The art of the pinch

[bloodygranuaile]

For reasons vaguely related to my new NaNoWriMo project that I hadn't actually expected to start writing anytime soon, I finally read Nicholas Rankin's Ian Fleming's Commandos: The Story of 30 Assault Unit in WWII, which I picked up at the Harvard Bookstore Warehouse Sale last year.

 

It took me a little longer to get through than I'd like, partly due to my being very busy and partly due to the writing being a bit drier than ideal, but I still finished it... about three weeks ago now, meaning it's not nearly as fresh in memory as it should be for me to be writing a review. It's been a busy few months.

 

This book is partly a biography of Ian Fleming but mostly a biography of the 30 Assault Unit, the Navy commando unit that he administrated in World War II, and a thorough cataloging of the things in the life of the 30 Assault Unit that were later used in the James Bond novels. It doesn't have as much of a strong narrative throughline as most of the other WWII spy books I've read, since it doesn't focus on an individual operation (the gold standard of WWII spycraft books that I've read thus far is still Ben McIntyre's Operation Mincemeat), and it doesn't quite focus on Fleming's life or career arc either, since there's so much great other stuff that was done by the rest of the 30AU and the Navy's intelligence operations generally. But it's still a really informative look into a lot of very cool stuff about WWII-era spycraft and especially counterintelligence--a main focus of 30AU's work was "pinching" machinery and documents that would allow the codebreakers at Bletchley to listen in on German messages. Near the end of the war, they also recovered a huge amount of the Third Reich's administrative documentation, which would prove invaluable in the aftermath of the war for figuring out what had gone on and proving it in the Nuremburg trials.

 

Despite being a little disorganized, it was a good read that I would definitely recommend for other people interested in that sort of subject.