The Real Life British Secret Agents Of World War 2 | David Jason's Secret Service | Timeline

one of the great privileges of working at history here and making films together with our team at timeline is the access we get to extraordinary historical locations like this one stonehenge i'm right in the middle of the stone circle now it is an absolutely extraordinary place to visit if you want to watch the documentary like the one we're producing here go to history hit tv it's like netflix for history and if you use the code timeline when you check out you'll get a special introductory offer see you there i'm david jason and ever since i was a boy i've been obsessed with the cloak and dagger world of spies i always wanted to know what it takes to be dropped behind enemy lines and risk everything for queen and country you are the original femme fatale now i'm on a mission of my own to uncover the true history of the british secret service they were a new kind of intelligence unit which still exists today from the world's first professional spy network the whole place was alive with spies to the real life agents who inspired james bond i'm going to bust the bank here my mate and the ingenious gadgets that made it all possible and done gordon bleeding spin it did it go off this week you're in i'm uncovering the exploits of britain's larger-than-life secret agents everything on double o seven i discover how in world war ii fearless recruits were trained into elite super spies come on baby you can do it then covert commando give him one of those knee in the old ghoulies and i've got him before being dropped into enemy territory to take on the nazis in their own backyard [Music] i'm on the trail of a crack team of spies whose unique skills and bravery help defeat hitler i've come to old warden aerodrome to see a very special world war two aircraft this is the westland lysandre the british-built reconnaissance plane tasked with dropping covert operatives into occupied france by mid-1940 the nazis had blitz creed their way across western europe the allies were on the run after the demoralizing retreat from dunkirk and hitler was on our doorstep to defeat the nazis churchill knew he had to fight dirty so he established a new unit of secret agents saboteurs and assassins to wage a clandestine war against the fuhrer's army yes okay are you receiving me up the front there dodge i am yes former raf test pilot dodge bailey is at the helm and i'm in the jump seat just like churchill's super agents what they would have felt when they got in this aircraft the feeling of trepidation it would have taken some pretty brave people to do it [Music] whilst hitler's luftwaffe was bombing british cities churchill's covert operatives were being dropped into nazi-occupied europe talk about the collie wolves i'd be feeling bloody off i'd be throwing up i mean i think there was an element of doing something important and you know being motivated to make a difference and then realizing that you might make a difference but you might also we have die to defend ourselves no ammunition no guns no just stealth so the trucks are going here she goes come on baby you can do it [Music] talk about flying by the seat of your pants go on dodge my son the brits had been dropping operatives into hostile territory since world war one but getting them out was always a problem british intelligence found the solution in the lysander its advanced aerodynamic design and low stall speed meant it could land on short makeshift airstrips painted black it was the perfect aircraft for night missions to get agents in and back out the pilots that did this they were pretty clever to fly this thing by night with no sort of modern sat navs they only did it when there was a lot of moonlight so they could look down and identify features on the ground the ground party would put the torches on for the landing and then the lysander would land woodlander and a good turnaround would take place in less than three minutes oh that's pretty fast two or three agents out two or three agents here touching down in occupied france churchill spies didn't know if they'd ever make it out alive [Music] not one of my best learnings david i'll give you a nine out of ten for that there she goes i was imagining what it must have been like it's very frightening the aircraft is noisy and she's bumpy and it's sort of saying to you that i'm taking you away from everything that you know and everything that you love and you may be saying goodbye forever with all those mixed emotions very proud to be british good old girl britain sent 470 agents into occupied france during the second world war but before i'm dropped behind enemy lines it's time for a spot of spy training i'm heading to a former top secret espionage hq tucked away in the new forest churchill's new super agents had to pass final examinations here before they were given their missions and unleashed on the nazis claire historian claire mulley is an expert on churchill's covert army they were called the special operations executive bully was soe's finishing school so before you came here you would have been given a new identity let's call you pierre armond from now on okay and your cover is more than a name so you have to have your different dates of birth