Tank Ace Posted October 19, 2003 Share Posted October 19, 2003 Is the 007 on micheal whitmans tank and influence on James bond's agent number "007"? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
melb_will Posted October 19, 2003 Share Posted October 19, 2003 I've got no idea. But I've been getting no emails coz Bigpond has been experiencing delays of up to a week. I'll let you know when it gets fixed so we can get that game started. Will 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tank Ace Posted October 19, 2003 Author Share Posted October 19, 2003 so ur the guy! yes it seems as if something was going wrong with the emails! 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pzman Posted October 19, 2003 Share Posted October 19, 2003 I have never heard of Whittman. Michael Wittmann on the other hand I have. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tank Ace Posted October 19, 2003 Author Share Posted October 19, 2003 watever, don't be so technicall, do think it had any influence on James Bond's agent #? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pzman Posted October 20, 2003 Share Posted October 20, 2003 Somehow I don't think so. Wittmann used more than one number during his years in the Wafften SS. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tank Ace Posted October 20, 2003 Author Share Posted October 20, 2003 but it was his 007 number in normandy that made him famous. just wonder if there is any link between James Bond's 007 and his. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pzman Posted October 20, 2003 Share Posted October 20, 2003 Accutally he was famous before then in Germany anyway. Most of his kills were while he served on the eastern front. He was only in Normandy a days before his death, although he did become famous in the west because of his action at Villiars Bocage. From my understanding 007 was a British service number, so somehow I don't think its related in any way. Considering that the creator of James bond started writing the books before or during WWII. Anyway people might have known his name, but I dought many people at the time would have known the number of his Tiger at Villiars Bocage was 007. [ October 19, 2003, 08:03 PM: Message edited by: Panzerman ] 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Snarker Posted October 20, 2003 Share Posted October 20, 2003 The 'Real' James Bond Dies 10-16-3 LONDON (Reuters) - A British war hero, said to have been the inspiration behind secret agent James Bond, has died aged 90, British newspapers reported Wednesday. Former Royal Navy Lieutenant Commander Patrick Dalzel-Job carried out a series of daring exploits behind enemy lines during the Second World War including some while serving under author Ian Fleming, who created the 007 character. Although he never claimed to be the real James Bond, Fleming had told him he was the model for the heroic spy, the Guardian newspaper said. Dalzel-Job's real life adventures certainly read like a James Bond novel. In one of most daring exploits in 1940, he disobeyed orders to rescue all the women, children and elderly residents from the Norwegian town of Narvik in local boats just before it was destroyed in a German bombing raid. He only avoided a court martial after the King of Norway sent his personal thanks and awarded him the Knight's Cross of St Olav. Later in the war he commanded a team in one Fleming's undercover units which worked far ahead of allied lines in France and Germany. He recounted tales of his wartime achievements in his memoir "From Arctic Snow to Dust of Normandy." However unlike the woman-chasing 007, Dalzel-Job returned to Norway after the war to marry a schoolgirl he had met there as a child. He even shunned the Bond films. "I prefer the quiet life now. When you have led such an exciting life you don't need to see a fictional account of it," the Guardian quoted him as saying. (AFP) -- The supposed model for secret agent James Bond, a British war hero who could ski backwards and navigate midget submarines, has died aged 90. Patrick Dalzel-Job served with Bond creator Ian Fleming in the Royal Navy during World War II, during which Dalzel-Job's exploits, worthy of Bond's extravagant adventures, are thought to have served as a model for agent 007. "I was Bond, it's true. I worked with Ian Fleming during the last war," Dalzel-Job once said, according to the Times newspaper. "We led a team of Royal Marines through enemy lines and he later told me he used me as a role model for Bond." Sent to Norway during the war, where he was told not to get involved with civilians, he evacuated an entire village which was threatened by Nazi reprisal bombings. He saved 4,500 lives and received the country's highest award from the King of Norway. But similarities between Dalzel-Job and the notoriously seductive 007 ended when it came to women. "I have only loved one woman," he said after the death of his wife in the 1980s. © 2003 Australian Broadcasting Corporation http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s967925.htm I doubt Fleming's source for '007' was to honor an enemy, especially given his source for his character. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Dorosh Posted October 20, 2003 Share Posted October 20, 2003 Originally posted by TANK ACE: but it was his 007 number in normandy that made him famous. just wonder if there is any link between James Bond's 007 and his. Coincidentally, perhaps, the driver of Wittman's tank in Normandy was named Johann Band. Interestingly, he was a third cousin of Balthasar "Bobby" Woll, Wittman's famous gunner. Knight's Cross Winners of the Tigertruppen When Admiral Canaris of the Abwehr (Army intelligence) was hanged in 1945, there were questions of Band's links to the July 1944 conspirators; of course, Band's death in Normandy made it a bit of a moot point. Band had joined the Waffen SS in the same Wehrbezirk (recruiting district) as Stauffenberg had been a staff officer in 1939. (At that point they were not yet known as the Waffen SS, naturally). July Plot Web Site [ October 19, 2003, 09:30 PM: Message edited by: Michael Dorosh ] 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Snarker Posted October 20, 2003 Share Posted October 20, 2003 You know what? Now my interest is really peaked, because Dorosh had to go and put that little inkling of doubt in my mind! Found this synopsis of the James Bond character: James Bond (the name was taken from that of an American ornithologist), is the son of a Highland Scots father and a Swiss mother. Both of Bond's parents were killed in a climbing accident when he was eleven, and an inheritance of £1000 a year let him add some other educational experiences to his boarding school years. At the age of sixteen Bond lost his virginity in Paris. He joined in the late 1930s the British secret service, but switched to the navy when the war broke out, attaining the rank of commander. Bond is a skilled golfer and the best cardplayer, expert driver and a crack shot. Among his friends is American Felix Leiter from the CIA. Bond's favorite drink is vodka martini, shaken, not stirred, and he trusts on Walther PPK, originally designed for the German plain-clothes police. However, "Bond mythology" is now mixed with elements from the films. In 2000 appeared an illustrated book, James Bond: The Secret World of 007 by Alastair Dougall, which do not mention the writer Ian Fleming - in tune with the idea of the book. Dougall's work sheds light on '"Agent Double-O-Seven and, perhaps most exciting of all, the extraordinary vehicles and gadgetry supplied by Q Branch for his use "in the field".' The consultant editor was Dave Worrall, who founded The James Bond Collectors Club. Still looking for the '007' roots, but this blurb refreshed my memory on the source of the character's name. And to really creep me out, they just played the Bond theme at the World Series... 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Quintusarrius Posted October 20, 2003 Share Posted October 20, 2003 I'd have to root through the morass that is my book room to find the reference (so I'll have to work from memory) but IIRC, John Dee Queen Elizabeth I's court astrologer and part-time spymaster used to sign off a lot of his letters with the numerological sigil '007'. A quick google turns up stuff like : http://www.sirbacon.org/links/dblohseven.html http://astrology.about.com/library/weekly/aa040500b.htm [ October 20, 2003, 03:49 AM: Message edited by: Quintusarrius ] 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Philippe Posted October 21, 2003 Share Posted October 21, 2003 What is needed here is for someone to dig up an interview with Ian Fleming where he was asked why he used 007 for his character. I'm sure someone, somewhere, must have popped the question in print during his lifetime. I even have a vague inkling of having read something about it once in the 'sixties, but I'm not supposed to be able to remember that far back... Given the lengths people will go to come up with 'original' academic topics, we may be giving some hard-pressed graduate student in comp lit or popular fiction a useful idea. And if that student's program isn't too rigorous, we might even get regaled with a discussion of whether John Dee or Michael Wittman (or Leaves of Grass, for that matter) had a subliminal influence on Fleming's choice of numbers. But failing a post-deconstructionist analysis, we should probably stick to using Fleming as the only appropriate source for something like this. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Quintusarrius Posted October 21, 2003 Share Posted October 21, 2003 I'm pretty sure of the 007 / John Dee connection. Fleming is said to have got the '00' numbers from reading Dee's biography during the years leading up to the creation of Bond. The '00' being seen as a symbol for the bearer being the 'eyes' of the state. (It's also an old designation for secret files) However '007' whilst also being Dee's "Sigil" was also the number on the front of the train in a certain Kipling piece of which Fleming was fond. The one thing that almost certainly wasn't the root of '007' was the turret # of an ardent Nazi (not unless anyone can ever prove that Fleming once lost money to Wittman at roulette...) 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Philippe Posted October 21, 2003 Share Posted October 21, 2003 Originally posted by Quintusarrius: The one thing that almost certainly wasn't the root of '007' was the turret # of an ardent Nazi (not unless anyone can ever prove that Fleming once lost money to Wittman at roulette...) And here I thought they were playing Chemin de Fer in Baden... Apart from that your explanation seems pretty plausible, just needs a bit more quellenforschungen. The text that we need is probably buried in the introduction to some Fleming anthology. Since he's not my favorite author I can't help on that. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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