reading

Select Bibliography

Almonds Windmill, Lorna, Gentleman Jim: The Wartime Story of a Founder of the SAS and Special Forces, London, 2001

—— A British Achilles: The Story of George, 2nd Earl Jellicoe, Barnsley, 2005

Asher, Michael, The Regiment: The Real Story of the SAS, London, 2007

Bagnold, Ralph, Sand, Wind and War: Memoirs of a Desert Explorer, Tucson, Ariz., 1991

Beevor, Antony, Crete: The Battle and the Resistance, London, 1992

Buckmaster, Maurice, They Fought Alone: The True Story of SOE’s Agents in Wartime France, London, 1958

Caillou, Alan [Alan Samuel Lyle-Smythe], The World is Six Feet Square, London, 1954

Close, Roy, In Action with the SAS: A Soldier’s Odyssey from Dunkirk to Berlin, Barnsley, 2005

Cooper, Artemis, Cairo in the War, 1939–1945, London, 1995

Cooper, Johnny, One of the Originals: The Story of a Founder Member of the SAS, London, 1991

Cowles, Virginia, The Phantom Major: The Story of David Stirling and the SAS Regiment, London, 1958

Dillon, Martin, and Bradford, Roy, Rogue Warrior of the SAS: The Blair Mayne Legend, Edinburgh, 2012

Extraordinary Editions and SAS Regimental Association, The SAS War Diary 1941–1945, London, 2011

Farran, Roy, Operation Tombola, London, 1960

—— Winged Dagger, London, 1998

Ford, Roger, Fire from the Forest: The SAS Brigade in France, 1944, London, 2003

Hafen, Lyman, Far from Cactus Flat: The 20th Century Story of a Harsh Land, a Proud Family, and a Lost Son, St George, Utah, 2006

Hastings, Max, Das Reich: The March of the 2nd SS Panzer Division through France, June 1944, London, 1983

Helm, Sarah, A Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Lost Agents of SOE, London, 2005

Hoe, Alan, David Stirling: Founder of the SAS, London, 1992

James, Malcolm [Malcolm Pleydell], Born of the Desert: With the SAS in North Africa, London, 1945

Jefferson, David, Tobruk: A Raid Too Far, London, 2013

Jones, Tim, SAS: The First Secret Wars, London, 2005

Kemp, Anthony, The Secret Hunters, London, 1988

—— The SAS at War, 1941–1945, London, 1991

Lewes, John, Jock Lewes, Co-founder of the SAS, London, 2000

Lewis, Damien, The Nazi Hunters: The Ultra-Secret SAS Unit and the Quest for Hitler’s War Criminals, London, 2015

Liddell-Hart, Basil, The Rommel Papers, Cambridge, Mass., 1991

Lloyd Owen, David, Providence their Guide: The Long Range Desert Group, London, 1980

McClean, Stewart, SAS: The History of the Special Raiding Squadron, ‘Paddy’s Men’, Stroud, 2006

McCue, Paul, SAS Operation Bulbasket: Behind the Lines in Occupied France, 1944, London, 1996

Maclean, Fitzroy, Eastern Approaches, London, 1949

McLuskey, Fraser, Parachute Padre: Behind German Lines with the SAS in France 1944, London, 1951

Mather, Carol, When the Grass Stops Growing, London, 1997

Molinari, Andrea, Desert Raiders: Axis and Allied Special Forces 1940–43, Oxford, 2007

Montgomery, Field Marshal the Viscount, Memoirs, London, 1958

Moorehead, Alan, The Desert War, London, 1965

Morgan, Mike, Sting of the Scorpion: The Inside Story of the Long Range Desert Group, Stroud, 2010

Mortimer, Gavin, Stirling’s Men: The Inside History of the SAS in World War II, London, 2004

—— The SAS in World War II: An Illustrated History, London, 2011

—— The Men Who Made the SAS: The History of the Long Range Desert Group, London, 2015

