Is this WWII hero the man who inspired James Bond?

The maverick heroics of MI6 agent James Bond may actually be based on the true story of one brave soldier, who took on the Germans and won again and again

If the dashing hero of Ian Fleming’s ^[1] best-selling spy thrillers ^[2] were among us, is it likely he’d be living alone on a far-away hill by the sea in Scotland?
A mildly spoken gentleman in his eighties, now grey and a little stooped—could he be secret agent 007 ^[3]? Come on.

Ah, but life is stranger than fiction.

Some of those who know best have always believed that Fleming based his superspy on a wartime comrade named Patrick Dalzel-Job—yes, our elderly gentleman in the Highlands.

There were other influences, of course. Bond’s love of vodka martinis and handmade cigarettes came, in fact, from Ian Fleming himself; and whereas 007 tumbled into bed with a different beauty ^[4] every few pages, Patrick Dalzel-Job (pronounced Deal-Jobe), has loved only one woman all his life.

“He saw in Patrick’s flinty blue eyes the look of a man whose mettle has been tested”

But there is something here. Consider:

Job, like Bond, is half Scots, a one-time naval officer, a master of languages who in real life performed precisely the kinds of derring-do Fleming later attributed to his flamboyant make-believe hero.

By the time Dalzel-Job walked into Commander Ian Fleming’s Admiralty office one day in 1944 looking for a new assignment, he had already seen service as a seaman, commando, submariner and spy, and had just become probably the first naval officer to qualify for army parachute wings.

Fleming, an ex-journalist who had broadcast his intention of becoming a best-selling author ^[5] some day, was then building up the clandestine army of naval intelligence officers and Royal Marine commandos which was to move out in front of the assault troops on D-Day ^[6] and capture secret enemy documents and weapons.

He saw in Patrick’s flinty blue eyes the look of a man whose mettle has been tested, and promptly signed him on.

Says veteran BBC broadcaster Charles Wheeler, who served with both: “Who could be surprised if a kind of James Bond seed were planted then and there?”

Patrick Dalzel-Job, born in Twickenham, Middlesex, in 1913, was three years old when his father, an infantry officer, was killed in France ^[7]. His mother, a small, spirited woman, brought him up alone.

They lived on the Sussex coast, then moved to Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire, where Patrick went to school. But he was a sickly boy, inept at team sports and home with mysterious bouts of fever more often than he was in class.

When he was 14, his mother took him to Switzerland, where the mountain air restored his health and he became an expert skier ^[8]. He continued to read widely in French and English, but his formal education was over.
Drawn to Norway ^[9] by stories he’d read as a boy, in 1937—the summer of his twenty-fourth birthday—he set sail from Scotland ^[10] in a 37-foot schooner ^[11], Mary Fortune, whose deckwork and interior he had built himself.
With his mother as crew, he spent the next two years exploring a wilderness of fiords ^[12] and islands from Bergen in the south-west to Nordkapp, on the northernmost coast of Europe.

His mother knew nothing of seamanship, but an ingenious array of ropes, chains and pulleys enabled Patrick to man the rugged little schooner single-handed.

Soon he was speaking Norwegian like a native and making friends up and down the western coast. A deep-rooted love for Norway and its people became a cornerstone of his life.

Wherever he sailed through the complex of waterways, he drew detailed charts, convinced they would be of use to the Royal Navy if war came. But when he sent them to the Admiralty, they were accepted with indifference.

And three years later, when the Germans invaded Norway and coastal charts of any kind were desperately needed, his could not be found.

Meanwhile Patrick, preparing the Mary Fortune for a voyage north to the Arctic Ocean ^[13], decided he needed another hand on board and turned to friends in Tromso, the Bangsunds: might one of their children be interested?

The keenest was 13-year-old Bjørg, with her wide blue eyes and a laugh that was the most beautiful sound Patrick had ever heard.

All through that spring and summer, Bjørg was a valiant and valuable shipmate, cheerfully helping out in the galley and learning how to handle the tiller ^[14]. Then, in early September, their radio brought news that the war had come.

Mary Fortune headed back to Tromso, where all the Bangsunds came to see off Patrick and his mother, their possessions reduced to what they could carry in two suitcases, on the coastal steamer.

As the ship ploughed through the night towards Britain, Patrick found a scrap of paper from Bjørg under his pillow. “I love you,” it said.

