ww2 Archives | Ian Fleming

Writer Benjamin Welton looks back at Ian Fleming’s war years and how they influenced his literary creativity.

James Bond remains the quintessential cold warrior of fiction, and yet it’s not that conflict that animated his creator. Sure, the Soviet Union and her agents are the arch villains of Fleming’s oeuvre, and the mere existence of SMERSH (a real entity of history) is evidence enough of Fleming’s interest in using Bond as a loyal British ‘instrument’ in the service against a contemporary enemy. But despite Fleming’s journalistic attachment to current events, the engine driving his creation of Bond was World War II.

Described by Fleming once as a ‘very interesting war,’ the Second World War gave this former Etonian and child of privilege not only an insider’s view of intelligence work and covert operations, but also a deep sense of duty that he later bequeathed to 007. As a result, Fleming’s Bond novels are haunted by the specter of the 1939-1945 conflict, from the machinations of diehard Nazis like Sir Hugo Drax or former double agents like Ernst Stavro Blofeld to Bond’s overall excitement for what American President Theodore Roosevelt once called ‘the strenuous life,’ albeit one chock full of custom-made cigarettes, well mixed drinks, and beautiful, but slightly damaged women.

Salad Days

The military and the call to defend the crown were never far from young Fleming. His father, Valentine Fleming, had served first as a Conservative MP before being killed on the Western Front in 1917. The death of his father left a giant vacancy in the Fleming household, and his mother Evelyn pushed her sons to pick up the mantle left behind by their father. Fleming’s older brother Peter became not only an Oxford-educated adventurer and travel writer, but he also served as an officer in charge of military deception during World War II in Southeast Asia.

It took longer for such glory to come Ian’s way. After attending Eton College, where he collected an impressive array of sporting titles and trophies, Fleming was pushed by a disapproving housemaster at Eton and his mother to attend the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. While there less than a year, Fleming flaunted a good many of the school’s strict regulations and left after an indiscretion out in town.

After failing to achieve a commission, Fleming spent the interwar years performing an assortment of high-end jobs. Besides trying his hand at banking with Cull & Co. and being a stockbroker with Rowe and Pitman, Fleming’s most important role before becoming a novelist was his time as a journalist and sub-editor for Reuters. Although Fleming’s mother had lobbied for the job on behalf of her wayward son, Fleming proved to be an excellent journalist, which Anthony Burgess, in a preface to the 1987 Coronet paperback editions of Ian Fleming’s original Bond novels, blames for Fleming’s ‘clarity of…style’ :

‘It is important to remember, that, like Daniel Defoe, [Fleming] was a journalist before he was a writer of fiction, and a good journalist too. The clarity of his style in the novels proclaims this, the apt image, the eye for detail, the interest in world affairs on the one hand and, on the other, the fascination with the minutiae of everyday life.’

While on assignment for Reuters in 1933, Fleming covered the trial of six British engineers with Metropolitan-Vickers who were accused of espionage and sabotage while working in the Soviet Union. The trial was nothing more than a Stalinist show trial, but it did provide Fleming, who had only been with Reuters for eighteen months at that point, with a taste of the world of international espionage. While not his first taste (Fleming had earlier attended a private school in Austria run by a former British secret agent named Ernan Forbes Dennis), the Metropolitan-Vickers trial did however expose Fleming to the dangers of communism and the potential thrills associated with being a British spy abroad.

On His Majesty’s Secret Service

Later in life, Fleming admitted that: ‘I extracted the Bond plots from my wartime memories, dolled them up, attached a hero, a villain, and there was the book.’ Barring some exaggeration, Fleming could lay claim to being privy to some of the war’s more interesting elements. As a Royal Navy Commander attached to Senior Service, Fleming got to experience the ‘intelligence machine’ from the inside. While serving as a liaison between MI5, the Security Service, and SOE, Fleming regularly attended top secret meetings and had access to Bletchley Park, where men like Alan Turing and others were busy decoding the ciphers of the German Enigma machine.

Fleming wasn’t content to just spend the war as a go-between, however. As author Nicholas Rankin details in his excellent book Ian Fleming’s Commandos, Commander Fleming was instrumental in the creation of a commando force within the Naval Intelligence Division, which he labeled an ‘Intelligence Assault Unit.’ Called both 30 Commando and 30 Assault Unit, this collection of Naval intelligence officers and Royal Marine Commandos were tasked with ‘pinching’ secret material from the enemy. Along the way, 30AU saw action in Algeria, Norway, the Greek Islands, Sicily, and most disastrously of all, the assault on Dieppe.

