Ian Fleming's Intelligence Assault Unit

This month in 1942, Commander Fleming, Naval Assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence (DNI), put forward a memorandum to his boss, Admiral Godfrey, entitled ‘Proposal For Naval Intelligence Commando Unit’. He had gained the idea from the success of a similar unit of German Military Intelligence (Abwehrkommando). The objective of the new British unit was, ‘to accompany forward troops when a port or naval installation is being attacked and, if the attack is successful, their duty is to capture documents, cyphers’. The proposal was eventually approved on 27 July 1942 in time for an Intelligence Assault Unit (IAU) comprising 33 Troop of the Royal Marines to participate in the ill-fated Dieppe Raid. Notwithstanding the failure of the raid, Fleming was able to persuade those above that the machinery of the unit had been a success.

Accordingly, the men were given their own headquarters near Amersham for training in explosives and safe cracking, along with French and German lessons. A number of RNVR officers with particular specialisations were attached to the unit, to form a technical troop. One such officer later to join the IAU was a Lieutenant Commander Ashe Lincoln, an expert in mines and torpedoes, and the inspiration for my character ‘Monty’ Montcalm in my WW2 novels. Accordingly, the latest of the trilogy, ‘Death to Touch’, contains many fictionalised references to the work of Ian Fleming’s ‘Red Indians’.

By August 1942, the IAU was being prepared to deploy to the Mediterranean as part of the ‘Operation Torch’ landings in North Africa, but for security reasons, it was referred to as the ‘Special Engineering Unit’. Later in the year it was renamed as 30 Commando and those members who had completed the rigorous Commando training in Scotland were entitled to wear the legendary green beret.

30 Commando’s first operation in the Mediterranean was in Algiers where they captured an Enigma machine and two tons of documents. Having proved their worth, they were then deployed to Sicily as part of ‘Operation Husky’, and after the invasion of the Italian mainland to the Naples and Bari areas in search of specific intelligence on Italian torpedoes. They briefly operated in Yugoslavia, but were not welcomed by Tito and were subsequently withdrawn back to Britain for retraining, equipping and reorganisation in preparation for the D-Day landings. Having initially been commanded by a naval officer, the new CO was a Royal Marine and naval officers only served in the technical section. 30 Commando then took a full part in the landings at Normandy and subsequently achieved some notable intelligence hauls within Germany itself, but that story will only be revealed in my next book, ‘He Who Would Valiant Be’!

30 Commando (or 30 Assault Unit as it was, also, named) was disbanded in 1946, but resurrected as 30 Commando Information Exploitation Group in 2010.