The parallel lives of Peter and Ian Fleming

He was a journalist and best-selling author, he devised ingenious deceptions while working in intelligence during the Second World War, he travelled to parts of the world tourists don't normally see, and he was in awe of his brother. I could be describing Ian Fleming, but it's his older brother, Peter, who I have in mind. 

I've just finished reading Duff Hart-Davis' brilliant 1974 biography of Peter Fleming, and was struck by just how closely Ian's life mirrored Peter's. Of course, being brothers growing up together, one would expect their childhoods to be near-identical, but even in adulthood, their paths followed remarkably similar trajectories.

Both Ian and Peter developed an interest in writing from a young age and began their literary careers in journalism. Ian joined Reuters in 1931, while, in the same year, Peter started at The Spectator as assistant literary editor. The following year, Peter was preparing for an expedition to Brazil, ostensibly to search for the explorer Colonel Fawcett, who had gone missing some years before, and was approached by The Times to become its Special Correspondent and report on the mission. Ian was also a Special Correspondent for The Times, but in 1939, when he covered a British trade mission to Moscow (by then Peter was full-time on the staff of the paper).

Throughout their journalistic careers, Ian and Peter's output was to some extent similar. In 1937, The Times sent Peter on a tour of European cities: Paris, Rome, Prague, Vienna, Berlin and Moscow. Some twenty years later, Ian took his own tour of European cities, though on behalf of the The Sunday Times, visiting Hamburg, Berlin, Vienna, Geneva, Naples and Monte Carlo. After the war, Peter returned to The Times as a writer of fourth leaders, which were generally light-hearted takes on the news of the day, while at The Spectator, he wrote humorous and idiosyncratic pieces under the pen-name Strix. Ian's Atticus column for The Sunday Times, written between 1953 and 1955, shared something of form and function of Peter's work. And curiously, both Ian and Peter managed to write articles about shaving, Peter's article being published in 1946, Ian's appearing in 1960.
 

Two of Peter Fleming's books in one volume

Peter Fleming is best known for his hugely successful travel books, among them Brazilian Adventure (1933), One's Company (1934), and News from Tartary (1936). One of his earliest forays into fiction was written during the early stages of the Second World War, when Britain was threatened by German invasion. The Flying Visit (1941) imagined a Britain in which the German plan had succeeded. Peter wrote it in bed while recovering from, ironically, German measles, and though the story was not a children's book, he dedicated it to his young son, Nicholas. Ian Fleming would similarly write a book – Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1964) – on his sick bed for his young son.

As for the Second World War, both Peter and Ian had what might be considered 'a good war'. Both worked in intelligence, which kept them away of frontline operations (although Peter would contrive, often unofficially, to be sent where the action was). Ian worked as assistant to the director of the Naval Intelligence Division (NID), while Peter, after a variety of roles, spent much of the war in the Far East running a unit known as GSI(d), which devised and executed methods of deception.

One of Peter's ruses was to take a corpse, provide it with the equipment of a British agent, including codes and a radio, and drop it into occupied Burma in the hope that the Japanese would find the body and start using the radio, which would transmit material back to British HQ in Delhi. If the plan seems familiar, then it may be because it was inspired by Operation Mincemeat, in which a body carrying disinformation was floated onto the Spanish coast for the Nazis to pick up. It's uncertain whether Peter was aware of it at the time, but he might have been amused to learn that the idea for that operation was Ian's.

Another wartime activity undertaken by both Ian and Peter was the setting up of commando units. Ian had his 'Red Indians', the 30 Assault Unit that would raid enemy territory to gather documents and other secret material. Peter, meanwhile, organised a commando unit in Greece on behalf of the SOE, and before that the XII Corps Observation Unit or Auxiliary Unit, which was a resistance force to counter a successful German invasion.
 

Ian Fleming alluded to Peter's wartime work in this collection

Among Peter's creations were underground hideouts, which were dug in woodland and concealed by vegetation and accessed by means of a trapdoor and rope ladder. The hideouts of course never saw hostile action, but Peter described them in his unpublished novel, The Sett, and they are likely to have provided the inspiration for the Soviet agents' underground bunker in Ian's short story, 'From a View to a Kill'. Indeed, Ian alludes to his brother's work in the story. Remarking on the sophistication of the Russian hideout, Bond considers that it was “far more brilliant than anything England had prepared to operate in the wake of a successful German invasion.”

