Commando Bond
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which you can read on this website or download here.
‘MI6 LOOKS FOR maladjusted young men who’d give little thought to sacrificing others to protect queen and country. You know—former SAS types with easy smiles and expensive watches…’
So says Vesper Lynd to James Bond in the 2006 film Casino Royale. Although it doesn’t get as much mileage in the finished film as it did in the press before its release, Casino Royale took a daring approach to the Bond mythos, presenting an ‘origin story’ for the character. Bond is a newly appointed member of MI6’s Double O Section—the film opens with him earning his stripes by cold-bloodedly murdering a traitor—and it would appear from his reaction to Vesper’s comment that she has hit home and that he is in fact a ‘former SAS type’. This was confirmed by the film’s official website, which provided a chronology of Bond’s pre-MI6 career, including a military dossier detailing his time at Britannia Royal Naval College, his intelligence role on HMS Exeter and special forces training at Plymouth and Brize Norton. The site even claimed Bond had been part of an invented outfit called ‘030 Special Forces Unit’.¹
Special forces have developed a particular image in popular culture in recent years. Britain’s SAS is probably the world’s best known special forces outfit, having featured in dozens of films, books and magazine articles, many of them generated by the worldwide media interest surrounding the storming of the Iranian Embassy in London in 1980 after terrorists took hostages inside, which was screened live on British television.
Members of the SAS have a popular image as gung-ho operators who shoot first and ask questions later: not really the type to create their own cocktails (or sport easy smiles). The use of tough SAS types in fiction has also become something of a cliché, with a whole genre being formed in the wake of Andy McNab’s 1993 memoir of an SAS operation in Iraq, Bravo Two Zero. It’s not quite James Bond territory. Or...?
In an article in TIME published shortly before the release of Die Another Day, Lee Tamahori, the director of that film, made the following remark about the direction he felt the character had been taken in the previous few films:
‘“I was worried that he was turning into an SAS man, machine-gunning everyone,” says Tamahori. “I’ve been trying to make him more of an Ian Fleming Bond.”’²
This is a misapprehension. While copious use of a machine gun is not a hallmark of Ian Fleming’s novels, the idea that James Bond might be an SAS man is not out of keeping with them. In fact, Fleming included several clues that point to James Bond having just such a type of background.
The Special Air Service didn’t always have the popular reputation it has today. The group was founded by David Stirling in 1941 to undertake acts of sabotage behind enemy lines. The son of a Scottish general, Stirling began a degree in architecture at Trinity College, Cambridge, but his studies were curtailed by his fondness for the local nightlife. He was eventually read out a list of 23 offences and asked to choose the three for which he wished to be sent down. He then decided to become the first man to climb Everest and enlisted in the Supplementary Reserves of the Scots Guards—he trained in the Swiss Alps and the Rockies. When war broke out he was 24, and was sent to the Guards Depot in Pirbright:
‘Pirbright was a mere hour from the attractions of London. During one lecture, possibly after a night at White’s Club or the gaming tables, Stirling fell asleep. He probably fell asleep in many, but on this occasion he was woken by the lecturer, asking him to repeat what had just been said. Stirling repeated it verbatim.’³
After this, Stirling volunteered for an expeditionary force setting off to fight a winter campaign in Finland—ski training was in Chamonix—before joining the commando group Layforce, after which he founded the SAS.
It’s hard to imagine a more ‘James Bondish’ background than this, but Stirling is one of the few leading commandos from the Second World War not to have been claimed as a model for 007. Fleming was certainly inspired by the real-life experience of such men, however, as he made clear in an interview with Playboy published after his death:
‘I think [Bond is] slightly more true to the type of modern hero, to the commandos of the last War, and so on, and to some of the secret-service men I’ve met, than to any of the rather cardboardy heroes of the ancient thrillers.’⁴
Fleming knew several heroic commandos and secret-service men who had served in the war. Perhaps the best known among them is Patrick Leigh Fermor, who worked for the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Crete, where he led the party that kidnapped General Kreipe in 1944. That mission was immortalised in W Stanley Moss’ book Ill Met By Moonlight, published in 1950, which was made into a film in 1957, with Dirk Bogarde playing Leigh Fermor.
