“One of the Double O’s - I guess
007. He’s tough and M thinks there may be trouble with those gunmen of Le
Chiffre’s. He must be pretty good with the cards or he wouldn’t have sat in the
Casino in Monte Carlo for two months before the war watching that Roumanian
team work their stuff with the invisible ink and the dark glasses. He and the
Deuxieme bowled them out in the end and 007 turned in a million francs he had
won at shimmy. Good money in those days.” (Casino Royale, Pan Books Ltd.,
1965, pp. 24-5)
M later says to Bond during his
briefing for the mission,
“I’m going to ask the Deuxieme to
stand by. It’s their territory and as it is we shall be lucky if they don’t
kick up rough. I’ll try and persuade them to send Mathis. You seemed to get on
well with him in Monte Carlo on that other Casino job.” (Casino Royale, Pan
Books Ltd., 1965, p. 26)
Later on in Casino Royale are
Bond is recovering in hospital from the horrific torture with the carpet beater
that he received at the hands of Le Chiffre he recounts to Mathis how he earned
his Double O status during the war for the secret service:
“‘Well, in the last few years
I’ve killed two villains. The first was in New York – a Japanese cipher expert
cracking our codes on the thirty-sixth floor of the RCA building in the
Rockefeller centre, where the Japs had their consulate. I took a room on the
fortieth floor of the next-door skyscraper and I could look across the street
into his room and see him working. Then I got a colleague from our organization
in New York and a couple of Remington thirty-thirty’s with telescopic sights
and silencers. We smuggled them up to my room and sat for days waiting for our
chance. He shot at the man a second before me. His job was only to blast a hole
through the windows so that I could shoot the Jap through it. They have tough
windows at the Rockefeller centre to keep the noise out. It worked very well.
As I expected, his bullet got deflected by the glass and went God knows where.
But I shot immediately after him, through the hole he had made. I got the Jap
in the mouth as he turned to gape at the broken window.’
Bond smoked for a minute.
‘It was a pretty sound job. Nice
and clean too. Three hundred yards away. No personal contact. The next time in
Stockholm wasn’t so pretty. I had to kill a Norwegian who was doubling against
us for the Germans. He’d managed to get two of our men captured – probably
bumped off for all I know. For various reasons it had to be an absolutely
silent job. I chose the bedroom of his flat and a knife. And, well, he just
didn’t die very quickly.
‘For those two jobs I was awarded a Double O
number in the Service. Felt pretty clever and got a reputation for being good
and tough. A double O number in our Service means you’ve had to kill a chap in
cold blood in the course of some job.’” (Casino Royale, Pan Books Ltd., 1965,
pp. 141-2)
In the ‘Chronology of James
Bond’s Adventures’ in James Bond: The Man and His World by Henry Chancellor
it dates these two assassinations as happening between 1941-44, and it also
claims that Bond was 17 when he claimed he was 19 and entered the RNVR as a
Lieutenant, then the secret service between 1937-41.
Regarding Bond’s involvement in
the armed forces in the Second World War, Dr. No (1958) gave one of the first
mentions of Bond’s involvement in the armed forces before his entry into the
world of espionage. When Dr. No’s men on the boat give their warning to Bond,
Quarrel and Honey Rider over the loudhailer on the beach at Crab Key we are
told,
“The machine gunner trained his
gun into the tops of the mangroves behind the beach. There came the swift
rattling roar Bond had last heard coming from the German lines in the Ardennes.
The bullets made the same old sound of frightened pigeons whistling overhead.”
(Dr. No, Pan Books Ltd., 1965, p. 77)
The Ardennes Offensive, or ‘the
Battle of the Bulge’ as it is popularly called began on 16 December 1944 and
ended on 16 January 1945. It was the last German offensive on the Western Front
during the Second World War. The ‘bulge’ refers to the unsuccessful attempt by
the Germans to drive a wedge into the Allied lines. After their invasion of
Normandy in June 1944, the Allies moved rapidly across northern France into
Belgium during the summer, but they lost their momentum in the autumn. General
von Rundstedt’s Panzer Armies took advantage of the bad weather, which was
hampering Allied aircraft and launched two parallel attacks with the aim of
retaking the great port of Antwerp. The Fifth Army under General von Manteuffel
had advanced by 24 December 1944 to within four miles of the Meuse River.
However, by Christmas the inadequacy of German supplies and Allied resistance
had halted the German offensive and ensured that this was to be the farthest
point of the German drive. The Germans thereby made an orderly withdrawal
between the 8 and 16 January 1945, having failed in their last desperate
attempt to regain the initiative on the Western Front.
