In March 1942, while working in wartime London as assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence, Lieutenant-Commander Ian Fleming proposed the creation of a tiny but dedicated front-line unit of commandos with the job of seeking and seizing enemy assets of intelligence value to the Allies. The resultant force came to be known as 30 Assault Unit.

Success came slowly and in fits and starts. The unit’s baptism of fire was in August 1942, during the disastrous British and Canadian raid on Dieppe. Amid the chaos its men failed to land and one officer was killed, shot in the head while struggling in the sea after the landing craft sank. Ashore at Algiers later that year they usefully retrieved a German Enigma machine. There was some lesser looting in Tunisia the following spring and no finds at all on Pantelleria in June.

In Sicily in July 1943 they recovered another Enigma machine, some equipment used for intercepting Allied battlefield signals, some documents relating to Italian radio direction-finding, and a store of underwater weapons – sea-mines and the like. In Italy in September they retrieved a wireless transmitter on Capri, plus the admiral in charge of Italian underwater naval engineering and some more bits and pieces relating to signals interception. In the Balkans and in the Aegean in the autumn they again found next to nothing; on Leros they lost three men.

The most interesting discoveries were made in northwest Europe in the final months of the war. Early finds in Normandy were a V1 launching site and a V2 fuelling point, cogs for a new type of Enigma machine, and various discoveries in a variety of radar installations. A wealth of documents and kit, from transmitters to torpedoes, came from the Kriegsmarine’s Paris headquarters, sub-offices and stores. In Germany they picked through factories and offices in Cologne, Ludwigshafen and Mannheim, scavenged their way through the shipyards of Bremen and Kiel and rounded up researchers involved with new liquid fuels and jet propulsion. In the seventeenth-century Schloss Tambach, near Coburg in Bavaria, the unit secured the German navy’s archives, sent there by Berlin to be safe from Allied bombing.

Aside from being an idea born from the mind that later invented James Bond, 30 AU was not unique. A plethora of other units became engaged in similar work, while hoards of greater size, interest and value were routinely discovered and recovered in the course of less irregular operations. Also, such scavenging ought always to be recognised as only one part of the intelligence cycle: it is an act only useful when the loot is properly and painstakingly collated, combed and exploited by others.

Still, on the face of it, this has the makings of a good story. And Nicholas Rankin is a proven storyteller, a former radio producer for the BBC World Service whose previous books include a fine biography of the war correspondent George Steer.

In researching Ian Fleming’s Commandos, however, Rankin seems to have encountered a less rich seam of material. He has spoken to some veterans and found documents in the National Archives. A few memoirs were written by men of 30 AU and he makes use of those. But these sources appear to be somewhat thin, for the book draws heavily on secondary sources and contains a great deal of material that is of tangential relevance at best.

Ian Fleming’s Commandos begins with a few scene-setting pages about the bloodbath at Dieppe but a hundred pages follow – almost a third of the book – before Rankin properly starts the story of 30 AU’s creation. Too often there are facts and figures, personalities and stories that add little or nothing to the central tale being told. For example it is unnecessary to explain, in a paragraph about the pebble beaches of Dieppe, that ‘chalk is a limestone made from the skeletons of ancient sea-creatures forming sedimentary strata of calcium carbonate sometimes hundreds of metres thick’.

Another problem is Ian Fleming’s personal involvement with 30 AU. The book’s title may suggest an inspired and gallant leader charging into battle at the head of elite troops. The reality is that, save for watching a smoke-obscured Dieppe from the safety of a destroyer far offshore, Fleming, an aloof and unlikeable figure, spent his war behind a desk. This is less interesting.

Fleming never wrote a memoir of his wartime career. He would also appear to have left few traces of himself in official documentation. To be able to say anything of Fleming’s character, opinions and work at that time, Rankin is left to weave something out of fleeting appearances in the published memoirs and memories of a few men and women whose paths Fleming happened to cross. It is telling that, save for the document setting out the concept for 30 AU, the longest quote from Fleming included in the book is remembered by someone else and relates to his stated desire to live in Jamaica after the war.

It is telling, too, that many wartime acquaintances, including men of 30 AU, were hardly enamoured of him. ‘We none of us liked him much,’ wrote one officer after Fleming briefly visited the unit in France in 1944. 

As our proprietary deity he felt himself entitled to demand offerings of Camembert and libations of captured cognac of the better sort … and we fed him to the best of our ability. We sat on the verandah sipping some cognac which he described as passable. He shot a line about the dangers of life in London.

Another called him ‘the egregious Fleming, who always claimed to know everything’.

30 AU had been Fleming’s brainchild. It is hard to avoid the suspicion that his greatest service to the unit was his simple suggestion that it should be created. Its achievements thereafter were chiefly driven by the officers and men who had the hazardous job of dodging shells and bullets and rooting around shattered factories. A tighter focus on those exploits would have enriched and improved Nicholas Rankin’s book.