

Along with his GCHQ work in the Far East and signalling the news of General Sikorski’s death, Ted shared his numerous wartime experiences with Aidan who reckons there’s “a wealth of stories that he never told or wrote down, and will now be lost.”

Some won’t, like Ted’s “story about the silk parachute” in Aidan’s book. He’d just parachuted into a Yugoslavian village where a local woman begged to buy his parachute “to make a wedding dress for her daughter.” Ted handed it to her, and though she insisted, he refused her money. “That would have been Ted,” writes Aidan, “generous to a fault.”

He was ordered to fly behind enemy lines with an RAF Air Commodore and just before take-off Ted was sent on another mission.

His replacement Radio Operator and the Air Commodore both died when their plane slammed into a mountain.

“A close call,” writes Aidan in a book full of Ted’s narrow escapes and other hair-raising wartime experiences. It’s available at good bookshops and at EastBelfastHistory.com