Further details of Bond’s wartime
activities are given in M’s obituary for Bond in The Times in You Only Live Twice (1964):
“By now it was 1941 and, by
claiming an age of nineteen and with the help of an old Vickers colleague of
his father he entered a branch of what was subsequently to become the Ministry
of Defence. To serve the confidential nature of his duties, he was accorded the
rank of lieutenant in the Special Branch of the RNVR, and it is a measure of
the satisfaction his services gave to his superiors that he ended the war with
the rank of Commander. It was about this time that the writer became associated
with certain aspects of the Ministry’s work, and it was with much gratification
that I accepted Commander Bond’s post-war application to continue working for
the Ministry in which, at the time of his lamented disappearance, he had risen
to the rank of Principal Officer in the Civil Service.” (You Only Live Twice, Pan Books Ltd., 1966, p. 179)
There is something at odds here.
In DR. NO we were led to believe that Bond’s wartime activities must have been
in the army as the Ardennes mention suggests. But the You Only Live Twice obituary confirms that Bond was a Royal Volunteer Naval Reserve (RNVR) man. As Kingsley Amis points out in The James Bond Dossier (1965):
“But, even if Bond had learnt how
to handle a bazooka in the Ardennes sector in 1944 (what was a Commander from
Naval Intelligence doing there, by the way?), he had fairy-tale luck when he
was allowed to snatch one off a U.S. soldier and fire it at Goldfinger’s
hijacked train. Here reason makes a late come-back and, though Bond hits with
his first and only shot, he inflicts no more than superficial damage.” (The James Bond Dossier, Kingsley Amis, Pan Books Ltd., London, 1966, p. 18-9)
In Thunderball (1961) Bond is
sent to Shrublands to make to recuperate from his hard drinking and smoking.
When Bond goes to see Mr. Joshua Wain in Consulting Room A he asks, “Bond to
remove all his clothes except his pants.”
We are told that,
“When he saw the many scars he
said politely, ‘Dear me, you do seem to have been in the wars, Mr Bond.’
Bond said indifferently, ‘Near miss. During the war.’”
After completing his inspection
of Bond’s body, Wain informs him that there is:
“‘some right sacroiliac strain
with the right ilium slightly displaced backwards. Due to a bad fall some time,
no doubt.’ Mr Wain raised his eyes for confirmation.
Bond said, ‘Perhaps.’ Inwardly he
reflected that the ‘bad fall’ had probably been when he had had to jump from
the Arlberg Express after Heinkel and his friends had caught up with him around
the time of the Hungarian uprising in 1956.” ( Thunderball, Chapter 2, Pan
Books Ltd., 1963, p. 21)
In October 1956 the Hungarians
had revolted against the communist rule, but Khrushchev sent Red Army tanks
onto the streets to swiftly and ruthlessly crush the uprising. Later on in the novel Thunderball when Bond and Felix Leiter are welcomed on board a United States Navy
submarine, the captain, Commander Peter Pederson, U.S.N., says to his guests,
“‘Well gentlemen. Welcome aboard.
Commander Bond, it’s a pleasure to have a member of the Royal Navy visit the
ship. Ever been in subs before?’
‘I have,’ said Bond, ‘but only as a supercargo. I was in intelligence – RNVR Special Branch. Strictly a chocolate sailor.’
The captain laughed. ‘That’s
good!…’ ( Thunderball, Chapter 20, Pan Books Ltd., 1963, p. 195)
Ian Fleming was of course also in
Naval Intelligence during the Second World War, being the Personal Assistant to
the Director of Naval Intelligence. He too held the rank of an honorary
commander in the RNVR, and like Bond he was teased for being a ‘Chocolate
Sailor’ who was more of an 'ideas man' who sat behind a desk in the Admiralty
planning missions rather than out in the middle of the action as he would have liked to have been.
In the short story ‘Quantum of
Solace’ from the For Your Eyes Only (1960) collection we are told
what Bond’s mission had been:
“Bond had been in the colony for
a week and was leaving for Miami the next day. It had been a routine
investigation job. Arms were getting to the Castro rebels in Cuba from all the
neighbouring territories. They had been coming principally from Miami and the
Gulf of Mexico, but when the US Coastguards had seized two big shipments, the
Castro supporters had turned to Jamaica and the Bahamas as possible bases, and
bond had been sent out from London to put a stop to it. He hadn’t wanted to do
the job. If anything, his sympathies were with the rebels, but the Government
had a big export programme with Cuba in exchange for taking more Cuban sugar
than they wanted, and a minor condition of the deal was that Britain should not
give aid or comfort to the Cuban rebels. Bond had found out about the two big
cabin cruisers that were being fitted out for the job, and rather than make
arrests when they were about to sail, thus causing an incident, he had chosen a
very dark night and crept up on the boats in a police launch. From the deck of
the unlighted launch he had tossed a thermite bomb through an open port of each
of them. He had then made off at high speed and watched the bonfire from a
distance. Bad luck on the insurance companies, of course, but there were no
casualties and he had achieved quickly and neatly what M had told him to do.”
