Courage, like death, seldom appears where it is expected.
(One of Ben Macintyre’s reflections in ‘SAS: Rogue Heroes’, page 178)
This is the official history of the Special Air Service (SAS) during the Second World War, from its inception in July 1941 to its disbandment in October 1945.
Among all the other textual paraphernalia there’s a two-page ‘select’ bibliography which includes no fewer than 25 other books which had already been written about the SAS when this one was published (2016) and I bet more have been published since. So it’s a very popular and well-trodden subject. Indeed, Macintyre writes that as the Second World War reached an end, and the British press discovered the SAS:
The hints of roguish derring-do, combined with a distinct lack of hard detail, created a hunger for SAS stories that has never abated. (p.273)
What distinguishes this book from its competitors is its official status and therefore the access Macintyre was given to a mass of material including: the regimental diary (the SAS War Diary), personal accounts, top secret reports, memos, private diaries, letters, memoirs, maps, never-before-released archival material and hundreds of photos. The result is a 310-page Penguin paperback which is presumably as close to the definitive account as we’re likely to get.
The narrative is surrounded by textual apparatus, including a Foreword by the Right Honourable Viscount Slim, patron of the SAS Association; seven good, clear maps; a list of all the SAS operations during the war; a regimental roll of honour; a chapter giving the post-war careers of the book’s leading figures; numerous photos; the bibliography and an index.
Overshadowing all this is the fact that the book was made into a big-budget BBC drama series, broadcast in 6 episodes at the end of 2022, well reviewed in the press and watched by millions. I bought the book after watching the series, probably like tens if not hundreds of thousands of others. So it’s not only a popular history of then, the Second World War, but very much an artefact of our times, of now.
Part 1. War in the Desert
‘SAS: Rogue Heroes’ is immensely readable, clearly, authoritatively, grippingly written, a perfectly calibrated entertainment. I couldn’t put it down and read it in two highly enjoyable evenings. No wonder it was a Sunday Times bestseller.
You can read the basic facts on the SAS Wikipedia article and countless other web pages. My blog posts are always too long because I summarise everything; this time I’m just going to give the most striking, dramatic or funny elements in note form:
David Stirling
The SAS was founded by Sir Archibald David Stirling who came from a grand, landed Scottish aristocratic family. His family connections helped at key moments drum up support from Scottish grandees high up in the British Army: ‘This was an age when family and class connections counted for much’ (p.23). And:
Stirling was possessed of a profound self-belief, the sort of confidence that comes from high birth and boundless opportunity. (p.10)
Apparently, the decisive moment in Stirling’s life was when he was rejected from a Paris art school for being no good. He became determined to prove himself some other way (pages 9 and 91).
Stirling prided himself on being a renegade, a rebel against traditional army discipline and authority, an opinion vouchsafed by everyone who knew him plus all subsequent biographers. After completing officer training his report summarised him as ‘irresponsible and unremarkable.’
In return he powerfully disliked army discipline and hierarchy, calling military bureaucracy ‘a freemasonry of mediocrity’ and ‘layer upon layer of fossilised shit’ (p.22).
Surprisingly (or maybe not) everyone who worked with him said he was quietly spoken, respectful of his men, got to know them all, rarely raised his voice or lost his temper. He presented comrades in the group with challenges or missions and somehow made them feel like it was their duty to do it.
He was also very against boasting and swank which he described as being ‘pomposo’ (p.126).
Alternative tactics
Traditionalists still thought of wars in terms of huge armies clashing across defined fronts. Stirling conceived of a small agile force working behind enemy lines to sabotage enemy resources.
This was war on the hoof, invented ad hoc, unpredictable, highly effective and often chaotic. (p.172)
This ended up working dramatically well in the North African desert where civilisation amounts to a thin strip along the roads by the coast, inland from which stretch truly vast areas of desert, many of which were unexplored and unmapped in the 1940s.
I was staggered to learn that the Libyan desert covers half a million square miles, nearly half the area as India (1.269 miles²) (p.58).
Stirling badly damaged his back on his first parachute jump, losing consciousness and, when he awoke, unable to walk. Doctors thought he’d be crippled for life. Slowly feeling returned but later he suffered from blinding migraines.
Operation Squatter
Notoriously, the first SAS ‘mission’, Operation Squatter, on 16 November 1941, was a catastrophic blunder. The aim was to parachute at night behind German lines in the Libyan desert, infiltrate five enemy airfields on foot, plants explosives on as many German and Italian airplanes as possible, then head south to a rendezvous with the jeeps of the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) deep in the desert.
But a fierce storm blew up just as the planes were due to depart. At that point, and then again when they were over the drop zone and due to jump, Stirling was warned to abort, but he took the pig-headed decision to proceed. 1) One of the aircraft carrying the SAS men was shot down – all 15 soldiers and the crew were killed. 2) The pilots were flying absolutely blind in a howling desert storm, had no idea where they were and told the soldiers to jump blind. 3) Some members of the remaining four teams were killed when they landed badly or were dragged across rocky, thorn-bush-full landscape by their chutes. Half a dozen were so badly injured they were left with pistols and told to fend for themselves. At least one shot himself there and then. Three of the teams couldn’t find the packs of ammunition, food and explosives that were dropped with them so were rendered useless. One by one they stumbled south to the rendezvous point. The mission failed to destroy a single enemy aircraft and of the 65 SAS men who set off only 21 made it back (p.55).
It was such a traumatic incident that Macintyre covers it twice, once in the brief prologue to the entire book, designed to drum up excitement (pages 1 and 2), then in an entire chapter (chapter 4, pages 47 to 56) which makes very grim reading.
Amazing that the powers that be let Stirling continue with his experiment. After this fiasco the only way was up.
Paddy Mayne
Top international rugby player. Notorious drunk with a terrible temper. Only close friend he had was Eoin MacGonigal with whom he forged a close, possibly homoerotic, bond, but who was killed during Operation Squatter. Mayne was never the same. Six months later Mayne took leave to go look for MacGonigal’s grave in the desert (p.116). Mayne was a core member of the early group but he and Stirling were never close.
Mayne seemed to take pleasure in slaughter: ‘Fighting was in his blood: he thrived on it.’ (p.115)
The attack on Tamet airfield, designed to knock out Axis planes, but when Paddy heard sounds of merriment from the pilots hut he and two others kicked the door open and opened up with machine guns massacring all the Germans and Italians within. Just one of many such incidents.
Jock Lewes
The exact opposite of Mayne, John Steele ‘Jock’ Lewes was a strict disciplined Englishman. Macintyre says he toured Nazi Germany in the late 1930s and even fell in love with a German woman, but when she introduced him to hard core fascists the scales fell from his eyes and he behave ever afterwards like a man angry at having been fooled.
Lewes was a key player in the formation of the unit with whom Stirling developed the idea of a special force which could be parachuted behind enemy lines and after seeing action in the defence of Tobruk, he joined the unit as Stirling’s second in command.
He was involved in the design of the unit’s badge and motto and was an inveterate tinker, designing the ‘Lewes bomb’ which could be attached to enemy planes or vehicles with an inbuilt timer. To cite his Wikipedia page:
To destroy Axis vehicles, members of the SAS surreptitiously attached small explosive charges. Lewes noticed the respective weaknesses of conventional blast and incendiaries, as well as their failure to destroy vehicles in some cases. He improvised a new, combined charge out of plastic explosive, diesel and thermite. The Lewes bomb was used throughout the Second World War.
He was killed by enemy airplane fire after leading an attack on Nofilia aerodrome, on 30 December 1941 aged 28 (p.79). Stirling later stated that Lewes had a better right to be the founder of the SAS than he did. Lewes’s death in the TV series is very upsetting and feels like the end of an era. It’s only by reading this book that you realise the entire North Africa era was just the first part of a much, much longer story.
Amateurishness
Throughout the book there’s a tension between the initial amateurishness of the group Stirling assembled and its home-made training regimes (for example, his bonkers idea that jumping out the back of a jeep travelling at 30 miles per hour was good training for making a parachute jump) and the tremendous commitment of everyone in the group to their leader and their methods.
Unlike most officers, who thought in linear terms, and care about promotion, medals and the steady progression of the battlefront, Stirling approached warfare sideways and from an amateur perspective. (p.99)
Fitzroy Maclean
Also from a grand family, Fitzroy Hew Royle Maclean, 1st Baronet, (1911 to 1996), unlike Stirling, was a scholar and an intellectual (p.83). When war broke out he transferred to the army from a successful career in the diplomatic service. He was with the SAS for about a year, in 1942, taking part in numerous raids, including the farcical attack on Benghazi. Later that year he was transferred to the Middle East as part of the Persia and Iraq Command before, in 1943, Churchill chose him to lead a liaison mission to Tito’s partisans in Yugoslavia in 1943. After the war he served as a Conservative MP and recorded his extraordinary career in the classic book ‘Eastern Approaches’. Maclean is routinely cited as a possible inspiration for Ian Fleming’s creation of the character of James Bond. He is quoted delivering a classic English attitude to foreigners (uncharacteristically philistine for a man fluent in numerous languages):
‘I have always found that in dealing with foreigners whose language one does not speak, it is best to shout.’ (p.105)
The motto
He describes the debate about designing a badge for the unit and choosing a motto. ‘Who dares wins’ motto beat alternative suggestions ‘Strike and destroy’ (too blunt) and ‘Ascend to descend’ (obscure) (p.85).