Credit: Marshall Bishop H. When war came to Norway, Patrick was forced to flee—though he would soon return as a soldier

In April 1940 Patrick, now an officer in the Royal Navy, was again bound for his beloved Norway ^[15].
The Nazis ^[16], in a brutal move to assure command of the northern sea lanes, had invaded their neutral neighbour, and an Allied expeditionary force was steaming north in an attempt to dislodge them.
Patrick was assigned the task of disembarking the troops at Harstad, 150 miles north of the Arctic Circle ^[17], and conveying them to combat staging areas.
This he did by organising fisherman friends ^[18], and their friends, into a flotilla of more than 100 of their boats. The objective was nearby Narvik, an ice-free port seized by the Germans as a base from which to protect their supply of vital iron ore from neutral Sweden.

The Norwegians did as Patrick said because they trusted him and he spoke their language; also because he never hesitated to fire a round from his father’s old service revolver across their bows when they forgot this was war and not just another fishing trip.

Wearing an unmarked greatcoat over his sub-lieutenant’s insignia and barking orders as if born to command, he even had senior officers calling him “Sir”.

The Allies captured Narvik—but held it only briefly. They were too few and had come too late. By the end of May, all but a small force had been withdrawn. No one doubted that Luftwaffe bombers would soon be rumbling across the sky, aiming to drive off the rest.

Courtesy of Imperial War Museum. Patrick was devastated to see the Narvik flattened by the Germans

On May 29 Patrick, standing offshore of the town with his ragtag fishing fleet, learned to his horror that no provision had been made to evacuate the townspeople.

His urgent enquiries only prompted a stern message from force headquarters: he was to hold his boats in reserve and not—”repeat not”—concern himself with the civilian population.

At midnight, a crisis meeting of the city council was still agonising about how they could evacuate the people to the designated safe areas. The then mayor, Theodor Broch, tells what happened next:

“There was a commotion by the door. A young Englishman said he had to talk to me, that we had to evacuate the town. I barked at him that we had no boats.”

“I have the boats,” said Patrick. “Let’s go.”

His providential appearance in defiance of strict orders; that clipped self-assurance; rescuing the population of a doomed city—what could have been more James Bondian ^[19]?

Within the hour, under Patrick’s close supervision, women and children were being handed down into the boats.

“A young Englishman said he had to talk to me, that we had to evacuate the town”

“I have never forgotten him,” says Gerd Carlsson, who was 21 and boarding with her sister and baby nephew. “There was shooting from land and sea, and lines of waiting people, and such a babble of shouting. But he shook each person’s hand warmly and was so calm that although I didn’t even know where I was going, I wasn’t afraid.”

During the next two days and nights, 4,500 people were ferried to safety in dozens of communities along the surrounding waterways.

Early on June 2, Patrick and Mayor Broch walked together through Narvik’s empty streets, making sure no one was left behind. By then, even the last of the troops had slipped away.

But hours later, while Patrick was still there, the bombers came, turning the town’s neat wooden buildings into an inferno, reducing most of them to splinters and ashes.

Patrick watched as Narvik burned, heartsick because he knew there was nothing in the town of military value, only people’s homes.

Courtesy of Division of Naval Intelligence of the Navy Department of the United States. Patrick used his intimate knowledge of Norway’s waterways to bring down German warships like the Tirpitz

On June 8, Patrick went back to Britain, disillusioned by the Allied defeat, bitter that he hadn’t managed to stay behind and organise a Norwegian resistance—and dreading a message from the Admiralty that he was to be court-martialled for gross disobedience of orders at Narvik.

Instead, the Admiralty signalled him with a message from King Haakon VII of Norway: His Majesty would be in London shortly and he would personally present Lieutenant Dalzel-Job with the Knight’s Cross of St Olav, Norway’s highest order, for saving the people of Narvik.

After that, nothing was heard about a court-martial. But Patrick was relegated to a series of converted merchantmen that zigzagged across the South Atlantic intercepting blockade-breakers or convoying Allied freighters safely to port.

“All this”, he recalled in the book he later wrote ^[20] (and published) about his adventures, “seemed terribly monotonous to me.”

Just as he began thinking the war had passed him by, Lord Louis Mountbatten summoned him to London and put him in charge of motor torpedo boat (MTB) operations in Norway. It was particularly dangerous work, for the Germans were throwing all they had into defending Norway’s coast.