O’Dowd, Gearóid, He Who Dared and Died: The Life and Death of an SAS Original, Sergeant Chris O’Dowd MM, Barnsley, 2011

Peniakoff, Vladimir, Popski’s Private Army, London, 1950

Pleydell, Malcolm, see James, Malcolm

Ross, Hamish, Paddy Mayne: Lt Col Blair ‘Paddy’ Mayne, 1 SAS Regiment, Stroud, 2004

Scholey, Pete, SAS Heroes: Remarkable Soldiers, Extraordinary Men, Oxford, 2008

Seymour, William, British Special Forces, London, 1985

Stevens, Gordon, The Originals: The Secret History of the Birth of the SAS, London, 2005

Strawson, John, A History of the SAS Regiment, London, 1984

Warner, Philip, The SAS, London, 1971

Waugh, Evelyn, The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Mark Amory, London, 1982

Author’s Note

Like war itself, battlefield courage takes many forms. This is a book about a style of warfare that was quite different from anything that preceded it, an unexpected species of hero, and an unusual sort of bravery.

The Special Air Service pioneered a form of combat that has since become a central component of modern warfare. It began life as a small raiding force, but grew into the most formidable commando unit of the Second World War and the prototype for special forces across the world, notably the US Delta Force and Navy SEALs.

Yet throughout the war, and for many years afterwards, the activities of this specialized regiment were a closely guarded secret. This book, describing the origins and wartime evolution of the SAS, has been written with full and unprecedented access to the SAS regimental archives – an astonishingly rich trove of unpublished material including top-secret reports, memos, private diaries, letters, memoirs, maps and hundreds of hitherto unseen photographs.

The most important single source has been the SAS War Diary. This is an extraordinary compilation of original documents, gathered by an SAS officer in 1945, bound in a single, leather-clad volume of more than 500 pages. Held in secrecy for the next seventy years, it is now preserved in the SAS regimental archives.

This is an authorized history, not an official one; I have been generously aided by the SAS Regimental Association at every stage of its production, but the views expressed herein are entirely my own, and not those of the regiment. It is not a comprehensive history. If such a thing were possible, it would be unreadable. For reasons of space and continuity, I have tended to focus on key individuals and events; many men who played gallant roles in the early days of the regiment do not appear in these pages; a few major operations have been omitted, to avoid repetition, and many minor ones. I have also given more prominence to the British elements of the SAS than to their French, Greek and Belgian counterparts. The Special Boat Squadron (later the Special Boat Service, SBS), emerged alongside the SAS, but the two forces divided in April 1943 and pursued largely independent paths. The wartime story of the naval special forces unit (remarkable as it was) therefore does not feature prominently in these pages. This is not a specialist military history but a book for the general reader, and I have tried to keep to a minimum the particulars of rank, unit numbers, medal awards and other military details when these are not essential to the narrative. A full list of wartime SAS operations and the regiment’s roll of honour are included at the end.

Many books have been written about the SAS. Some are excellent, but often these have focused on a single individual, consequently downplaying the impact of others; some veer towards the hagiographic; many are somewhat over-muscled, tending to emphasize machismo at the expense of objectivity, physical strength over the psychological stamina that was the hallmark of the organization in its earliest incarnation. While many members of the wartime SAS exhibited extraordinary qualities, they were also human: flawed, occasionally cruel, and capable of making spectacular mistakes. The SAS has become a legend, but the true story contains darkness as well as light, tragedy and evil alongside heroism: it is a tale of unparalleled bravery and ingenuity, interspersed with moments of rank incompetence, raw brutality and touching human frailty.

At the time of its founding, the SAS was an experiment, and an unpopular one among many of the more traditional-minded officers in the British army. The idea of inserting small groups of highly trained men behind enemy lines, to carry out special operations against high-value targets, ran contrary to all the accepted notions of symmetrical warfare, in which armies faced one another across a defined battlefield. Originally a British unit, formed in the North African desert in 1941, the SAS drew fighting men from all over the world: American, Canadian, Irish, Jewish (from Palestine), French, Belgian, Danish and Greek. The regiment started small, and expanded hugely in the space of three years.

