Last October, I received an email from Rory Kaufhold of WAG Entertainment. The company wanted to use an image of Josef Jakobs in an upcoming episode of Combat Dealers for Discovery. I agreed on the condition that they send me a copy of the program when it aired. I never heard back from Rory and eventually reached out to WAG Entertainment. After a bit of back and forth, a DVD was finally sent (but has yet to arrive). In the meantime, the company sent me a link to the episode on Vimeo (password protected). I’ve also found the episode on YouTube.
Combat Dealers – Season 5 Episode 6 – James Bond/Ian Fleming
Combat Dealers is a reality show following the exploits of a flamboyant group of Brits. The main personality is Bruce Crompton, a former paratrooper who buys old military gear, fixes it up and then sells it onwards, for a profit of course. In this episode, Crompton and his sidekicks are on the trail of military gear related to Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond. Fleming worked for Naval Intelligence and many of his real life exploits seem to have direct links to his creation, James Bond.
I was a bit perplexed as to how Josef Jakobs would fit into a story about Fleming and James Bond but… they managed to work in a few minutes of Josef’s story. The gist seemed to be that espionage was not for the faint of heart and that capture often resulted in execution. In the YouTube video (below), the Josef section begins at the 9:33 minute mark. The sound quality is poor… turn up the volume!
Crompton and his ex-paratrooper sidekick, Freddie, enter the Tower of London where they meet a Yeoman Warder named “Shady” Lane. This would seem to be Beefeater Andrew Lane. According to Crompton, the Tower was used as an ultra secure prison for prisoners of war and spies. Even Rudolf Hess was held and interrogated at the Tower. This statement is a bit of a stretch. I have seen correspondence between MI5 and the local coroner which noted that the Tower of London was considered to be a fortress, not a prison, and therefore notices of executions did not need to be posted on the doorway (as they were at prisons). Rudolf Hess was only held at the Tower for a few days before being moved elsewhere. As for Josef, he only arrived at the Tower a few hours before his execution at 7:12 am on August 15.
Andrew Lane then leads the two visitors to the Outer Ward along the eastern edge of the Tower and shows them a car park (between the Martin Tower and the Constable Tower) where the rifle range used to be situated. At this point, the film flashes an old image from the Tower of London (see below). This image does not show the rifle range in which Josef Jakobs was executed. The shed pictured below was located along the northern side of the Tower, between the Boyer Tower (pictured below) and the Flint Tower (off the right side of the image below). I wrote a blog about the confusion between the shed and the rifle range in 2014. At the very least, it would seem rather odd for a firing range to have windows along its length, what with the potential for ricochets. The rifle range in which Josef was executed appears to have had sky lights.
The Yeoman Warder then tells the visitors that the last execution in the Tower of London was that of Josef Jakobs and gives a bit of detail about the execution.
According to Crompton: “Josef Jakobs was a hopeless Nazi agent, straight out of Carry On Spying (1964 British comedy film). He parachutes into a potato field and breaks his ankle and sits there rubbing where it hurts [I doubt that Josef rubbed his comminuted fracture of the tibia/fibia with bone fragments pressing up under the skin] til the Old Bill [British slang for a law enforcement officer] turns up. [Josef fired a pistol to attract the attention of two passing farmers who summoned the Home Guard.] Far from concealing his identity, he’s got in his rucksack [no rucksack, just a briefcase] a transmitter [and receiver], code books [it was a code disc and Josef had torn it up and scattered it around him], forged papers and to cap it all, a German sausage [even spies have to eat]. In short, everything except a signed photo of Adolf Hitler. [Although he did have a steel parachute helmet with a swastika logo on it.]“
There is no doubt that Josef was ill-prepared for his mission, although there is no need to exaggerate the circumstances of his landing in order to create dramatic effect. The story has enough drama without manufacturing it. The piece on Josef is very short, just a few minutes and it’s amazing at how many inaccuracies one can stuff into that brief of a span.
At least they did acknowledge the Family of Josef Jakobs for the photograph…
Review Score
3/5 – Inaccuracies always irk me. There is more than enough accurate information about Josef Jakobs on my site and blog. The lack of accurate research on the part of the production company is disappointing.