by Andrew Cook
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.
• 7 •
JAMAICA
• WHAT TO DO NEXT •
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 Euro
pe 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.
He tied up the loose ends of his naval career and considered the future. He would carry on training with the RNVR. The Cold War began soon after the hot one finished, and nobody was completely sure, for a long time, that hostilities would not break out somewhere. Godfrey still lived at No. 36 Curzon Street and gave dinners to which he invited members of Naval Intelligence – men only, of course. There they could reminisce and talk shop for as long as they liked.
Just as Ian was beginning to relax, Anne received a proposal. In 1945 she told him she would marry Esmond Rothermere. They would live at her house in Montagu Square.
Ian took a flat in Montagu Place. Anne, as Lady Rothermere, was financially secure, and returned to doing what she did best – entertaining what the French would call a salon of artists and writers, mostly witty, not particularly intellectual but good, if slightly bitchy, company for her and for one another. She invited Peter Quennell and Lucien Freud, Duff and Diana Cooper, Evelyn Waugh and Noël Coward, Stephen Spender, Barbara Skelton, Felix Topolski, Cyril Connolly and many others. She was far from happy with her husband, but she understood Ian and knew that, like a cat, he was attracted to women who didn’t seem to want him. Ian was just around the corner, and since he did not appear to enjoy himself much with her crowd, he was not always invited.
• REFUGE •
Ivar got in touch, quite suddenly. Reggie Acquart thought he’d found the perfect property. Could Ian come out and see it?
Ian could. Reggie, a Jamaican by birth, took him to see what Bryce called ‘a fourteen-acre strop’ – a long narrow piece – on the island’s north coast about a quarter of a mile east of the village and harbour of Oracabessa. This was a village, a ‘free village’ founded by the famous abolitionist James Philippo in the 1830s. Nothing much ever happened there, except when banana boats called in from time to time. The locals had a jolly time then, loading green bananas onto the boats, getting paid and partying long into the night. ‘Oracabessa was fast asleep between these calls.’
There was a shack on a clifftop near the village end of the 14 acres. A garden’s length in front of it, and 40ft below, was the ocean – with a white sand beach and an underwater reef with tropical fish flashing in and out, just visible through clear water. Ian was enchanted. On a rock sticking up from the seabed grew a few wild plants: a single fragrant Portlandia, with its dancing bell-like blooms, and the local weed, Shamelady (so called because if you touch it, it shrinks away). The beach was inaccessible except by boat, but anyone who bought the land could have steps cut in the cliff.
Ian agreed the price by cable. The strip of coastline with the shack on it would cost £2,000 sterling. The future he’d imagined for himself on the plane back from the Kingston conference, in the middle of the war, had never left his thoughts. In Jamaica, in his own house, alone, he would find peace and quiet and write spy stories that would make him rich and famous.
Now all he needed was an income of some sort, and something rather better than the shack to live in.
The war had allowed him to outgrow his childhood. The RNVR was family now. The Flemings of course were still part of his life. Amaryllis, the little sister in whom he had not shown much interest until she was a teenager, had proved to be far more of a rebel than her brothers. She resented Eve, the woman she had been told was her adoptive mother. Nobody knew, said Eve, who her father was. Eve had her own half-baked reasons for telling these lies, but as a result of them Amaryllis felt lonely, rejected and defiant.
At Downe House School, which she loathed, she had spent every spare moment playing the cello and lived for her regular trips to private lessons at the Royal College of Music. She had performed on BBC radio when she was 15 and completed her education at the RCM while performing as a soloist. When the war ended she was 20, and managing her own career. It helped that she was a beautiful redhead of outstanding talent, but she still struggled to find work at first and asked both Eve and Peter for an allowance to see her through. Both refused, saying she should join an orchestra to earn her keep, but she knew she would be trapped if she did that.
She was determined to be recognised as a unique talent while she was still young, and she went on to become one of Europe’s leading solo performers, partly by investing in herself. She paid for tuition from others of great merit. One of those was Pierre Fournier, with whom she had an affair. He was married with a child and the same age as Peter Fleming. She later said that the Fournier tuition had come to abrupt close when Peter discovered their love affair and visited the cellist in his London hotel room. There was a lively exchange of views, after which the white-faced lover called the whole thing off, telling Amaryllis that he would never feel safe as long as he feared that one of her brothers might come after him with a pistol. What she did not know, but Peter almost certainly did, was that during the war Fournier had earned generous fees by performing on a German-funded radio station that broadcast to Vichy France.
