Fleming Ian - Ian Flemings Commandos: The Story of the Legendary 30 Assault Unit

2 30AU in Nazi Germany. As Hitlers Third Reich collapsed under assault from Allied forces, small, mobile parties of 30AU men were able to seize key targets: industrial factories, oft en using slave-labour from concentration camps, major naval bases and experimental workshops developing new weapons of war. In one brilliant coup, 30AU also captured the entire archive of the German navy at Tambach Castle.

BIOS British Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee

CAFT Consolidated Advanced Field Teams

CIOS Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee

COHQ Combined Operations Headquarters

COPPs Combined Operations Pilotage Parties

DNI Director of Naval Intelligence (DDNI, Deputy Director; ADNI Assistant Director)

FFI Forces franaises de lintrieur

FIU Royal Navy Forward Interrogation Unit

GC&CS Government Code and Cypher School

IAU Intelligence Assault Unit

ISTD Inter-Services Topographical Department

JIC Joint Intelligence Committee

LRDG Long Range Desert Group

MI(R) Military Intelligence (Research)

NID Naval Intelligence Division

OIC Operational Intelligence Centre

OSS Office of Strategic Services

RDF Radio Direction-Finding

RTU Returned to Unit

SAS Special Air Service

SBS Special Boat Section/Service/Squadron

SHAEF Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force

SIGINT Signals Intelligence

SIS Secret Intelligence Service

SOE Special Operations Executive

TAC HQ Tactical Headquarters

W/T wireless telegraphy

On 20 September 2010 the Pentagon ordered the entire first print-run of a book written by a US military intelligence officer about spycraft in Afghanistan to be destroyed, because it revealed secret classified information. One of the 200-odd deletions from the second edition of Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffers Operation Dark Heart was the term TAREX, defined in the first editions glossary as TARget EXploitation. Small-unit, up-close, intelligence-gathering operatives. Usually two-to-three man units.

The gathering of intelligence by small units at the military front may be a secret to Americans; it is not new to the British. Th is book describes how Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond books Lieutenant Commander I. L. Fleming RNVR (Special Branch), as he then was introduced the idea to Britains Naval Intelligence Division during the Second World War. Ian Flemings Commandos tells the true story of the commando unit that Fleming founded, known at various times as 30 Commando or 30 Assault Unit, who won their spurs seizing Axis enemy intelligence in North Africa, Italy and France and finally achieved two great intelligence coups in the collapsing Third Reich in 1945.

Flemings fictional secret agent James Bond is now as well known as Sherlock Holmes. The books (a dozen novels, two volumes of short stories) have sold millions and the films have made billions. Anthony Burgess considered James Bond likely to end up as one of the great twentieth-century myths, adding that he is a model neo-Elizabethan, a hero we need. Simon Winders The Man Who Saved Britain argued that Flemings quixotic hero masked and solaced the UKs drastic post-war decline.

Much of Ian Flemings Commandos is about the secret side of warfare, the codebreaking, the deals and double-dealings, and above all the drive to acquire new, war-winning technologies things that Fleming learned about in his six extraordinary years working in wartime Naval Intelligence. There he liaised with spies, agents and special forces, and founded his commando unit dedicated to seizing enemy documents, weapons and equipment from the front line. Th is is the backstory of James Bond, who, like his creator, thought nostalgically and unreasonably of the excitement and turmoil of the hot war, compared with his own underground skirmishings since the war had turned cold.

In a new century, after a gap of six decades, Ian Flemings ground breaking idea of a Royal Navy intelligence assault unit dedicated to target exploitation has been revived in the UK. With just a few of its original veterans from the Second World War still alive, 30AU has risen like a phoenix from the ashes.

The inaugural parade of 30 Commando Information Exploitation Group Royal Marines took place on a very cold, bright morning, 13 December 2010, at Stonehouse Barracks in Plymouth. The name 30 Commando was chosen in tribute to the forgotten men of Flemings 30 Commando/30 Assault Unit, and the secretary of the 30AU old comrades association, Mrs Dianne Fisher, represented them at the ceremonial blessing of their yellow and blue standard.