William Martin (Royal Marines officer)

Glyndwr Michael has been commemorated on stage in Cardboard Citizens's 2009 Mincemeat play and Spitlip's Operation Mincemeat musical, as well as on film in The Man Who Never Was in 1956 and in the 2021 production Operation Mincemeat.

However, in 2004 John and Noreen Steele suggested that Montagu resolved these objections by using the body of a serviceman, and pointed to the accidental loss of HMS Dasher in the Clyde in March 1943, and the loss of 349 of her crew. They argued that such a person would be of military fitness (which Michael was not) and had died in a marine accident (as Michael had not); also that there would be little difficulty in obtaining identity papers and that the body would be considerably fresher than one that had been on ice for three months.

The Steeles named the person whose body was used as John Melville; in recognition of this, in 2004 a memorial service was held on the present-day Dasher, a patrol craft, at which John Melville's daughter was present. However the Royal Navy later said that there had been a mistake and that the crew had been given wrong information ahead of the service.

Another investigation into the Dasher affair was published in 2003 by Colin Gribbons, drawing similar conclusions to the Steeles'. However, Gribbons identified the body used in Operation Mincemeat as that of yet another person, Tom Martin, a sailor who perished in the Dasher incident.

In 1998, after the British Government identified the body as Glyndwr Michael, a new inscription was added to the gravestone:

The identity of the body employed as Major Martin was kept secret during and after the war, and was the source of some speculation. The body was identified in 1996 as that of Glyndwr Michael, a Welsh homeless man, and recognised as such by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

Montagu stated that the body was released on the condition that the man's real identity would never be revealed. However, in 1996, Roger Morgan, an amateur historian from London, uncovered evidence in the Public Record Office that the identity of the corpse was a Welshman named Glyndwr Michael.

Ewen Montagu, the officer in charge of Operation Mincemeat, was faced with the task of finding a body to give substance to the persona of William Martin. In this he was assisted by Bentley Purchase, coroner of St Pancras District. Several different accounts of this have been given. In Montagu's book, The Man Who Never Was, written in 1953, he states that in 1942 there was no shortage of bodies, but none they felt they could take. He states that the body of a young man who had died of pneumonia was found, and that permission to use the body was given. The body was released on the condition that the man's real identity would never be revealed.

On 30 April 1943, Lt. Norman Jewell, captain of the submarine HMS Seraph, read the 39th Psalm, and "Martin"'s body was gently pushed into the sea where the tide, aided by the push of the submarine's propellers, would bring it ashore off Huelva on the Spanish Atlantic coast.

The submarine designated for the mission was HMS Seraph, which departed from the Clyde on 19 May 1943. Before the mission set off from the Clyde, Montagu described having to drive from London with the body while a Scottish source for the body would have made this task easier.

After the identification of Michael as Major Martin, doubts began to surface. It seemed odd that an operative as meticulous as Montagu would risk the success of the operation by using a body of a man neither physically fit (as might be expected of a Marine officer) nor having died in the manner suggested (drowned, or as a result of an air crash). Montagu formally states in his book that, in 1942, there was no shortage of bodies, but none they felt they could take. He also states that he feared they may have to steal a body ("do a Burke and Hare"), before the body of a young man who had died of pneumonia, and for whom permission to use the body was given, could be found.

The body was buried, with full military honours, as Major William Martin. His grave, No.1886, is in the San Marco section of the cemetery of Nuestra Señora, in Huelva, Spain. The headstone reads: