In December 1944 Ian Fleming set off for the Far East on his mission to review the British Pacific Fleet intelligence arm. He flew via Cairo and on to Ceylon, where his old friend from Spain and Operation Golden Eye, Alan Hillgarth, was now Chief of British Naval Intelligence Eastern Theater (CBNIET). He had gone out the year before and had first worked in Delhi from the headquarters of Lord Louis Mountbatten. Early in 1944, that HQ was moved to Colombo, the capital of Ceylon. Alan spent most of his time at HMS Anderson, a land-based signals intelligence center named after the Anderson golf course about ten miles from Colombo. There Japanese radio traffic was monitored and analyzed and shared with Bletchley Park. It was so secret Mountbatten knew little about it.
HMS Anderson was laid out on an open site, with lots of single-story, bungalow-like structures with verandas surrounded by jungle. The radio direction-finding hut stood alone, in a 200-yard clear space, marked out by a mass of aerials. By the use of high-frequency, direction-finding “Huff-Duff,” they monitored Japanese radio traffic. Using it, skilled operators were able to identify individual Japanese ships from that vessel’s “finger prints.” They could identify the ship’s individual radio men often by the way they used their keypads. Not only that: even the W/T equipment had distinct traces.1
Two days before Christmas, Fleming got to Ceylon. Alan Hillgarth was pleased to see him. He wrote to his wife: “My friend Ian Fleming here on a brief visit…” and went on to say Ian would “solve” a lot of problems at home: “It’s nice seeing him, because he brings a breath of the big world.” His assistant, Wren Clare Blanchard, took to Ian and he was instantly attracted to her. Here was a “thirty-six and beautiful” naval officer in his tropical uniform, she confided in a letter to her brother. Everything about him was “right.”2
Ian took Clare to a Christmas dance at the Galle Face Hotel, where he was billeted. She was thrilled, although he was not a good dancer. He in turn was stunned by her appearance in a long white silk dress. Seventeen years later he sent her a postcard of the ballroom, marked it with an X and wrote, “I’m behind the palm tree on the right, watching you in the white dress…” The two explored the island together; Ian enjoyed the tropical heat, and confided to her that he would never “spend the winter in England again.”3
However, it was not all festivities. Ian sent two reports to the DNI about the intelligence structure Alan was setting up.4 Clare typed them up and was surprised when she found Ian editing them. He explained to her it was wise to “make one or two corrections in a report otherwise no one will know you’ve read it.”5
In Delhi, Ian caught up with his brother, Peter, who was on Mountbatten’s staff and ran a small deception team, D Division, which had managed to convince the Japanese that Allied strength in India was greater than it was. He was not above comical abuse either: one of his agents continually told his “Japanese contact that his commanding officer was living with a prostitute, and that the ruling family of Japan had short, furry tails, of which they were inordinately proud.”6
In January, Ian returned to Colombo, and then set off for Australia on January 23, 1945, accompanied by Alan and Clare. Ian, never overly fond of flying, was annoyed when the Catalina flying boat had to turn back with engine trouble after only two hours. He threatened to go back to England if they did not set off in the morning. Two days later they were in the air again. The journey took twenty-six hours in an unheated plane at 10,000 feet. They wore flying suits, overcoats, and were covered in rugs, yet still felt cold.
In Sydney, Ian and Clare enjoyed the good life, staying at Petty’s Hotel, frequenting the nightclubs and taking trips to Whale Beach for swimming. It was as if there was no war. Yet all too soon Ian left and headed for Pearl Harbor. From there he sent a personal letter to Alan thanking him: “You could not have been more kind from the moment I stepped ashore in Colombo to the day I left Sydney.” He praised the job he was doing, and that he should be “very proud.” He added, “Please give my best love to the angel Clare.” He said he would write to her and she was a “jewel and I miss her protective wing very much.” He finished by promising to fight Alan’s “battles in London.”7
It is revealing that Bond calls another Wren an “angel” in The Man with the Golden Gun. Mary Goodnight is a capable crutch for 007 to lean on after tangling with Scaramanga.8 He first comes across her in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and she has “blue-black hair, blue eyes, and 37-22-35, was a honey…” Office gossip has it she is more fond of 006, the former Royal Marine Commando. She is Loelia Ponsonby’s replacement.9
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By early February 1945, after his round-the-world trip Ian was back at his desk in Room 39. Colonel Humphrey Quill RM, who had commanded 30AU in the Mediterranean, was now to lead the unit as they went with the Allied Armies across the border into Germany. The main targets on Ian’s blacklists were the advanced U-boats built and designed at Kiel. The 30AU was the first Allied force to enter the town. Ian kept them busy with constant requests from his shopping list, of which some items were openly questioned to even exist. Much evidence was found about the fast Type XVII U-boats, or “Walterboats” as they were known, named after the Walter drive system powered by hydrogen peroxide and designed by Doctor Hellmuth Walter.
