Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Medal sale of WWII SAS hero who inspired Bond
Sergeant was comrade of 007 author Ian Fleming
THE medals of a wartime SAS soldier whose brave raids behind enemy lines inspired James Bond creator Ian Fleming are being sold.
The escapades of Sergeant Major Tom Winter and his commando colleagues included stealing two German ships they had boarded like pirates.
A watchman on one of the merchant vessels, off a West African island, jumped overboard when confronted by Sgt Maj Winter clasping a dagger between his teeth.
The daring SAS unit also rowed up to a lighthouse the Germans were using as an observation post in the Nazi-occupied Channel Islands.
They took all of the enemy soldiers prisoner, destroyed their weapons, recovered codebooks and returned to England seven hours after setting out.
But the men’s luck ran out on a similar operation on a French coastal town 10 days later, in 1942.
They landed in the wrong place and met fierce opposition, resulting in three of them being killed and five taken prisoner. Sgt Maj Winter was one of those and endured 10 days of torture and interrogation by the Gestapo. He spent two years in a POW camp, before escaping by posing as a French soldier. Sgt Maj Winter received the Military Medal for his involvement in the first two operations. Now his medal group is being sold at auction in Central London for a pre-sale estimate of £30,000. A spokesman for auctioneers Dix Noonan Webb said: “Tom Winter and his comrades were truly extraordinary.
“The hijacking of enemy ships from a West African port was a feat of which Sir Francis Drake would have been proud.
“Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, was involved in the planning of these operations which subsequently inspired a number of scenes in the 007 series.”
Fleming maintained he took inspiration for Bond from various sources.
Sgt Maj Winter survived the war and lived into old age.
His medals are owned by a private collector, who is selling them tomorrow.