Mark Simmons - Ian Fleming’s War: The Inspiration for 007

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Copyright 2021 by Mark Simmons

Simultaneously published in the UK by The History Press, 2021

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Set in Minion Pro

epub isbn : 9781644281789

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Simmons, Mark, 1921- author.
Title: Ian Flemings war : the inspiration for 007 / Mark Simmons ;
foreword by Anthony Horowitz
Description: First North American hardcover edition. | Los Angeles, CA :
Rare Bird Books, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020046046 (print) | LCCN 2020046047 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781644281345 (hardback) | ISBN 9781644281789 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Fleming, Ian, 1908-1964CharactersJames Bond. |
Bond, James (Fictitious character) | Politics and
cultureEnglandHistory20th century. | Fleming, Ian,
1908-1964Political and social views. | Spy stories, EnglishHistory
and criticism. | Espionage in literature. | Spies in literature.
Classification: LCC PR6056.L4 Z856 2020 (print) | LCC PR6056.L4 (ebook) |
DDC 823/.914dc22

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020046046
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020046047

Tiger was completely sent. He was back there again fighting the war. Bond knew the symptoms. He often visited this haunted forest of memory himself.

You Only Live Twice

Contents

Introduction

Glossary and Acronyms

1 Lunch at the Carlton Grill

2 Naval Intelligence Division, 191239

3 The Phoney War

4 Find the Admiral

5 Operation Golden Eye

6 Operation Ruthless

7 The Hess Affair, May 1941

8 Architect of US Intelligence

9 Gibraltar

10 Is Your Journey Really Necessary?

11 Change of Command

12 30AU Get their Knees Brown

13 Back to France

14 The Final Push

15 Casino Royale

Appendix 1: Ian Flemings James Bond Books

and their Second World War Content

Appendix 2: Other Writers of Bond Books and their Books

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Foreword

By Anthony Horowitz

Who is James Bond?

The question may seem an obvious onehe is by some distance the most famous fictional character ever createdbut actually, theres no obvious answer.

If you start with the films, you have to sift through seven quite separate personalities from Connery to Craig, taking in Roger Moore with his exuberant puns (more double entendre than double-0-seven) and George Lazenby, who described Bond as a brute and walked away from the franchise. Personally, Ive always admired the way the films have adapted themselves to whatever decade theyve found themselves in: since 1962 and Dr. No , Eon Productions have almost written a social history of the UK and its place in the world.

That said, some of the films have only a passing acquaintance with Ian Flemings books. After Dr. No , From Russia with Love, and Goldfinger , the films went their own way, sending Bond into outer space, equipping him with an invisible car or pitting him against a villain with steel teeth. All very enjoyable but, as the author of two Bond continuation novels (generously credited by Mark Simmons in this book), Ive always found myself more drawn to Flemings literary work.

But even here the question of Bonds inspiration is a tricky one.

Mark Simmons correctly draws parallels between Bond and his creator: they had the same taste for cigarettes, scrambled eggs, and clothes. They had the same rank of commander and, for that matter, the same sexual drives. But Lionel Crabb, the Royal Navy diver, also appears in these pages, as does Dusko Popov, the Yugoslavian double agent. Fleming knew both of them and both have at one time or another been suggested as the original Bond.

The pleasure of Ian Flemings War jammed with anecdote and information I had never read beforeis that it clearly demonstrates how much James Bond owes to Naval Intelligence, to the Special Operations Executive (SOE), and the fabled Room 39, and how some of the harebrained schemes thought up in Baker Street and elsewhere ended up in the stories that would still be entertaining millions of people seventy years later.

Its an extraordinary collision of fact, fiction, and fantasy. I love the way that Simmons starts with one of my favorite childhood storiesErskine Childers 1903 classic, Riddle of the Sands and suggests how this may have given Fleming the idea for a wartime operation to spy on enemy U-boats. Like so many of his schemes, this never actually happened but years later it turns up, vaguely, as the plot of A View to a Kill . So from fiction to fact and back to fiction again. Or what about the completely bonkers idea of luring a Nazi leader to Britain on a fake peace mission? It was inspired by a novella written not by Ian but by his brother, Peter Fleming, and that might have been the end of it except that, less than a year later, Rudolf Hess landed in Scotland and was captured in not entirely dissimilar circumstancesand when you add in the fact that Fleming seriously investigated Hesss interest in the occult, even (perhaps) meeting with the famous black magician and Great Beast, Aleister Crowley, you begin to get a sense of the delirious mix of sense and nonsense that make the Bond books so delicious. Simmons adds that Crowley was the inspiration for Le Chiffre in Casino Royale , something I should have known but didnt.

Ever since I started writing Foyles War for television, I have had a fascination with the intelligence organizations during the war. Everything about them, from their larger-than-life personalities, their intense loyalty to the service and to each other, their imaginative schemes and, of course, their gadgets are allwell, pure James Bond. I remember seeing a Sykes Fairbairn commando knife on display at the Special Forces Club in Knightsbridge and thinking of Bond in Live and Let Die , using a commando dagger of the type devised by Wilkinson during the war. The limpet mine Bond uses in the same chapter could just as easily have been an SOE sticky bomb (thinking of later Bond films, SOE also invented a miniature submarine). I like the idea that, according to Simmons, Fleming traveled to Madrid with a fountain pen equipped with a cyanide cartridge and that a prototype of the briefcase with its various secret weapons used by Bond in From Russia with Love accompanied him on the same trip.

Watching the films as a boy, my favorite scenes were always the ones where Bond received his orders from M, and I loved the relationship between them in the books: the bridge game at Blades, the health drive that leads to Shrublands, the lecture on diamonds that prompts M to growl: Dont push it in. Screw it in. Hes referring to a jewelers magnifying glass but Bond has other uses of the dictum in mind. Kingsley Amis wrote of M as the analogue of a father and a father of pre-1939 vintage at that ( The James Bond Dossier ). But I think of him as the very exemplar of wartime intelligence.