I. G. Aylen, known as “Jan,” then a commander serving with 30AU, came across two of the Walterboats in Hamburg on May 3. U-1408 and U-1410 had both been “heavily damaged by bombs” as they lay on the jetty. They resembled “a gigantic fish rather than a conventional submarine… It was clear that certain parts, mainly the ‘boiler’ unit of the turbine drive, had been cut away with a blow torch and removed.”10
In Kiel, 30AU caught up with Doctor Walter, “a rather heavy, flabby-cheeked man.”11 He talked freely but only about generalities. He would reveal nothing about using the liquid hydrogen peroxide in the combustion chambers, and confessed to being a loyal Nazi.
Colonel Quill rushed off to Admiral Karl Dönitz’s HQ on the Danish border. Germany had officially surrendered on May 4 and all U-boats were ordered to return to base the day after. Quill obtained written orders from the admiral, the last leader of the Third Reich, that nothing was to be withheld from 30AU. Dönitz also sent one of his aides to see Walter with the same message. Walter then cooperated fully, ensuring that submarine test units, various torpedoes, aircraft jet engines, and V-1 launch ramps were ready to demonstrate for Allied VIPs.12
Aylen got to know Walter and his immediate staff well and says:
though our relationship was of necessity coolly formal, mutual respect was established, and he worked loyally for UK interest. This was perhaps in keeping with his background as an entrepreneur par excellence who would have employed his undoubted technical ability in the service of whatever political system happened in the ascendant. His close friendship with Dönitz helped, and he had, I believe the ear of the Führer in so far as Hitler had any interest in anything naval.13
A Dr. Walter is a character in Moonraker; he is German and a rocket expert. Would Ian have met Hellmuth Walter? Unlikely. Would he have known about him? Almost certainly. Not that Hugo Drax’s chief scientist looked like the one 30AU captured. Fleming’s character is “thin elderly” with a head of black hair and pronounces his name “Valter,” whereas the one captured in Kiel was heavy and flabby-cheeked. Yet Ian’s fondness for using real people’s names in thinly veiled characters makes him a good candidate.14
Kingsley Amis felt Hugo Drax was Fleming’s best villain “because the most imagination and energy has gone into his portrayal.”15 His full name was Graf Hugo van der Drache and Fleming gave him a comprehensive background. He serves with the Brandenburg Regiment initially raised by the Abwehr. Then later he is with SS Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny, who commanded the 150th SS Panzer Brigade in the Ardennes in 1944, from which Drax gets cut off fifty miles behind enemy lines. He falls in with a small section of the Hitlerjugend Werewolves; a guerrilla forced raised by Heinrich Himmler of fanatical Nazi volunteers. Their leader is Krebs, who had “certain gifts which qualified him for the post of executioner and persuader…”16
Drax has fifty German guided-missile technicians, who under the guidance of Dr. Walter develop a ballistic missile system located on the cliffs between Dover and Deal. Drax, a mysterious multimillionaire, has convinced the government it is to protect Britain, but his aim is to use it against London. His mother was English, and he was educated in England until twelve. But he despises Britain, a country of “useless, idle, decadent fools, hiding behind your White Cliffs while other people fight your battles,” he tells Bond.17
M draws Bond’s attention to Drax in the beginning because he cheats at cards, and he doesn’t trust him. He is not prepared to “chance anything going wrong with this rocket of his.”18 At Blades Club, where M plays cards, Bond soon works out how Drax cheats at bridge using a highly polished cigarette case to read the cards before the dealer puts them down on the table. Bond himself cheats to trap Drax, who loses £16,500.
Bond and Gala Brand, an undercover policewoman working for Drax, discover his plan. The two become trapped beside the rocket when it is about to launch but manage to reset the coordinates, targeting the Soviet submarine Drax and his cronies are escaping on. Drax is a SMERSH agent.