The French
Surprisingly ‘French troops would play a vital role in the evolution of the SAS’ (p.87). This remark is à propos the arrival of 52 Free French paratroopers under the command of Colonel Georges Bergé and it is, indeed, surprising to learn the extent to which Free French troops were involved in SAS operations.
The farcical raid on Benghazi
Featuring Maclean and Randolph Churchill. Chapter 9, pages 97 to 110, a) from a base in the Jebel mountain range and b) using the ‘Blitz Buggy’. This was a Ford V8 station wagon with a top speed of 70 mph containing two rows of 3 seats, with the roof and windows removed and painted Wehrmacht grey. (p.94).
On the evening of 21 May 1942 the Blitz Buggy, containing Stirling, Maclean, Randolph Churchill (Winston’s son) and three others bluffed their way past German then Italian guards and into Benghazi where they hid out in a ruined house while planning to row dinghies out to ships in the harbour and attach limpet mines. Everything went wrong starting with the fact that the drive across the desert and up and down gullies etc damaged the rods or something in the buggy which led to it making a howling racket wherever it went. Their night-time attempt to blow up the ships is fouled by heavy guards and the fact that the two inflatable dinghies they brought along both have punctures (and the pumping equipment makes an incredibly loud racket). They nearly get caught umpteen times and are forced to hole up in the ruined flat all day, twitching with nerves as enemy patrols pass by neighbours interfere and, at one point, a drunken Italian blunders in, only to run off at the sight of filthy bearded men with guns. Eventually they drive back out of town in the racketing Blitz Buggy after a very intense 24 hours. The whole thing is like a comic movie and makes for a tense but hilarious scene in the TV series.
In fact Randolph Churchill wrote a highly dramatic ten-page account of the day to his father, Winston, precisely the kind of buccaneering adventure designed to appeal to the wartime PM, and which helped bolster his support for Stirling and the SAS (p.110).
Car crash
It’s typical of Stirling, who really was reckless, not just in military sense, that the four days later, safely back behind British lines, Stirling was driving the Blitz Buggy far too fast, took a corner at speed and, to avoid an oncoming lorry, swerved and ended up rolling the vehicle resulting in: the death of Arthur Merton the distinguished war correspondent; Maclean suffering a broken arm, collarbone and fractured skull; Randolph Churchill receiving three crushed vertebrae; and Sergeant Rose having his arm broken in three places. Maclean quipped that:
‘David Stirling’s driving was the most dangerous thing in World War Two.’ (p.109)
I know he’s a great hero and everything, but quite regularly Stirling comes over as a reckless idiot, the death toll in Operation Squatter and incidents like this providing a powerful indictment.
Captain George Jellicoe
George Patrick John Rushworth Jellicoe, 2nd Earl Jellicoe (1918 to 2007) sailed out to the Middle East with Layforce, met Stirling in the bar at Shepheard’s hotel in April 1942, and signed up for the SAS (p.120). He joined the raiding party of 13 June 1942 which attacked fortifications at Heraklion on Crete. It was led by Colonel Georges Bergé. Disguised as Cretan peasants they cut through the perimeter barbed wire surrounding Heraklion airfield and planted bombs on the fleet of parked Junkers 88 bombers. As they started exploding, the team escaped back to the perimeter fence in the confusion.
Bergé paused after half an hour and announced that they would all be awarded the Croix de Guerre for the night’s work. He then led the party south. Or rather north, because in the excitement he had been reading the map upside down. (p.121)
We get a lot of detail about Jellicoe’s time with the SAS but the most memorable remark is his comic comment on the Free French:
‘They were very, very free; and very, very French.’ (p.124)
An independent force
By June 1942 what had started as L Detachment had raided all the important German and Italian airfields within 300 miles of the forward area. It had long ago dropped the idea of parachuting behind enemy lines and instead had worked closely with the Long Range Desert Group which, basically, drove them to within walking distance of targets, dropped them off, then hung around for a day or two to pick up the returning survivors of each attack.
