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Ian Fleming and SOE's Operation Postmaster: The Top Secret Story Behind 007: The Untold Top Secret Story

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family, resulted in his association with their small high speed vessels. Experimental types were built in 1942 and numbered 344, 345 and 346. No. was intercepted in Paris by a French double agent called Ortet. He accompanied Graham on his journey Some years later Fleming, who by then had quit banking for a career as a writer, created his Bond character, a Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) agent codenamed 007 and with a licence to kill. But they should be rightly proud, for ranging the blue Mediterranean during the enemy occupation of many of its lonely islands was a young Dane whose exploits became legendary. After a voyage lasting six and a half days, the two tugs and their spoils entered Lagos harbour, accompanied by the British corvette H.M.S Violet, which had been sent out to “discover” the Duchessa d’Aosta and the Likomba “adrift” in the open sea and to accompany them to a British port. The illegal seizure (codenamed "Operation Postmaster") could well have damaged relations between Great Britain and Spain, so it was imperative as far as possible to hide the fact that the British were behind this operation.

The raiders left Lagos in their two tugs on the morning of 11 January 1942, and while en route they practised lowering Folbots and boarding ships at sea under the command of Captain Graham Hayes. They approached Santa Isabel harbour and at 23:15 and 23:30 hours on 14 January 1942; both tugs were in position 180 metres (590 ft) outside of the harbour. Onshore, Lippett had arranged for the officers from the Duchessa d'Aosta to be invited to a dinner party. Twelve Italian officers and two German officers from the Likomba also attended. [15] This later became No 11 Special Air Service and he was posted for duties with the Special Operations Executive (SOE), which specialised in secret actions behind enemy lines. a good sea story, an interesting footnote to history." International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, December 2021

Winter and Hayes then set off the charges. Similar actions took place on the second smaller craft and the larger liner, boarded by a small party led by Major March-Phillipps.

Taking heavy fire, the boat began to sink and the raiders attempted to swim to the MTB, which had been discovered, hit and forced to temporarily withdraw. Not all operations were successful and few were as disastrous as the raid on the Greek islands of Halki and Alimnia, when ten agents were captured after being surrounded by German gunboats. Nine of them were executed after being tortured.After completing his training, Winter worked with the Small Scale Raiding Force (SSRF). During 1942, while the rank of warrant officer, he took part in three key missions – codenamed Operations Postmaster, Dryad and Aquatint. This real life ripping yarn about an officially-sanctioned act of wartime piracy involving an unconventional Norfolk hero who was destined to become a pillar of the county establishment surpasses the most hyperbole-laden Hollywood thriller. Making full use of offical papers long embargoed and personal files only recently made available for public scrutiny, Lett has written the most compelling and comprehensive account yet of the daring mission to Fernando Po whilwe also arguing that Postmaster and its leaders served as inspiration for the greateast fictional spy hero of all – James Bond. Eastern Daily Press The first two operations led to him being awarded the Military Medal. The third resulted in abject failure and dire consequences for all involved.

Churchill, Winston (1949). The Second World War, Vol II, Their Finest Hour. Cassell & Co Ltd. p.217.The five soldiers billeted there were taken prisoner but, as they were being escorted to the beach, they began to struggle and scream for help. Unable Operation Aquatint on 12 September 1942 was a failed raid by 11 men of No. 62 Commando British Commandos on the coast of occupied France on part of what later became Omaha Beach. Three commandos were killed in the raid, including their commander, Major 'Gus' March-Phillipps and the others became prisoners of war, of which only five would survive the war; one was killed in captivity and the fate of the other two is uncertain. This was exactly the sort of highly dangerous mission for which the Special Operations Executive was created, a force of highlytrained but unconventional commandos to, as Churchill put it, “set the lands of the enemy ablaze.” Operation Postmaster was just the start of it.

Ian Fleming and SOE’s Operation POSTMASTER: The Untold Top Secret Story, is a historical look at just one of the Special Operations Executive’s (SOE’s) missions in West Africa. The author draws parallels between this mission, the makeup of the SOE, and Ian Fleming’s James Bond series. In 1943, the German battleship Tirpitz was hiding out in Norwegian fjords, positioned to threaten Allied convoys from Britain to the Soviet Union. Even worse for the British, the four battleships tasked with keeping the Tirpitz at bay were desperately needed to fight against the Japanese in the Pacific. With this in mind, as well as the fact that the Tirpitz was the responsibility of the Royal Navy to defeat, the British admiralty came up with a daring plan to damage the Tirpitz using midget submarines.

Operation Postmaster

To transport the raiders to the island, the tugs Vulcan and Nuneaton were provided by the Nigerian administration. The chosen raiding force was 32 men in the form of four SOE agents, 11 SSRF commandos and 17 men recruited from the local population as crew for the tugs. The mission suffered a blow when General Sir George Giffard, the British military commander in West Africa, refused to support the mission and would not release the 17 men required on the grounds that the undertaking would compromise some unnamed plans he had in mind and that which was in law an act of piracy would have significant repercussions.

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