Britain's Special Air Service was the first special ops force put into combat by a major conventional military. The concept, conceived in Cairo, was predicated on getting behind German lines on the desert side and from there, launching raids on airbases and supply depots. Desirable recruits would be self-reliant individualists, not biddable yes-men. Indeed, the organization specialized in eccentrics. In late 1941, they launched their first mission. They parachuted into the night in the middle of almost hurricane conditions. It was a total failure, as over half of the men were lost. On their next mission, driven to their objectives by the Long Range Desert Group, they met with spectacular success, as they destroyed planes and airfields hundreds of miles behind Rommel's front line. They continued in the new year and launched successful mission after mission. The western half of the Sahara where the war was fought stretched 1200 miles from Tunisia to the Nile and a thousand miles south of the Mediterranean. The Afrika Korps and the 8th Army seldom ranged far from the coast. There was ample room to travel, strike anywhere, and then slip away. Over the course of 1942, their tactics evolved from surreptitiously sticking explosives by hand on planes to blasting their way onto airbases driving Jeeps with three fighter plane guns bolted on. On one of their raids, a British Army reporter went along. After Randolph Churchill told his dad about the SAS, the PM asked to meet their commander . After a dinner in Cairo, Winston quoted Byron, "He was the mildest mannered man / That ever scuttled ship or cut a throat." Churchill later called Maj. David Sterling the Scarlet Pimpernel, and wholeheartedly supported the SAS. The SAS finished the desert war in fine form and with the respect of the once skeptical army establishment.
The SAS next saw action in Sicily and on the Italian mainland. Their assignments were more of a commando nature, such as attacking artillery batteries before an invasion, and were not to the liking of the men, who had grown accustomed to night raids. Also, they were now facing Hitler's order that commandos were to be shot upon capture and not treated as POW's. They fought in France behind enemy lines with the Resistance and with the SOE (Special Operations Executive), Churchill's spies and infiltrators. They crossed the Rhine in March of 1945 and fought on German soil. They helped take a submarine base, liberated Bergen-Belsen and were part of the occupation of Norway, where 300,000 Wehrmacht troops had to be processed. Their war was over. The SAS was officially disbanded in September.
This is superb book, but it lost some of its sparkle after Africa. The European story lacks the verve of their time in the desert. One delightful aspect of this book, though, is that the raiding stories were the basis of quite a few English movies.
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