But during this period it had itself got to know and understand all kinds of desert terrain and benefited from the inspired navigating skills of Mike Sadler.
With its own transport base and navigators, and the ability to attack at will from a forward base, L Detachment was fast becoming what Stirling had always intended it to be: a small, independent army, capable of fighting a different sort of war. (p.132)
Stirling discovers from intercepted messages that the Germans are calling him ‘the Phantom Major’ (p.138).
Sidi Haneish
The extraordinary story of the massed jeep attack on Sidi Haneish airfield. Eighteen jeeps drove 50 miles across the desert from their hideout in Bir el Quseir and then overran the airfield, driving along the main runway in two columns, each jeep armed with Vickers K machine guns, incredibly powerful weapons originally designed for RAF aircraft, causing incredible destruction (pages 139 to 142).
Dinner with Winston Churchill
On pages 153 to 156 Macintyre describes Stirling, back in Cairo, washed and scrubbed and attending dinner with Winston Churchill, with Field Marshall Jan Smuts and General Alexander, C-in-C of the African front. Churchill was, predictably, bowled over by Stirling’s enthusiasm and asked him to write a memo laying out aims of the SAS, a document which still survives.
Stirling asked the three eminent leaders, Churchill, Smuts and Alexander, to sign a piece of paper as a souvenir. Later, with typical chutzpah he typed above it ‘Please give the bearer of this note every possible assistance’ and use it shamelessly to cajole quartermasters into supplying immense amounts of new equipment (p.156).
Expansion
In September 1942 the SAS was recognised in the official British Order of Battle. It was expanded to include 29 officers and 572 other ranks. It was divided into four squadrons, one under Stirling, one under Paddy Mayne, one devoted to the French forces, and a newly commissioned Special Boat Service put under George Jellico (p.167).
At the age of 26 Stirling had become the first man to create his own new regiment since the Boer War. (p.167)
At the end of 1942 a second SAS regiment came into being, commanded by Stirling’s brother, Bill (p.179).
Battle of El Alamein November 1942
The final actions of the SAS in North Africa took place within the much larger event of the (second) Battle of El Alamein, October to 1942. The Germans had advanced inside the borders of British Egypt, and to within forty miles of Alexandria. Not only Egypt was at stake but the country contained the Suez Canal which was the lifeline to the entire British presence in the Far East, as well as controlling access to the oil fields of Persia, also vital for the Allied war effort.
Over two months the new commander of British Forces Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery led the Eighth Army to a victory which was the beginning of the end of the Western Desert Campaign. Victory eliminated the Axis threat to Egypt, the Suez Canal and the Middle Eastern and Persian oil fields. It revived the morale of the Allies, and coincided with the Allied invasion of French North Africa far to the West, thus trapping Rommel’s Afrika Corps in a classic pincer movement.
Stirling is captured
Stirling was desperate to make a contribution to this vast effort. On 16 January a force of 14 men in five jeeps set off from their base in the Tunisian desert aiming to link up with the fast-moving First Army near the coast. The Germans had, of course, for some time been aware of a roving force of saboteurs operating behind their lines and Rommel had ordered sweeps and searches to be made of desert areas close to his main forces. And so it was that, at a rest stop in a ravine en route to the coast, Stirling and his force were surrounded and arrested by a much larger German force. (In fact three of the group managed to escape in the initial confusion and trekked west through the desert to meet up, more dead than alive, with American forces advancing from the West, which I mentioned above.)
But for Stirling the war was over. He was sent to bases in Africa, then Italy, interrogated at all of them. He made some notable escapes but always managed to be recaptured until he was eventually sent to the impregnable fortress of Colditz near Leipzig in East Germany.
Because his capture happened at more or less that same time that the Desert War came to an end (with Allied victory) it coincided in a significant change in the personnel and purpose of the SAS. Macintyre has an elegiac page remembering the members who died during the desert campaign, before turning to the fact that the regiment was now to have a new leader, the dedicated stone-cold killer Paddy Mayne, and was now to operate entirely in occupied Europe.
