Ian Fleming's War

The Inspiration for 007

Mark Simmons

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780750993265
• eBook ISBN: 9780750995795
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Literature

In 1953, Ian Fleming's literary sensation James Bond emerged onto the world's stage. Nearly seven decades later, he has become a multi-billion-pound film franchise, now equipped with all the gizmos of the modern world. Yet Fleming's creation, who battled his way through the fourteen novels from 1953 to 1966, was a maverick – a man out of place. Bond even admits it, wishing he was back in the real war… the Second World War. Indeed, the thread of the Second World War runs through the whole of the Bond series, and many were inspired by the real events and people Fleming came across during his time in Naval Intelligence.

In Ian Fleming's War, Mark Simmons explores these remarkable similarities, from Fleming's scheme to capture a German naval codebook that appears in Thunderball as Plan Omega, to the exploits of 30 Assault Unit, the commando team he helped to create, which inspired Moonraker.

1

LUNCH AT THE CARLTON GRILL

The Carlton Hotel London in 1939 stood on the corner of Haymarket and Pall Mall. It was there on 24 May in the Carlton Grill restaurant that the 31-year-old Ian Fleming met Rear Admiral John Godfrey for the first time. The restaurant was within easy walking distance of the Admiralty, where Godfrey had started work as the Director of Naval Intelligence (DNI) only four months before.

Godfrey had returned with his battlecruiser Repulse to the UK from the Mediterranean. The old ship was due to be paid off in December 1938 at Plymouth, but with the heightened tensions of the Munich Crisis it was saved from the breaker’s yard and diverted to join the Home Fleet at Scapa Flow, where Godfrey’s old friend Ernest Spooner took over command.¹ Repulse is directly referred to in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.²

Godfrey had been warned of his likely appointment in August 1938 by letter, which arrived while Repulse was in Malta; it was from the Naval Secretary to the First Lord and read: ‘I expect you will be requested to come to the Admiralty early next year to relieve Troup (Vice Admiral James Troup) as DNI. I hope this will suit you. This is for your own personal information.’³

Godfrey was delighted by the prospect, the only concern he had was that few DNIs ever got a sea command again. He went ashore and consulted with his boss Admiral Dudley Pound, then the Commander-in-Chief (C-in-C) Mediterranean Fleet, who told him he saw no reason why later he could not return to sea duties, and he would help him when the time came. This ended Godfrey’s one doubt about his new appointment, although later at the height of the war Pound had to renege on his assurance. However, Godfrey never regretted becoming DNI.⁴

John Godfrey had joined the Royal Navy as a cadet in 1903. His family had no tradition of service in the armed forces. Rather it appears that it was the idea of his older brother by fifteen years, Charlie, that he should join the Navy. In the entrance examination he passed fifteenth out of more than 200 applicants.⁵ By the time he became DNI he had been in the Navy more than thirty-five years. During that time he served with distinction in many hotspots around the world. In 1910 he joined the river gunboat HMS Bramble on the China station, patrolling the Yangtze River on the eve of the revolution that overthrew China’s last Imperial Dynasty. He spent most of the First World War in the Mediterranean, at first in the Dardanelles as a lieutenant navigating officer aboard the light cruiser Charybdis. In 1917 he became staff officer to Commodore Rudolf Burmester, Chief of Staff of the Mediterranean Command, mostly based in Egypt. There he met T.E. Lawrence on more than one occasion, who he found ‘practical, logical, hard-working and amazingly knowledgeable about Middle East archaeology, topography and Arabic roots’, and that much ‘rubbish had been written about Lawrence …’⁶ Godfrey also recalled meeting Lawrence on the Euryalus, walking up and down the quarter-deck with him one evening between Jidda and Port Sudan while for an hour ‘he [Lawrence] explained how and why there were twenty ways of spelling and pronouncing the word Cairo’. At the time Godfrey was trying to complete a survey on inshore place names for combined operations with Arab forces as the existing charts were inadequate but he had to retain names the Arabs would understand.⁷

After the war, in which he had twice been mentioned in dispatches, and awarded the Legion of Honour by France, he was appointed to the staff of C-in-C Home Fleet Sir Charles Madden. In 1921 he joined the Plans Division and in December of that year married Margaret Hope. In the 1920s he had two spells at the Royal Naval College at Greenwich, the second as Deputy Director. In 1931 he was appointed to command the heavy cruiser Kent on the China station. Returning home, he had another spell at the Plans Division, this time as Deputy Director, before early in 1935 being given command of the 32,000-ton battlecruiser Repulse, which had just undergone a major refit and was destined to join the Mediterranean Fleet.