Jan Aylen, later a rear admiral, visited a V-1 and V-2 factory at Nordhausen that was built into a hillside with four miles of tunnels: “Components entering at one end and the completed missiles emerging on railway wagons at the other. The huge V-2’s, six foot diameter cylinders, reared up thirty feet as if in some Wagnerian devil’s kitchen, as indeed it was since it was largely staffed by slave labor.”
Many of those Aylen saw were walking skeletons. The factory even had cremation ovens and a gold filling abstraction slab. He was filled “with a blind and sickening rage against the Nazi regime.”19
The 30AU, like many Allied units, had to deal with the arrogance of mostly the junior German officers, who were mainly ardent Nazis. In Kiel, the Royal Marines dealt with some 25,000 German soldiers and sailors. The senior officers were more contrite while the men generally did as they were told. Two SS guards were executed when the prison ship Athen was found to have 6,000 people locked in the hold. They had been there for twelve days without food or water.20
With the items on Ian’s blacklist near fulfilled by 30AU, he got in on the hunt himself. Commander Jim “Shanco” Glanville, in Bad Sulza in the Weimarer region, came across evidence of the German Naval Intelligence archives. Some of these had been destroyed but other parts had been sent to “25KL/KA.” It took Glanville some time to discover that meant they had been sent to somewhere called Tambach. The only problem was that there were several places of that name in southern Germany. They thought it might be near Ingolstadt in Bavaria as there was a naval base there used to service mines and torpedoes. The route there took them past the concentration camp at Buchenwald. They were shocked by the living skeletons and piles of corpses. Arriving at Ingolstadt, they found no records and realized the base was just a staging point for U-boat crews on their way to the Atlantic ports.
Glanville then thought it could be Tambach Castle “west of Coburg on the fringes of the Thuringian forest.” They backtracked almost to their starting point, and avoided shattered Nuremberg. The journey was difficult because of downed bridges and wrecked roads. “The whole area was in a state of chaos, with SS units fighting it out, the Wehrmacht fighting or surrendering and with bands of escaped POWs, mainly Russians and Poles, roaming the countryside, or deserters from the German Army.” They reached the castle at sunset and found their way in, only to be confronted by a single German naval rating who immediately surrendered when challenged by Marine Booth’s Tommy gun. When asked who was in command, he replied “Kontradmiral Gladisch.” Admiral Walter Gladisch was a veteran of the First World War.21
They were in the right place. The old admiral had by that time served in the German Navy for forty-seven years and now had charge of the entire German Naval archives since 1870. He confessed he was delighted by the arrival of Glanville and his men. Admiral Dönitz had ordered him to hand over the records to the Allies, but he had doubted his ability to comply as some of his staff, notably the “Kriegsmarine Helferinnen,” similar to the Wrens, some of whom were hard-line Nazis, wanted him to burn them. They were led by the “formidable” Fraulein Androde, who had been trying to contact the SS.
Lieutenant Jim Besant had to confront the Helferinnen. After meeting Androde, he thought she should “have been drafted to Ravensbruck as the wardress in charge.” He had to keep them all confined and only had a few Marines with which to do so. He decided to arm some of the German sailors loyal to Admiral Dönitz and unite them on watch with a Marine Commando. “They had strict instructions to make sure the women did not leave their quarters and that nobody from outside got in.”22
Concerned about the fate of the records, Ian set off for Tambach Castle via Hamburg. He told Harling two weeks after his return that “for so chair-bound an officer such an excursion promised to be an unusual tail-end bonus to his personal war.”23
After the war, Ian, while researching his book Thrilling Cities, came to the conclusion Hamburg was “one of my favorite cities in the world.” Yet this was tinged with guilt as he recalled how it was devastated during the war. In 1942, over nine days of raids by the RAF 48,000 people were killed in the resulting fire storms. Fleming remembered how “in those days, studying the blow up photographs from the Photographic Reconnaissance Unit and reading the estimates of damage, we in the Admiralty used to rub our hands with delight. Ah me!!”24
On the journey to Tambach, Fleming was chauffeured in a staff car, while two Marine Commandos rode shotgun in a naval patrol car. Royal Marine Commandos are mentioned several times in the Bond books, and we know 006 was a former Commando. However, in Octopussy we do come across the more rounded character of Major Dexter Smythe RM, retired and living like Ian Fleming in Jamaica. During the war, Smythe had been given “the unenviable job of being advanced interrogator on Commando operations.” His German was excellent as his mother had come from Heidelberg. At the end of the war he joins the “Miscellaneous Objectives Bureau,” their job being to clean up the “Gestapo and Abwehr hideouts when the collapse of Germany came about.”25 He is given the Tyrol area of Austria to ferret out Nazis on the run. In one location with a lot of documents he comes across an envelope containing a single sheet of paper that tells the whereabouts of two bars of gold hidden under a cairn near Kitzbühel.
