Born in Cape Town on 27 July 1904, the son of Arthur Henry Divine and his wife, Mabel Frances Durham, he was educated at Rondebosch Boys' High School and Kingswood College, Grahamstown.
Divine would write the screenplay for the feature film Dunkirk (1958) and was the likely inspiration for central character Charles Foreman (Bernard Lee), skipper of the motorboat Vanity.
He was also present during Operation Torch – the American landings in North Africa in 1942, and travelled over the Atlas Mountains with the first US troops to fight the German army in the Second World War.
[6] Working for the Sunday Times foreign news service under former naval intelligence officer (and later creator of James Bond), Ian Fleming, Divine travelled widely.
[7] He subjected Britain's defence establishment to withering fire in The Blunted Sword (1964) for a lack of imagination and for missing countless opportunities since the Royal Navy began its transition from sail to steam.
Divine recommended maximum decentralisation to the commands and a return of the function of weapons production to industry, to competitive development and to new ideas untrammelled by bureaucracy and tradition.
[8] A naval reviewer acknowledged Divine's painstaking factual accuracy but accused him of seeing only one side of the question and failing to properly appreciate the difficulties faced in the past.
[11] This was because the Soviet air defences had demonstrated their effectiveness against manned aircraft by shooting down the high-altitude Lockheed U-2 spy-plane piloted by Gary Powers with a surface-to-air guided missile.
[17] By coincidence, two years after the novel was released, a 16" bronze statuette of the goddess Artemis removing an arrow from her quiver was found near Delos, Divine's original setting.
His writing on defence issues was a notable influence on Wing Cmdr Hubert Allen's controversial books and articles on British airpower, especially Who Won the Battle of Britain and The Legacy of Lord Trenchard.
Allen claimed that Divine was the 'notable exception' to the Fleet Street defence correspondents, who 'almost to a man' swallowed the notion of the V bomber's low-level capability.