In an afterword for the 2001 edition of Moss’ book, Leigh Fermor wrote about the operation for the first time. He modestly refuted the ‘Baroness Orczy—John Buchan—Dornford Yates’ status that the episode has gained over the years, but at the same time revealed that during a prolonged stay in Cairo with SOE colleagues, the villa they had stayed in had been filled with gelignite disguised as goat’s droppings, magnetised trouser buttons that turned into compasses and gossamer-thin maps stitched into the lining of clothing. Many of these items were created by a Major Jasper Maskelyne, who Leigh Fermor recognised as a stage magician he had seen perform in London as a child.⁵
After the war, Leigh Fermor took up writing, drafting some of his first book, The Traveller’s Tree, during a stay at Goldeneye in 1948. He loved Fleming’s Jamaican retreat and commented in his book that it could become a model for new houses in the tropics.⁶ The two men became friends, and Fleming repaid Fermor’s plug for Goldeneye by quoting a long passage on voodoo from The Traveller’s Tree in Live and Let Die.
Another of Fleming’s friends mentioned in his novels was David Niven, whose manners Kissy Suzuki so admires that she names her cormorant after him. Niven also served as a commando of sorts in the Second World War: while serving with ‘Phantom’, the regiment responsible for ferreting out information in forward areas and radioing it back to GHQ, he worked on joint operations with the SAS, whose command it came under from 1944.⁷
Another friend, Anthony Terry, was captured during Operation CHARIOT, the daring commando raid on the harbour installations at Saint-Nazaire in 1942, and was awarded the Military Cross for it.⁸ After the war, he worked for Fleming’s Mercury News, as well as continuing his contacts with MI6, and in 1960, he guided Fleming around Berlin, helping him with much of the research for the short story The Living Daylights.⁹
Closer to home, Ian Fleming’s brother Peter was also engaged in commando work during the war. In 1940, he and ‘Mad Mike’ Calvert—who later found fame with the SAS—prepared for a guerrilla defence of Britain the event of a German invasion. Later that year, Peter Fleming led a reconnaissance party into the Norwegian port of Namsos and the following year he formed and took a small commando team to Greece (the latter mission under the auspices of SOE). Neither expedition was a great success: Peter was reported to have been killed in Norway and an obituary even ran in The Daily Sketch, causing his family great distress until he arrived, alive and well, in Scotland. It may be that this episode later gave Ian the idea for Bond’s false obituary in You Only Live Twice: it can be useful for a secret agent to have the world believe him dead.
In Greece, the Yak Mission, as Peter’s group was nicknamed, wrecked the path of advancing German paratroops—Peter even booby-trapped a bridge by fitting a London double-decker bus with flame-throwers on it—before it was attacked from the air near the island of Milos. A 400-ton yacht that had been commandeered by the Navy burst into flames and sank, and Peter was again very lucky to come out alive.¹⁰
Peter Fleming was also a celebrated travel writer and journalist. His novel The Sixth Column, published in 1951, was a gentle send-up of the thrillers he had enjoyed growing up, and was dedicated to Ian, also an aficionado of the genre. One of the main characters is a former commando called Archie Strume, who has great success with a thriller based on his war-time experiences titled ‘Hackforth of The Commandos’. Colonel Hackforth is always saying things like:
‘Tell the Minister of Defence to have a midget submarine alongside the Harwich customs jetty not later than last light on Tuesday. It’s important.’¹¹
Peter Fleming exploring China
The Sixth Column may have been a spur for Ian Fleming to knuckle down and write his own thriller, which he had been promising to do since the war: he started writing Casino Royale just a few months after the publication of his brother’s book. Archie Strume and Colonel Hackforth were partially based on the author Dennis Wheatley—who Peter had become friends with during the war—and his secret agent character Gregory Sallust, but the references to wartime commando adventures involving midget submarines may have been for Ian’s eyes only.
In 1942, Ian Fleming set up what he liked to call his ‘Red Indians’. No. 30 Assault Unit was a small roving commando outfit made up of men from the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force. Its task was to go in after the first wave of Allied attacks and scavenge for technical intelligence: codes, weapons, equipment, maps and documents left behind by the Germans. The commanding officers were Dunstan Curtis, who had played a leading role in the Saint Nazaire raid, and the Antarctic explorer Quentin Riley.¹²
One of 30 AU’s most enterprising officers was Lieutenant-Commander Patrick Dalzel-Job RNVR, who led missions in France, Belgium and Germany in the latter stages of the war. Dalzel-Job had an unusual background: after the death of his father in the Somme, he spent his formative years in Switzerland, where he learned to cross-country ski and speak French fluently. While still in his twenties, he built his own schooner and sailed to Norway with his middle-aged mother and a Norwegian schoolgirl as his crew.