Part 2. War in Europe
As I mentioned, I bought the book after watching the hugely enjoyable BBC TV series. which, I now realise, only dramatised part one of the book, the Desert War section, pages 1 to 189. It turns out that pages 193 to 310 describe the completely different environment the unit faced fighting in Europe, first up through Italy, then playing their part in the D-Day landings and the push across France, then fighting in Germany itself. All this leads up to the surprising fact that it was SAS men, some of whom we met way back in the early part of the desert campaign, who were the first to enter the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945 which tends to cast a grim nihilistic shadow over everything which preceded it.
As I mentioned, the thing about the army, especially in wartime, is that it continually chops and changes and rearranges its units to suit changing needs. Thus, at the end of the desert war, in 1943, 1SAS was split into two parts, a Special Boat Squadron (SBS) under Jellico and a Special Raiding Squadron under Mayne. 2SAS continued in existence under the command of Stirling’s brother, Bill. I imagine for an author like Macintyre the main challenge is which activities of which unit to include.
Sicily
July 1943 Mayne’s SRS was tasked with knocking out defences on beaches on Sicily, ahead of the main allied invasion. In the event:
The Italians surrendered with indecent haste. ‘They gave up very easily,’ said [Johnny] Wiseman. (p.197)
During the assault they had had to paddle their dinghies past Allied paratroopers who were intended to land behind enemy lines but whose gliders got blown off course, crashed in the sea, and now they were drowning. Hard man Reg Seekings describes how they had to paddle straight past them, as stopping to pick them up would wreck their own mission, upon which lives depended.
Seeking emerges, in the second half of the book, as a barely controlled psychopath and hard man. He becomes the Spirit of Killing.
Seekings stormed the machine gun post, hurled in a grenade and then killed the occupants with a revolver as they staggered out, one after the other. ‘I enjoyed the killing. I was scared but I would have gone into action every day if I could.’ (p.197, and cf the massacre on page 293)
If war with Russia comes, then we will want lots of Reg Seekings.
Italy
The assault on Bagnara, a port on the Italian mainland. Then they’re tasked with taking Termoli on the opposite, northern coast of Italy. The Germans were pulling out when an SRS force of 207 men landed and seized the town. The German C-in-C, Field Marshall Kesselring was furious and ordered a counter-attack. Enemy spotters guided artillery fire into the town. There was a direct hit on a lorry loading up with 17 men and bags of grenades. After a huge explosion, not a single body was left intact, with heads and legs and other body parts strewn around the street. Seekings had just walked away from the lorry, Wiseman had just jumped down from the cab, and so both survived but were badly traumatised. An Italian family had been at a doorway watching. the mother and father were both killed instantly but then Seekings saw the little boy running round screaming with a his intestines hanging out of a bad stomach wound, so Seekings grabbed him and shot him dead on the spot. Yes, we want the Reg Seekings on our side.
Hitler’s commando order
On 18 October 1942 the German High Command had issued the ‘Commando Order’ which stated that any Allied soldiers captured in Europe and Africa should be summarily executed without trial, even if in proper uniforms or if they attempted to surrender. Any commandos or similar unit not in proper uniforms should be executed on the spot (p.208).
Three points:
1) This meant men in units like the SAS fought harder to avoid falling into enemy hands, and then made every effort to escape (and Macintyre describes some mind boggling escapes). Many others were caught and executed according to the Order (the execution of Sergeant Bill Foster and Corporal James Shortall, page 210).
2) It indicated a general darkening of the war. In the desert the unit had felt like it was having tally-ho adventures, a freewheeling band of buccaneers. In Europe the fighting got a lot dirtier, darker and more sadistic (p.205).
3) This last relates to the way the SAS found itself being used more and more as a commando i.e. an extension of the proper army, going ahead to defuse enemy defences, and not the band of pirates Stirling conceived of, operating for long stretches behind enemy lines to distract and demoralise the enemy. The tension between the two roles waxed and waned over the next two years (pages 201, 209).
An estimated 250 Allied servicemen, including downed airmen, perished under Hitler’s Commando Order. (p.311)
France (pages 212 to 274)
D-Day was 6 June 1944. The SAS had grown. 1SAS and 2SAS, combined with two French SAS regiments, a Belgian contingent and a signals squadron brought the total of the SAS Brigade to 2,500, commanded by a new, regular brigadier.
When Bill Stirling learned that a lot of these SAS forces were to be parachuted in ahead of the landings to act as shock troops ahead of the main attack he was furious; this was the climax of ‘ordinary’ military thinking and completely against the spirit of the SAS, so he resigned, an act which ‘signalled the end of the Stirling brothers’ leadership of the SAS’ (p.215).