where you lived you have to have a new career but there's a lot of other things that you need to learn as well so how to set up a safe house how to recruit people how to shake off a tail how to follow someone if you need to grief wait a minute there's an awful lot here that i have to learn yes but if you can't survive this in bewley in england how are you going to cope behind enemy lines what do you think that my odds are of surviving if i went on such a mission the agents were told they had about 50 50 chance of surviving the war so i mean you had to have real blunt courage to go out there on these operations churchill famously ordered his new unit to set europe ablaze recruits would be trained in a new kind of warfare using dirty tricks sabotage and guerrilla tactics they were nicknamed the ministry of ungentlemanly warfare but it wasn't just men that were signed up there were 39 women recruited soe was a real gender leveler actually the women were recruited in the same way they went on the same courses they were armed together with the men and they worked with them in the field the first woman to work for britain as a special agent in the war was christina scarbeck better known as christine granville and she was in the field before the end of 1939 a former polish beauty queen christine granville was one of the soes top operatives and a constant thorn in the nazi's side she ran successful resistance and sabotage operations all over occupied europe she on her own single-handedly converted an entire german garrison in a strategic pass in the alps she converted them what do you mean they had a number of conscripted polish forces who are really fighting under duress threats to their families lives and so on and she climbed up a mountain and she spoke to them in their native polish you know putting her life at risk because she was clearly an agent and she persuaded them that when the time was right they would take the pins out of the big guns bring down any small arms and refuse to continue with their german commander and that's what they did what a wonderful story there are stories that she was the inspiration for vesper linde the bond girl in casino royale the first bond book but i've got to say i think she was much more bond than bond girl really a remarkable woman but anyhow if you're ready i think we're going to put you through your paces now david my name is not david manziel it is antoine you're going to be fine although it is pierre pardon me myself i always get my peers and my antons mixed up you know i fear i may crack under questioning hopefully i'll perform better in the next phase of spy training jason dorner is here to school me in the art of lock picking first off the tension wrench here is designed to apply the turn that the key would apply to the lock right the second tool is our actual pick yeah and this would be used to manipulate the pins lifting them to their correct height and by using both these tools at the same time we'll then rotate the plug yeah opening the door right okay what could be simpler i'm going to have a go at this right at the bottom of the keyway okay ease it in so not too deep in and just from there a little bit of downward pressure and at the same time just a little bit of lift on them as well so you're asking for everything now if you want to lift you want to push it in tumble it up and down so this is the sort of thing they would have to learn when they were stationed here is it that's right it was definitely one of the things that the students had to pass if they were going to go out into the field god bless me i'd be here forever the germans would have arrested me and got me in the clean hours ago there there you go and you're in that's correct brilliant and that's really important because now you can break into a building you can break into a desk or a filing cabinet steal some papers make your way back out and no one will know that you've been in there it's stealth work i can't reveal all the lock picking secrets jason's taught me but for soe stealth tactics were essential although recruits wouldn't be mission ready until they'd passed a final test here at bewley time to put my new nefarious skills to good use nifty oh i'm terribly sorry i must be in the wrong room no you haven't got the wrong room david i've been expecting you noreen reals was just 18 when she received her call-up papers but the soe soon spotted her potential and recruited her for a very special role in candidate training now i want you to imagine that you are an agent in training right and your conducting officer is going to invite you to dinner tonight to celebrate the end of your training while you're having a drink i shall walk in and freddie or whoever it is who's bringing you will say oh no really lovely to see what are you doing here come and be my friend have a drink and then he'll say well if you're not doing anything why don't you say and have dinner with and after a few blushing refusals i'll accept but at the moment to go into the dining room there'll be a telephone call and your conducting officer will come back saying i've just got to go and deal with something start dinner and i'll join you well of course he doesn't and that's where i come into it noreen became a master of an elaborate psychological