by Andy H on 01 Sep 2004 19:13 Captain Bill Jewell
(Filed: 24/08/2004)
Captain Bill Jewell, who has died aged 90, planted a corpse off the Spanish coast in 1943 as part of the deception plan which was later filmed as The Man Who Never Was.
As captain of the submarine Seraph, Jewell had the grim task of launching into the sea a dead body, which was dressed as a Royal Marines officer and handcuffed to a brief-case containing fake plans and letters. The ruse was part of Operation Mincemeat, an attempt to deceive the Germans about preparations for the Allied landings in southern Europe.
Jewell had brought the body from the Clyde in a sealed canister packed with dry ice; as he ordered his crew to leave him alone on the casing of Seraph, he told them that it contained a secret weather-device.
Then, once he was on his own, he read the 39th Psalm - "I said, I will take heed to my ways, that I sin not with my tongue" - as he pushed the body into the deep.
It was duly washed up at Huevla, on the Spanish coast. The fictitiously named "Major Martin" was buried in the town a few days later with full military honours and a wreath from his supposedly heartbroken girlfriend in London. The brief-case was then returned to the British authorities, apparently unopened; however, the Spanish had copied the papers for the Germans.
Hitler swallowed the bait whole, ordering the strengthening of fortifications in Corsica, and sending a Waffen SS brigade to Sardinia. He dispatched Rommel to Athens to inspect plans for the defence of Greece, and - perhaps most damaging of all to the Germans - he ordered two Panzer divisions to prepare to move from Russia to Greece just as the great tank battle at Kursk was reaching its climax.
Operation Mincemeat was a closely guarded secret even after the Second World War, though eventually Seraph was the subject of several books and of the film The Man Who Never Was (1955), in which Jewell was played by William Squire.
In Jewell's own book, Secret Mission (1944), he never mentioned this particular operation. However, the politician and diplomat Duff Cooper's novel, Operation Heartbreak (1950), dealt loosely with the affair; and Ian Colvin, later a distinguished Daily Telegraph journalist, linked it to a footnote in a memoir by General Westphal, formerly Kesselring's Chief of Staff.
Colvin proceeded to locate the dead man's grave, and wrote The Unknown Courier (1953), which was so close to the truth that the authorities had little choice but to allow Ewen Montagu, who had organised the deception, to publish his own version of what was the most important strategic deception of the war. Nevertheless, Montagu's book, The Man Who Never Was (1954), failed to reveal the true identity of the body, which was probably that of either a down-and-out in London or a sailor lost from the carrier Dasher.
Norman Limbury Auchinleck Jewell was born on October 24 1913 in the Seychelles, where his father, a doctor of Ulster stock, was serving as a colonial officer. Young Jewell was educated at Oundle before joining the Navy. He became a submariner in 1936 and passed his "perisher" course in 1941.
On taking command of Seraph, Jewell made his first patrol in July 1942 off Norway, where his baptism of fire came courtesy of the RAF, which opened fire on the submarine but failed to score a hit. The boat was then sent to Gibraltar to join the 8th Submarine Squadron during the build-up to Operation Torch, the Allied landings in North Africa.
Seraph was chosen to take the American General Mark Clark and his staff to talks with French officers in Algeria. On October 19 Jewell landed Clark's party in small collapsible boats about 50 miles west of Algiers, with a close protection squad of three British marines.
Seraph spent a day lying submerged in deep water but, after dark, Jewell took her in until there was less than 10 ft of water under the keel; but the sea was too rough to recover the boats from the beach. Meanwhile, Clark had been betrayed, and Jewell took Seraph in until she was almost aground. Clark and his party then dashed for the boats, paddled hard through the surf, and were hauled on board; Seraph reached Gibraltar on October 25.
Clark had been told that the only man who could unite the French forces in North Africa was General Henri Honoré Giraud, who had escaped from German internment and was hiding in Vichy France. Jewell and Seraph were sent to pick him up, but Giraud refused to be rescued by the British - so an American, Captain Jerauld Wright, was placed nominally in command of Seraph; Jewell commissioned Wright as a Royal Navy officer using a rolled-up picture of a voluptuous nude torn from a magazine.
For five nights the boat patrolled the southern coast of France until Seraph drifted slowly shoreward to rendezvous with Giraud, who was waiting in a small dinghy. Seraph flew the stars and stripes and, for several days, its ship's company practised their best movie American, with cockney accents. Giraud was too proud to notice the ruse de guerre, though he thanked them all politely in English as he and his staff were transferred to a Catalina flying boat.
During this period Jewell rammed and badly damaged a U-boat; and, in more conventional patrols, sank 7,000 tons of enemy shipping and damaged a further 10,000 tons. He was appointed MBE; later he was awarded the US Legion of Merit for his part in Operation Husky, when Seraph acted as a beacon for Allied landings on Sicily. Jewell also received the DSC for his successful patrols and, after the war, the Croix de Guerre with palm.
Although Seraph was scrapped in 1963, her periscope and other items were presented by the British government to the Military College of South Carolina, where General Clark was the president for some years and where the Seraph Monument commemorates Anglo-American co-operation during the Second World War; it is the only place in the United States permitted to fly the White Ensign.
Jewell commanded several submarines and, in 1948, became Captain 3rd Submarine Flotilla. He was a director of the RN Staff College at Greenwich and also worked on Mountbatten's staff, where he took pride in having predicted Iraqi threats to Kuwait in the early 1960s, persuading the Navy to send ships to the Gulf to forestall an invasion. Mountbatten told him that he had been too precocious, and should have waited until he was an admiral before proving himself so right.
Jewell retired in 1963, and worked for the Mitchell and Butler brewery in Birmingham, where he was also life president of the Submarine Old Comrades' Association.
In 1945 a doctor found that Jewell had broken two vertebrae when he had fallen down a hatch four years earlier, which meant that he had fought the rest of the war with a broken neck. In 1998 Jewell fell again, but this time he was not so lucky: he was paralysed from the neck down, and was confined to a wheelchair at the Royal Star and Garter Home, Richmond.
Bill Jewell, who died on August 18, married Rosemary Patricia Galloway in 1944: she died in 1996, and he is survived by two sons and a daughter.
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