SAS Rogue Heroes is a war story of two halves, writes Jim Sullivan.
SAS: ROGUE HEROES:
The Authorised Wartime History
Ben Macintyre
Viking/Penguin Random House
By JIM SULLIVAN
This is not an official history and is the better for it. An "official" historian would probably tell us less about the personalities who made up the Special Air Service (SAS).
Ben Macintyre is a journalist and his roll call describes the eccentrics, from criminals to Bertie Wooster types, from homosexuals (in and out of the closet) to roaring drunks and from womanisers to borderline psychopaths.
The SAS was formed in North Africa in 1941 and New Zealand readers will savour the first half of the book as during the war in North Africa New Zealanders were a crucial part of SAS operations. In fact, New Zealanders were early victims of the SAS reluctance to play by the rules. While a 2NZEF unit was "up the blue" on an exercise, the SAS was setting up its first training camp nearby. The SAS visited the largely-deserted New Zealand camp and "removed tents, bedding, tables, chairs, cooking equipment, a gramophone, hurricane lamps, rope, washbasins and tarpaulins".
Parachuting into an objective behind the lines demanded a means of getting away after the job was done and SAS founder David Stirling called on the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG), which had become expert at traversing vast miles of desert and returning safely to base. The first LRDG units had been recruited from the 2NZEF, "farmers and leathery outdoorsmen used to surviving for long periods in harsh terrain" and it was a New Zealand crew that waited in the desert to take the SAS home after the first and depressingly disastrous foray behind the lines (more than half of the 55 SAS men were dead, wounded or missing). Wandering towards what they hoped was the rendezvous point in pitch darkness the SAS warriors heard a welcome loud whisper: "Over here, Pommies."
SAS: Rogue Heroes is a war story of two halves and the SAS exploits in Europe make harrowing and sometimes confusing reading. Macintyre is a superb storyteller and what rich raw material he has. An SAS officer could be behind enemy lines leading his own men, Italian partisans, Russian deserters, Belgians, German Jews, Italian women and a specially-summoned piper from the Highland Light Infantry. In pursuit might be Germans, Italian fascists and even a troop of Mongolians (Macintyre doesn’t tell us how they came to be in Italy but some sources suggest that, as an ally of Russia, Mongolia sent a small number of troops to Europe).
The war in Europe was a dirty one for the SAS, culminating in SAS troops being the first to reach the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The Boy’s Own Paper days of the desert were long gone.
Macintyre includes a "what happened to them" appendix. Not surprisingly, many SAS men never settled into civvy life. Suicides, prison and violence marked the post-war years for many veterans. The other welcome appendix is a Regimental Roll of Honour featuring more than 300 names and flicking from the main text to this list provides a sobering reminder of how many men who survived outrageously dangerous raids were killed in later actions.
Officially, the SAS was disbanded in 1945 but it has been resurrected in many of the world’s armed forces (in New Zealand in 1955).
War, it seems, will always need its rogues.
- Jim Sullivan is a Patearoa writer.
