Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War

by Ben Macintyre

Stirling was one of those people who thrive in war, having failed at peace.

To test them, Stirling carried out a dummy night raid against the Allied shipping in Suez harbor, which proved to be almost as inadequately defended as Benghazi. When a passing British soldier spotted three men inflating a boat in the middle of the night beside the harbor and asked them what they were doing, he received the following response: “Never you fucking mind. Fuck off.” Which he did.

“How strange the desert war seemed,” he wrote. “The way we travelled over vast tracts of wilderness in order to search out and kill one another.”

All went well and I was enjoying myself fine until just as I was passing three Jerry soldiers, who were out walking, the pump fell from my bike, engaged itself in the chain, and I went head over heels, hit the deck, and then the bike hit me. I let go one mouthful: “Fuck me you bastard.” Suddenly I remembered the Jerries and when I saw them walking towards me, I immediately started to curse in French but all the time thinking I had had it. However, they just laughed, helped me pick up my bike, and off I went, pedalling like hell.

After two hours of marching, the fourteen SAS troops found a mountain path, and immediately ran into a forty-strong patrol of Germans, who “were busy eating” and initially failed to spot the approaching British. Druce tried to back quietly away, but “unfortunately one German saw the last man in our column and shouted ‘Achtung,’ whereupon he was shot by the man he had seen.”

But then courage, like death, seldom appears where it is expected.

It would have been only too easy to unleash the SAS on the remaining SS inside the camp; instead, calmly and quietly, Tonkin chose to demonstrate what civilization means.