Some exceptional warriors appear only briefly in what follows, but a handful of individuals fought in the SAS from its inception to the war’s end, from the sands of Libya to the coasts of Italy to the hills of France and into Germany. Recruits tended to be unusual to the point of eccentricity, people who did not slot easily into the ranks of the regular army, misfits and reprobates with an instinct for covert war and little time for convention, part soldiers and part spies, rogue warriors. They were, as one former SAS officer put it, ‘the sweepings of the public schools and the prisons’. Success in the ranks of the SAS required a particular cast of mind, and this book is, in part, an attempt to identify those elusive qualities of character and personality.

At the end of the war the SAS was disbanded, on the erroneous assumption that such specialized troops would no longer be necessary. The importance of special forces in the prosecution of modern war has grown steadily ever since.

In 1947, the SAS was re-formed by the British government as a long-term, deep-penetration commando force. The SAS has never confirmed or denied its participation in any operation carried out after that date: in accordance with the terms of the Ministry of Defence Disclosure Policy, the post-war activities of the regiment lie outside the scope of this book, and do not feature in what follows.

The techniques employed by the SAS have changed radically over the last seven decades, but its essential nature has altered little since 1941: an elite force deployed on clandestine, highly dangerous missions beyond the capability of conventional forces.

The US defense secretary recently described the role of special forces carrying out missions against ISIS, the brutal Islamist self-styled caliphate in Iraq, Syria and (once again) Libya, where the SAS story began seventy-five years ago: ‘We have the long reach … You don’t know at night who’s going to be coming in the window. And that’s the sensation that we want all of [ISIS’s] leadership and followers to have.’ That is a definition of the role of special forces that David Stirling, the founder of the SAS, would have recognized and applauded. Today special forces are deployed more widely, and more effectively, than ever before.

The SAS was at the sharp end of the Second World War’s toughest assignments, and inflicted immense damage on enemy forces, both material and psychological. In the desert, SAS raiding parties wrecked fleets of aircraft, terrified Rommel’s troops, carried out vital espionage operations and forged a myth; in Italy they spearheaded the Allied invasion; in support of D-Day, they parachuted into occupied France to conduct guerrilla operations that helped to turn the tide of war. They paid a heavy price, in blood and sanity. The hallucinatory hell of war echoes through these pages, as well as the delight of comradeship, the pleasure in destruction and the horror of senseless death.

Bravery sometimes comes in unexpected forms, and in places far from the battlefield. The wartime history of the SAS is a rattling adventure story, but in the following pages I have also tried to explore the psychology of secret, unconventional warfare, a particular attitude of mind at a crucial moment in history, and the reactions of ordinary people to extraordinary wartime circumstances.

This is a book about the meaning of courage.

Afterlives

David Stirling was appointed OBE in 1946 and initially settled in Rhodesia, where he became president of the newly founded Capricorn Society, an idealistic scheme to unite Africans without regard to racial, political and religious divisions. When that failed (he blamed the Colonial Office), Stirling returned to the UK and set up a series of television stations around the world, mostly in developing countries, another project that was as imaginative as it was unprofitable. ‘I had the biggest collection of the most bankrupt television stations in the world,’ he said. Later he ran Watchguard (International) Ltd, a secretive company through which he helped train security units for Arab and African countries. He was also associated with several instances of covert military action in the Middle East. In the aftermath of the 1974 miners’ strike, he set up GB75, ‘an organization of apprehensive patriots’ who would help keep essential services, such as power stations, running in the event of a general strike. He then turned to fighting left-wing extremism in trade unions, by backing the Movement for True Industrial Democracy (Truemid). In 1984, he gave his name to the Hereford Headquarters of the SAS, the Stirling Lines. He was knighted in 1990, and died later that year.

