Ian Fleming's Commandos

Ian Fleming’s Commandos THE STORY OF THE LEGENDARY 30 ASSAULT UNIT

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’

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

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

July 1940 was a key month in Britain’s reorganisation for total war. Two days after Keyes’s appointment, Army Order 112 formally authorised the British army’s Intelligence Corps, which set up its depot in Oxford University. On the same day, 19 July, the Cabinet established another new organisation, SOE, ‘to co-ordinate all action, by way of subvers

1 30 Assault Unit’s area of operations in north-west France. First blooded at Dieppe in August 1942, they took part in the Operation NEPTUNE landings in Normandy on D-Day, 6 June 1944, where their targets included naval bases, midget submarines, radar stations and rocket-launching sites. 30AU was at the spearhead in Brittany and helped to liberate

2 30AU in Nazi Germany. As Hitler’s Third Reich collapsed under assault from Allied forces, small, mobile parties of 30AU men were able to seize key targets: industrial factories, often using slave-labour from concentration camps, major naval bases and experimental workshops developing new weapons of war. In one brilliant coup, 30AU also captured t

The 1940 Norwegian campaign saw Britain’s first tentative use of what would become known as ‘Special Forces’, a grouping that would eventually include Ian Fleming’s 30AU. In mid-April 1940 ten ‘Independent Companies’, each made up of 270 volunteers and twenty officers, were recruited from Territorial and Regular units. Each company was armed and eq

Copyright © 2011 by Nicholas Rankin