This experience stood him in good stead when the war came. In April 1940, when Peter Fleming was in Namsos, Dalzel-Job was in Narvik, where he countermanded orders not to evacuate civilians. Later on, he worked behind the scenes developing the Royal Navy’s midget submarines, used in the attack on the Tirpitz, and finally went behind enemy lines with 30 AU, where among other things, he accepted the formal surrender of the city of Bremen and captured the Nazis’ own midget submarines.
Dalzel-Job did not care overly for his boss back in London, finding Ian Fleming cold, austere and egotistical, although he appreciated his ‘amusing and pungent’ minutes on operational intelligence reports.¹³ Dalzel-Job’s ‘Nelson touch’ even brought him into conflict with Fleming at the end of the war, when he sent a signal to the British Flag Officer in Oslo as though it were from the Admiralty, sending himself on a fairly pointless mission to Norway so he could find the schoolgirl he had sailed with before the war. Fleming was furious at not being consulted, and gave Dalzel-Job an earful about it, but off he went, found the girl, and married her.
Another member of 30 AU who saw action in France was Tony Hugill. Also a lieutenant-commander in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, he was awarded the Croix de Guerre for his part in D-Day and won the Distinguished Service Cross for taking the surrender of 280 troops under a Luftwaffe officer at a radio station near Brest. From 1945-6, he led the Forward Interrogation Unit in Hamburg, Germany.
After the war, Hugill went into the sugar industry, managing Tate and Lyle’s West Indian operations between 1954 and 1966. In Fleming’s last novel, The Man With The Golden Gun, Bond is vouched for by local sugar executive Tony Hugill, who, we learn in Chapter 4, was in Naval Intelligence during the war: ‘sort of Commando job’. Bond’s cover name for this mission, Mark Hazard, may have been inspired by the title of Hugill’s war memoirs, The Hazard Mesh, published in 1946, but if so Fleming either hadn’t read the book or was in a generous mood, because Hugill’s depiction of him (although he is not named) is not flattering:
‘One of the Admiralty pundits signalled us that he was about to honour us with a visit. We none of us liked him much. He was one of those very superior professorial type R.N.V.R.s who got their claws into Their Lordships early in the war and have kept them in ever since. As our proprietary deity he felt himself entitled to demand offerings of Camembert and libations of captured cognac of the better sort (But my dear feller this stuff’s undrinkable!) from time to time. He also interfered with us on a higher level.’¹⁴
After Fleming’s death, Hugill described Fleming in gentler terms.¹⁵ In contrast to the popular perception of commandos today, the British commandos Fleming knew from the war were often, beneath their tough exteriors, cultured men of great sensitivity: Patrick Leigh-Fermor and Peter Fleming were both acclaimed travel writers, Tony Hugill’s memoirs are filled with poetry and Patrick Dalzel-Job’s autobiography is, at root, a love story.
Fleming never saw action in the field himself, although he may have liked to have done. John Pearson recounted in his biography that Fleming liked to tell people, Gatsby-ishly, that he had once killed a man, but that the story seemed to change with each telling¹⁶, and some of his other claims of prowess have been similarly questioned.
This sense of inconsistency extended to James Bond. In his fiction, Fleming made use of those real-life episodes he found most fascinating and exciting; ensuring that all of his novels’ re-imagined tidbits meshed together was of secondary concern. For example, Fleming fans the world over know that James Bond killed twice in cold blood to obtain his licence to kill—nobody cares to dwell on the irritatingly inconvenient sentence in Chapter 19 of From Russia, With Love in which Fleming baldly states:
‘Bond had never killed in cold blood.’