Paddy Mayne never adjusted to peacetime and civilian life. After the war he joined a geographical expedition to the South Atlantic to survey the Falklands region, a project calling for ‘able-bodied men with the ability to survive in difficult conditions’. But after a month he was invalided home on account of the back injury which had been sustained while parachuting in the desert, worsened by subsequent jumps and seldom mentioned to anybody. Mayne became secretary of the Incorporated Law Society of Northern Ireland, and spent much of his time looking after his infirm mother. He drank far too much, and not happily. In an entry for the Dictionary of National Biography, George Jellicoe wrote: ‘Mayne was an unusual and complicated person … The life of this normally gentle giant of a man was also punctuated from time to time by acts of sudden, often inexplicable, violence – usually associated with an over-generous intake of alcohol.’ His back pain became so acute that he could no longer play rugby, or even watch the sport as a seated spectator. He rarely spoke about his war service, and increasingly gave way to ‘brooding, and strange sensitivity’. On 14 December 1955, in his hometown of Newtownards, after a Masonic dinner followed by an evening of drinking and playing poker, he climbed into his red Riley sports car and headed home. He crashed into a stationary lorry at 4 a.m. and was found dead at the wheel with a fractured skull. The line of mourners at his military funeral, conducted by the Rev. Fraser McLuskey, was over a mile long.

After a period as an instructor at Sandhurst, Roy Farran joined the counter-insurgency police squads in Palestine. In May 1947, his team intercepted an unarmed Jewish schoolboy, Alexander Rubowitz, distributing anti-British propaganda for a proscribed underground organization. During the ensuing interrogation, in a deserted area outside Jerusalem, Farran allegedly killed the boy by smashing his skull with a rock. Farran fled custody twice, but was finally acquitted for lack of admissible evidence. The following year, a parcel bomb addressed to ‘R. Farran’ was opened by his brother Rex, who was killed in the resulting explosion. Roy Farran then worked as a quarryman in Scotland, and ran unsuccessfully as a Conservative parliamentary candidate. In 1950, he emigrated to Canada, where he became a dairy farmer, founded newspapers, wrote two best-selling books about his wartime exploits, entered municipal politics and eventually became Alberta’s solicitor general.

Brian Franks, the commander of 2SAS, lobbied to preserve the skills of the wartime SAS after the regiment’s disbandment in 1945. He founded the SAS Regimental Association, and it was partly through his efforts that the Artists’ Rifles, a Territorial Army battalion, was redesignated as 21SAS, a combination of 1 and 2SAS. Franks commanded the unit until 1950, before going on to become Colonel Commandant of the regiment. He was managing director of the Hyde Park Hotel from 1959 to 1972.

Henry Druce was awarded the Croix de Guerre with Palm for his wartime actions with the French resistance. After the war, he rejoined MI6, the British intelligence service, first in Holland and then in Indonesia. Having left government service he worked in Anglo-Dutch plantations in Java until 1951 and then moved with his family to Canada. There he built up a shipping business in Newfoundland, and later in Quebec and the Cayman Islands, before retiring in 1981 and settling in British Columbia to collect stamps, play golf and speculate on the stock market where his ‘predilection for risk’ proved rather less profitable than it had in Nazi-occupied France.

Bob Lilley rejoined the SAS, becoming regimental sergeant major of 21SAS, and later ran a pub in Folkestone, where he would occasionally regale drinkers with the story of the time he strangled a lone Italian soldier in the middle of the desert. In special forces jargon the term a ‘Boblilley’ is now used to describe a commando hit-and-run operation. Alex Muirhead, the mortar expert, became a GP and then served for eighteen years as the BBC’s chief medical officer. Harry Poat returned to the family tomato-farming business in Guernsey, and died in 1982 at the age of sixty-seven. Mike Sadler accompanied Mayne on the expedition to the Antarctic, and then joined the Foreign Office. He still lives in Cheltenham.