After the war, Peter settled more comfortably into his estate in Nettlebed in Oxfordshire, while Ian built Goldeneye, his house in Jamaica. Goldeneye was designed by Ian to admit as much of the outside – the breeze, the sounds, the smells, and occasionally the creatures – into the house as possible by means of large, spartan rooms and enormous unglazed windows. Merrimoles, Peter's house on the Nettlebed estate, was built in 1938/9 with much the same principles in mind. Peter wanted plenty of doors and french windows and, as a friend suggested, the inside of the house to be like the outside. 

More generally, Peter and Ian had a similar outlook on life. Both were fatalistic and essentially irreligious and had been immensely affected by the events and acts of heroism they witnessed in the Second World War. They believed that the war showed Britain at its best, and expressed disappointment with values of the post-war generation. As for how they regarded each other, Ian felt that he was in Peter's shadow and considered Peter a hero, while Peter looked up to Ian (quite literally, too – Ian was taller).

That's not to say that Ian and Peter saw eye-to-eye on everything. Peter was not fond of the Caribbean, while Ian detested shooting, unlike his brother, who shot throughout his life, and in fact died of a heart attack in 1971 while out shooting in Scotland.

The lives of Ian and Peter Fleming were different in a number of respects, yet both enjoyed similar careers and successes, and had a lasting cultural impact on the lives of many others. Parallel lives, indeed.

References:

Hart-Davis, D, 1987 Peter Fleming: a biography, Oxford University Press, Oxford
Lycett, A, 1995 Ian Fleming: the man behind James Bond, Turner Publishing, Atlanta

In the footsteps of Octopussy's Major Dexter Smythe

Following a recent cycle ride in the Tyrolean mountains, guest writer Radley Biddulph revisits Ian Fleming's 'Octopussy', and considers why the short story remains a fascinating and exciting read.

I recently participated in a cycle race in the Alps. The seven-stage 880-kilometre bike race started in the Bavarian town of Sonthofen, near Munich, and climbed into the mountains via Austria and Switzerland, and finally into Italy with a finish in Arco, near Lake Garda. The route went through Tyrol, and covered 21 mountain passes of seemingly ever-increasing height, and each with an impressive name, such as Hahntennjoch, Flüelapass and Berninapass. The region is simply stunning, with dramatic landscapes, alpine lakes, green pastures, and snow-covered peaks. It was also baking hot. 

A view of the Tyrolean landscape

No surprises then that my thoughts turned to Ian Fleming’s own account of the Tyrolean mountains – and probably my favourite of Ian Fleming’s short stories – 'Octopussy'.

The story tells of Major Dexter Smythe, a member of the Secret Service during the war - now retired to Jamaica – and assigned to a unit called the Miscellaneous Objectives Bureau (MOB), who is tasked with searching in Tyrol for anything of interest – documents, lists of names – in Gestapo and military locations after the collapse of Germany. He discovers papers indicating gold buried in the Kaiser mountains, near Kulfstein, and he engages a local guide, Hannes Oberhauser, to help him show him the route up the slopes. Once the gold is located, Oberhauser is killed. It is the ill-gotten gold that enables Smythe to retire to Jamaica, where soon bored, and with his wife having overdosed on sleeping pills, he is slowly drinking himself to death. 

It is a brilliant read. You get a real sense of Fleming’s intimate knowledge of life in Jamaica. Fleming’s description of life in the small ex-pat British community is vivid, and, like Fleming, Smythe lives on the North Shore of Jamaica, and spends much of his time snorkelling, drinking and smoking excessively. 

The story is also engrained with Fleming’s own experiences of the Second World War with 30 Assault Unit (30AU). Smythe is a former Royal Marine Commando, seconded to Combined Operations and MOB, and Fleming’s own involvement with 30AU, which was tasked with undertaking operations in enemy territory to capture intelligence, meant that he would have had first-hand source material for the story. The story is also reminiscent of other military units at the end of the war, such as T-Force, a unit jointly raised by US and British forces to secure information, documents and equipment, and the Allies’ Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section, which was established to safeguard cultural assets and works of art during and after the war, recently depicted in the George Clooney film, The Monuments Men (2014).

