Heroes Of The SAS: True Stories Of The British Army's Elite Special Forces Regiment

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Peter Davis was a young officer who joined the SAS at the end of 1942 and served with the regiment throughout the rest of the war. Shortly after the end of the war he wrote an account of operations in Sicily and Italy based on his diaries but for decades his memoir remained unpublished. In 2015, twenty years after Davis’s death, his son published his father’s memoir, providing readers with a vivid picture of operations in the Mediterranean, although contrary to the subtitle, Davis was not an SAS ‘Original’, the collective name given to the first 66 recruits of the regiment in the summer of 1941. Davis was particularly strong in conveying the physical and temperamental characteristics of his fellow soldiers. Of the great and fearsome Paddy Mayne, he wrote: ” Under great jutting eyebrows, his piercing blue eyes looked discomfortingly at me, betraying his remarkable talent of being able to sum a person up within a minute of meeting him.” My observation from conversations with men who have not only endured but relished the sort of extreme danger that to the rest of us is unimaginable is that they are truly a race apart. They made a run for it and it was a good few days before they made it to safety. All the time they were being pursued across the Iraqi desert in vehicles and Andy and his gang had to escape and evade, which we are trained to do as part of our SAS selection. With lesser men, the whole lot of them probably would have died. As it was, one of the guys froze to death but nearly all the rest either escaped or were captured. In Andy’s case, he was captured and tortured and held until the Iraqis ran the white flag up. So this is a real survival story. The guys who escaped and are alive today had all done SAS selection and were fit guys so they are around today to tell the story.

I enjoyed the story telling of these characters and what happened leading up to Desert Storm. This book is well written, well researched and uses fictitious names (obviously). I enjoyed the stories about Cambodia, Kuwait and even operations on the Australian mainland. NetGalley, Liz Pegler An amazing and heart-stopping account of Australian SAS officers' involvement in the Vietnam War. Books Monthly Despite my many misgivings on war I am not above being entertained by war-inspired movies and video games. One of these video games was Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines, a tactical game where with a small team of specialised soldiers the player had to infiltrate enemy bases and destroy key equipment and buildings. There's something intensely satisfying about the idea of a small unit slipping through nets of patrolling enemies and reaching the target undetected. While I knew this was somehow based on real life war practices I assumed it was heavily spiced up for entertainment value. Now I know better. Just as diverse as the soldiers were the many campaigns they engaged in. Essentially, each chapter of the book is a concise narrative of a major operation undertaken by the SAS. As these were generally carried out by small groups, there are brief synopses of the key figures involved, followed by a dramatic recounting of the action. Although this renders the structure of the book episodic, it is engrossing nontheless, particularly as the accounts are laced with flashes of humor and genuine drama. In fact, I found myself wondering how many of these exploits had already been mined (or will be mined) by Hollywood scripwriters.I was totally immersed from the get-go with Major Pete and his SAS team starting with their covert operations in Cambodia till the final chapter on the Islamic terrorists on Aussie soil . While recovering in a hospital from his disastrous first parachute jump, Stirling came up with a vision that he then refined and zealously promoted: a unique fighting force with unprecedented independence and special skills, one made up of “fighters who were exceptionally brave but just short of irresponsible; disciplined but independent-minded; uncomplaining, unconventional and, when necessary, merciless.” Such men are not easily controlled, but then Stirling, whose contradictory traits rivalled those of his ideal soldiers, proved an inspired leader. In the summer of 1941, at the height of the war in the Western Desert, a bored and eccentric young officer, David Stirling, came up with a plan that was radical and entirely against the rules: a small undercover unit that would inflict mayhem behind enemy lines.

An excellent read and a must for anyone interested in an in-depth look at the Special Air Service operation on Pebble Island. You can look through a lot of World War II history books written between 1945 and the end of the 20th century and not find more than a mention of the S.A.S. This group consisted of a small number of British Army soldiers (later linked with other countries' forces) that were primarily functioning in North Africa during the time the Allies were battling with Rommel to control this vast territory. Stirling was a terrible University student: "If he ever opened a book, the event was not recorded." The pilots indicated that the parachutists should prepare to jump—although, in truth, they were now flying blind, navigating by guesswork. The parachute-canisters were tossed out first containing explosives, tommy guns, ammunition, food, water, maps, blankets and medical supplies. My neighbour Chris is now in his late 50s and saw 15 years' service in Northern Ireland, Colombia, Africa, the Balkans and elsewhere.Deaths are not common but are dealt with in a very low-key way, with no public outpouring of grief and very little attention. How he managed to bypass this bureaucracy and start the SAS is the story of this book. The book is well written and easy to read. It does not go beyond WWII, except to explain that the SAS was disbanded from 1945-47. It still exists today.

When I reached university age, we lived in a little village seven miles from town and, one summer, I got to know a near neighbour, Rob, who was no more than 5ft 6in, quietly spoken and never discussed his work. The SAS (Special Air Service) was founded during WWII when Britain was on the verge of losing the battle against Hitler and information about it was classified for years after the war. The author finally gained access to it and in conjunction with personal diaries, interviews, etc. has provided the reader with a riveting tale of bravery and deception. My school friend's dad became a Sufi – an adherent of the mystical branch of Islam that Cat Stevens embraced. It was his way of reconciling the dual aspect of his character. He was, he discovered, both a warrior and a deeply spiritual person. First and foremost was Lieutenant David Stirling, the founder of the SAS, an unfailingly polite but unconventional man. Stirling, scion of a famous Scottish family with deep connections in both the aristocracy and the upper echelons of the military, was initially regarded as “impertinent, incompetent, and profoundly irritating” by both his fellow officers and his superiors, yet he was endowed at the same time with phenomenal powers of concentration and great ingenuity.I have read most of Ben Macintyre’s work and enjoyed virtually all of it, yet this book, with its great sweep taking in the gamut/gauntlet of the SAS soldiers’ experience, is to my mind his most ambitious yet. He doesn’t claim to have penned the full and definitive history of the SAS during WWII, but I believe he made good on his promise to disclose “darkness as well as light, tragedy and evil alongside heroism.” This is an excellent book all about survival. That is the survival of the human spirit against adversity. When the chips were down Andy and the other men with him had to escape and evade detection across hundreds of miles of open desert in the extreme cold before they could get to safety. And they weren’t really equipped for that kind of harsh weather.

He was a teenage paratrooper at the Battle of Goose Green in the Falklands and applied for the SAS soon after.

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Mr Craighead, who was also awarded an MBE by the late Queen earlier in his SAS career, says the book is a metaphorical story about a wolf who becomes a sheep dog. As Allied forces drove the Germans into their homeland, “the tide of war turned in a welter of recriminations and blood-letting,” and the SAS, who had in the past laid ambushes for the enemy, now found themselves being ambushed, sometimes by civilians. One of the final scenes in the SAS’s European war took place when an SAS team on a reconnaissance foray became the first Allied soldiers to enter the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. In one of the most sobering chapters of the book, Macintyre describes the horrifying conditions the SAS men witnessed. One soldier wrote starkly, “This day at Belsen was the most horrible of my life.”