Pat Riley, the American-born desert veteran, joined the Cambridge police in 1945 but found police work too sedate and volunteered as a captain with the Malayan Regiment. He worked closely with the newly formed Malayan Scouts, which became 22SAS, in operations against communist insurgents. He left the army in 1955 and became landlord of the Dolphin Hotel pub in Colchester, Essex, before joining Securicor, the security firm, where he held various senior positions until his retirement in 1980. After a period on secondment with the British Military Mission to Ethiopia, Jim Almonds served with the Eritrean Police Field Force and then returned to the SAS. He left the army in 1961 as a major and retired to the house in Stixwould, Lincolnshire, where he was born. Tony Greville-Bell became a Hollywood scriptwriter, and wrote the 1973 horror-film classic Theatre of Blood, starring Vincent Price and Diana Rigg. He later became a professional sculptor. His bronze of a wounded soldier being helped to safety by a comrade stands in the SAS Garden of Remembrance.

On demobilization, Reg Seekings returned to Cambridgeshire and took over the Rifleman’s Arms pub in Ely with his new wife Monica, which they ran for the next nine years. They then emigrated to Rhodesia to farm tobacco. During the period of the Rhodesian Bush War in the late 1960s and 1970s, he became an inspector in the police anti-terrorist unit, formed by the white minority government to fight African communist guerrillas. Seekings returned to East Anglia soon after Zimbabwean independence.

Johnny Cooper rejoined the family wool business and, predictably enough, found it hard to settle down. In 1951, he took an extended short-service commission with 22SAS, for which he was appointed MBE. He served in the Sultan of Oman’s armed forces before being recruited by David Stirling to help resist the Egyptian-backed coup in North Yemen. In 1966, he retired with the rank of lieutenant colonel, and moved to Portugal.

After the war, Fraser McLuskey travelled throughout Britain visiting the families of SAS soldiers killed in action and telling relatives about the circumstances of their deaths. He helped to set up the Royal Army Chaplains’ Training Centre, before returning to Scotland as minister in Broughty Ferry and then Bearsden in Glasgow, to tend to one of the largest congregations in Scotland. He met the young American evangelist Billy Graham and began a lifelong friendship. In 1960, McLuskey moved to St Columba’s in Knightsbridge, remaining there until his retirement in 1986. He was Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1983–4.

John Tonkin took part in the Antarctic expedition with Mayne and Sadler and fell down a glacier, requiring a long and perilous rescue which, as usual, he found quite funny. He travelled widely, and eventually moved to Australia where he became a mining engineer and successful businessman.

In 1943 Fitzroy Maclean led Churchill’s liaison mission to Yugoslavia’s partisan leader General Tito; he described his role as ‘simply to find out who was killing the most Germans and suggest means by which we could help them to kill more’. Randolph Churchill was also a member of the mission, and brought in the novelist Evelyn Waugh. After the war, Maclean was promoted to the local rank of major general, and returned to the UK to take up his parliamentary seat. He served as an MP until 1959, while administering the family estate in Argyll and running a hotel on the shores of Loch Fyne. In 1949 he published his acclaimed memoir, Eastern Approaches, which included a description of his time in the SAS. His decorations included the Order of Kutuzov (Soviet Union), the Croix de Guerre (France) and the Order of the Partisan Star (Yugoslavia). He was also appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1944, honoured with the baronetcy of Maclean of Strachur and Glensluain, and made a knight of the Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Thistle. He was also, according to some, a model for Ian Fleming’s James Bond.