But for me, the story comes alive with the description of the climb up the Kaiser mountain. It is arduous, both Smythe and Oberhauser are sweating with their exertions, and their climbing is sending boulders and rubble crashing down the slope. You can really feel the enormous effort needed to reach the summit, or the Peak of Gold, as Smythe refers to it. And for Smythe, this is only the half of it. The more difficult part is to get the gold back down the slope. The box is heavy and he is dragging it clumsily behind him, the sun beating down and his shoulders burning. Finally he succeeds, and with some planning, having found a conduit to exchange the gold, he is able to resign his commission and retire to the West Indies.

The challenging slopes of the Tyrolean mountains

The story is also interesting because, like The Spy Who Loved Me, it is not seen from the viewpoint of James Bond but of another character, in this case, Smythe. In fact, Bond is merely a device; arriving at Smythe’s house to question the former security officer about his wartime record, and in particular his activities in Tyrol, and it is because of Bond’s visit, Smythe looks back on the incident in the mountains and his life with MOB.

Tryol's rocky slopes

As for Bond, he chooses to take on the case because Oberhauser taught Bond to ski before the war and was like a father to him when he needed one. Intriguingly, the forthcoming Bond film, Spectre (2015) stars Christoph Waltz as Franz Oberhauser, a figure in SPECTRE who claims a personal connection with Bond. Whether this personal connection will refer to Bond’s friendship with Hannes Oberhauser remains to be seen but it would be nice to think there is a reference to 'Octopussy', a story very closely linked to Fleming’s own experiences.

Operation Crossbow and Ian Fleming

Last month saw the publication of Operation Crossbow: The Untold Story of Photographic Intelligence and the Search for Hitler's V Weapons. The book, by Allan Williams, describes how a team of top photographic interpreters and intelligence officers uncovered the secrets of Germany's long-range ballistic missile programme from millions of aerial photographs, which had been taken in daring reconnaissance missions by Spitfire and Mosquito pilots. The discovery of an aircraft on a ramp at Peenemünde in northern Germany was the breakthrough that allowed the allies to plan countermeasures and seek and destroy rocket bases.

Readers of Nicholas Rankin's Ian Fleming's Commandos (2011) will be familiar with Fleming's peripheral involvement in the operation. Days after the Allied landing on the Normandy beaches on D-Day, commandos of Fleming's 30 Assault Unit (30AU) joined a heavily-armed unit to investigate a possible V-weapon launch site. The site was confirmed, and the resulting intelligence sent back to London (and presumably transferred to Medmenham in Buckinghamshire, where photographic interpreters were based). Rankin also describes a later episode when Fleming visited members of 30AU at Carteret in Normandy and discussed V-weapons with some of the men.

In his book, Ian Fleming's Secret War (2008), Craig Cabell goes much further, suggesting that Fleming was responsible for much of the intelligence fed to 30AU about the location and structure of V-weapon launch sites, and claiming that Fleming had gathered his information from resistance groups and after poring over aerial photographs. What's more, Fleming's novel, Moonraker (1955), holds the clues to his involvement in Operation Crossbow and the search for German rockets. It cannot be denied that the novel, featuring as it does Nazi scientists and a V2-like rocket, took inspiration from wartime events. But then again, so too did Hergé's Destination Moon (1953), which sent Tintin into space – anyone writing about rockets in the 1940s/early 1950s can hardly have failed to turn to images of German technology – and indeed, Cabell admits that his argument for Fleming's involvement in Crossbow lacks evidence.

In contrast, Allan Williams' account makes no mention of Ian Fleming's involvement (which perhaps tells us something), but Fleming does appear twice. Williams mentions in passing that Frederick Sidney Cotton, pioneer of wartime aerial photography and reconnaissance, was the inspiration for Fleming's fictional head of MI6 research and development, Q. Cotton thus joins Charles Fraser-Smith and others identified as the real Q, despite there being no such character in the books, although Fleming and Cotton certainly knew each other and, indeed, were friends. (Incidentally, Cotton has the rare distinction of also being identified as a model for James Bond; again this seems highly unlikely.)

Ian Fleming is mentioned again later in Williams' book in connection with a map Bond uses in The Man with the Golden Gun (1965). The map, supplied by Mary Goodnight, is a 1:50,000 Overseas Survey Map made by the Directorate of Overseas Surveys (DOS). Maps prepared by DOS proved critical in the search for V-weapons, and the deputy director of DOS, John Wright, was said to have been thrilled by the oblique reference to his work.

While Ian Fleming's 30AU had been involved in the search for German missile launch sites, and Fleming had been inspired by events and German technology when he came to write Moonraker, the latest research suggests that Fleming's part in Operation Crossbow, beyond facilitating the gathering and distribution of intelligence, had been somewhat peripheral.