ruse to test if recruits were mission ready i am put there to get you to say what you're up to adjoining the dining room there is a balcony overlooking the sea and if i can get you out onto the balcony you inevitably come rather sentimental and when you're sentimental you talk so you're going to try and entice me to discuss certain things that you shouldn't be talking about but are you going to use your feminine child oh absolutely yes yes all of them um used to have to have an interview with our commandant colonel woolwich we call him wooly bags behind his back and he had to make a final summary if you had talked the door would open and i or one of the others would come in he would say do you know this woman and then he's realized he'd been tricked as well as brits soe trained up many foreign nationals often soldiers or escapees from nazi occupied countries desperate to stick it to hitler but failed this final test and it was game over i remember one he was a dane and i don't think i had very much difficulty getting him out onto the balcony actually and the next day i'll never forget him because when the door opened and i walked in and willie back said do you know this woman the look of pain surprise and then of absolute fury on his face he half rose in his chair and he said you bets oh god oh no woman that's been called a [ __ ] and i didn't like it much either if he can't resist talking too pretty face over here he's not going to resist when he's over there and it won't only be his um life that's in danger it'll be many others so you are the original femme fatale oh not the original has been going on for centuries look out for them and don't fall for their tricks i won't by late 1942 the nazis occupied most of france the gestapo had overrun paris and the french resistance needed help it was time for churchill's new super spies to fight back i've completed my training at bewley the finishing academy for churchill's world war ii spy unit the special operations executive now i'm following in the footsteps of one of soe's top agents wing commander joe thomas codenamed the white rabbit carried out multiple covert missions affluent french speaker he was an ideal operative to be sent behind enemy lines by mid-1943 the nazis had paris locked down with 32 000 officers in the city they decimated the leadership of the french resistance in a brutal purge a strong anti-german guerrilla army would be a critical ally for defeating the nazis in france and joe thomas was tasked with re-galvanizing the movement but before he was deployed he would be issued with the tools of his trade i've been granted special access to the uk defense academy in shriven great to see you i'm meeting firearms expert carl to learn what weapons joe thomas might have used on his missions so in soe you need weapons for things that are up close and personal and you're gonna be doing tasks like sabotage even assassination so you're going to need to learn about pistols this is a cult model 1903 self-loading pistol it's flat it's compact it's light it's the same caliber as the valve for ppk that james bond uses so yo thomas would have carried one of these at all times not necessarily it's a good weapon to carry in certain circumstances but not always you might want to do things quietly covertly you don't want people to notice so soe developed this it's called a well rod silenced pistol it fires a nine millimeter cartridge has this very large suppressor which muffles the shot being fired if you fired that in a room someone sitting in the next door room wouldn't know you fired a gun cool that's good in it it is extremely quiet in fact if you were to look closely down the barrel of this you would see there's a recess at the end the purpose of that recess is so that you could actually put it right up against someone to further muffle the sound with their body as you shoot them and that was a technique that essay we were trained to use it's a chilling thought assassinating someone so close you can see the whites of their eyes sae employed armorers and the armorers would give people what they thought they most needed typically they'd be given the smaller lighter 32 caliber pistol which is easier to conceal should i take it with me i'm afraid he left it here please all right if you insist in september 1943 joe thomas was sent on his second mission behind enemy lines it was called operation marie claire yo thomas was flown under cover of darkness into western france he was met by members of the french resistance and made his way to nazi occupied paris [Music] i've come here to see what i can learn about his mission [Music] sophie oh hello david how did sophie jackson is a spy historian who's got the scoop on the white rabbit so what was joe thomas here for what was he doing well gene mullen had been in charge of the resistance and he had recently been arrested and tortured to death this had left the resistance in a terrible state yeo thomas came to see what could be salvaged from that wreckage there was around 32 000 gestapo in paris at that time and he knew that they had an idea of who he was he was on their most wanted list so he was trying to keep a low profile absolutely but it wasn't exactly very easy in fact at one point euro thomas found himself on a train in a dining