The House Article | “The perfect short novel”: Lord Black reviews ‘Operation Heartbreak’

9 July 1943: American 82nd Airborne Division paratroopers en route for the invasion of Sicily | Image by: Pictorial Press / Alamy

4 min read20 May

I might not have been here to write about Operation Heartbreak – Duff Cooper’s only novel – if it hadn’t been for the events which are central to it: the meticulous planning for Operation Mincemeat.

Mincemeat – the subject of Ben Macintyre’s exceptional book, and of a film in 2021, and even a musical (currently showing at the Fortune Theatre in London’s West End) – was the most successful covert operation ever undertaken in the history of warfare. It deceived the Germans into believing the allies would launch the invasion of Europe through Greece. As a result, when the allies landed instead in Sicily in July 1943 – in a turning point in the war allowing the Mediterranean to be opened up – they met significantly less resistance than they might have done. Mincemeat saved thousands of lives. And my father’s may well have been among them as he was one of the first troops ashore.

The story of Mincemeat is well known. British intelligence dressed up the body of a tramp (Glyndwr Michael), placed personal items on him identifying him as Captain William Martin and ensured the body – carrying secret documents about allied plans for invasion in Greece – was washed up on the Spanish coast, where the authorities in Franco’s Spain predictably placed them in German hands. It worked like a dream.

It has been republished as a Penguin Classic, and rightly so. For classic it indeed is

What is less well known is that the first time this operation was actually written about was in an exquisite short novel by Duff Cooper – first lord of the Admiralty under Neville Chamberlain (a post from which he resigned over Munich), later becoming the first Viscount Norwich – after he heard a version of Mincemeat from Winston Churchill “in one of his expansive after-dinner moods” when Duff was ambassador to France in Paris in 1944.

Published in 1950 – despite Cabinet Office efforts to stop its publication (not for intelligence reasons but in case it offended the Spanish) – it has been republished as a Penguin Classic, and rightly so. For classic it indeed is.

The hero of Operation Heartbreak is Captain Willie Maryngton, the tragedy of whose life was that he was desperate to fight for his country but was too young to take part in the Great War, and too old to fight in the rematch. An endearing character – “not too clever”, but with “good manners… and a happy smile which made him welcome wherever he went” – Willie was unlucky in love. After his first love, Daisy Summers, runs off with a married man, he turns his attention to Felicity Osborne who refuses to marry him “for reasons that are too difficult to explain” (though we eventually discover why).

What happens to Maryngton – an army major by the end of the book – to make him so important to British intelligence? That would ruin the delicious denouement for you, dear reader, contained in perhaps one of the most exquisite surprise endings I have ever encountered.

This is a perfect novel – short, focused, gorgeously written and deeply moving – that you could get through in an evening, waiting for the Division Bell. I just wish my dad was around to read it, and raise a glass to Willie.

Lord Black of Brentwood is a Conservative peer

Operation Heartbreak

By: Duff Cooper

Publisher: Penguin Classics