It has been estimated that the Nazis might have hidden as much as £35 billion in gold in the Austrian Alps. The US Counter Intelligence Corps investigated the matter in 1947. Lake Toplitz, not far from Salzburg, was one of the suspected sites. Here counterfeit notes were dumped into the lake from Operation Bernhard, whereby slave labor forged British and American notes worth billions.26
Smythe memorizes the location and burns the note. Having found the place, he forces a local man, Hannes Oberhauser, to guide him to the spot. After a long trek up into the Alps, they find the cairn. Smythe then shoots Oberhauser with two bullets in the back of the head. The impact knocks the guide off his feet, and he falls over the edge of a cliff, landing on a glacier. Smythe then sets about dismantling the cairn rock by rock, at a frenzied speed and ignoring his cut and bleeding hands. He finally finds an “old gray Wehrmacht ammunition box” and sits on a rock looking at it for a quarter of an hour. Smythe drags it to a nearby hut, where he consumes Oberhauser’s sausage; “a real mountaineer’s meal—tough, well fatted and strongly garlicked.” He throws the ammunition box over the cliff, watching where it lands, and he does not mind if the impact opens it. Then he climbs down the face, testing all the hand and footholds with his weight on the way down. Reaching Oberhauser’s body, he throws it into a deep crevasse. The ammunition box lid has been sprung open by the impact. The two bars of gold “glittered” in the sun. Both had the marks of “the Swastika in a circle below an eagle” as well as “the mint marks of the Reichsbank.”27
He marries a Wren, Mary Parnell, and they set up home in Jamaica. After removing the Nazi markings from the gold, he cuts off a piece and approaches the Foo brothers, local Chinese traders, to sell it. However, they still know it is Nazi gold because it is ten percent lead, a sure giveaway. The Nazis always tried to cheat and swindle: “Very bad business, Major very stupid,” says one of the Foos. Of course, even with ninety percent gold, the bars are still worth a fortune.28
When Bond arrives at Smythe’s house asking what happened to Oberhauser twenty years ago, Mary had been dead two years and now he was “fifty-four, slightly bald and his belly sagged.” He had known one day someone would come. He tells Bond what happened and wonders how a Secret Service man is involved. Bond tells him that Oberhauser had taught him to ski and had been a father figure for him, “when I happened to need one.”
Smythe asks him if he wants a written confession. Bond says no, he will send his report to the Royal Marines and Scotland Yard. They should be in touch shortly and will send someone out to arrest him. Swimming is one of Smythe’s favorite pastimes, and after Bond leaves he goes out to feed his octopus. He is distracted by what has happened and, suffering chest pains, he is stung by a scorpion fish he has speared to feed his octopus. He knows he will be dead within fifteen minutes and it will be painful, but it is the penance he must suffer. He continues out to the reef to feed the octopus but he too becomes its meal.29 Octopussy, a collection of short stories including “The Property of a Lady and The Living Daylights,” was published after Ian’s death.
