BOOK OF THE WEEK

ROGUE HEROES

by Ben Macintyre (Penguin £25)

Like everyone else, I was glued to the television in awe when men in balaclavas swung into the Iranian embassy in London on ropes and in 17 minutes of controlled mayhem rescued 24 hostages and ‘took out’ the terrorists holding them, back in 1980.

These masked, macho, armed avengers burst on the world’s consciousness as if out of nowhere, did the impossible, then disappeared again. The incomparable legend of the SAS was born.

Mired in secrecy, revelling in its ‘Who dares wins’ mystique but revealing nothing about itself, it was as if the regiment had appeared fully formed to take on the dirty tasks necessary to make the modern world a safer place.

Who were the SAS and where had they come from? The answer is supplied in the first ever fully authorised history of the SAS, covering its secret activities in World War II

That’s been their role ever since — undercover on secret ops in Northern Ireland, the Falklands, Iraq, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and so on.

Every other special force in the world, from Deltas to Seals, models itself on them. They were pioneers of a new kind of warfare.

But who were they and where had they come from? The answer is supplied in the first ever fully authorised history of the SAS, covering its secret activities in World War II.

Author Ben Macintyre had access to a confidential, 500-page ‘war diary’ compiled by the regiment’s archivists. It was a gold mine of first-hand reports from those who took part in one clandestine operation after another, from the regiment’s formation in 1941 until 1945.

A master at setting the pulse racing, Macintyre relates stories of raw courage and daring by extraordinary men whose chief characteristic was that they defied every convention.

The tone was set by the SAS’s creator, 25-year-old David Stirling, an aristocratic Scots Guards officer renowned for heavy drinking and disobeying orders, who found himself in Egypt when the British Army was getting a kicking from Rommel’s Afrika Korps.

Their role has been going undercover on secret ops in Northern Ireland, the Falklands, Iraq, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan (pictured) and so on

‘Big Dave’ blagged his way into the office of a general and argued that the Brits needed to send guerrillas behind the German lines to create mayhem.

Such was the desperation of the situation, he got permission to assemble a bunch of bad-ass warriors, vagabonds and near-psychopaths to do just that.

The Special Air Service was born. From the start, it was an elite unit, barely 100 strong, but trained and tested to almost superhuman standards.

Scores of would-be recruits were rejected as not tough enough. One walked 40 miles across the desert in his socks after his boots disintegrated rather than admit defeat and be ‘RTU-ed’ (‘returned to unit’).

Those who made it were a breed apart, willing to endure conditions that would reduce other men to jelly, ruthless enough to kill with gun, knife or bare hands without a flicker of doubt or regret.

It was typical of them that in ration packs they carried biscuits so hard a Jeep could drive over without breaking them.

The sabotage missions they embarked on involved trekking up to 300 miles across relentless, un-mappable Sahara desert, at the end of which they would steal unexpectedly upon German and Italian air bases, blow apart parked planes and cut down anyone in their way.

They showed incredible daring and courage. Corporal Jack Sillito had only a revolver, a compass and a small flask of water when he was separated from the rest of his raiding party near Tobruk, Libya.

Scores of would-be recruits were rejected as not tough enough. One walked 40 miles across the desert in his socks after his boots disintegrated rather than admit defeat and be ‘RTU-ed’ (‘returned to unit’)

He knew it was 180 miles back to base across the pitiless desert, and even the slightest error in direction meant certain agonising death. But he walked rather than surrendered.

His water ran out on day two and from then on he drank his own urine, which grew steadily thicker and more disgusting.

His feet were blistered and cracked and his tongue was hideously swollen. At one point, he spotted Jeeps in the distance, only for them to drive off. He trudged on.

On day eight, by now a skeleton with sore, bleeding feet and close to death, he was found by an SAS patrol. After a fortnight’s R&R, he was back on duty.

Sillito was an out-and-out survivor. Others in the SAS were out-and-out killers, such as Paddy Mayne, who, as Stirling’s second in command, did more damage to enemy air power than any fighter pilot on either side.

However, he also seemed to take great pleasure in slaughter, and didn’t always stop to query if it was necessary. Bursting in on a mess hut in which enemy soldiers were partying, he ‘kicked open the door and stood there with my Colt .45. We were a frightening sight, bearded and with unkempt hair.

‘The Germans stared at us in complete silence until I said: “Good evening”, at which point a young German moved slowly backwards. I shot him, then turned and fired at another.’

At least 30 were gunned down in what even Stirling found indefensible, describing it as an ‘over-callous execution in cold blood’.

And a nagging doubt overcame me as I read of these men and their testosterone-fuelled exploits. What did they actually achieve?

The answer that emerges from this authorised history is inescapable — very little. The first raid ended with not a single hit on the enemy, but 34 men dead, injured or missing; only 21 returned to base.

And so it went on. Big losses, small gains, if any. Certainly they dared — as their motto promised — but they didn’t win very often at all.

ROGUE HEROES by Ben Macintyre

They were a nuisance to the enemy. A lot of planes were shot up and airfields temporarily put out of action, but, in the greater scheme of the North African campaign and the course of World War II, these were pinpricks rather than devastating blows.

They also lost their charismatic leader: Stirling was captured on another botched mission and spent the rest of the war as a prisoner, ending up in Colditz.

But by then he had pulled off his greatest single achievement — which was to win over his superiors.

In the British military, there were plenty of high-rankers who turned their noses up at the SAS, the influential Monty of Alamein (General Bernard Montgomery) among them. He dismissed ‘the boy Stirling’ as ‘mad, quite, quite mad’.

But Stirling played an ace that trumped the doubters. He invited the garrulous and bibulous Randolph Churchill, the son of prime minister Winston, to join a mission to Benghazi, and, though this too was a screw-up, the gung-ho Randolph reported back to Dad what brilliant fun it had been.

Here was just the sort of up-and-at-’em enterprise that appealed to Winston. He gave the SAS his blessing, and they were elevated to full regimental status.

But they were never again quite the self-starting rogue band of brothers that the buccaneering Stirling had wanted them to be.

They were made to swap their distinctive sand-coloured headwear for the red berets of paratroopers, and worked to orders behind enemy lines in Italy, France and Germany.

There they aided the Allied advance to victory by destroying communications, collecting intelligence, training Resistance fighters — and sustaining horrible losses as the SS carried out Hitler’s notorious Commando Order to execute on the spot any British saboteurs they caught.

They operated without drawing attention to themselves, and at the end of the war were quietly stood down and disbanded, job done. The SAS had seemingly passed into history.

But then the authorities realised that in the modern world there was still a need for a secretive guerrilla organisation of highly trained heroes capable of taking the fight into the enemy’s backyard.