The Ian Fleming Miscellany (8 page)

Had the Germans, in fact, opened it? Would they have been forewarned of the attack?

Technical experts decided not, and observation revealed no giveaway build-up of German patrols. Holding their nerve, the British ordered Operation Torch to go ahead. It worked exactly as planned.

The courier was dead, but the macabre Thomson/Fleming/Cholmondeley idea – of the body with the false clue – had come to life again. It was used in Operation Mincemeat. The Germans needed to be tricked, and fast, because as soon as North Africa was fully under control, the dimmest German schoolboy with a map would spot the Allies' next move – on Sicily, which offered the easiest of landings conveniently opposite the shores of Libya. Just such an invasion was planned for the summer of 1943.

Could the Germans be duped into defending a different invasion point, or even two? Probably, but a plot would require scrupulous attention to detail. A body was obtained, that of a poor derelict Welshman who had died alone in King's Cross. Sir Bernard Spilsbury, the pathologist, advised on making it credible as a drowned man, and on the conditions necessary to mislead Spanish or German pathologists as to cause of death. A name was chosen – a common enough name that did, in fact, belong to more than one officer in the services. The corpse was to be a major. The uniform and boots fitted, the underwear – obtained from someone who'd been hit by a tram – was well worn. A backstory, supported by correspondence, identity tags and documents and random indications of the deceased's origins and character, was concocted, and a fake Most Secret letter.

Ewen Montagu and others in Room 39 involved were having rather a good time, carefully putting together a convincing persona to be stuffed into the dead man's pockets. The penultimate touch, a love letter with a fiancée's photograph and a bill from Phillips in Bond Street for the engagement ring – along with scolding letters from father and bank manager – came close to over-egging the pudding.

The Most Secret communication was the one the Germans must seize upon. It would outline a projected pincer movement of invading forces from the Balkans in the east to the South of France in the west. There was some concern about concealing this sealed personal letter (genuinely written by the Vice-Chief of the Imperial General Staff) because the entire effort would be wasted if, as in the genuine incident last September, the Spaniards didn't open it. The consensus in Room 39 was that the Operation Torch courier's mail had remained undisturbed because Spanish people were Catholics and unwilling to disrespect the dead. The plotters decided that their particular major would therefore carry the valuable letter separately, not in his pockets. He would keep it with other valuable documents in a briefcase secured by a chain loop of the kind that normally runs across the body and down the sleeve; bank messengers in the City used something similar. But who would wear such an uncomfortable thing on a plane journey? Instead the leather-wrapped chain was carelessly, but tightly, tied to the belt of his greatcoat.

Luck was on their side. A couple of British planes did crash at about the right place, at about the right time, before the body was found, complete with associated briefcase. And thanks to a little nudging from Hillgarth's network of influential locals, the body, and the letter, found its way to German strategists, who were convinced. The Allies knew they would be expected in Sicily, so they were going to land in the South of France or in the Balkans – the Germans had proof of it. They deployed their defensive forces accordingly. So when British and American servicemen landed in Sicily in the summer of 1943, they were able to move relentlessly on through Italy with little opposition.

Fleming had the satisfaction of having devised Mincemeat in the first place, but he was busy, by then, with something more important.

Before Operation Torch and the invasion of Africa, and Operation Mincemeat and the successful advance through Sicily, there had been a test run. In the summer of 1942 with the Office for Strategic Services officially instituted, Roosevelt insisted on an immediate invasion of Northern Europe by British and American forces. Churchill was adamant that this would not work; it was too soon. But he could not prove it. The idea of invading Europe from Britain, right now, had to be tested before Roosevelt would be convinced.

A crack commando unit would therefore carry out a small, targeted raid on a German post in north-west France. Its stated aim would be to capture intelligence – cypher codes, handbooks, equipment worth investigating – and leave. Its unstated aim was to test German defences.

The crack commandos would be men of outstanding ability and initiative: 30 Assault Unit (30AU), the brainchild of Ian Fleming. He would watch from a destroyer offshore and report on the outcome. This worked perfectly. He wrote the battle description as it happened, and the commandos, with heavy losses, made it back to Newhaven. This proved that invasion by the even the most competent force, 30AU, might fail. Nazi defences across the Channel were currently too strong to be tackled. They must be reduced, and diverted elsewhere, before an invasion along the Channel coast. Roosevelt gave in.

30 Assault Unit probably had its roots in Peter Fleming's experiences of the Independent Companies – territorials who had worked to great effect in Norway in 1940 and 1941, laying mines to entrap U-boats – and the Auxiliary Units, undercover groups from the Home Guard he had set up with Colin Gubbins. Ian's 30AU, made up of three troops of marines, sailors and soldiers respectively, included exceptional individuals.

Education and experience had made Ian a passionate elitist. He had come across a lot of clever people like Cotton by 1942, enough to hand pick such men and make a crack commando unit out of them. They would usually be deployed in an intelligence capacity, that is, capturing materiel and data that could be used by cryptologists and saboteurs. Every man was strong and athletic, intelligent and resourceful, and ideally fluent to native-speaker standard in a second or third language. Many had unconventional backgrounds. They were trained in parachuting, safe-cracking, lock-picking, searching of persons and care of prisoners, and facial recognition techniques. They learned how to behave should they be captured and how to react under interrogation. The Navy troop, while being trained ‘on general Commando lines' took courses in enemy sea mines and torpedoes, electronics and the essential layout of submarines, among other things. They all learned Italian (daily lessons before Sicily), and individual skills such as photography were known and exploited.