While Fleming was not frequently on the front lines, he did however actively engage in overseeing the unit’s activities (he was also known to accompany them on certain assaults), plus he had a habit of concocting fabulous missions for his men. Examples include Operation Ruthless, which was a plan devised before the creation of 30AU in order to retrieve the Enigma codebooks while using what Fleming himself described as ‘a tough bachelor, able to swim.’ Operation Ruthless’s ideal operator not only prefigures James Bond’s grueling underwater storming of Mr. Big’s fortress in Jamaica in Live and Let Die, but Fleming’s description of the task reads like a synopsis of one of Bond’s many exploits:

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For Your Eyes Only. 12 September 1940

To: Director Naval Intelligence

From: Ian Fleming

Operation Ruthless

I suggest we obtain the loot by the following means:

Obtain from Air Ministry an air-worthy German bomber

Pick a tough crew of five, including a pilot, W/T operator and word-perfect German speaker. Dress them in German Air Force uniform, add blood and bandages to suit

Crash plane in the Channel after making SOS to rescue service

Once aboard rescue boat, shoot German crew, dump overboard, bring rescue boat back to English port

Another Fleming-created operation was Operation Golden Eye, which centered on keeping the lines of communication open to Gibraltar if Spain decided to join the Axis. Like Operation Ruthless, Operation Golden Eye was closed down before it could be put into action.

Book cover of Casino Royale by Ian Fleming, featuring yellow typography and a repeated heart motif.

The War Becomes a Best-Seller

When Fleming set out to write Casino Royale, the ‘hot war’ had turned cold. Britain’s main enemies were communism and the various post-colonial nationalist movements that helped to bring down the empire. And yet, in most of Fleming’s Bond novels, the action as well as the villains all have some tie to the older conflict. Moonraker deals not only with the lingering fear of the Nazis’s V-2 rocket, but also the idea that some former Nazi scientists in Britain and America were still enraptured by the Hitlerian philosophy. According to Ben Macintyre’s For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond, the inspiration behind mining Mr. Big’s boat in Live and Let Die and giving the Disco Volante a trap door in Thunderball may very well have been the 10^th Light Flotilla, a special unit of the Italian Navy that Fleming saw operate in the Mediterranean during the war. Of course, Bond’s most enduring enemy, Blofeld, began his life of infamy as a Polish double agent who sent secret items to the Nazis ahead of their 1939 invasion of Poland.

Even Bond himself is a product of the war, for while serving as Commander Bond in the Royal Navy’s Intelligence Service, he earned his 007 title by killing what he describes in Casino Royale as ‘two villains’ — a Japanese cipher expert and a Norwegian double agent. And while Bond spends a small portion of the same novel conflicted over his role in the more morally slippery Cold War, he nevertheless decides to stay in the action as an agent tasked with eliminating or weakening some of the wrongs associated with the postwar fallout between the former Allies. In another way, the Bond novels can be read as a continuation of Fleming’s work during the war, as Bond, through fiction, reasserts British dominance on the world stage all the while re-living some of his creator’s experiences from his time as an intelligence officer.

Benjamin is a freelance journalist who has been published in The Atlantic, VICE, MI6-HQ, and others. He is a regular contributor to Literary007.com .

The diaries of Maud Russell, A Constant Heart, shed interesting light on Ian Fleming’s War years. Here Josephine Lane examines their contents and shares insights into this intimate and significant relationship.

On the 8^th February 1944, Maud Russell wrote in her diary,

‘Yesterday I. came to dinner, looking well and busy with a dream, the dream being a house and 10 acres on a mountain slope in Jamaica after the war.’

‘I.’ was none other than Ian Fleming, who went on to realise this exotic dream in 1947 by buying an old donkey racetrack in Jamaica where he built GoldenEye, the home which sheltered him from the bitter British winter and where he wrote his James Bond novels every year from 1952 until his death in 1964. Russell’s recently published war diaries reveal that it was her gift of £5,000 that enabled Fleming to build this creative sanctuary which nurtured the rise of his fictional hero. But who was Fleming’s generous benefactor and what significance does their relationship with each other hold?

Born in 1891 to German Jewish parents who had settled in London in the 1880s, Maud Russell was a society hostess and one of the foremost French art collectors of her time. She married Gilbert Russell, a stockbroker and cousin of the Duke of Bedford, during the First World War and they lived between the beautiful Mottisfont Abbey in Hampshire and their house in Cavendish Square in London. Gilbert introduced Maud to many politicians and members of the aristocracy while her interest in the arts encouraged a host of artists, writers, society figures and musicians into their social circle. Amongst them was Ian Fleming who Maud described as having the ‘handsome looks of a fallen angel.’ Although Maud was quite a few years older than Ian, their relationship blossomed from casual acquaintances to intimate friends and likely lovers.

A Constant Heart: The War Diaries of Maud Russell 1938-1945 is skilfully and affectionately edited by Maud’s granddaughter Emily Russell and reveals an intimate portrait of an intelligent and independent-minded woman who was surrounded by influential people of the day. The book is bursting with references to key figures of the time, such as this auspicious entry about a new acquaintance she met when dining with Lord Louis Mountbatten in 1942, ‘At lunch there was his nephew Prince Philip of Greece, a nice looking man, who speaks perfect English and is in the Navy. It struck me afterwards that he would do for Princess Elizabeth.’