“He knew that capture meant summary execution, on Hitler’s own orders”

But Patrick knew plenty of narrow entrance channels that the Germans didn’t. His MTBs raised havoc with commando raids, sabotage and attacks on enemy ships.

It forced the Germans to step up defensive operations and induced trepidation quite out of proportion to the number of MTBs employed against them.

Still only a lieutenant, Patrick was next posted to a detachment of midget submarines. In September 1943, he briefed their four-man crews on the remote Arctic estuary where the German battleship Tirpitz was moored in apparent safety; three of the tiny craft crept into the fiord and crippled her in a raid that earned VCs for two of the participants.

Next, equipped with a radio transmitter, he was put ashore on a Norwegian island, on a one-man intelligence mission to track supply convoy patterns through the inland waters.

He knew that capture meant summary execution, on Hitler’s own orders. Yet he remembers those three weeks, alone and utterly dependent on his own wit for survival ^[21], as among the most exhilarating of his life.

Taken off the island by pre-arrangement, he assuaged his reluctance to leave by directing the MTB that picked him up to a German merchantman whose anchorage he had noted. Two torpedoes finished her off.

On June 10, D-Day-plus-4, Patrick landed on Utah beach in Normandy as a member of Commander Ian Fleming’s intelligence hit squad, the 30th Assault Unit (30 AU)—a name intended to mislead, since it was never meant to assault anything and probably took its number from an office door in the Admiralty.

Patrick, promoted to lieutenant-commander, was in command of Team 4, reporting by courier directly to Fleming.

All the way through Normandy, Belgium and into Germany, Team 4 operated ahead of the assault troops in enemy-held territory, getting their hands on German documents, weapons and installations before they could be destroyed by the Germans or by Allied artillery.

“Patrick’s audacity was sometimes breathtaking”

Patrick revelled in it; this kind of war, where he was free to set the level of risk, was the kind he wanted to fight. And he sent back a steady stream of data and captured equipment.

He found the control centre for the long-range bombing of Allied convoys in the Atlantic; he recovered intact a new and dangerously effective midget submarine; reaching Cologne 24 hours before any other Allied troops, Team 4 walked unhindered into the vast Schmidding metalworks and took it over.

Patrick’s audacity was sometimes breathtaking. When some nuns showed him a heavy safe used by the Germans, he promptly blew it open, breaking every window in the convent. He gave the money in the safe to the nuns for repairs and sent the documents in it to London.

His reports from the field to the desk-bound Ian Fleming kept fleshing out a portrait of the kind of man the would-be writer was conjuring up for his fictional hero ^[22]. But Patrick’s most stunning exploit was still to come.

Courtesy of US Office of Naval Intelligence. The Bremen shipyard hid an immense prize, which Patrick was determined to investigate

The target was the vast Deschimag shipyard in Bremen where, he had heard from prisoners, there could be as many as 20 of the newest high-speed German submarines—a prize of enormous intelligence value.

But winning it would be a race: the 52nd Lowland Division, following on close behind 30 AU, was planning on blasting the shipyard into oblivion.

In the afternoon of April 26, 1945, Team 4 entered Bremen’s deserted central square. A fretful policeman appeared. Please, he said to Patrick in the lead Jeep, would the commander accompany him to the city hall where the mayor was waiting?

Patrick found the mayor, dressed in formal black, alone in the empty, echoing chamber.

“He wanted me to accept the surrender of the city of Bremen and all its services,” Patrick recalled, “and he gave me assurances of vigorous police action against any who failed to co-operate fully.”

Patrick went at once to radio Army Command that organised military resistance was ended and whatever the Allies wanted would be done. “I told them that, except for some sniping, the city was secure. They didn’t have to shell the shipyard.”

But the Army did not see it that way. They were going to open fire that very evening, they replied, as soon as they came within range.

Furious, Patrick climbed into his scout car and set out alone for the shipyard, staking his life that there really was no resistance there, and that his presence would keep the Army from shelling it.

Then, at the very gates of the shipyard, his scout car sputtered and died—it had run out of petrol. And when he tried to radio for help, all he got was static; contact had been cut by interference from surrounding buildings.

It’s like a bad film ^[23], Patrick remembers thinking. But what would happen in the last reel?