Ian Fleming's commandos and James Bond

The story of Ian Fleming's 30 Commando/Assault Unit has been a long time in the telling. There have been books from members of the elite force, such as From Arctic Snow to Dust of Normandy, by Patrick Dalzel-Job, and The Hazard Mesh, by J A C 'Tony' Hugill, but these have been personal narratives, rather than broader dispassionate histories. Recently, we have had Craig Cabell's History of the 30 Assault Unit, which, though a welcome attempt to tell the story of the unit, incorporating interviews with survivors and information from documents that had remained secret, lacked depth and was marred by excessive typographic errors. Then there was the film, Age of Heroes, starring Sean Bean. The film had its moments, but contained too many plot holes or rather great chunks of script torn from the pages of the screenplay to accommodate the shoestring budget.

So with the publication of Nicholas Rankin's, Ian Fleming's Commandos: the story of the 30 Assault Unit in WWII, the 30AU and Ian Fleming's role in it finally has a definitive account. What separates this book from those before it is the author's complete self-assurance at placing the inception and function of the unit in context. The book spends pages and pages away from the unit to explain the work of the Bletchley Park code-breakers, or German rocket technology or the events leading up and during the war in the Mediterranean and D-Day. Consequently, the importance and success of the work of 30AU – particularly with regard to Enigma and German naval intelligence – is made more significant.

The book also details aspects of the war that normally fall between the cracks of official histories. Rankin describes the petty jealousies among officers and leaders, devastating friendly-fire incidences caused by poor communication and human error, and the mental anguish and physical horrors suffered by soldiers in the face of the carnage of Dieppe and D-Day. But above all, there is the bravery, comradeship, humour and incredible heroism among the men who served in 30AU.

Ian Fleming's achievements were as an organiser, fixer, and administrator. Very early in the war, he recognised the valuable contribution that elite units could make to intelligence gathering. This was irregular warfare of which not everyone approved. But Fleming was adept at persuading people to his way of thinking, and before long his commandos were up and running. Then on, he made sure that his men had everything they needed to carry out their work, even if that meant ruffling the feathers of the top brass.

But although Fleming was respected by his men, but he was not universally liked. Tony Hugill thought him 'one of those superior professorial type RNVRs', although he modified his opinion after being name-checked in The Man With The Golden Gun.

The 30AU and the world of wartime intelligence had a lasting impact on Fleming, and their legacy is apparent in the James Bond books he wrote 10-20 years after the end of the Second World War. Of James Bond, Fleming said that he was a 'compound of secret agent and commando types'. Rankin highlights other connections. For example, M is popularly thought to have been based on Fleming's chief in the Naval Intelligence Division, Admiral John Godfrey, but he also writes in a green ink like Colonel Claude Dansey, a top SIS officer (a Major Dansey is also mentioned as Kerim Bey's predecessor in From Russia, with Love). Rankin wonders whether the name Dr No was influenced by a certain Dr Noton, who had complained about 30AU. And in Thunderball, Largo's men steal the two nuclear weapons from the RAF bomber using a two-man midget submarine employed in the war by the Italian navy (also a 30AU target) usually to plant limpet mines.

The stories that rely most heavily on the work and the targets of the 30AU are, of course, Moonraker and 'Octopussy'. The former is steeped in the events of the end of the Second World War and the start of the Cold War. For instance, and most obviously, it has as its backdrop Britain's attempt to develop an independent nuclear capability and keep up with the Americans and Soviets. Fleming refers to the race in the months before and after the war ended to capture German missile experts and technology. Drax's missile system is fuelled by hydrogen peroxide, a fuel developed by the Germans for submarines (and whose secrets were pinched by 30AU) but superseded soon after the war by nuclear power. Krebs, Drax's main henchman, served in the war as a 'Werewolf'', a member of a Nazi youth guerrilla organisation.

The short story 'Octopussy' concerns the actions of Major Dexter Smythe, an officer in the Miscellaneous Objectives Bureau, whose mission is to clear out German hide-outs. Clearly 30AU provides a model for the fictional MOB force. The gold that Smythe kills for (and the reason why Bond tracks him down) is taken from the massive hoards of gold stolen and melted down on an industrial scale by the Nazis throughout the war.

Nicholas Rankin's book contains many other links between Fleming's war and James Bond, and is an essential read for anyone interested in the origins of Bond and his adventures.