Cue to a kill - a look back at Fleming`s war

It was in 1958 that Ian Fleming first introduced the readers of Dr No to the trademark handgun for James Bond, the Walther PPK. Here, for the first time, Bond had what his armourer, Major Boothroyd, called “a real stopping gun”. Apart from its firepower, the Walther had another advantage for the secret agent - at just over an inch wide it could be easily concealed in a holster or a waistband.

Using the Walther PPK was simply a matter of moving the safety lever and pulling the trigger. Sounds simple? Could you kill an enemy agent? Ian Fleming couldn’t - reports the Financial Times.

Towards the end of the second world war, Fleming was in Toronto with Naval Intelligence. In his biography, The Life of Ian Fleming, John Pearson recounts how Fleming had got himself on to a Special Operations Executive course for a couple of days. There he distinguished himself so much that he was considered to have real potential as an agent.

For the final exercise Fleming was given a loaded revolver and told to make his way to a certain hotel where he was to shoot dead an enemy agent. This “agent” was in fact an expert SOE instructor who was ready to disarm Fleming when he entered his room. However, Fleming never made it - at the last minute he turned around and left. “I couldn’t kill a man that way,” he was later reported as saying.

Back then, Fleming had no access to the modern psychological techniques and video-game technology that can be used very effectively to manipulate and condition the mind to overcome this resistance to killing.

The creator of James Bond was not alone in discovering that he could not kill the enemy. In 1947, US General S.L.A. “Slam” Marshall surprised the military world with his book, Men Against Fire. Marshall was a combat historian who had travelled with the US Army and interviewed soldiers after battle. In the book he made the startling suggestion that in the second world war “on an average not more than 15 per cent of the men had actually fired at the enemy... the best showing that could be made by the most spirited and aggressive companies was that one in four had made at least some use of his fire-power.”

Although Marshall’s methods were later criticised, there does appear to be some truth in his assertion. During the Sicily campaign in 1943, Lieutenant-Colonel Lionel Wigram of the British School of Infantry had found that only a quarter of the men in a typical British platoon could be relied on to try to engage the enemy in battle.

It was therefore not surprising that after the war the US and British armies changed the way they trained their soldiers. Thanks to the work of Lieutenant-Colonel Dave Grossman, a former US paratrooper turned military psychologist, we can now understand why these changes proved so effective at turning soldiers into killers.

In his book, On Killing, Grossman points to the military establishment’s adoption of “operant conditioning”, a behavioural modification technique pioneered by the psychologist B.F. Skinner. Whereas most soldiers in the second world war were trained on the range, firing their weapons at bulls-eye targets, modern soldiers are put into realistic battlefield scenarios and shoot at life-size targets. The sequence is constant: the target pops up (stimulus), the soldier fires (response), the target falls when hit (reward). Do it often enough in practice and it is an easy transition to the real thing. According to Grossman, “What is being taught in this environment is the ability to shoot reflexively and instantly and a precise mimicry of the act of killing on the modern battlefield.”

Fleming did not know that this conditioning was the key to realising his ambition as a secret agent. Instead he was left to fill the gap in his life with the fantasy of the Bond novels (while giving his friends the impression that he might have been a man of action after all). Pearson’s biography describes how “one of the slightly disconcerting things about Fleming in real life was that he liked to imagine he had killed someone in the line of duty.”

In fact, Fleming’s ambition was more attainable than he realised at the time. Although training for most soldiers changed only after the second world war, there was, in fact, a unit during the war that realised how effective this conditioning was, and that unit was the SOE. And by curious coincidence the man who introduced this technique was very likely to have been the man Fleming could not shoot in the Toronto hotel: Major William Fairbairn. Although Pearson does not name Fairbairn, it seems from his description as an unarmed combat expert from the Shanghai Police that he was the man waiting for Fleming. And it was Fairbairn, together with his fellow Shanghai colleague, Eric Sykes, who revolutionised the way the SOE trained its agents.

