Operation Mincemeat
A dead 'Major Martin' with fake letters fools the Germans
In 1943 the British dressed a dead vagrant as a fictitious Royal Marines officer, 'Major William Martin', and floated him ashore in Spain carrying 'secret' letters about landings in Greece. The Germans bought it and were caught off guard in Sicily. The idea traced back to a memo shaped by Ian Fleming, Bond's future creator.
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Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1918–1920 Spanish flu pandemic — 25 years earlier
- 1939–1945 World War II — 4 years earlier
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 4 years later
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 5 years later
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 6 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1929–1933 Collectivization in the Soviet Union — 14 years earlier
- 1936–1938 Great Purge — 7 years earlier
- 1941–1944 Siege of Leningrad — 2 years earlier
- 1942–1943 Battle of Stalingrad — 1 year earlier
- 1945 German surrender and Victory Day — 2 years later
Middle East
- 1923 Treaty of Lausanne — 20 years earlier
- 1932 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia proclaimed — 11 years earlier
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 5 years later
- 1948–1949 1948 Arab–Israeli War and the Nakba — 5 years later
- 1953 Iranian coup against Mosaddegh — 10 years later
Africa
- 1935–1937 Italy invades Ethiopia — 8 years earlier
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 13 years later
- 1958 Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart — 15 years later
- 1960 Year of Africa — 17 years later
- 1963 The Organisation of African Unity is founded — 20 years later
Asia
- 1945 Atomic bombing of Hiroshima — 2 years later
- 1945 Indonesia proclaims independence — 2 years later
- 1947 Independence and Partition of India — 4 years later
- 1953 First ascent of Everest — 10 years later
- 1966–1976 Cultural Revolution in China — 23 years later
Americas
- 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression — 14 years earlier
- c. 1930–1936 Dust Bowl — 13 years earlier
- 1945 ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer — 2 years later
- 1947 Invention of the transistor — 4 years later
- 1955 Salk polio vaccine declared safe — 12 years later
Oceania
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 7 years earlier
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 2 years earlier
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 1 year earlier
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 11 years later
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 16 years later
Alive at the time
- Nikola Tesla (aged 87)
- Mahatma Gandhi (aged 74)
- Winston Churchill (aged 69)
- Joseph Stalin (aged 65)
- Albert Einstein (aged 64)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 62)
- Adolf Hitler (aged 54)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 54)
- Mao Zedong (aged 50)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 25)