Think James Bond's pure fantasy? His creator's real WW2 missions were more outrageous than you'd believe

Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, author Edward Abel Smith lifts the lid on those inspirations and paints a portrait of Fleming not just as a master of fiction, but as someone whose secret wartime work helped shape the modern spy thriller.

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“Ian Fleming is a real enigma of an individual,” Smith explains. “From early on, I was interested in him because he created this franchise – one of the largest in the world – yet lived his whole life feeling like he wasn’t a success.”

Fleming’s early failures

Born in 1908 into wealth and political influence (his father, Valentine Fleming, was a Conservative MP), Ian Fleming was educated at Eton and Sandhurst before drifting through careers in journalism, stockbroking and intelligence.

But despite his background, Fleming’s early adulthood was marked by frustration and a sense of failure. He never matched the expectations placed on him by his powerful family or his older brother, Peter, a successful writer and adventurer.

“By the age of 20, he had failed pretty much in everything that he had attempted,” Smith notes.

In May 1939, just months before war broke out, Fleming, then in his early thirties, finally saw a window of unconventional opportunity. Rather than fighting on the frontlines, this opportunity came in the form of a discreet but influential role in the Admiralty, where he would find himself working under one of Britain’s top intelligence officials.

From misfit to master planner

Fleming was appointed personal assistant to Admiral John Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence. His title was unassuming and ambiguous, but the post offered immense flexibility and access.

“The role didn’t really have much of a remit,” Smith explains. “It was very much Fleming’s to shape.”

Godfrey, whose personality reportedly inspired the fictional ‘M’ in the Bond novels, gave Fleming remarkably free rein. The result was that Fleming flourished, using his time to devise and design devious strategies, imaginative deception plans and daring sabotage operations – often with a flair for the dramatic.

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“Admiral Godfrey gave him such a long leash that he was really able to let his imagination go wild during the time of the Second World War,” Smith says. “And really, a lot of his books are based on some of those eccentric ideas that he came up with during the war.”

One of his first contributions was The Trout Memo, a 1939 brainstorming document modelled like a fishing guide, offering more than 50 tricks intended to “bamboozle” the enemy. It reads today like a script for a Bond prequel, and while under Godfrey’s name, Fleming’s fingerprints are all over it.

Among its more surreal suggestions was an idea to plant booby-trapped tinned sausages, complete with German labels, into the sea in the hope that they’d be retrieved, heated and detonated aboard U-boats.

The birth of Bond-style sabotage

The wartime operations that followed show just how far Fleming’s imagination – and nerve – stretched.

One aborted plan, Operation Ruthless, called for British agents to crash-land a captured German bomber in the English Channel, kill the rescue crew, and steal their naval codebooks, potentially unlocking the keys to enemy communication.

“The plan was met with a huge amount of optimism,” Smith recalls. “But it was scrapped at the last minute when Turing and his team intercepted a message saying the boats needed to be relocated.”

Another Fleming-supported venture, Operation Postmaster, was more successful. British agents, using disguised tugs and a clever ruse involving parties, sex workers and copious amounts of alcohol, snuck into the Spanish-controlled island of Fernando Po (off modern-day Equatorial Guinea) and stole three Axis ships from under the Nazis’ noses.

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“It’s right out of a spy novel,” Smith remarks. “There was only one injury and that came from a charging pig that knocked one of the men off his feet.”

Yet another scheme, Operation Tracer, proposed bricking British agents inside a secret chamber in the Rock of Gibraltar, equipped with food, water and radio equipment, where they would remain, potentially for a year or more, to spy on German naval movements.

“They would be cemented in, and their spying would commence,” Smith says. Though never activated, the concept would echo years later in Fleming’s short story From a View to a Kill.

The real-life Bond unit

Fleming didn’t stop at ideas. He also helped create and operationalise his own intelligence-gathering unit: 30 Assault Unit (30AU), a special-operations commando force tasked with capturing enemy intelligence ahead of advancing Allied troops.

“It was very much Fleming’s creation, and off the back of the success of Operation Postmaster, he wanted to create something that was more permanent,” Smith explains.

The unit’s missions were high-risk and highly classified. Members of 30AU were embedded with combat troops during major advances, including the Normandy landings, but focused on gathering sensitive documents, technology and codebooks from German headquarters, research centres and factories.

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One of their primary objectives was to gather intelligence on Germany’s V1 and V2 weapons programmes, which caused widespread devastation during the final two years of the war.

Yet the rocket technology behind these weapons – seen as the forerunners of modern ballistic missiles – would go on to serve a very different purpose.

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“A lot of the V1 and V2 technology was eventually sent to the US and used in part during the Apollo space programme,” Smith notes. “It helped to put the first man on the moon.”

30AU was, in essence, a wartime MI6 field force – part spy network, part elite military unit – and a direct inspiration for Bond’s globe-trotting missions.

Was Bond Fleming’s wish fulfilment?

For all his involvement in espionage, Fleming never saw active combat himself. His lack of physical fitness, along with his intelligence value, meant he was tasked with orchestrating operations rather than executing them.

“James Bond as a character was an amalgamation of lots of people that Fleming met during the war,” Smith says. “But really, he was the person that Fleming always wanted to be. He wanted to live this lifestyle where he was smoking cigarettes, drinking martinis and spending lots of time with beautiful women.

“At the same time, he wanted to then be able to trek through the desert or be able to jump out of planes. Of course, the reality is you can’t have the two together. But in the fictional character of James Bond, he was able to do that.”

In that sense, Bond was both homage and wish fulfilment for Fleming. He combined the courage of the agents Fleming admired, the tactics he devised and the charisma he aspired to.

“But he made huge contributions to the war, and they should never be underestimated,” Smith concludes.

Claire Bubb was speaking to Spencer Mizen on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.