Western-Centric WWII Mythology
This article is symptomatic of the western-centric view of WWII. It omits the most important secret operation of all: the Soviet spy in the Germans' Tokyo embassy, Richard Sorge. In October 1941 Sorge confirmed for Stalin that the Japanese would go south against the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies and Hawaii, which freed up 400000 troops and several thousand tanks from the Soviet Far East to be moved to the gates of Moscow just in time for the Soviet counterattack that began on December 5. Sorge's espionage ensured that the Japanese bought into the German victory scenario at the absolute peak of the German military bubble, a classically foolish buy-in at a bubblicious peak.
With regard to Operations Mincemeat: Sicily was a side show, while the largest tank battle in history at Kursk was the main event. It was Kursk that was one of the decisive turning points of the war, as much as Stalingrad, putting the Wehrmacht permanently on the defensive.
Inflatable tanks and D-Day: D-Day was not one of the ten biggest battles of the war. It was Operation Bagration, launched on June 17, that threw the Germans back 800 km to the gates of Warsaw in 10 weeks. It was Bagration that allowed for the Allied success at the Falaise Gap, which triggered the breakout from stagnant hedgerow fighting in Normandy. Bagration was the most important WWII battle westerners have never heard of (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/21/we-must-not-forget-the-other-d-day). Half of German casualties in the war occurred in its last year and 7 of 8 German soldiers killed died on the eastern front. Churchill was right when he said it was the Red Army that tore the guts out of the Nazi war machine.
Operation Gunnerside: The key to German failure to develop a nuclear weapon lies elsewhere. Hitler had five different agencies, including the postal service, doing nuclear research. The Nazi regime worked on a principle of bureaucratic darwinism in which Hitler gave an assignment to multiple agencies, "and the strongest one wins". This research comes from The German War Economy, Alan Milward. The other key to German failure here was the USA as a refuge for German, Italian and Hungarian Jewish physicists. German and Italian antisemitism exported the best physicists to the USA. Germany could have developed an atomic bomb if Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, Einstein had been working for the Germans instead of Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. Then the Man in the High Castle becomes more than just a counterfactual sci-fi fantasy.
Bagration and Kursk were not secret operations. But neither would have happened without Richard Sorge's espionage in Tokyo, the top hinge of fate secret operation of WWII that most westerners never heard of.