car sitting opposite klaus barbie the butcher of lyon he was the one who had tortured jim mulan to death and he ended up at the same table as him by sheer bad luck joe thomas was face to face with senior gestapo officer klaus barbie on a train to paris nazi intelligence were desperate to capture the infamous white rabbit but joe thomas kept his cool posing as a french businessman what earth would you talk about i mean you don't you don't sit opposite the butcher of leon and say well it's lovely nice weather we're having in there well he was really under pressure so you thomas looks out of the window as they're traveling and he sees the wreckage of engines and carriages that have been blown up by the resistance and he turns to klaus barbie and he says to him what are you lot going to do about that brilliant i love it yo thomas continued working with the resistance and evading capture and just months later they hit the jackpot stealing top secret documents about a new nazi super weapon the v-1 rocket britain was still reeling from the blitz bombings and a new aerial threat could be devastating it was vital joe thomas got the intelligence back to the uk there was a network of people who helped the resistance smuggle documents out of france and he was given a briefcase like this one with the documents hidden inside and he was told to go to a corset shop on a particular road and to use a certain code phrase i mean if he gets caught with this he's for the high jump isn't he absolutely and he knew he'd been followed on a number of occasions but he was quite cunning at getting away from people he would dive into shops and lose them in the other shop or he'd spot one of the bicycle taxis that was around paris and you'd jump on and leave his tail far behind that is extraordinary isn't it absolutely and there were certain episodes that were deemed too sensitive for the official record but luckily joe thomas wrote down one of these encounters in his personal memoir right as i left around 10 30 i noticed a man standing in the shadow of a doorway on the opposite side of the street i immediately felt suspicious and instead of walking straight turned i had not walked far before i sensed that i was being followed it was essential that i should throw off my pursuer so i descended the steps into the metro station the train came in i stepped into the first class compartment my shadow got into the next carriage now i knew beyond a doubt that i was being followed i walked fast into the avenue short of making a dash for it i would not shed my embarrassing double i felt my cult 32 the only solution was to bump him off but where there was a ramp leading down to the riverbank passing under the bridge it was a risky business but i had no choice i was quickly in the shadow thrown by the bridge before he realized anything he was within a foot of me the man crumpled i dragged him to the edge of the bank over he went sliding into the river without any noise it had been a dirty job but it had to be done having just walked through it it's even more extraordinary than it is on the paper i mean to have come up with such a plan under such pressure and actually pull it off well he was clearly a man of steel yeah it was brutal it was terrible it's over the consequences of getting caught he had a job to do so do i [Music] i'm in paris on the trail of one of britain's greatest world war ii spies wing commander joe thomas in late 1943 he was on the run from the gestapo in possession of stolen documents about hitler's new super weapon the v1 rocket his orders were to head to a corset shop where an ally from the french resistance was waiting to aid his escape spy historian sophie jackson is helping me fill in the blanks what happens now well now you have to give across your code phrase well it does yes yeah okay right sick you are joking of course no i'm not joking that was the actual code phrase was it uh excuse me more ave on trey grand [Music] brazil [Music] is that here well i'm just now well that's exactly what happened to you thomas because it turns out there was more than one corset shop in that particular road he's in the wrong shop so he's walking up and down the street going in all these corset shots asking him for a large brazilian he must have had half a dozen by the time he's finished thank you madame oh thank you anyway he goes into the right one and what happened well he finally finds the right shop and he's taken through various people and ends up being transported in an empty hearse to his rendezvous with the british plane that'll take him back to england the vital intelligence obtained by joe thomas alerted the brits to the threat of the v-1 rocking crucially it proved to churchill that the french resistance was still a dependable ally in the fight against the nazis well and that's it i mean happy ending yeah well not quite because yo thomas went on a third mission to france no not again and he goes back and this time he's not so lucky if the gestapo catch up with him he is betrayed by another resistance member he is captured he is tortured he is beaten he's half drowned but he sticks to his false identity he says he is a downed raf pilot and because of that instead of being executed he sent to a concentration camp joe thomas was transferred to