Courtesy of United States Strategic and Tactical Air Forces. Patrick had to enter the Bremen shipyard before the Allied forces blew it to smithereens

He considered going ahead on foot, but needed the rest of his team with the radio truck. Without it, how could he tell the Army he was inside the shipyard? He would only get killed there.

Spotting some workers, he grabbed a bicycle from one of them. Frantically he pedalled back through the sunset to his unit—aware that there was still enough daylight for a sniper to put a bullet in his back.

When he rounded the last corner, his anxiously waiting men hauled him on board the lead vehicle, bicycle and all, and the column sped off for the shipyard at breakneck speed.

Inside, they found 16 brand new submarines and two destroyers, and forestalled their imminent demolition by the shipyard technicians and directors.

Patrick and his men took them all prisoner, and in a night-long search found technical papers detailing the most recent German naval research, as well as machine tools of highly advanced design.

They had not heard the last from the Army. Early next morning, when submarine experts had already begun a detailed study of the captured U-boats, all of the new high-speed Type 21, a British Army staff officer appeared and asked Patrick to sign a receipt for them—implying that the 52nd Division had captured them.

This was the last straw for Patrick. He slammed the gate and had a sign posted on it to the effect that the entire shipyard was the property of 30 AU: “Keep Out!”

The war ended soon after. Patrick never saw Ian Fleming again, nor did the British government reward his wartime valour with even a single honour or citation.

Among those who still wonder why is Rear Admiral Jan Aylen, then a Commander in 30 AU, who calls Patrick “one of the most enterprising, plucky and resourceful people that the Second World War produced ^[25]“.

The reason is not complicated. Frequently Patrick committed the unforgivable offence of disagreeing with senior officers and, worse, being proved right.

Just like James Bond.

“Patrick committed the unforgivable offence of disagreeing with senior officers”

As soon as the fighting ended, Patrick responded to the great hunger in his heart and returned to Norway.

Six years had passed; Bjørg was 19 now, a different person. He was different. But as soon as they saw each other, they knew they had only been marking time. They married three weeks later.

The James Bond years, about to begin for Ian Fleming, were over for Patrick. He and Bjørg went to Canada, where Patrick served in the Canadian navy and their son lain grew up.

In 1960 they settled near Plockton in the West Highlands, prepared to continue living happily ever after. Patrick taught in the village school and Bjørg became a pillar of the community until her death, in 1986, of cancer.

Patrick, brave as ever, soldiers on alone.

Banner credit: Courtesy of Imperial War Museum © IWM A 29402^[26]
Keep up with the top stories from Reader’s Digest by subscribing to our weekly newsletter^[27]

Loading up next…

References

^{^} Ian Fleming’s (www.readersdigest.co.uk)
^{^} spy thrillers (www.readersdigest.co.uk)
^{^} secret agent 007 (www.readersdigest.co.uk)
^{^} different beauty (www.readersdigest.co.uk)
^{^} becoming a best-selling author (www.readersdigest.co.uk)
^{^} D-Day (www.readersdigest.co.uk)
^{^} killed in France (www.readersdigest.co.uk)
^{^} expert skier (www.readersdigest.co.uk)
^{^} Drawn to Norway (www.readersdigest.co.uk)
^{^} set sail from Scotland (www.readersdigest.co.uk)
^{^} schooner (www.readersdigest.co.uk)
^{^} wilderness of fiords (www.readersdigest.co.uk)
^{^} Arctic Ocean (www.readersdigest.co.uk)
^{^} learning how to handle the tiller (www.readersdigest.co.uk)
^{^} beloved Norway (www.readersdigest.co.uk)
^{^} The Nazis (www.readersdigest.co.uk)
^{^} Arctic Circle (www.readersdigest.co.uk)
^{^} fisherman friends (www.readersdigest.co.uk)
^{^} James Bondian (www.readersdigest.co.uk)
^{^} book he later wrote (amzn.to)
^{^} for survival (www.readersdigest.co.uk)
^{^} fictional hero (www.readersdigest.co.uk)
^{^} bad film (www.readersdigest.co.uk)
^{^} Imperial War Museum (www.iwm.org.uk)
^{^} Second World War produced (www.readersdigest.co.uk)
^{^} Imperial War Museum (www.iwm.org.uk)
^{^} subscribing (www.readersdigest.co.uk)