Ian Fleming's Commandos

sabotage and destruction in Gibraltar, and return undetected. In chapter 13 of Ian Fleming’s novel Thunderball, James Bond tells Felix Leiter of the CIA that the failure to spot what was going on in the Olterra was ‘[o]ne of the blackest marks against Intelligence during the whole war’. The Italian ‘gentleman crook’ in the novel, Emilio Largo, has

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These prisoners were men from the Decima Flottiglia Mezzi d’Assalto (10a Flottiglia MAS, or the Italian ‘Tenth Light Flotilla Assault Craft’) whose activities would later occupy Ian Fleming’s intelligence commandos. Italy’s most original contribution to the technology of the Second World War was sub-aqua, pioneering midget submarines and producing

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Three years of fighting across arid parts of Egypt and Libya was now entering its final bloody phase among towns and fields. General Rommel had called the war in the desert Krieg ohne Hass – war without hate. Though dust and sand grimed and gritted everything, some people had still talked romantically of a ‘clean’ war, perhaps because civilians wer

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The pinch of the Abwehr Enigma machine in Algiers filled in another piece of the ISOS jigsaw and completely vindicated the IAU’s existence. After it was flown from Blida airfield to Gibraltar and then back to England, it yielded the reading of six weeks’ back-traffic from an unknown Vichy link, which pleased both Dilly Knox of Bletchley Park and Ia

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However, when Abwehr offices communicated the agents’ messages onwards to Berlin or got replies from HQ, they were mechanically enciphered using the Abwehr-modified Enigma machines. This more difficult and more important trunk system of secret communications was first broken by Dilly Knox on 8 December 1941 (the day after the Pearl Harbor attack),

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The Abwehr intelligence service employed two kinds of cipher. German secret agents in the field were given simple systems you could work out with pencil and paper (sometimes called manual or hand ciphers) to scramble the messages they sent by wireless to their controllers. These were the twigs and branches of secret communications. The ‘ham radio’

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Abwehr Enigma machine was different from the one used by the German armed services: it was smaller and had no Steckerbrett plug board at the front, so the code-breakers did not have to worry about cross-plugging, but its rotors ‘turned over’ far more often, not once every 26 letters, but 11, 15 and 19 times respectively on the three different wheel

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The philosophy of the pinch was not confined to the British, and neither was the use of commandos. The enemy was making strides in these areas too. In the summer of 1941 Admiral Godfrey was interested to learn that when the Germans were on the offensive, the head of the Abwehr, Admiral Canaris, had ‘reconnaissance detachments’ right up in the front

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resources. An absurd decision came down from on high that the romantic South African name ‘Commando’ should go, to be replaced by ‘Special Service Battalions’ in a ‘Special Service Brigade’. But top brass had a tin ear: for most people, the lightning-flash letters ‘SS’ stood for Hitler’s stormtroopers. The units used their famous initiative and sim

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