(‘Quantum of Solace,’ from For Your Eyes Only, Pan Books Ltd., 1965, p. 85)
This assignment saw Bond trying to
stop Fidel Castro’s communist rebels from overthrowing the brutal regime of the
pro-American dictator of Cuba, Fulgencio
Batista. The rebel forces under Castro had launched their ultimately successful
attacks against the regime in the autumn of 1958 and Batista was forced to flee
with his family to the Dominican Republic on 1 January 1959. This left the
rebel leader Fidel Castro in charge of Cuba, where indeed he remained as leader
until ill health forced him to hand the reins of leadership to his brother (as Acting President of Cuba) on 31 July 2006.
Another assignment from the For Your Eyes Only short story collection is mentioned in passing in ‘The Hildebrand Rarity’:
“It had been nearly a month before when M had
told Bond he was sending him to the Seychelles. “Admiralty are having trouble
with their new fleet base in the Maldives. Communists creeping in from Ceylon.
Strikes, sabotage – the usual picture. May have to cut their losses and fall
back on the Seychelles. A thousand miles farther south, but at least they look
pretty secure. But they won’t want to be caught again. Colonial Office say it’s
safe as houses. All the same I’ve agreed to send someone to give an independent
view. When Makarios was locked up there a few years ago there were quite a few
Security scares. Japanese fishing-boats hanging about, one or two refugee
crooks from England, strong ties with France. Just go and have a good look.” M
glanced out of the window at the driving March sleet. “Don’t get sunstroke.”
Bond’s report, which concluded that the only
conceivable security hazard in the Seychelles lay in the beauty and the ready
availability of the Seychelloises, had been finished a week before and then he
had nothing to do but wait for the Kampala to take him to Mombasa.”
(‘The Hildebrand Rarity,’ from For Your Eyes Only, Pan Books Ltd., 1965, p.
156)
The continuation author John Gardner kept on
the tradition of reporting Bond’s involvement in contemporary events in
Icebreaker (1983):
“In more official terms, Bond was what the
American Service speaks of as a ‘singleton’ – a roving case officer who is
given free rein to carry out special tasks, such as the ingenious undercover
work he had undertaken during the Falkland Islands conflict in 1982. Then he
had even appeared – unidentifiable – on a television newsflash, but that had
passed like all things.” (Icebreaker, Coronet Books, Hodder and Stoughton
Ltd., 1984, p. 21)
The Falklands War was a brief, undeclared war
fought between Argentina and Great Britain in 1982 over the control of the
Falkland Islands. Argentina had claimed sovereignty over the Falkland Islands
since the early nineteenth century but Britain consistently rejected
Argentina’s claims, having administered the islands since 1833. In early 1982
the Argentine military junta under Lieutenant General Galtieri launched an
invasion of the Falkland Islands. Argentine troops invaded the Falklands on 2
April 1982, rapidly overcoming the small garrison of British marines at the
capital of Stanley. The British government under Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher assembled a naval task force with which to retake the islands. Perhaps
Bond could have fitted among this contingent? The British naval force and the
land-based Argentine air force fought intensive battles, the Argentineans
sinking the HMS Sheffield and the container ship Atlantic Conveyor with Exocet
air-to-sea missiles in the process. Argentina failed to stop the British from
making an amphibious landing near Port San Carlos, on 21 May 1982.The large
Argentine garrison at Port Stanley surrendered to the British on 14 June 1982
and this effectively ended the Falklands conflict. Argentina’s defeat in the
war discredited the military government to the extent that it led to the
restoration of a civilian government there in 1983. In Britain, Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher converted the widespread patriotic support for her tough
stance on Argentina into a landslide victory for the Conservative Party in the
1983 General Election. It seems fitting then to end this study of the literary James Bond’s involvement in contemporary events here as the Falklands War was seen by
many as Britain’s last great outpouring of patriotic fervor for a war in a
far-flung part of the dwindling Empire.
TBB Article No. 5
TBB Article No. 5
© The Bondologist Blog, 2007.
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