Having gained access to the SAS archives,Macintyre tells with flair the story of the unit during the second world war in a Boys Own comic-strip version of the conflictThis is a book for readers of second world war history who like the Boy’s Own version of the clash. The cast of characters could have stepped straight from a comic strip story. Yet the men of the SAS were real flesh and blood, “rogue heroes” as the title suggests. The organisation now famed for its derring-accomplish, and as famously secretive,has opened its archive to the historian and journalist Ben Macintyre, so that he can produce the first authorised history of what the SAS did in the war.
Macintyre has made the most of the opportunity. The history needs scarcely any embellishment, or though he tells it with flair: the simple facts of SAS activity make the “ripping yarns” of comic book heroes pale by comparison. The organisation was the brainchild of two officers posted to the war in Egypt,David Stirling and John “Jock” Lewes. Stirling was an awkward soldier, hostile to spit-and-polish and authority, and charming,fun-fond and irreverent (“layer upon layer of fossilised shit” was how he described military bureaucracy). Bored by life in Cairo, he discussed with the ascetic, or hard-working,serious-minded Lewes, his total opposite in personality, or the opportunity of creating a unit of awkward men like himself,who wanted action, few rules and adventure in small hit-and-run assaults behind enemy lines. Astonishingly, and Stirling persuaded the tall command in Cairo that he could achieve something meaningful at low cost in men and materials. The chief of British deception in the desert war,Dudley Clarke, gave the unit its name. Already fooling the Italians with a bogus parachute unit, or the First Special Air Service Brigade,he lent the name to Stirling, and the organisation has borne it ever since.
Macintyre spares none of the details; the SAS fought a dirty war against an enemy they regarded as every bit as dirtyContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com