buchenwald in germany a brutal ss concentration camp where pows was subjected to cruel medical experiments still under suspicion of being a british agent he switched identities again this time with a dying french prisoner and was transported to a succession of labor camps he may have dysentery and he's been abused he's malnourished but he's still here thomas he is determined to escape and he does and when he escapes he takes with him information on the typhus experiments that have been happening in the camp so he's still spying even though he's in the concentration camp this boat is more bond than bond isn't he absolutely and this is all real it was 1945 by the time joe thomas finally escaped just two years later he was a key witness in the nuremberg war trials helping achieve convictions for the camp officials at buchenwald in recognition for his service throughout the war he received 13 military medals including the george grass but there was one more twist in the yo thomas story his exploits captured the attention of a young naval officer who went on to become a household name this is a copy of a document that i unearthed in the national archives which as you can see was written by ian fleming oh yeah while he was part of the admiralty this concerns the very end of europe thomas's story fleming sends this letter to hq about the appalling treatment joe thomas suffered at the hands of the nazis well that is amazing isn't it it is and it's only the tip of the iceberg many of you thomas's missions had episodes in them that could have been lifted straight from a james bond novel this top secret memo written by bond creator ian fleming proves the yo thomas story had captured his imagination so if i wanted to find out more about ian fleming where do you think i ought to start well for that i think you'll have to go back to the very beginning i'm intrigued by what more fleming can tell me about british spies in world war ii i've come to western austria where the author spent time as a young man but in the mid-1930s the nazis were on the rise austria's border with germany made it a hot spot for british intelligence who were desperate to anticipate hitler's next move and it was here the young fleming had his first encounter with the real agents risking it all on her majesty's secret service [Music] your name is jason david jason sorry sir i cannot smoke in here um you cannot smoke in here oh yeah if we see in the film that he did i'm sorry all right place your bets please so david ah andrew just the man i want to see who are you all right good andrew lysate is a leading authority on the life of ian fleming i wanted to talk about ian phil i mean of course this is the life that he led this is definitely ian fleming's life he came from a wealthy family he was working in the city but he put his energies into womanizing and gambling but when did he start to sort of get involved in espionage there was somebody whom he befriended and got to know quite well called conrad o'brien french i've got a photo of him here who do you have he was an action man he'd spent time in canada worked for the mounties he was a bit of a playboy and there he was in kitsball he ran a company called tiralay's tours which brought punters from britain and elsewhere to austria but the aristocratic o'brien french was much more than an international playboy who was the real thing he was working undercover as the representative of mi6 the secret intelligence service so why would the british government be interested in sending him out here because there was this sense that a conflict with nazi germany was brewing o'brien french is known to have had great contacts not just in austria but in southern germany in fact it was his contacts that gave him the first indications of german troops pushing into austria in 1938 when you look at these pits especially that one that could be james's and funny enough after that we get the sense of ian fleming beginning to put himself forward for a job in some branch of the secret services i could see that is where it all came from place your bouts please well there's only one number i'll play now everything on double o seven i'm going to bust the bank here my mate don't you worry two monkeys about that [Music] crossing paths with playboy's secret agents in austria may have attracted a young fleming to the world of espionage inspiring his bond novels but it was back in britain that his real legacy was born after being recruited into british naval intelligence in 1939 he was stationed in the admiralty offices in whitehall in a department nicknamed the ideas factory i've come to meet historian nick rankin ah nick david hello he's got the inside story on a remarkable fleming brainchild right so what sort of ideas do you think that ian fleming was coming up with he's got hundreds of ideas fizzing out about things to do but i think if there's one idea that's of real historical importance i've got it here now what this is is a proposal for naval intelligence commando unit these commandos accompany forward troops and if the attack is successful their duty is to capture documents and ciphers before they can be destroyed by the defenders he puts this idea up to the admiral and here in pencil yes most decidedly fleming's new idea was given the green