The maquis
The following chapters depict the many adventures of the many different units of the SAS parachuted in to work with, lead and train, the French Resistance, or maquis as it was more commonly referred to.
Main learnings:
1) The maquis contained a surprising number of fighters from other nations, above all Russians, prisoners of the Germans who had somehow escaped and headed west.
2) There was a continual risk of treachery and betrayal; quite a few SAS-led hideaways in forests and mountains were betrayed to the Germans, who surrounded, captured and then, as per the Commando Order, executed everyone.
3) Some of this was because the maquis was riddled with internal politics, in fact the maquis was the continuation by other means of normal French politics and that politics was riddled with extremist factions who hated each other, notably the die-hard communists at one end of the spectrum and right-wing Catholic nationalists at the other. These were the dire political and social divisions which undermined the French republic throughout the 1930s, weakened France’s resistance to the initial German invasion, and would return to dog French politics even after the war. As Reg Seekings put it, the maquis were:
‘really political parties who had run away into the woods.’ (p.228)
And as Macintyre comments:
By 1944, the conflict in rural France had taken on many of the aspects of a civil war, with all the treachery and cruelty which that entails. (p.229)
4) Lack of proper military training or discipline often hampered the maquis’ usefulness.
The French resisters were fickle allies, riven by internecine disputes that often turned deadly. ‘The blood feud between the maquis was terrible,’ wrote [Johnny] Cooper. Fraser McLuskey considered even the most competent French fighters to be liabilities: ‘Co-operation with them in military operations is in most cases inadvisable and in many cases highly dangerous.’ Spies, real and imagined, were everywhere, and as the German occupation was rolled back the score-settling intensified. (p.240)
The book includes eye witness descriptions from our boys of watching the resistance hold quick kangaroo courts and then execute civilians accused of ‘collaboration’, often on no evidence apart from gossip and malice. For all these reasons the straight-down-the-line British SAS often found them difficult allies to work with. See my review of:
There was another aspect to all the SAS operations in occupied France which was German reprisals; almost every SAS-led attack on rail lines or fuel dumps or tank camps was met a few days later by the Germans’ wholesale slaughtering of entire nearby villages, farmsteads and so on, for example the rape, murder and burning the Germans inflicted on the village of Vermot (p.236).
The parachute padre
1SAS received its first chaplain, the Reverend Fraser McLuskey, who came to be known as ‘the parachute padre’ (p.230). This figure slowly grows in importance, getting to know the men, listening in private to their fears and concerns, holding (quite) services in their forest or mountain hideouts, helping improve morale and cement bonds.
Paris
Head of the SAS Paddy Mayne and seasoned navigator Mike Sadler arrived in liberated Paris on 25 August 1944.
It’s a recurring theme of this period that SAS groups entering towns were surrounded by deliriously happy civilians and especially young women throwing flowers and kisses but that, occasionally, enemy snipers or forces had remained behind, opened up firing, and then all these civilians got in the way of effective armed response.
SAS killings
Macintyre makes much of the illegality and immorality of the Hitler Commando order and yet, as the France chapters proceed, the objective reader notices quite a few times when SAS men have gone on the record, either in writings or interviews, as shooting dead surrendering opponents, for example this, from Roy Farran. During the Battle for Crete of 1941, his squadron encountered a group of surrendering soldiers:
‘Five parachutists came out of the olive trees with their hands up. I was not in any mood to be taken in by German tricks. I ordered the gunner to fire.’ (p.253)
Operations were now so continual that Macintyre includes a diary of Farran’s: 4 September destroyed two staff cars and a ten-ton troop carrier; 5 September ambushed a motorcycle convoy killing 6; 6 September surrounded by girls with flowers so not able to properly engage a German staff car making a getaway; 7 September attacked by 600 German troops, counter-attacked killing the German colonel and second in command – every day like that, for months.
SAS headquarters were moved to Hylands House near Chelmsford in Essex.
The Vosges
the campaign in the Vosges mountains led by Captain Henry Carey Druce of 2SAS, who went by the nom de guerre of ‘Colonel Maximum’. There’s no point detailing their actions which are too long and complicated, but they, like almost everything in the book, read like scenes from the most action-packed war movies.
North Italy
Back to Italy and a detailed account of Operation Tombola to shoot up German headquarters in the town of Albinea.
Into Germany
SAS forces followed the main Allied advance into Germany. the key learning here is that, in the desert and in France the Germans had been operating in neutral or opposition territory where the SAS or resistance could move freely to the indifference or active support of the native populations, could find good hideouts and strike at will.
