Mr. Macintyre draws sharp, Dickensian portraits of these men and displays his usual gifts here for creating a cinematic narrative that races along, as Mr. Stirling’s crews find themselves in one harrowing situation after another — trudging through blazing desert heat with precious little water or food; desperately trying to elude snipers and ambushes as they rush to blow up German airplanes and supply lines; attempting to extricate themselves from dire predicaments that would test the resourcefulness, never mind stiff upper lip, of James Bond.

Image Ben Macintyre Credit... Justine Stoddart

Because this history of S.A.S. (Special Air Service) during World War II — based on documents compiled as the “SAS War Diary” and made public in 2011 — is episodic, it lacks the coherence of Mr. Macintyre’s earlier books, which focused on a particular mission or central character. The colorful Mr. Stirling and his co-conspirator in founding S.A.S., Jock Lewes (who was as austere and disciplined as Mr. Stirling was fond of drink and gambling), only intermittently hold center stage, and many of the men they recruit suffer horrific deaths not long after we get to know them. Besides Mr. Lewes and Mr. Stirling, the one team member who remains firmly wedged in our minds is Paddy Mayne,who has a capacity for “devotion on an almost spiritual level” but is also given to terrifying bursts of violence on the battlefield and off.

Mr. Macintyre is masterly in using details to illustrate his heroes’ bravery, élan and dogged perseverance. He makes us feel the “constructive brutality” of the training that recruits endured — marching up to 100 miles through the desert, carrying a full load of equipment and prohibited from taking a drink of water until the trek’s end. He describes men who died — or were horribly injured — during missions and had to be left behind. And he conveys both the heart-stopping horrors of combat — one fight left 21 men dead, 24 wounded, 23 as prisoners — and the plucky, schoolboy spirit that emerged as their default setting.

“Stirling never relaxed his dress code,” Mr. Macintyre writes. “Whether going into battle or unwinding after it, he always wore a tie. The men chatted idly in the heat, using a shared jargon, weighted with euphemism, black humor, and profanity, a private language unintelligible to a stranger: heading into the desert was ‘going up the blue’; a raid was ‘a party’ or ‘jolly’; grumbling was ‘ticking’; sinking into sand was ‘crash diving’ or ‘periscope work.’”

While individual S.A.S. sabotage and reconnaissance missions (in Libya, Egypt, Italy, France and Germany) are evoked with considerable verisimilitude, Mr. Macintyre has difficulty zooming out from his heroes’ story to give a broader understanding of how their operational work fit into the larger canvas of the war. The story of what happened to the S.A.S. at war’s end feels truncated and rushed, as does the story of how it would be resurrected and copied around the world. At the same time, the book never delves into the mind-set of special forces soldiers with the power and immediacy of “No Easy Day” by Mark Owen (a.k.a., Matt Bissonnette, a member of the Navy SEAL Team 6, which took out Osama bin Laden).