A closer look
British intelligence agencies successfully executed Operation Mincemeat in 1943 by taking the corpse of a homeless Welsh man who died from ingesting rat poison, dressing him up in a fancy Royal Marines uniform, and outfitting him with a briefcase full of fake classified documents. They dumped the body off the coast of Spain, perfectly orchestrating it so that fascist sympathizers would find the corpse and immediately hand the forged papers over to Nazi high command. Adolf Hitler personally read the fabricated documents, fully believed the Allies were planning to invade Greece instead of Sicily, and completely reorganized his defensive strategies based entirely on the posthumous travels of a dead vagrant. It was a spectacular act of strategic deception that saved thousands of Allied lives and proved that sometimes the most effective weapon against a terrifying fascist regime is an overly elaborate, morbid theatrical prank
