The SAS: Who Dares Wins

The initial recruits were a diverse lot—they included a hotel porter, an ice-cream maker, an amateur boxer and a tomato farmer—united by their ability to think and act as individuals.

The SAS: Who Dares Wins
Photo: IWM via Getty Images

What is a hero? The word has been so overused as to be almost meaningless. A person “admired for their courage, outstanding achievements, or noble qualities” is one dictionary definition. For Ben Macintyre, the author of “Double Cross,” “Agent Zigzag” and other best-selling books on World War II espionage, the founding members of Britain’s Special Air Service (SAS) meet conditions like these handsomely. It is the story of their exploits in World War II that he tells in “Rogue Heroes.”

One of the world’s best known special forces units, the SAS was the brainchild of David Stirling, a 6-foot-6-inch Scotsman whose blue-bloodline stretched back to King Charles II. In the summer of 1941, Stirling was a 25-year-old lieutenant serving with the Scots Guards in North Africa. British forces were locked in combat with German and Italian troops, and he asked senior officers for permission to raise a unit for waging irregular warfare far behind enemy lines. Charm and family connections helped win the necessary approval.

Next came the search for volunteers. “Courage, fitness and determination in the highest degree,” read Stirling’s shopping list of desirable qualities, “but also, just as important, discipline, skill, intelligence and training.” The initial 66 recruits were drawn from army units in North Africa. Those selected were a distinctive and diverse lot—they included a hotel porter, an ice-cream maker, an amateur boxer and a tomato farmer—united by their ability to think and act as individuals. “I always hoisted onboard guys who argued,” Stirling later recalled. Their training began under the demanding gaze of his second-in-command, Jock Lewes. Some were killed while learning to parachute.

Rogue Heroes

By Ben Macintyre

Crown, 380 pages, $28

Operations began in November 1941. The first was a mess. Fifty-five men parachuted into enemy-occupied Libya with orders to raid local airfields. The jump was made in fierce storms that killed some and injured more and made it impossible to recover the equipment drop. The airfields were left untouched, and only 21 men made it back. Lessons were learned, however. One was the advantage of four-wheeled desert travel, “cutting out all the danger and uncertainty involved in jumping out of airplanes in the dark.” Within weeks, Stirling and his men were back in action and to better results. Soon they were operating with impunity.

Grit, confidence, daring and initiative were hallmarks of the SAS throughout the war. One raid in July 1942 saw a massed attack by 18 jeeps, each wielding four machine guns, that smashed through the perimeter of a German airstrip in the Egyptian desert and, at walking pace, destroyed an estimated 37 airplanes. It is said that over the course of multiple raids, one SAS officer, the star rugby player Paddy Mayne, personally wrecked more enemy aircraft—with bullets, bombs and his bare hands—than were shot down by the RAF’s highest-scoring fighter pilot.

Later, the SAS helped spearhead the invasions of Sicily and Italy and the Allied conquest of northwest Europe, where its roles ranged from capturing ports to fighting—and dying—side by side with Italian partisans and the French Resistance. By the end of the war, Stirling’s tiny band had become a brigade of five regiments (two British, two French and one Belgian): a formidable force of 2,500 men.

“Rogue Heroes” is a terrific story of human enterprise, endurance and achievement and vividly brings to life an extraordinary cast of characters. Mayne, a wild and troubled Ulsterman destined to rank among the most decorated British soldiers of the war, was “240 pounds of highly volatile human explosive.” “Recruiting Mayne,” Mr. Macintyre writes, “was like adopting a wolf: exciting, certain to instill fear, but not necessarily sensible.” The author is particularly good at showing how irregular war fits some men better than others. David Stirling was a drifter by nature, almost allergic to rules and a poor fit for conventional army service, but exceptional as a leader of like-minded adventurers.

We live in an age when special forces have been shrouded in a haze of glamour. Mr. Macintyre points out that studies of the SAS “veer toward the hagiographic; many are somewhat overmuscled, tending to emphasize machismo at the expense of objectivity.” Aiming for balance, he draws attention to how members of the group carried out acts that were tantamount to murder—the execution of prisoners, for example—and how men who were increasingly accustomed to killing could find lines blurring as the war wore on. He touches, too, on the psychological costs for some of those who fought like that. But he is not detached enough. Contemporary criticisms of the SAS as undisciplined adventurers beyond the control of senior commanders are dismissed as carping rather than fully explored.

“Rogue Heroes” also overstates the newness and significance of what the SAS achieved. They did not “turn the tide of war”; the ebb and flow of World War II was decided on conventional battlegrounds, not by pinprick raiding. Nor is Mr. Macintyre correct to claim, pointing to the long-range targeting of enemy assets with lightning attacks, that the SAS “changed the face of warfare.” It is true that some of its tactics and techniques match those of special forces today; it is less accurate to say that the SAS pioneered them. Elite units have been a feature of warfare since Thermopylae, if not earlier. British precedents range from the ghillie-suited Lovat Scouts in the Boer War (raised by David Stirling’s uncle, a fact omitted from Mr. Macintyre’s book) to Orde Wingate’s ruthless Special Night Squads in Palestine in the 1930s.

Even the name “Special Air Service” had been used before. Mr. Macintyre claims it was invented in 1941 in the Mideast for a bogus British unit whose supposed existence, when leaked, might make the enemy think that a new airborne force was being deployed. But the name was actually coined a year earlier in England for a real battalion of flesh-and-blood commandos who were the first British soldiers to be trained in parachuting. Some of them, as X Troop of the 11th Special Air Service, saw action in Italy in February 1941. Later that battalion became the Parachute Regiment.

It may seem pedantic to pick holes like these in a work of popular history, but, importantly, this is the first account of the SAS to be “authorized” by the regiment itself, which remains one of the British Army’s elite units. Why the SAS felt the need for such a book is not explained. Nor is its preference for Mr. Macintyre’s style of rip-roaring history over more measured scholarship. A great deal is made of his privileged access to the SAS archives, which are off limits to other researchers. In the end, though, beyond some photographs, a few quotations from contemporary documents, and a couple of forays into long-open files elsewhere, he has produced little that adds substantially to what others have published before.

The greater problem for Mr. Macintyre is that the story of the SAS in World War II has been told and retold by historians and biographers repeatedly since the war. SAS veterans shared their stories freely. Many penned memoirs. The recollections of Malcolm Pleydell, a medical officer with the SAS in the desert, were published as early as 1945. The extent to which Mr. Macintyre depends on these sources will not be obvious to most readers since “Rogue Heroes” is without footnotes.

A study of foreign archives would have added something new. Mr. Macintyre confines himself to the SAS’s British contingent, so its French and Belgian members barely get a mention and the opportunity is missed to introduce a fresh perspective. Accuracy, too, could have been improved by greater reference to enemy records. His estimates of the damage and carnage of SAS operations are overly dependent on the claims of the raiders themselves. A rounded picture would weigh accounts from all sides, but Mr. Macintyre’s Italians and Germans tend to appear as faceless and craven caricatures.

“Rogue Heroes” is an absorbing story of derring-do, told with skill and flair. But it is not the groundbreaking account that it claims to be.


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