The two killings described in Casino Royale are both examples of operations usually undertaken by special forces: assassinations. Governments and conventional intelligence services cannot be seen to sanction extra-judicial murder, so such jobs inevitably fall to less accountable units. As Bond’s second kill, in Stockholm, involved a Norwegian ‘who was doubling against us for the Germans’, it appears that both these missions took place during the war. According to MRD Foot’s official history of the SOE, Stockholm had been the initial base for that organisation’s activity in Scandinavia¹⁷, so perhaps Fleming had heard of a similar operation through intelligence contacts and embellished it.¹⁸
Bond’s first ‘wet job’, in New York’s Rockefeller Center, was inspired by Fleming’s visit to the British Security Co-ordination’s offices in the same building in June 1941; he accompanied BSC officers as they burgled a Japanese cipher clerk’s office on the floor below theirs.¹⁹ The clerk was unharmed, but SOE, whose affairs in the Western hemisphere were controlled by the BSC in New York²⁰, did have an assassination capability. This was officially abandoned at the end of the war, but many SOE officers joined MI6, so the expertise may have remained in place²¹. During the war, SOE operatives were commonly referred to as ‘terrorists’ by the Nazis; MRD Foot, who was a member of SAS during the war, recalls being captured and over-hearing one of his interrogators saying: ‘If he is a terrorist he is shot at once’.²²
After the war, the SAS evolved into more of a counter-insurgency regiment; the 1969 Army Training manual stated that its tasks included ‘the ambush and harassment of insurgents, the infiltration of sabotage, assassination and demolition parties into insurgent-held areas, border surveillance liaison with, and organisation of friendly guerrilla forces operating against the common enemy’.²³ The SAS executed some of these responsibilities in the Mau-Mau rebellion in Kenya during the 1950s and in Aden in 1967.²⁴ More recently, it has seen action in Aghanistan, Northern Ireland, Gibraltar and, latterly, Iraq.
Despite the above rather lurid description, members of the SAS have not always approved of assassination. When I asked former SAS sergeant Jacques Goffinet in 2005 if he had been tempted to assassinate Joachim von Ribbentrop when he discovered him in hiding in a flat in Hamburg in June 1945, he replied simply: ‘That would have made me as bad as them.’²⁵
James Bond is often concerned with the same dilemma: outside of the episodes mentioned in Casino Royale, he makes for a rather shaky assassin. In the short story Octopussy, he travels to Jamaica on a private war crimes investigation. His target is Dexter Smythe, who as a member of the Miscellaneous Objectives Bureau—a (fictional) wartime commando outfit formed by the Secret Service and Combined Operations—had murdered one of his early mentors. But while Bond had no qualms about murdering double agents or cipher clerks, this time he does not draw his weapon, leaving Smythe the options of suicide or disgrace.
In The Living Daylights, Bond’s mission is strategically defensive—to stop another assassination—but here he also has reservations, and deliberately muffs the assignment because of the ‘sharp pang of longing’ he feels for his female target—a sackable offence, as he admits himself at the end of the story. In For Your Eyes Only, Bond undertakes the mission to assassinate Von Hammerstein as retribution for the murder of M’s friends: an ‘eye for an eye job’. In the event, however, the deed is done by the friends’ daughter, although Bond kills another of the villains and comforts the girl afterwards. In The Man With The Golden Gun, Bond is a little less circumspect, eventually shooting Scaramanga five times.
‘The Second World War was a time of irregular warfare, and resourceful young men barging into offices in Whitehall demanding to mount their own raids against the Nazis were not uncommon‘
James Bond is neither straightforward assassin nor pure commando in Ian Fleming’s novels: most of the time he works as a counter-espionage agent, sent by M to head off an emerging threat, rather than initiating offensive action against the enemy. Nevertheless, Fleming incorporated many details of war-time commandos into his novels: apart from the references to old colleagues and friends who had been involved in special forces, Q Branch’s weapons and gadgets parallel the work done by similar departments in SOE and elsewhere. Bond’s self-reliance and stamina are reminiscent of the commando ethic, as is his basic fitness regimen described in Chapter 11 of From Russia, With Love. His habit of taking Benzedrine was also common practice among commandos during the war, when remaining alert for long periods was often necessary.
Bond is also a martial arts aficionado—we know from M’s obituary in You Only Live Twice that he founded the first judo class in a British public school. In Chapter 10 of the same novel, Tiger Tanaka tells Bond he will show him one of his service’s secret ninja academies in the mountains, and Bond replies that MI6 also has a commando training school for unarmed combat attached to its headquarters. This is an example of Fleming carrying details across his books successfully, because in Chapter 8 of Moonraker Bond is happy to have his Unarmed Combat class with ‘that dam’ Commando chap’ cancelled for a meeting with M. Bond is clearly a good student, though, because in the first chapter of Goldfinger we find him nursing the hand that has killed a Mexican with a ‘Parry Defence against Underhand Thrust out of the book’ and a hand-edge blow to the Adam’s Apple that had been ‘the standby of the Commandos’. A little later, in Chapter 5, we learn that Bond is writing Stay Alive!, a ‘handbook of all methods of unarmed combat’.