Gold crops up many times in Fleming’s Bond books, often in the form of buried or lost treasure; a subject that had fascinated him since childhood. The hunt for Rommel’s treasure is mentioned in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, where it is “supposed to be hidden under the sea somewhere off Bastia” (on the east coast of Corsica).30
Goldfinger is the seventh book and the longest, in which Auric Goldfinger, a SMERSH agent, plans to steal all the gold held in Fort Knox and thus throw the United States and the Western world into chaos. He plans to steal it away on board a Soviet Sverdlovsk (Sverdlov)-class cruiser while the US lies poisoned with “GB,” a Trilone nerve poison developed by the Wehrmacht in 1943. His Soviet masters had captured the German stocks. It would work well if introduced into the water supply.31
Where did this idea come from? Maybe the cruiser to carry away the gold is a giveaway. Captain Charles Brousse, a French naval officer after the fall of France, revealed to the American Elizabeth Thorpe, with whom he had an affair, the whereabouts of a huge amount of gold. She was code-named Cynthia and worked for the SIS and BSC. She was an attractive woman of thirty with “bright auburn hair, large green eyes, and a slender voluptuous figure.” Marion de Chastelain worked closely with Cynthia, being fluent in French, when the agent was working to infiltrate the Vichy Embassy. Charles Brousse raided the safe regularly and handed over the contents to Cynthia. De Chastelain thought, “She was the type who reveled in espionage. She really loved it. And came from a good Washington family so she had entry to all the embassies and places.” Cynthia told her that on one occasion when she and Brousse were almost caught by a guard she took off all her clothes to make it appear that they were engaged in “other undercover activity.”32 She learned from Brousse that 286 tons of gold had arrived on the island of Martinique aboard the light cruiser Emile Bertin. As the situation in France got worse, the cruiser was ordered to take the gold to Halifax, Nova Scotia.
However, by the time the ship got there the armistice had been signed. It escaped internment and went to Martinique, which was then controlled by the Vichy regime. The gold was transferred to an old fort and stored in the old magazines. The Emile Bertin joined the substantial forces there, ready to defend the island against a British attack.
BSC devised a scheme using disaffected sailors and soldiers aided by British agents on the island to launch a rebellion against the Vichy regime. Gaining control of some French ships, they would take the gold and head for Canada. However, the British action at Oran scuppered that idea as it fostered resentment among the French crews. Churchill was still keen on the idea, but by mid-1941 Martinique was firmly in the grip of Vichy powers. However, with the United States’s entry into the war, a watching blockade was maintained and no evidence could be found that the gold was aiding the enemy. The powerful French Fleet at Martinique did not move until in June 1943 they joined the Allied navies. No doubt it was another scheme Fleming would have come across.33
Cynthia’s exploits for BSC are said to have greatly assisted Allied operations. However, the story of her obtaining Italian naval ciphers could not have aided Admiral Cunningham at the Battle of Cape Matapan. She is supposed to have obtained Italian codebooks from Admiral Alberto Lais, her lover. But when Lais told her where to find the codebooks, the lovers were bidding each other farewell on the ship that was to take Lais back to Italy. That departure was recorded in the New York Times and took place on April 26, 1941, almost a month after Cunningham was supposed to have used Lais’s codebooks at Matapan. Also, the admiral’s son was serving in the Mediterranean and it is extremely doubtful he had access to the Italian Fleet’s codebooks in the US anyway. After the war, Admiral Lais strongly denied this ever happened.34
Robert Harling asked Fleming if when he got to Tambach Castle he was welcomed with open arms. Not really, he felt, although the location was picturesque “mountain background, forest clearing, lake and so on.” As to the castle, he found it “cold. Dismal. Comfortless. Ghastly Count Dracula stuff.” He found the old admiral to be “quite helpful” and that the possible destruction of “those priceless naval records had been causing him quite a few sleepless nights.” The entire archives were brought to Hamburg in a convoy of three-ton trucks, where they were loaded on to a fishery protection trawler for the voyage to London.
Harling observed that Fleming only spent four days at Tambach, leaving the convoy responsibility to Glanville, which rather proved his own theory “that the somewhat basic and care free life of 30AU in the field was not for Ian.”35
Later, Ian admitted to having enjoyed the trip to Germany and seeing a part of the country he had not seen before. Regarding 30AU, he felt that, compared with others serving at the front, his “Red Indians” had “enjoyed a far more light-hearted war.” It was more of an adventure than his war had been. Harling observed that there were grim moments and they had suffered casualties.
“I agree,” said Fleming, “that 30AU had its sharper moments and had lost a disproportionate number of its men, but the rest of you got away with far more than a fair share of unadulterated entertainment.”36
For Fleming the war was winding down. He had little to do with the German Naval archives once they arrived in London. The end was close in the Far East. After some mopping-up operations in Norway, the end came for Ian. On November 10, 1945, Commander Ian Lancaster Fleming, RNVR, was released from the Royal Navy, granted fifty-six days’ resettlement leave.37 After six years in Naval Intelligence, a job that he had loved, Ian had emerged as a far more mature man with a wealth of experience, though it had been exhausting. An established pattern to his life was gone. What to do next was the question?