Henry Cavill wears a Jaeger-LeCoultre Dirty Dozen Military

In January 1942, Gus March-Phillipps sailed a small team into the neutral Spanish port of Santa Isabel on Fernando Po, stole two Italian merchant ships, and towed them to Lagos. The raid was Operation Postmaster, it earned him the Distinguished Service Order, and Guy Ritchie's The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare dramatizes it with Henry Cavill as March-Phillipps, founder of No. 62 Commando, the Small Scale Raiding Force that helped father the SAS. Alan Ritchson plays the Danish officer Anders Lassen, Henry Golding plays Freddy Alvarez, and Eiza González plays the SOE agent Marjorie Stewart; Ritchie co-wrote from Damien Lewis's book Churchill's Secret Warriors, and Lionsgate released the film in April 2024. An epilogue notes that Ian Fleming, who appears in the film played by Freddie Fox, drew on Postmaster for James Bond. The real March-Phillipps did not survive the year: he was killed that September on Operation Aquatint, shot trying to swim ashore on the occupied French coast, at thirty-four.

Cavill wears a vintage military Jaeger-LeCoultre of the kind collectors call the Dirty Dozen, on a nylon strap. The name covers twelve Swiss manufacturers, Buren, Cyma, Eterna, Grana, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Lemania, Longines, IWC, Omega, Record, Timor, and Vertex, who built watches to the British W.W.W. specification, Watch Wrist Waterproof: black dial, Arabic numerals, subsidiary seconds, luminous hands, a rugged waterproof case regulated to chronometer level, and the broad arrow of Crown property on the back. The W.W.W. watches were all delivered in 1945, and Operation Postmaster happened in January 1942, so the watch on March-Phillipps's wrist is a real wartime piece worn three years before it existed. Even the strap runs ahead of itself: the originals shipped on pigskin or canvas, and nylon straps of this style date from decades later.

The Ministry of Defence went to Switzerland for these watches because British watchmaking had deteriorated past the job, and Swiss neutrality kept the workshops running through the war. The twelve are highly sought after by collectors today.