When they entered Germany the tables were turned. Now the entire civilian population was against them, now the Germans were on home soil, now it was the Allies who drove along the main roads in large convoys and were vulnerable to sudden ambushes by small, mobile enemy units. Plus, of course, the fanaticism of the real die-hard Nazis.
The SS seemed ‘happy to die’ and the SAS often seemed happy to oblige them. (p.289)
The other thing was the child soldiers. In its dying months Hitler’s regime press-ganged tens of thousands of boys under 18 into uniform and forced to fight. You might think these children, some only 14 or 13, pitiable victims, but the accounts here show that many of them were as much if not more fanatical than their often demoralised elders (p.292). Macintyre gives accounts of children shooting not just machine guns but Panzerfaust single-shot man-portable anti-tank weapons at them. And the SAS responding in kind. An anonymous SAS soldier is quoted as saying:
‘If you shot one little bastard the others would all start crying.’ (p.292)
Big question: Did the Nazis pioneer the use of indoctrinated child soldiers (which I have recently been reading about in Africa, Sierra Leone and Uganda)? Did Germans invent the phenomenon?
Operation Howard
Worth mentioning this incident, on 10 April 1945, near the village of Börger, where a unit of SAS driving in jeeps came under fierce attack from a wood and where Paddy Mayne – still alive and still leading from the front – displayed unbelievable courage in leading the attack on the ambushers (pages 296 to 300). By this stage in the narrative Mayne has emerged as a beyond larger-than-life figure, as a force of nature, a whirlwind of cold-eyed death and destruction wrought on the enemy. He was nominated for the Victoria Cross (VC) but in the end received another bar to his Distinguished Service Order.
Macintyre contrasts Mayne’s action with that of a Dane, Major Anders Lassen, who in April 1944 led an SAS action against the Greek island of Santorini and was the only non-Commonwealth soldier in the Second World War to be awarded a VC.
Bergen-Belsen
The war narrative climaxes with the SAS unit which came across Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945, described in chapter 23, pages 303 to 306. It seems like something from a movie that among the unit which discovered it were individuals we’ve come to know very well throughout their previous operations and escapades, including Johnny Cooper, the Reverend Fraser McLuskey, the hard case Reg Seekings, and officer in charge Major John Tonkin. Amazing that they all survived this long.
Among the horror and evil of the Nazi death camp, the most telling moment is when the SAS officer in charge, Tonkin, ordered the camp guards and officer not to be shot on the spot. God knows they’d killed enough Germans in the preceding years. Instead:
Calmly and quietly, Tonkin chose to demonstrate what civilisation meant. (p.305)
Eight months later the commandant and warden of women prisoners were tried, convicted and hanged in Hamelin prison. He doesn’t mention what happened to the guards.
Colditz
On the same day that Belsen was liberated, so was Colditz Castle where Stirling had spent two long years as a prisoner of war. Two days earlier the camp commandant had received orders to ship the entire population of POWS East. Suspecting they would be used as bargaining chips or simply murdered, the senior British officer refused. Stirling was back in England by 17 April. Next day he broke out of the psychiatric evaluation camp where he was being held, headed for London, hit a nightclub and by 2 in the morning was having his ‘first roger for years’ (p.308).
But fighting continued up to the final German surrender on 8 May 1945. On 1 October the combined SAS forces paraded for the last time at Hyland House and were then officially disbanded.
War Crimes Investigation Team
There’s an odd coda which is that after the fighting ended, the head of 2SAS Brian Franks, sent Major Eric ‘Bill’ Barkworth to find the burial places of all SAS men listed as lost during the war and to track down all the German officers responsible for their murders as a result of the Commando Order. Macintyre calls it the last operation of the wartime SAS and describes it, along with the trials and punishments it led to, in fascinating detail pages 311 to 315.
The SAS idea spreads
Initially, after the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, the Army chief of staff thought we were entering an entirely new era of warfare and so disbanded the SAS. However, just two years later they realised that a host of small conflicts had sprung up around the world, not least in Britain’s efforts to hang onto its empire, and so the SAS was re-established in January 1947.