light by the top brass at naval intelligence his commanders would be called the 30 assault unit and recruits needed to be fearless cunning and multi-talented so they're looking for people with a wide range of skills right absolutely they have to be agile and think on their own if they get into a building they've got to be trained in what to look for dealing with booby traps camouflage getting into safes for example so where would you get hold of a safeguard you go to scotland yard and say who are the people who uh blow safes and they found such a man johnny raminsky and he was brought out of jail and he taught people how to blow open safes so what you're saying is sort of think outside the box yeah exactly fleming's 30 assault unit were to wage a new kind of covert smash and grab warfare they'd infiltrate hostile territory strike with force and precision and snatch the enemy's hardware intelligence or personnel right from under their nose so this commando unit's idea is to go in in the middle of battle somewhere nick whatever they can find and go back home is that it that is it so you recruit marines first of all as the brawn and you recruit mechanics electricians people with technical skills who can fix the kit drive cars use weapons and then you start training them in other skills what you're talking about is going ashore into combat you need people who can fight and it wouldn't be long before 30 au was sent into combat in august 1942 nazi u-boats were winning the battle of the atlantic and fleming's commandos were sent on a daring intelligence raid to help swing the war back in the allies favor i'm on the trail of an elite squad of world war ii commando spies 30 assault unit the brainchild of bond creator ian fleming their objective was to seize war-winning documents weapons and equipment from the front line [Music] but stealing nazi secrets was extremely risky they would need intense training in covert warfare guerrilla fighting and hand-to-hand combat right okay then what's happening what we got here well sir david they had to come up with something that was effective irrelevant of the size of the person clive edit is one of the uk's leading historical combat experts and he's an instructor in the unique fighting system talk to our world war ii special forces defender it had to be very simplistic for the reason being is some of these guys only had three or four days training before they were put into the field okay i understand right let's see it in action shall we brandon can you show disarm please good grief that is clever would you like to try it no but i will okay i might need it right what do i do right so david yeah you stand where brandon was yep yep yep so zach's going to place the gun in the small of your back your hands go up right like you're under arrest yes so first thing you're going to check over your right shoulder then you're going to actually move to your left hand side as you circle you're going to take your left arm circle over the top of zack's arm that's it you're going to capture it and squeeze out to your hip you're going to drive your right hand underneath his chin and then you're going to take your knee and drive it into his groin oh this is the best beer oh i did it yeah and then all you're going to do you're going to turn back towards me to you and as you do that the gun will peel out it does take the gun sir stand back and jobs are good bloody good in it even though that he may pull the trigger by doing that it's harmless it is it will go off if it goes off behind you which is what you want hence the important part was when you turned and you went over the top of his arm that the gun was past you that is that is really clever that's brilliant okay my son off you go should we do it a bit faster see if i can do it gun in the back puts his hands up you look over your right shoulder to see that that will put him off a turn like that arm comes down grabs that give him one of those knee in the old ghoulies keep going take the gun out of his little mitt and i've got him well i'm fit i'm ready i'm off to foreign lands look out germany here i can't kill myself [Music] fleming's 30 assault unit were thrust into action on their first mission in august 1942 the royal navy were losing the battle of the atlantic modifications to the enigma coding machine meant they could no longer decipher german uber communications and the brits were losing millions of tons of vital war supplies to the nazi torpedoes getting hold of the latest enigma intelligence was crucial to understanding u-boat tactics and getting control of the atlantic [Music] 30 au were deployed with a 10 000 strong allied naval force off the coast of northern france well david this is the main beach at dieppe and it's here that ian fleming's idea is put into action this is the first time they tried out going ashore to try and get intelligence in the middle of a huge raid i'm on dry land with historian nick rankin what were they after what they hoped to do was to get into the naval headquarters and get an enigma machine and this would help them break the german codes operation jubilee was a daring amphibious attack on nazi hell diem the plan was for the royal navy and canadian forces to sweep in on the early morning tide and storm six beaches along a