Macintyre uses the SAS war diary as the backbone of his narrative, and is candid about failure as well as the hard-earned successes.
Already fooling the Italians with a bogus parachute unit, the First Special Air Service Brigade, he lent the name to Stirling, and the organisation has borne it ever since. The chief of British deception in the desert war, Dudley Clarke, gave the unit its name. Astonishingly, Stirling persuaded the high command in Cairo that he could achieve something significant at low cost in men and materials. Bored by life in Cairo, he discussed with the ascetic, hard-working, serious-minded Lewes, his complete opposite in personality, the possibility 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. Stirling was an awkward soldier, hostile to spit-and-polish and authority, charming, fun-loving and irreverent (“layer upon layer of fossilised shit” was how he described military bureaucracy). The organisation was the brainchild of two officers posted to the war in Egypt, David Stirling and John “Jock” Lewes. The history needs scarcely any embellishment, though he tells it with flair: the simple facts of SAS activity make the “ripping yarns” of comic book heroes pale by comparison. Macintyre has made the most of the opportunity. The organisation now famous for its derring-do, 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. Yet the men of the SAS were real flesh and blood, “rogue heroes” as the title suggests. The cast of characters could have stepped straight from a comic strip story.
T his is a book for readers of second world war history who like the Boy’s Own version of the conflict.
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