In 1945 Peter and Celia Fleming were living in Oxfordshire and bringing up their son, Nicholas, aged 6; they would soon have two daughters as well. Celia had reservations about Ian. In 1940, when Peter was an officer in the British Expeditionary Force in Norway, the Daily Sketch had reported his death in action. Eve and Celia were devastated, and Celia never got over a suspicion that Ian could have prevented Lord Kemsley from printing such an error.
Peter remained a popular author. At the start of the war he had found time to write The Flying Visit, a gentle satire in which Hitler floats down from the sky somewhere in the Home Counties. After much puffing and sliding and scavenging across muddy countryside he arrives at a village hall where a talent contest in full swing. When he takes the stage everyone thinks he is a comic turn and he wins a pound of butter. Much put out by being laughed at – and dismissed as a disgrace by his pre-war admirer Lord Scunner – he is captured and kept as a prisoner of war. Upon his deportation the German government, having employed a double in his absence, sends the real Hitler back.
Peter Fleming’s war opened in the Grenadier Guards and ended in India and the Far East. In between, among other things, he was engaged by Lieutenant-Colonel Gubbins to help set up the Auxiliary Units, secret commando-type units of the Home Guard that would become active only in case of invasion. Members of the Auxiliaries were trained in sabotage and guerrilla warfare. They were the military predecessor of 30AU, and many of the soldiers had served in The Independent Companies in Norway.
Richard went back to the bank. It seemed that you did not need to be a financial genius to run a merchant bank after the war. If you were family, you took advice, and you sat on the Board, and you made decisions based on that advice. There were no major mergers or acquisitions, no upheaval. The City went on much as it always had, with the clearing banks doing what they did, and the Barings, Rothschilds and Flemings occupying their own niches.
Eve had become eccentric. At the start of the war she had chosen to live in an old abbey in Berkshire that was supposed to be haunted. Her companions were her crotchety maid Hilda (the one who called her ‘The Great I Am’) and, in the school holidays, sulking Amaryllis. The house in Cheyne Walk was shut up, and later on it was hit by a bomb, so in 1944, when the German attacks had died down, Eve took a flat in Knightsbridge. The following year she moved to No. 21 Charles Street, a smart Mayfair Georgian terrace with four storeys and a basement. She was in her element again, overseeing its redecoration. And Ian moved quite soon to Hay’s Mews, which was not only close to his mother’s house but to Godfrey’s c
onvivial dinners in Curzon Street too. Amaryllis was a frequent visitor to Hay’s Mews, and according to Fergus Fleming, she met plenty of girlfriends coming and going. ‘They ran his baths; they fetched his lighter off the mantelpiece; and they cooked salmon kedgeree, which he sent them to learn from his mother.’
• THE INCOME •
At the end of the war Ian was offered a suitable job with a high salary: working for Lord Kemsley as head of foreign news for all thirty or so papers in the Kemsley group, including The Sunday Times, which was then based in Grays Inn Road. He took it, on condition that he might spend two months of every year in Jamaica. Kemsley agreed. Ian would be a manager, information gatherer and occasional contributor. He brought glamour and connections to the post.
In Fleet Street at the Rothermere group’s Daily Mail, Anne was directing Esmond, according to Time magazine. Esmond had managed to quell the pre-war appeasement stance of that paper – these days it supported Churchill – but his new wife was often called ‘imperious’. She acted like a newspaper magnate manquée but had no idea of financial or other considerations. ‘Annie’s boys’, who included Peter Quennell, were, on the whole, good journalists. They got an extremely generous salary and expenses.
Ian commuted by car from Hay’s Mews to The Sunday Times offices. Weekly editorial conferences were held at the start of the journalistic week on Tuesdays. They were chaired by Lord Kemsley, who besides being the owner was also editor in chief. Ian’s job meant appointing foreign correspondents and making sure that their articles were syndicated to papers all over Britain. All his reporters would have a few pieces on the back burner, and he would be in touch with key players before the weekly meeting to get a precis of breaking news in capitals across the world. He would have a rough outline, always subject to change, of the following Sunday’s foreign coverage, and Kemsley and the other editors would indicate approval or otherwise.