Rogue Heroes

     BOOK REVIEW:   Britain's Special Air Service --- or SAS --- was the brainchild of David Stirling, a young aristocrat whose aimlessness belied a remarkable strategic mind. Where most of his colleagues looked at a World War II battlefield map and saw a protracted struggle, Stirling saw an opportunity: given a small number of elite men, he could parachute behind Nazi lines and sabotage their airplanes and supplies. Defying his superiours' conventional wisdom, Stirling assembled a revolutionary fighting force that would upend not just the balance of the war, but the nature of combat itself. Bringing his keen eye for detail to a riveting wartime narrative, Ben Macintyre uses his unprecedented access to the SAS archives to shine a light on a legendary unit long shrouded in secrecy.

     MY REVIEW:   History books of this sort don't tend to interest me. But this one did. It is quite interestingly told, and the subject is an interesting one as well. I enjoyed reading about this aspect of WWII. I had never grasped just how widespread the fighting was, or the cruelty of the Nazi's.
     Off to a less-than-comforting start, the small band of men arrived at their desert headquarters to find it very sparsely furnished. A few hours and enemies later, they were much more comfortably housed. Armed with sufficient character and brilliance to pull off their mission, they merely lacked the important detail of just how to proceed. Impromptu training techniques taught by unskilled teachers included jumping off the back of moving trucks or rickety platforms, and rigorous, prolonged, nearly brutal training in desert survival. Their objective? To parachute undetected into enemy camps via the scarcely guarded desert front to wreck havoc. When finally they had completed their training and proceeded with their first attack, a violent desert storm took their success and several casualties. Eventually, it was concluded that the LRDG (desert patrol of sorts) who so effective got the men out after their sabotaging could be equally effective in driving them in, thus diminishing the use of parachutes.
   The beginning of this book was very interesting, but once the desert war ended and the small band (which grew to 100) was moved about in Italy, France, and otherwhere's, it was slightly less interesting. They divided into several different bands and their style of attack was changed to suit the enemies' awareness of them. However, as I have found with others, if I were to read the book a second time, it proves doubly informative. Especially if read within a closer time frame.
      Ben Macintyre is a "writer-at-large" for The Times in London, and others of his books include A Spy Among Friends, Operation Mincemeat, and Agent ZigZag. Benmacintyre.com will provide you with additional books and information.

    I received a copy of this book from BLOGGING FOR BOOKS per their blogger program. All thoughts and opinions are my own.