Maud’s passion for art led her to be acquainted with several exceptional artists of the day and the diaries record lunches with Matisse, for whom she sat in the 1930s, members of the Bloomsbury Group and the photographer Cecil Beaton. She was also close friends with the artist Boris Anrep who specialised in the art of mosaic and whose work can be seen in the foyer of the National Gallery; a project funded by Maud. Undoubtedly her most important artistic relationship during this period was with Rex Whistler whom Maud commissioned to undertake a stunning and vast trompe l’oeil in what is now known as the Whistler Room at Mottisfont Abbey.

As well as documenting meetings with interesting figures from the 1940s, the diaries open a captivating window into a very unique perspective of life during the Second World War. They are a stark reminder of the great uncertainty and the daily anxiety faced when victory against the Axis powers was by no means guaranteed and international freedom was at grave risk. ‘I was in a rage all day and mad to think we have so miscalculated the German forces as to be in danger of losing Egypt… I roared myself hoarse.’

But few fights were more personal than Maud’s own endeavour to help her Jewish relatives living in Germany. On the 9^th–10^th November 1938 there was an atrocious, nationwide attack on the Jews in Germany, which came to be known as Kristallnacht – the Night of Broken Glass. Approximately 1,000 synagogues were burned, 7,000 Jewish businesses were destroyed, 91 Jews were murdered and tens of thousands more were arrested and interned in concentration camps. The situation was critical and Maud not only campaigned for visas for her relatives but actually flew to Cologne in December, risking her own safety to help her family. ‘I had arrived on the day when all Jews in Germany were ordered to stay indoors between 8am and 8pm so I wondered whether my appearance might arouse comment, but it didn’t.’ The courage and fearlessness of such actions inspire limitless admiration.

‘I think these months are enormously significant and interesting but I wish I was living on another planet.’

The diaries also bear witness to the death of Maud’s beloved husband Gilbert, who died of asthma in 1942. These passages are incredibly moving, as Maud unravels her grief and processes her loss;

‘The main, the fullest, the richest and the most feeling part of life ended with him. I gave him all the tenderness I possessed. There was little over.’

Reading through the diaries it becomes clear how vital her relationship with Ian Fleming was, particularly during this difficult time, ‘His solid friendship helped me these days. He understood how I felt about G. I think he was very distressed about Gilbert himself.’ Indeed, it is likely that Gilbert Russell engineered Fleming’s role in Naval Intelligence during the War and in turn Ian helped Maud to obtain a post in the Admiralty after Gilbert’s death in her bid to forge a new life.

‘He loves his NID work better than anything he has ever done, I think, except skiing.’

The diaries reveal an intimate closeness and fond affection between Ian and Maud, who meet at least once a week throughout the war. An outcome of this is the extraordinary insight the diaries provide into Fleming’s wartime activities. Amongst other things she notes that Fleming broadcasts directly to the Germans, tours the coastal defences, witnesses the Dieppe raid from a destroyer and visits Spain and Portugal to discuss intelligence matters with Roosevelt’s special envoy. A particularly shocking anecdote is recorded in November 1941,

‘He has been on some dangerous job again. He cannot ever tell me what they are. A house in which he was dining was blown from under him. He and his friends were left marooned on the third floor, the staircase and most of the floors below were blown away. Eventually there was a tap at the window, a fireman’s head appeared and they left the house by the fireman’s ladder. The story was told as if there hadn’t been any danger.’

‘We discussed how either would know if the other was killed. Not knowing at once gives an empty blank feeling.’

There are hints throughout the diaries that Ian and Maud’s relationship was more intimate than mere friendship. Maud provided Ian with his identification tag during the War (which he stipulated be made of gun-metal) and Emily Russell reveals that she found an envelope labelled ‘I.’s’ containing a lock of black hair, amongst her grandmother’s possessions. However, most telling of all is this touching and raw recollection, ‘He talked about marrying me, I had qualities he wants to find. I said, ‘No, ages makes it impossible.’ He said, ‘If I was five years older.’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘If you were at least 10 years older.’ For he is sixteen and a half years younger than me. If he were 10 years older I would marry him, but it’s no use a woman of 52 trying to keep pace with a man of 36. After a few years he might fall in love and want me to release him. I should do it and be alone again after much pain and drama, a good deal older, and in still greater need of compassion. He is very good to me.’

A Constant Heart is a fascinating book, documenting a period of great international importance from a very personal perspective. Maud Russell’s concise and witty records set within an awe-inspiring social circle are a joy to read and her relationship with Ian Fleming is both moving and surprising. Little was known about Maud’s role in Ian’s life before the publication of these diaries and it is a pleasure to encounter Fleming from her perspective as a kind and thoughtful friend. And perhaps her influence runs deeper still. Without her generous gift of £5,000 who knows whether Fleming would have had the peace, quiet and solitude to dedicate himself to devising the deeds of agent 007. But when one learns that he addressed his correspondence to her as ‘Dear M.,’ perhaps it could be argued that her impact was even more fundamental to the literary lore of James Bond.

A Constant Heart: The War Diaries of Maud Russell 1938-1945 is published by Dovecote Press. Photographs courtesy of Dovecote Press and Emily Russell.

Tag: ww2

The Story Behind: Fleming’s War

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The Story Behind: Ian & Maud