But Bond also uses weapons, of course. In Chapter 18 of Live and Let Die, he tries to kill an octopus using a commando dagger ‘of the type devised by Wilkinson’s during the war’. This would be the Fairbairn-Sykes Fighting Knife, issued to the SAS and other special forces outfits and eventually adopted as the Commando Association’s emblem. It’s still made by Wilkinson’s, still in use by British special forces²⁶ and is currently the shoulder-flash of the Royal Marine Commandos.²⁷
The idea that this character has had some sort of experience with special forces is not implausible—but what form might that have taken? In The James Bond Dossier, Kingsley Amis wondered what a Commander from Naval Intelligence had been doing in the Ardennes sector in 1944²⁸ (which Bond recollects in Chapter Nine of Dr No). This may simply have been an oversight on Fleming’s part, like the ‘cold blood’ boo-boo in From Russia, With Love, but it may also have been deliberate. In his obituary in You Only Live Twice, M tells us that Bond joined the Special Branch of the RNVR in 1941. Between that date and 1944, Peter Fleming undertook missions for both MI R and SOE; army intelligence officer Anthony Terry was captured in a naval commando raid; RAF men took part in 30 AU’s amphibious landings with Royal Naval Commandos; and Patrick Leigh Fermor and SOE colleagues arranged for guides to help Special Boat Service (SBS) officers across the mountains of Crete.²⁹ The Second World War was a time of irregular warfare, and resourceful young men barging into offices in Whitehall demanding to mount their own raids against the Nazis were not uncommon. Dozens of small commando units were formed, changed names or were subsumed into larger groups during the war, and as a result some enterprising men had extremely varied resumes by the cessation of hostilities. Churchill also set up Combined Operations under Lord Mountbatten, which ensured that commando groups worked together (like Dexter Smythe’s outfit in Octopussy). For Operation FRANKTON, for example, a raid on Bordeaux Harbour in December 1942, the Royal Marine Boom Patrol’s Detachment used limpet mines that had been developed by SOE³⁰—or ‘those things our saboteurs used against ships in the war’, as Bond describes them in Chapter 15 of Live and Let Die (later in the book he attaches a limpet mine to the hull of the Secatur).
Against this background, it’s not so unlikely for someone in the Special Branch of the RNVR to have heard machine-gun fire in the Ardennes. Unless Fleming meant for Bond to have been an infantry soldier at the Battle of the Bulge—which seems even more unlikely for someone in the RNVR—by far the most likely way for him to have been in the area would have been on a special forces mission. SOE’s Operation CITRONELLE, which sought out maquis in the Ardennes in April 1944, for example: he could have been a member of one of the famous Jedburgh teams, all of which contained one Brit, one American and one Frenchman—early training for working with Felix Leiter and René Mathis, perhaps. SOE produced more than its fair share of successes during the war: one of its best-known agents was the Polish-born countess Krystyna Skarbek, best known as Christine Granville.³¹
Another plausible explanation is that Bond was seconded to the SAS: it drew and still draws men from all armed forces (the ‘Air’ in its name was used to fit in with an earlier deception operation), and undertook several missions in the Ardennes during 1944.³² Fleming might easily have heard about one of these operations from David Niven or another friend who had worked with the regiment, and stored it away as being a suitable field of operation for Bond during the war.
Most obviously, perhaps, Fleming’s own brainchild, 30 Assault Unit, also undertook reconnaissance work in Belgium at around this time, and in his 2013 novel Solo William Boyd has Bond remember this episode and suggests he was attached to that unit. Boyd wasn’t the first author after Fleming to emphasise 007’s special forces ties: John Gardner—who served in the Royal Marines’ 42 Commando during the war—had Bond train with the SAS and the SBS in his novels.³³ The relationship has been even more overt onscreen: the closing scenes of many of the films, for example, are spectacular commando-like raids on villains’ lairs. HALO jumps, bungee jumps, parachute landings and shooting while skiing are all areas of special forces expertise. The recent Bond films continue the series’ habitual nods to special forces work: in Casino Royale, as well as Vesper’s appraisal, Bond holds up an embassy single-handedly and engages in plenty of hand-to-hand combat—he seems to have paid attention in his classes with that dam’ Commando.
The Bond novels and films have never purported to be realistic portrayals of clandestine work: they are fantastic adventures with one toe in the real world. James Bond is an amalgamation and elaboration of the most exciting bits of espionage and commando lore, filtered through the prodigious imagination of his creator. He is not, therefore, an out and out commando, but as a back story for the character, ‘former SAS type’ is not out of place: it is entirely fitting with his heritage. And, as I’ll explore in the next chapter, some of the special forces history that inspired Fleming would also inspire the Bond film-makers.