Although Godfrey had often worked around the fringes of the intelligence world, he freely admitted himself to be a novice and that he was indebted to Admiral Reginald ‘Blinker’ Hall, nicknamed ‘Blinker’ because of his rapidly blinking eyes, the likely cause of which was sarcoidosis or dry-eye and the blinking a sub-conscious attempt to keep his eyes lubricated.⁸

Hall had been DNI in the First World War and came to see Godfrey on 27 March, only weeks after he had taken over his new department, and ‘offered me full access to his great store of knowledge and judgement in this strange commodity intelligence, about which I then knew hardly anything’. He supplied many varied ‘contacts’. And it was through Hall that Godfrey met Sir Montagu Norman, the Governor of Barings; Olaf Hambro, Chairman of Hambros Bank; and the two Rothschilds, ‘all of whom helped me in a variety of fruitful and helpful ways, particularly in the recruitment of wartime staff’.⁹

When Godfrey asked Hall about the type of man he should appoint as his personal assistant, the former DNI thought he should try a stockbroker, as he had done in Claud Serocold. Godfrey had little knowledge of the City and so, ‘I consulted Serocold and Admiral Aubrey Hugh-Smith and talked again with Hall about filling this appointment in war.’ They advised him to consult with Montagu Norman and Edward Peacock, of the merchant bank of Barings.¹⁰

Shortly after this, Norman telephoned Godfrey to advise him that he had found his man. They met at the Admiralty to discuss the matter. There Norman told him about Ian Fleming, a stockbroker who was not as successful as Serocold but with many attributes.

The young man Godfrey was to meet for the first time at the Carlton Grill that warm spring day of 1939, Ian Lancaster Fleming, was only four days past his thirty-first birthday. It would be hard to say that Fleming had had a distinguished career up to that time. Out of four Fleming boys, Ian was the black sheep of the family. Peter won all the academic prizes at Eton, and in 1926 went on to Christ Church, Oxford. Richard became head of house, and the youngest, the popular Michael, sailed through everything with no trouble and was loved by everyone. There was only a year between Peter, the eldest brother, and Ian, and although they were devoted to each other there was an early air of competition that in some ways remained with Ian all his life. Although outclassed at Eton by the superior intellect of Peter, Ian was a far better athlete. Peter on the other hand never felt superior to Ian, mainly because he was smaller physically.¹¹

Ian broke his nose while playing football, which his mother felt gave him an air of ‘battered nobility’.¹² Yet he was far more adept at non-team games and in 1924 at Eton he swept the board in the junior athletics. As a senior he was Victor Ludorum (champion of the games) two years running, a feat that had not happened within living memory at the time.

This was a fact he would use on the blurb of Casino Royale more than twenty-five years later and again citing the superiority of his brother, ‘he was educated at Eton, where he was Victor Ludorum two years in succession, a distinction only once equalled – presumably, he suggests, by another second son trying to compensate for a brilliant elder brother’.¹³ However, on the whole Ian hated Eton, and he had his fictional hero James Bond expelled from the school ‘after trouble with one of the boys’ maids’. This was in The Times obituary for Commander James Bond in You Only Live Twice.¹⁴

His mother, Evelyn, was the first to call him the black sheep of the family. Ian’s poor academic performance at Eton made her force him into the Army class, considered as the place for dunces, where they could prepare for Sandhurst Royal Military College. However, he was soon in trouble with motor cars and girls, both of which were banned in term-time. He shared a Morris two-seater known as William with his brother Peter, who by that time was at Christ Church, Oxford.¹⁵

