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

Special Air Service. The SAS.

Archibald David Stirling.

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

“We acquire more merit on this earth in doing gladly those tasks set us which are least attractive than by any amount of enjoyable labour,” he wrote.

Colonel Dudley Wrangel Clarke

Commandos were already some of the most highly trained soldiers in the army, but he was looking for something more profound, and rarer: an ability to think and react independently. Individuality and self-reliance are not always highly prized in an army. Indeed, many officers prefer soldiers to do exactly what they are told, without question or, indeed, thought. But Stirling was insistent that this unit would not be composed of biddable yes-men: “I always hoisted onboard guys who argued.”

The men would also have to be willing to kill, at close quarters, and not merely for the sake of killing. “I didn’t want psychopaths,” he insisted. Stirling, then, was seeking a set of qualities that are not often found together: fighters who were exceptionally brave but just short of irresponsible; disciplined but also independent-minded; uncomplaining, unconventional, and, when necessary, merciless. People who simply wanted a change of routine were dismissed out of hand:

He even listed the traits he sought: “Courage, fitness and determination in the highest degree, but also, just as important, discipline, skill, intelligence and training.”

Ralph Alger Bagnold,

The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes, first published in 1941

Benghazi. For more than 2,500 years, competing forces had fought over the ancient Mediterranean seaport: Greeks, Spartans, Persians, Egyptians, Romans, Vandals, Arabs, and Turks. The Italians had invaded in 1912, ruthlessly oppressing the locals and building a charming seafront of Italianate villas. Benghazi flourished as a showcase for Mussolini’s imperialist vision, and by 1939 some twenty thousand Italians were living in this thriving colony with shops, restaurants, and a cinema. In February 1941, it had been captured from the Italians by British and Commonwealth forces in the first major Allied military action of the Western Desert campaign. Two months later it was recaptured by Rommel’s Afrika Korps. The port was seized back by the Allies on Christmas Eve, only to change hands once again barely a month later as Rommel’s forces swept eastward. A vital target in the see-saw war, Benghazi and its surrounding airfields had taken on strong symbolic, as well as strategic, significance. With Tobruk back in Allied hands, Benghazi was the essential supply port for the Afrika Korps, while the nearby airfields—Berka, Benina, Barce, Slonta, and Regima—were vital to the Axis air forces in the battle for air supremacy over the Mediterranean.

Ralph Hale Mottram, First World War novels

Byron’s Don Juan: “He was the mildest-mannered man / That ever scuttled ship or cut a throat.” The continuation of that quotation also fitted Stirling’s character: “With such true breeding of a gentleman, / You never could divine his real thought.”

“The irresistible force meets the immovable object,” grunted Churchill. This is known, in philosophy, as the “sword and shield paradox,” a conundrum in which two absolute forms of power are pitted against each other. But it also captured something of Churchill’s wartime philosophy: immovability would bring victory (“We shall never surrender”), but it must be combined with overwhelming and dramatic force. War was not just a matter of bombs and bullets, but of capturing imaginations. Stirling

“Scarlet Pimpernel”—a reference to the hero of Baroness Orczy’s novel, Sir Percy Blakeney, a wealthy, foppish Englishman on the outside, but in reality a master of the secret, undercover war.

Robert Marie Emanuel Melot

word derives from the practice of tying a single pigeon to a stool in order to lure others: the stool pigeon (also known as a stooge) is a decoy, an informer who infiltrates a group by appearing to be the same as them, while secretly collecting information for the enemy.

restructuring. The original unit, 1SAS, would be split into two parts: the Special Boat Squadron (SBS), under George Jellicoe, to carry out amphibious operations, and the Special Raiding Squadron

(SRS), under Mayne, to be used as assault troops in the coming invasion of Europe.

Jellicoe’s SBS, 250-strong, moved to Haifa and began training for operations in the Aegean. The 2SAS, meanwhile, the new sister regiment formed under David Stirling’s brother Bill, would continue training in northern Algeria befor...

Mayne’s newly named section, the SRS, though it included many SAS veterans, was a far cry from the muscular, mobile force Stirling had dreamed of before his capture: reduced in strength to between 300 and 350 men, it was now under the overall command of HQ Raiding Forces, to be used in straightforward attacking operations. The SRS was no longer the independent, agile, self-sustaining SAS of the desert,

In all but spirit, the 1SAS had ceased to exist. It would soon return to its original shape and purpose, but for the moment, in order to survive, the SAS had to fall into line.

In the late spring of 1943, the SRS began a fresh round of intensive training in Azzib, Palestine: endurance marches around Lake Tiberias in broiling heat, cliff scaling, weapons use, bayonet practice, wire cutting, beach landings, and the use of explosives.

the invasion of Sicily: more than three thousand ships carrying 160,000 soldiers, the combined forces of Montgomery’s Eighth Army and the US Seventh Army under General George Patton. D-Day in Sicily was set for the early hours of July 10, 1943. The task of the SRS was to knock out the artillery defenses at a key point on the Sicilian coast: Capo Murro di Porco—Cape of the Pig’s Snout—a distinctly nasal promontory stretching

into the sea south of Syracuse on the island’s eastern side. The cape was a “veritable fortress,” according to intelligence reports, perched atop a steep rock cliff and equipped with searchlights, a range of heavy guns, and Italian defenders who would outnumber the assault team “by 50 to one.”

tungsten

French Milice

Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, a place that would become synonymous with Nazi barbarity. Some 60,000 prisoners were still packed into a camp designed to accommodate 10,000;

Some 70,000 people perished at Belsen.

In May 1945, Barkworth, Sergeant Major Fred “Dusty” Rhodes, and four SAS troopers climbed into a truck and a single jeep, and headed for the Continent: this was the War Crimes Investigation Team (WCIT), but in effect it was the last wartime mission of the SAS, unauthorized, unconventional, and therefore, in a way, entirely apt.

For the next three years, Barkworth and his rogue unit gathered evidence of murder: interviewing witnesses, compiling dossiers, combing prison camps, taking statements, locating suspects.

Roy Farran

Fitzroy Maclean

Order of the British Empire (CBE)

Alan Samuel Lyle-Smythe,

Alan Caillou,

Malcolm Pleydell

was himself hospitalized with a gastric ulcer. While recuperating, he wrote Born of the Desert, the finest firsthand account of the SAS in North Africa.

Asher, Michael, The Regiment: The Real Story of the SAS, London, 2007

Caillou, Alan [Alan Samuel Lyle-Smythe], The World Is Six Feet Square, London, 1954

Hastings, Max, Das Reich: The March of the 2nd SS Panzer Division Through France, June 1944, London, 1983