Bill Fraser won no such recognition. One of the bravest soldiers in the SAS, wounded three times, he ended the war with the rank of major, and won the Military Cross with bar and the Croix de Guerre with palm. He rejoined the Gordon Highlanders, but the demons that had stalked him in the last days of the war finally seized him. He was court-martialled for drunkenness and reduced to the ranks, and appears to have left the army soon afterwards. There were rumours that he had been seen sleeping rough in parks. In 1954, Paddy Mayne wrote: ‘Poor old Bill Fraser has collected a three-year prison sentence for breaking into 30 odd houses.’ On his release, Fraser found work in a bakery and later as a costing clerk. He died in 1975.

After leading the Special Boat Service in a series of operations along the coasts of Italy and Yugoslavia, George Jellicoe was among the first Allied soldiers to enter German-occupied Athens. One of the longest-serving parliamentarians in the world, he was a member of the House of Lords for sixty-eight years. In 1973, he resigned as leader of the House of Lords after admitting ‘some casual affairs’ with call girls, but went on to become chairman of the council of King’s College London, chairman of the Medical Research Council and a trustee of the National Aids Trust. He was also president, among other institutions, of the Royal Geographical Society, the Institute of British Geographers, the Anglo-Hellenic League, the Kennet and Avon Canal Trust, the UK Crete Veterans’ Association, the British Heart Foundation and, not least, the SAS Regimental Association.

Alan Samuel Lyle-Smythe, the eccentric, tweed-wearing intelligence agent encountered by Malcolm Pleydell in the Jebel mountains, became a big-game hunter in Ethiopia, founded a Shakespeare Company in Tanganyika, wrote under the pen name Alan Caillou and finally evolved into a successful Hollywood actor. He penned fifty-two mildly saucy novels with titles such as The Love-Hungry Girl at the ‘Billion Dollar’ Oasis, and appeared in numerous television series in the 1960s and 1970s, including the Man from U.N.C.L.E., Daktari and The Six Million Dollar Man. His most alarming role was in Quark, a short-lived 1978 science-fiction series in which he played the master of the galactic government and appeared only as a gigantic disembodied head.

Theodore Schurch alias John Richards, the fascist spy, was arrested in Rome in March 1945. Six months later he was tried by court martial in London, found guilty on nine counts of treachery and one count of desertion with intent to join the enemy, and sentenced to death. David Stirling gave evidence at his trial. Schurch was hanged, by executioner Albert Pierrepoint, on 4 January 1946 at HM Prison Pentonville. He was twenty-seven. Schurch was the only British soldier executed for treachery committed during the Second World War.

Markus Lutterotti, the German doctor who had escaped from the SAS in the desert, survived the war and returned to his country estate at Fontanasanta in the South Tyrol. With the coming of peace, his interests shifted from tropical medicine to the ethics of euthanasia, a legacy of the soldier whose suffering he had brought to an end in a desert ditch in 1942. An opponent of medically assisted suicide, he founded the ecumenical hospice movement in Germany and dedicated the rest of his life to providing palliative care for the dying. He never forgot his brief sojourn with the SAS in the desert, and the English doctor, the enemy who had befriended him. ‘It was a gentleman’s war in Africa,’ he said.

Malcolm Pleydell worked in a hospital on Malta until the end of 1943, when he was himself hospitalized with a gastric ulcer. While recuperating, he wrote Born of the Desert, the finest first-hand account of the SAS in North Africa. He returned to the UK, recovered in body but suffering from what would be diagnosed today as post-traumatic stress disorder. Ever the acute self-chronicler, Pleydell knew that the experience of desert war, so exciting at the time, had also left invisible wounds: ‘I felt an alien, totally out of place in this new environment … I still found myself avoiding social gatherings years after that because of the accumulation of my traumatic experiences.’ He devoted the rest of his life to the National Health Service. In 1991, he wrote: ‘My life has come full circle. I am retired, and out of doors as much as possible [where] I can sense again the wide sweeps of desert, in which I used to commune with the universe and tell the time by the sun by day, and the stars by night.’

Ben Macintyre

SAS: ROGUE HEROES

The Authorized Wartime History

Contents

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Author’s Note

Afterlives

Wartime SAS Operations