He was removed from Eton by his mother shortly after he had won his second Victor Ludorum and to make sure he got into Sandhurst she sent him to a special crammer college, run by Colonel William Trevor; he was there only three months. He passed the Sandhurst entrance exam eleventh out of 120 candidates. Trevor wrote to Evelyn pleased with Ian’s achievement and felt he should make a good soldier, ‘provided always that the Ladies don’t ruin him’.¹⁶

The life at Sandhurst, with its strong code of discipline, was not for Ian. He did not take the military life seriously and one of his reports advised that he needed to ‘make the best of what is, to him, a bad job and settle down’.¹⁷ During a night out in London at the 43 Club in Soho he contracted gonorrhoea from a hostess. On 1 September 1927, at his mother’s insistence he resigned from Sandhurst. Evelyn felt that she and the family had been disgraced by Ian, and she thought about sending him to Australia with a one-way ticket. However, she did not wash her hands of him and instead sent him to the Villa Tennerhof in Kitzbühel, Austria, for further education. Peter had gone there in the summer of 1927 to improve his German; he disliked Austria and wrote: ‘I simply loathe this place.’¹⁸ The school was run by Ernan Forbes Dennis, a friend of Evelyn who was a former British diplomat and spy, assisted by his wife the author Phyllis Bottome. Forbes Dennis later recalled of Ian’s arrival: ‘all he could do successfully was to make a nuisance of himself. For he was a rebel like most second sons.’¹⁹ Here the pupils were treated more like guests and there were few rules, which suited Ian.

Yet Ernan and Phyllis got Ian to buckle down and work. Phyllis in particular encouraged him to write some short stories. For his education, they set the main goal as the Foreign Office examination, for which competition was fierce, with most places being taken by Oxford and Cambridge students. The course he undertook with Ernan was much wider than any he could have acquired at a university. They instilled a love of books in him, and not just for reading but as an object in their own right, for he would become a keen collector. All these influences would lead him to make a living with his pen. Ian wrote in his book Thrilling Cities about his time in Kitzbühel:

I remember, in those days before the war, reading, thanks to the encouragement of the Forbes Dennises, the works of Kafka, Musil, the Zweigs, Arthur Schnitzler, Werfel, Rilke, von Hofmannsthal, and of those bizarre psychologists Weininger and Groddeck – let alone the writings of Adler and Freud – and buying first editions (I used to collect them) illustrated by Kokoschka and Kubin.²⁰

Ian also found the freedom at Kitzbühel to explore the company of young women without his family breathing down his neck. One of his fellow pupils admired the effect he had on the female sex, calling him ‘irresistible to women’.²¹

By now an old Standard Tourer he got while at Eton had replaced William the Morris. About this time he borrowed a three-litre Bugatti in which he exceeded 100mph on the open road for the first time. Ian would instil in his hero James Bond an equal love of cars, starting in Casino Royale where he describes his car as ‘his only personal hobby’. It was a battleship-grey 4.5-litre Blower Bentley ‘with the supercharger by Amherst Villiers’.²²

The old Standard made it to Austria. Ralph Arnold, another pupil who would also become a novelist, remembered riding in the Standard with Ian, following a large lorry loaded with machinery up a narrow mountain road. Ian became impatient behind the slow-moving vehicle and began to invent a story of agents in the lorry being chased by gangsters. He explained to prevent their capture one would, ‘Climb out on the back of the lorry and slice through the ropes. Just think what would happen to us now if those ropes went and that machinery came crashing down. We’d all be smashed to smithereens.’²³

A similar scene would be used i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Anthony Horowitz
• Introduction – James Bond the Maverick
• Glossary and Acronyms
• 1 Lunch at the Carlton Grill
• 2 Naval Intelligence Division, 1912– 39
• 3 The Phoney War
• 4 Find the Admiral
• 5 Operation Golden Eye
• 6 Operation Ruthless
• 7 The Hess Affair, May 1941
• 8 Architect of US Intelligence
• 9 Gibraltar
• 10 Is Your Journey Really Necessary?
• 11 Change of Command
• 12 30AU Get their Knees Brown
• 13 Back to France
• 14 The Final Push
• 15 Casino Royale
• Appendix 1: Ian Fleming’s James Bond Books and their Second World War Content
• Appendix 2: Other Writers of Bond Books and their Books
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements