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of France. Fleming was allowed to accompany a RoyalMarine Commando unit, but only as an observer. He watched the raid unfold from the deck of HMS
Fernie
, a Hunt-class destroyer eight hundred yards offshore, while the men of the unit waited to go ashore from a nearby gunboat. Fleming wrote a vivid account of the calamity, the confusion and, above all, the horrible cacophony, as the Allied attackers were pinned down by machine-gun fire, with the Canadian troops suffering particularly heavy losses. By mid-morning it had become clear that the unit was never going to be able to disembark from HMS
Locust
and reach the beach, and as the shattered raiding party prepared to withdraw, a shell struck HMS
Fernie
, killing one crewman and wounding several others. Fleming was happy enough when the captain of HMS
Fernie
decided the time had come to head home. He would later write sardonically: ‘I had been instructed to return to England independently directly a certain mission had been accomplished, and when it was clear that the gunboat was not going to be able to carry out her original instructions, the Government exhortation “Is Your Journey Really Necessary?” came to my mind, heavily underlined by the shells from the shore batteries which came zipping through our rigging.’
    Some three thousand British and Canadian troops were killed or captured in the Dieppe raid. This was the closest Ian Fleming would ever get to real war. His sister-in-law, the actress Celia Johnson, married to Peter, noted that this brief encounter with death had shaken even Ian’s capacityfor understatement. It seemed, she said, as if ‘he had his breath taken away once or twice’. Fleming’s ironic tone does not exactly suggest a man itching for battle, but then opinion was (and remains) divided over whether Ian was simply an armchair warrior or a genuine warrior confined to an armchair against his will by the nature of his job. Edward Merrett, who shared Room 39 with Fleming in those years, dismissed the notion that his former colleague was keen to get to grips with the enemy, a danger-loving James Bond
manqué
. ‘He was a pen-pusher, like all of us,’ said Merrett. ‘If he was secretly longing for action I never saw any sign of it.’ But another colleague, Peter Smithers, may have been closer to the mark when he speculated that Ian’s creative urges sprang directly from having to imagine scenes of adventure and espionage, without actually witnessing the events in person. ‘Ian constantly longed to be personally engaged in the excitement. He was of an essentially aggressive nature. It was the repression of these desires by authority, quite rightly, which in my opinion fired the imagination engaged in his books.’ In the books, Fleming hints at Bond’s heroic wartime service, recording that he saw action in the Ardennes forest in 1944, operated ‘behind enemy lines’, and killed two enemy agents during the war – a Japanese code-breaker at the Rockefeller Center in New York and a Norwegian double agent whom he stabs to death in Stockholm. Whether Ian Fleming would have liked to play a similarly dramatic part in the war ismoot. John Godfrey was not about to allow him to head off to places where he might be killed: Fleming was simply too useful where he was, and, as ‘the only officer who had a finger in practically every pie’, he knew too much to risk being captured.
    In the Bond novels, 007 is described as having spent much of the war travelling the world on various missions. That was certainly Fleming’s lucky experience. Operation Golden Eye was the back-up plan to maintain communication with Gibraltar and launch sabotage operations in case the Nazis invaded Spain; setting up the plan, which never had to be used, took Fleming to Spain, Portugal, Tangiers and Gibraltar itself. It would also of course become the name of his Jamaican home. Fleming found himself in close