SAS: Rogue Heroes

by Ben Macintyre

One night, after an official dinner, Mayne vanished. Cromey was still waiting for him at 3 a.m. when Mayne, in bedraggled evening dress, burst in and announced, ‘I’ve just shot a springbok’, before dumping a very bloody, very dead South African antelope on the floor.

When a passing British soldier spotted three men inflating a boat in the middle of the night beside the harbour and asked them what they were doing, he received the following response: ‘Never you fucking mind. Fuck off.’ Which he did. The raiders planned to employ exactly this tactic if challenged in Benghazi.

Jellicoe remarked of the Free French forces: ‘They were very, very free; and very, very French.’