dozen miles of the german defended french coast with the assault in full swing mission was to blast their way into german naval hq and seize enigma machines code books and top secret files so you have ten thousand men in total and in the middle of this lot are in fleming's commanders now ian fleming himself is out there on a destroyer called hms ferny he wanted to come ashore but he was not allowed because he knew all kinds of secrets they thought the germans had truth drugs and could torture you and get secrets so certain secrets had to be kept this little group in fleming's commandos is one platoon about 24 men and their plan is to come charging in but they must have been being shelled all the time well they got to about there when there was a hail of shellfire and so there's cannon fire there's machine gun fire so they turn around with dead and wounded on board and they go back out there to the ships and they say right we're gonna have another go sounds like a suicide mission they set off and they go through a wall of smoke and fog that's set by the destroyers and the smoke pots floating in the water and it is chaos it's full of dead bodies wrecked tanks the shrapnel bursting falling down dogfights going on overhead bullets splashing carnage ian fleming's people hit an obstacle out there machine guns are hitting them now the young officer who's leading this force he says every man for himself all over the side so this handful of men swim out it was a disaster they had to go back with nothing the cost here was huge 1300 people were killed in this operation it just hurts me though to think of how many young men lost their lives [Music] so what did fleming learn about the group that he put together 30 a.u well he he knew that what you had to have was tenacious people who had enterprise and and and the right kind of spirit who don't just give up at least eight of those men who were here at dieppe volunteered next time to go on the next mission which was in november 1942 going to algiers and there they did have success there they did capture an enigma machine and all kinds of other information and the idea begins to grow so this raid wasn't so much as a failure as a learning curve it's a steep moment yes yeah in june 1944 the allies launched the largest amphibious landing in history on the beaches of normandy 30 au were part of this vast armada their smash and grabbed rage captured essential intel including details of the v1 rocket sites and a list of all german radar installations in north west europe but as the allies pushed the nazis back after d-day 30 au scored their biggest victories by then 30au has developed it's got new people new techniques they're looking for all kinds of secrets miniature submarines robot vehicles hydrophones the new kinds of torpedoes every single kind of technology you have 30 assault unit on the one hand capturing all the archives of the german navy then you've got them catching the hardware of the germans the valtaverk factory they've got rockets they've got all kinds of kit and they capture not just the equipment but the scientists themselves so you're taking people as well as ideas the hardware the software of the german brain so fleming's idea was the beginning of a success definitely it was a new kind of intelligence unit which still exists today i mean we have now a 30 commando that is the information regiment of the commando brigade you know when the guys capture osama bin laden they kill islam bin laden but they take all the computers you gather intelligence on your mission so this is an idea developed by ian fleming and that idea started here on the beaches here the exploits of the secret agents and elite commandos we've uncovered wouldn't be out of place in a bond adventure but the reality is these brave operatives not only helped win world war ii they also changed british intelligence gathering [Music] forever [Music] the real stories of real british agents are the stories of real british heroes the undeniable tenacity the coolness under pressure and the sheer bloody courage of the men and the women that we've uncovered just go to show that where james bond is concerned the truth is far stranger than fiction [Music] next time i go in search of the ingenious tech wizards this is the sort of device q would have given james bond and backyard brainiacs get hey that is the secret well and the sea balls who were the masterminds of a left field campaign to outfox the nazis why did you ask me to get you a back of the condom and i get my hands on the gadget how fiendishly clever and deadly diy devices that helped lead britain to victory it was held together with sticky tape but that will blow through an armor-plated mercedes i've only gone and blown the bloody doors off

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 393,546

Keywords: History, Full Documentary, Documentaries, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, 2017 documentary, BBC documentary, Channel 4 documentary, history documentary, documentary history, david jason, secret agents, james bond, mi5, mi6, british secret service, ww2 documentary, world war 2, world war 2 documentary hd, cold war, spy documentary

Id: tlJ2C7uA4x4

Length: 46min 56sec (2816 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 13 2021