In its 4 June 1943 roll of wartime casualties, The Times of London dutifully reported that Major W. Martin, Royal Marines, had died. In itself, the report was rather innocuous, probably eliciting only passing interest from the average reader, whose eye gravitated toward another report that actor Leslie Howard had been killed when the plane he was aboard had been shot down by Luftwaffe fighters over the Bay of Biscay. Martin, however, had supposedly died in similar fashion, and the larger account gave subtle plausibility to the story of the dead major, which was – from start to finish – a work of pure fiction.
Martin’s death notice was, in fact, a coda to the elaborate ruse that fooled the Abwehr (German Intelligence) and convinced Hitler that the expected Allied…
