Book review: Fleming’s Commandos

IN 1939, Ian Fleming, the raffish son of a Scottish banking dynasty who affected the air of a dissolute man about town, sat down to luncheon in the grill of the Carlton Hotel in London

His lunch companions were two Admirals from the British Royal Navy. Fleming was about to be recruited to serve his country. By 1942, Lieutenant-Commander Ian Fleming RNVR was personal assistant to the director of naval intelligence.

The story of Fleming’s war, specifically the role he played in the formation of “30 Assault Unit”, a group of men who would go into the front lines to physically recover enemy intelligence material, is as action-packed as his novels.

30 Assault Unit specialised in interventions, and participated in landings in North Africa and Normandy. Their greatest success was the liberation of the compete archive of the German Navy in 1945, an archive which, as Nicholas Rankin explains, became instrumental in constructing the prosecution case at the Nuremburg trials. Some 60,000 files were shipped to London in crates of Munich Beer. “Rarely,” Rankin notes mildly, “can any country have captured so much of another country’s past.”

But while these plans met with considerable success, Fleming also gloried in generating a series of rather more far-fetched schemes. Rankin diplomatically calls these Fleming plans “imaginative brainwaves” but many were clearly on the bonkers side of brilliant.

Operation Ruthless – the plan to secure the Enigma Codes by pitching a captured German plane into the English Channel where it would be rescued by the Germans, who would then in turn be overpowered by the stranded German fliers who were really British airmen in disguise – might have succeeded had it got the green light from officials. It certainly had the support of mathematician Alan Turing of Bletchley Park.

A later plan, to enlist the “Great Beast” Aleister Crowley in a bizarre scheme to lure Rudolf Hess into contacting anti-Churchill agitators in Britain sounds like the plot of a particularly outré Fleming novel. This book meticulously recreates Fleming’s wartime experiences and avoids the reductive trick of relating everything to Bond. Rankin’s narrative style, of placing the reader in the middle of fictionalised scenes, complete with novelistic dialogue, reads as slightly coy, and for all its detail, the book does leave the question open as to how significant Fleming’s contribution to naval intelligence actually was. If it weren’t for the sterling service his famous fictional creation gave in defence of the realm, would we still be interested in Fleming’s wartime service?

• FLEMING’S COMMANDOS

Nicholas Rankin

Faber and Faber, £20

DAVID STENHOUSE