30AU as a whole were to find and retrieve certain items from locations targeted on a Black List; these were required for, to quote Fleming, ‘hastening the decisive defeat of Germany and Japan the improvement of Allied naval equipment ensuring that Germany and Japan shall not be in a position to fight a third war'.

Each fast-moving section of 30AU should know what to look for. They would capture wireless receivers, plans, technical handbooks, operators' logs, instruction books, radar equipment, cypher books and machines, and in particular, anything to do with new weaponry. They would demand these things from living Germans and riffle through the clothing and possessions of dead ones. At the invasion of Sicily, having claimed its hoard each troop collected it in one place and shipped it out.

As war ground on through 1943 and 1944, 30AU was supposed to infiltrate occupied territory, and even Germany, in order to discover more about the atom bomb that the Germans were working on.

They were also tasked with sabotage operations. Records exist of a plan to sink seven enemy ships out of the eight that lay at anchor in Las Palmas, Canary Islands. Eight trained Polish men would sail into the harbour on a ship that was under British control. The skipper of the Danish ship
Slesvig
would be paid to wait for ‘passengers' (the Poles) who were expected to arrive soon. Under cover of darkness, the Poles would dive into the harbour and place two limpet mines on the hull of every ship, including the British one, except for the Slesvig. These mines had a three-hour time delay. The Polish saboteurs would not hang about. They would climb aboard the Slesvig and sneak away.

Meanwhile the crew of the British ship would take to the lifeboats, and as soon as their ship went down, they would row ashore and report to the British Consul as Displaced British Servicemen. They were to deny any knowledge of other personnel having been aboard.

The raid on France by 30AU was the nearest Fleming ever really came to seeing action. The Las Palmas plan would have killed a lot of people. The question that arises now nags: did Fleming fully understand the key fact about destroying an enemy as rapacious as Hitler – that if necessary, you must be prepared to match him in cruelty? Was Fleming personally the sort of person who would do that?

He delighted in violence in the privacy of the bedroom. He liked to bully masochistic women mentally, as well as physically. And, as he later proved, he could imagine torture and murder. He had that internal shard of ice that enabled him, as a writer, to withdraw and observe most situations. He lived through the Blitz without panicking. Yet there is no evidence that his job ever took him into the London Cage in Kensington Palace Gardens, where British officers tortured German prisoners to extract information, or to the suburban houses of the Combined Services Interrogation Centre. As to killing someone, his invention, James Bond (‘licensed to kill'), would admit of himself that he ‘never liked doing it'.

Somebody certainly passed POWs to him for interrogation of a gentler kind. There were people in Military Intelligence (Guy Liddell was one) who were pretty sure torture was less effective than the velvet glove. Ian was good at soft-soaping people. Wearing civilian clothes, he would take captured German U-boat commanders, who presumably were elegantly shod and given suits from decent tailors, to lunch in smart restaurants. In theory, rare beef and several bottles of Romanée-Conti could work wonders and probably did, until one day, when he and two such guests were enjoying an animated conversation at Scott's in Mount Street, they were interrupted by Scotland Yard detectives. A waiter, hearing conviviality in German, had called the police, and Fleming and his friends were hauled away in a Black Maria. He never entirely lived that down in Room 39.

Captain Edmund Rushbrooke, Godfrey's successor in the autumn of 1942, seems to have encouraged Fleming to carry on much as before, as Commander of 30AU – in command but never in the fight.

His job in wartime is often described as ‘deskbound'. This is very much an elastic term. Throughout his naval service he had continued to draw a salary from Rowe and Pitman, and he kept in touch with City contacts. So that was some long lunches sorted; then there were the cocktails and dinners with his OSS liaison officer in London, Lieutenant Tully Schneider, at the American Officers' Club in Park Lane. He was seeing a pretty colleague called Joan Bright at the time. At 38, and doing rather well on his own, he saw no point in marriage. Women, he told Schneider, were ‘like dogs; men were the only human beings, the only ones he could be friends with'. He did admit to being badly upset when Muriel Wright was killed by a bomb.

He visited Cairo, a hub of British intrigue in the Middle East, for the Churchill-Roosevelt conference in November of 1943 and Joan Bright went along. A month later he and Anne were both Christmas guests at Send, a quiet, dispersed old village near Guildford, where Loelia Westminster lived at Send Grove.

In 1944, Anne would receive news of Baron O'Neill's death in action. Eve Fleming had lost her husband when she was 38 and had lived on a generous allowance ever since. Anne O'Neill was 41 when she was widowed, and there wasn't a lot of money. She was miles from being poor, but in order to maintain her lifestyle and social position she needed a rich husband. The two favourites, had London society been opening a book on it, would have been Esmond or Ian. People were hard pressed to say which, but they probably thought both men were terribly well off. Esmond was extremely rich, but he and Anne were forever bickering. Ian was reluctant to marry and anyway hadn't inherited the income Anne would require. His grandfather had left him and his brothers out of his will and his grandmother died intestate.

Ian did not make a move. That winter he was travelling with Clare Blanshard, Hillgarth's assistant, in the Far East. But as the Allies began to bomb Japan the Nazi threat to Britain diminished. The end of the war in Europe was within sight and he was thinking more and more about how to live when it was over. His job was being slowly wound down. In 1945, the mundane tasks were all that remained. Typical was a day he spent in Malvern, reporting on the office and accommodation proposed as home for staff of the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment. He delivered a caustic but constructive two-page assessment of the state of HMS
Duke
, which had until then been a Royal Navy shore base. To sum up, the lavatories were disgusting and all its scant facilities required an upgrade.