I started watching the current BBC series (which on the whole faithfully reflects Macintyre’s book) but quickly decided to read the book, finishing it well before the end of the series. The staggering levels of eccentricity, oddness and bordering psychopathy that engendered the founding of this originally phantom regiment were clearly described, beginning with pocket biographies of Stirling, Lewes and Mayne. Macintyre plainly sets out his stall in the beginning, stating that this is the story of men who failed at peace, but succeeded at war. I knew a certain amount about David Stirling, but very little about the other original members of what became the Special Air Services. His usual journalistic approach, involving interviewing anyone still alive who participated was rather hampered by the fact that only one survivor, the navigating whiz Mike Sadler, is still alive (a feisty centenarian). Ben Macintyre is at the top of his game here with coveted access to the famous SAS war diary, he displays his usual measured but immensely readable style. Lady Caroline Lamb’s famous epithet on Lord Byron is a wonderfully appropriate description of the founders of this now famous regiment. The result is not just a tremendous war story, but a fascinating group portrait of men of whom history and country asked the most. Bringing his keen eye for psychological detail to a riveting wartime narrative, Ben Macintyre uses his unprecedented access to SAS archives to shine a light inside a legendary unit long shrouded in secrecy. He faced no little resistance from those who found his tactics ungentlemanly or beyond the pale, but in the SAS’s remarkable exploits facing the Nazis in the Africa and then on the Continent can be found the seeds of nearly all special forces units that would follow. Paired with his constitutional opposite, the disciplined martinet Jock Lewes, Stirling assembled a revolutionary fighting force that would upend not just the balance of the war, but the nature of combat itself. Where most of his colleagues looked at a battlefield map of World War II’s African theater and saw a protracted struggle with Rommel’s desert forces, Stirling saw an opportunity: given a small number of elite, well-trained men, he could parachute behind enemy lines and sabotage their airplanes and war material. The incredible untold story of WWII’s greatest secret fighting force, as told by our great modern master of wartime intrigue Britain’s Special Air Service-or SAS-was the brainchild of David Stirling, a young, gadabout aristocrat whose aimlessness in early life belied a remarkable strategic mind. To learn more about how and for what purposes Amazon uses personal information (such as Amazon Store order history), please visit our Privacy Notice. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie Preferences, as described in the Cookie Notice. Click ‘Customise Cookies’ to decline these cookies, make more detailed choices, or learn more. Third parties use cookies for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalised ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. This includes using first- and third-party cookies, which store or access standard device information such as a unique identifier. If you agree, we’ll also use cookies to complement your shopping experience across the Amazon stores as described in our Cookie Notice. We also use these cookies to understand how customers use our services (for example, by measuring site visits) so we can make improvements. We use cookies and similar tools that are necessary to enable you to make purchases, to enhance your shopping experiences and to provide our services, as detailed in our Cookie Notice.
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