Not only that but the idea of a small armed force of soldiers trained in survival behind the lines and sabotage spread to Allie countries and was replicated in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and, after some delay, in America, taking the form of what became known as Delta Force. Right at the end of this splendid book Macintyre give a quick summary of the unit’s rationale:
In tactics and intentions, American and British special forces still follow the principles pioneered by the SAS in the desert more than seventy years ago: attacking the most valuable strategic targets without warning and then melting way again, forcing the enemy to remain on constant, debilitating alert. (p.317)
Afterlives
This wonderfully researched, brilliantly written, absolutely riveting book comes to a logical conclusion with six pages on the post-war lives and careers of the main characters we’ve got to know well during the main narrative, including David Stirling, the man who really emerges as the embodiment of SAS values Paddy Mayne, and others such as Roy Farran, Mike Sadler, Jim Almond, Reg Seekings and Johnny Cooper, the reverend Fraser McLuskey, John Tonkin and Bill Fraser. Not all these lives had happy endings, a kind of muted indication of the long-term psychological damage caused by the terrible scenes they’d witnessed and sometimes dreadful things they’d done.
I liked it that Reg Seekings for many years ran a pub in Cambridgeshire. There’s one landlord you wouldn’t want to have an argument with about chucking out time.
Many of them, like Reg and Stirling, went on to serve or lead forces in various parts of the British Empire, against communists, insurgents and nationalist forces, but that is another, and morally far more complicated story.
Within the context of this book and this war these men really were amazing heroes, models of unbelievable bravery and daring. And this book is an outstanding tribute to them.
Unexpected comedy
Macintyre has some nice comic timing and phrasing. Stories which made me laugh include the Churchill faked request form, plus:
1) When Dr Malcolm Pleydell was assigned as medical officer to the group, he expected to find a bunch of cold-eyed killers. Instead Stirling showed him round the camp like the host of a village garden party, explaining that the distant bangs were because some of the group were about to go out ‘on a party’ i.e. attacks on coastal defences, and were just practicing the explosives.
Pleydell had been expecting a man of blood and steel, a ruthless trained killer; instead he was made to feel as if he had just joined a particularly jolly beachfront house party, with bombs. (p.113)
2) Of the storming of Italian defences on Sicily, Macintyre writes:
A Cambridge graduate and former spectacles salesman, [Johnny] Wideman lost his false teeth but won a Military Cross that day. (p.197)
3) A lot later, in August 1944 in occupied France, Henry Druce was leading a group of SAS hooked up with a large party of French Resistance (which in fact included renegade Russian soldiers). The Resistance was generally referred to as the maquis, referencing the tough scrubland found in the south of France which made for good hiding places. The problem with the maquis was their lack of discipline, their poor training, and their fierce internal squabbles. Anyway, they light flares for an RAF drop of ammunition and food but, with typical indiscipline, members of the maquis rip the canisters of supplies open before Druce and the Brits can gather and guard them. Some of the French, starved from long months in hiding, ripped open the provisions in the canisters and started gorging themselves.
‘One Frenchman died of over-eating,’ Druce recorded. Another of the maquis extracted what he took to be a hunk of soft cheese from one of the containers and devoured it only to discover that it was plastic explosive, which contains arsenic. He then ‘died noisily’. (p.265)
4) At the end of 1944, operating in north Italy, SAS forces are joined by Captain Bob Walker-Brown, the son of a Scottish surgeon who had joined the SAS after tunnelling out of an Italian POW camp, crawling through the main sewer then walking to Allied lines.
He had an enormous moustache, a bluff sense of humour, an upper-class accent so fruity that the men barely understood his commands, and a habit of saying ‘what what’ after every sentence, thus earning himself the nickname ‘Captain What What’. (p.279)
So there is, throughout the book, a thread of very English humour, Macintyre entering into the spirit of self-deprecating humour and understatement evinced by so many of these soldiers, both at the time and in later memoirs and interviews.
A non-British account?
Once the SAS started working alongside the Americans, after D-Day, I began to wonder what the Yanks made of the determinedly upper-class, stiff-upper-lip, committed but often ramshackle and amateurish shenanigans of the Brits described in this book.
Most of the books about the SAS and its leading figures are written by Brits who share their private school and Oxbridge background (Macintyre attended a private school, then Cambridge) and so buy into their values, assumptions and banter – so they tend to be eulogies which draw you into that world.
I wonder if an account exists written by a complete outsider, say an American, which doesn’t buy into the self-reinforcing mythology surrounding this group, and gives a more objective and possibly critical account of their actual military achievement?
Credit
SAS: Rogue Heroes by Ben Macintyre was published by Viking in 2016. References are to the 2022 TV tie-in Penguin paperback edition.
Books & Boots 