Fairbairn and Sykes first met as members of the Shanghai Municipal Police, which maintained law and order in the International Settlement on the Shanghai waterfront until the war. Fairbairn was an assistant commissioner and head of the riot squad, and Sykes was a reserve police officer and firearms salesman who also ran the sniper unit. At that time Shanghai was probably the most violent city in the world. Founded on the opium trade, the city was plagued by violence, drugs, murder and corruption. Fairbairn developed a system of unarmed tactics that he called Defendu, and it proved highly effective against the city’s criminals, many of whom were black-belts.

Fairbairn brought Defendu to the SOE and wartime commandos, together with the system of instinctive shooting that he had developed with Sykes. In their 1942 book, Shooting To Live, they said: “Target shooting is of no value whatever in learning the use of the pistol as a weapon of combat.”

Fairbairn and Sykes also brought other innovations such as the “killing house”, later made famous by the SAS. Here students faced realistic fighting situations and realistic moving targets.

US Major General John K. Singlaub recalled his SOE training in his autobiography, Hazardous Duty: “Sykes’ method of instinctive firing involved creeping around a blacked-out cellar and shooting at moving targets, illuminated by the muzzle flash of our first shot. Once we could hit the targets with absolutely no hesitation, Major Sykes pronounced us ‘improving’.” If Fleming had attended the full SOE training course there is a chance that the conditioning might have kicked in and he might have graduated as a secret agent.

One of the failings of the Bond films is that they owe more to Hollywood stunts than to the realities of the spy world. Fairbairn and Sykes forbade taking careful aim with the pistol. Instead, they taught their students to draw quickly and fire instinctively from the hip by pointing the gun rather than aiming it, as Bond does in From Russia with Love when he saves Kerim’s life.

After the second world war, this type of training was extended to ordinary soldiers, and today anyone can submit themselves to this conditioning simply by playing video games, especially ones where light guns are used for a more realistic experience.

Grossman now campaigns against media violence and video games, which he says can have the same effect on teenage kids as the military training. According to Grossman, “video games can be superb at teaching violence - violence packaged in the same format that has more than quadrupled the firing rates of modern soldiers.”

On his website, killology.com, Grossman gives examples of the tragic consequences of this conditioning. In one case in the US, he was called in as an expert witness for a murder trial where a young man was facing the death penalty for killing a shop assistant during an armed robbery. The young man had walked into a store and pointed a .38 pistol at the shop assistant’s head. The assistant turned to look at the young man, who instinctively pulled the trigger and shot him right between the eyes. When Grossman asked him why he had pulled the trigger, he said: “I don’t know. It was a mistake. It wasn’t supposed to happen.” Grossman then explained to the jury that the young man in the dock had spent hundreds of dollars on video games, learning how to point and shoot so often that his reflexes took over when he held a real gun in his hand.

Not all psychologists share this view. Last year Professor David Buss of the University of Texas published The Murderer Next Door, in which he said it was evolution that made humans kill. According to Buss, “Murder is deeply ingrained in the human mind,” and is “a product of the evolutionary pressures our species confronted and adapted to”.

The notion that we are all natural killers is rejected by Robert Sussman, professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis and joint author of Man the Hunted. He says in his book that “we humans are not slaughter-prone assassins by nature.” When I asked him about Buss’s theory, he said, “If murder statistics vary from place to place, one simple evolutionary, biological, universal explanation cannot be correct, when so many cultural ones are so much better. There is no evidence whatsoever from the fossil record or from primate behaviour to support this type of adaptationists’ scenario.”

Evolution certainly did not help Ian Fleming when he tried to pull the trigger. But it is surely ironic to think that if he had been able to play the video game, From Russia with Love, it might actually have helped him in his ambition to become a real-life secret agent.

David Lee is the author of “Up Close and Personal: The Reality of Close-quarter Fighting in World War II”, to be published by Greenhill Books in April.

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