ObituaryPatrick Dalzel-Job
Real-life model for James Bond, without the martinisAs a wartime secret agent, Patrick Dalzel-Job, who has died aged 90, risked a court martial to save the population of a Norwegian port and became a model for the fictional James Bond, whose creator Ian Fleming was once his chief. Unlike Bond, however, he remained true to one woman and did not go in for martinis, shaken or stirred.
The real-life exploits of Dalzel-Job, and his romance with a Norwegian girl, outbid fiction. His initiative after the aborted British seizure of Narvik stands out amid a sorry tale of incompetence by senior commanders and politicians.
Early in 1940, Berlin and London each feared the other would seize neutral Norway for strategic reasons. The British decided to mine Norwegian coastal waters, the route used by German ships carrying iron ore from Sweden, and to land troops if the Nazis showed signs of invading. The British Operation Wilfred was scheduled for April 8, but the Germans, meanwhile, had decided to invade Norway on April 9, in order to deny it to the British, mobilising their entire surface fleet for attacks on Oslo, Narvik and three other ports.
The two navies clashed on April 8, when the British sent cruisers from the Scottish port of Rosyth as a reinforcement - leaving behind the troops they were meant to deliver. Transports waiting in the Clyde were stripped of their escorts for the same reason and could not sail.
The Germans took Narvik with 10 destroyers. When the Luftwaffe seized Stavanger airfield, the RAF was forbidden to bomb it in case of civilian casualties, thus helping the Germans swiftly to gain control of south Norwegian airspace. Amid the fog of war, dashing attacks by often outgunned destroyers at Narvik and elsewhere stood out on the British side. But, by April 12, the Germans were dug in in southern Norway and Narvik, which the allies now resolved to capture.
It fell to 30,000 British, French and Polish troops on May 28 - four days after the allies decided to abandon Norway altogether. Dalzel-Job, then a sub-lieutenant, was under strict orders not to get involved with Norwegian civilians, but he rightly feared that the Germans would use their overwhelming airpower to bomb Narvik when their troops were driven out.
He therefore organised the evacuation of 4,500 people by the local fishing fleet. When the Luftwaffe duly came, only four Norwegians were killed. The allied military evacuation succeeded against all the odds. But instead of the anticipated court martial, Dalzel-Job received the Knight's Cross of the Order of St Olaf from the recently evacuated King Haakon VII of Norway.
Dalzel-Job was born in London, and lost his father, a machine-gun company commander, in the battle of the Somme three years later. He went to Beaconsfield school, but was frail enough to be sent for his health to Switzerland, where he was privately tutored and learned to sail on the lakes.
He flung himself into ocean sailing, and took his mother on voyages along the convoluted Norwegian coast and up to the Arctic. In an echo of The Riddle Of The Sands, by Erskine Childers, whose fictional heroes scouted the north German coast before the first world war, Dalzel-Job sent detailed navigational reports to the Admiralty. On his last prewar voyage, he "borrowed" Bjoerg Bangsund, the 13-year-old daughter of a friend, as his temporary crew.
On the outbreak of war in 1939, he immediately volunteered for the Royal Navy and was sent to Norway as part of the preparations for Plan R4 - the abortive scheme to seize four Norwegian ports to deny them to the Nazis. German U-boats and major warships made effective use of the long Norwegian coastline from 1940.
In his dangerous wartime missions, Dalzel-Job navigated a midget submarine and became a crack shot and expert skier - he could even ski backwards. In 1944-45, he served under Ian Fleming in 30 Assault Unit, a secret squad that raced ahead of advancing allied troops to seize enemy equipment and papers before they could be destroyed. In this capacity, he accepted the surrender of the north German city of Bremen before the British reached it. He finished the war as a lieutenant-commander.
After the war, he went on another mission to Norway - to find Bjoerg, now 19, and marry her, which he did within three weeks. They lived in the Scottish Highlands, then in Canada, where Dalzel-Job worked for the Royal Canadian Navy, and in Plockton, Scotland, again from 1960, where he taught. He wrote two books, on his war and his life in Canada.
His wife died in 1986; their son survives him.
ยท Patrick Dalzel-Job, secret agent, born June 1 1913; died October 12 2003
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