Captain Bill Jewell (1913-2004)

• New House 1926-31

 

Captain Bill Jewell 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 in to the sea a dead body, which was dressed as a Royal Marines Officer and handcuffed to a briefcase 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 briefcase 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. Jewell also wrote his own book about the operation, Secret Mission (1944).

Norman Limbury Auchinleck Jewell was born on October 24 1913 in the Seychelles where his father 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. In the years that followed 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.

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. 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.

Bill Jewell, who died on August 18th, 2004, married Rosemary Patricia Galloway in 1944: she died in 1996, and he is survived by two sons and a daughter.