Why this book: Selected by the SEAL book club I’m in.  I wasn’t keen on reading another specops book, but this one was really well done and enlightening.

Summary in 4 sentences; The book begins in North Africa, with David Sterling, generally recognized as the father of the SAS, coming up with a non-standard tactic for intrepid men like himself, who felt stifled by traditional military bureaucracy, to go behind Rommels forces and wreak havoc in their comfortable safe spaces in the rear.  The first half of the book is about their steep learning curve and accounts of their multiple successes as well as some of their tragic failures in North Africa.  In the second half of the book, the British Army and the SAS are applying their lessons learned in Africa against the Germans in Italy and in France, working with local resistance fighters fighting in Italy and in support of the D-Day invasion and the move through France to Germany. The book then moves to operations inside of Germany before the final surrender, and concludes with an interesting section about what happened to the many heroes in the book, after the war.  

The Book:  Copyright 2016, Paperback published by Broadway Books, 351 pages. 

My Impressions:  Rogue Heroes tells the improbable story of the formation of the SAS, their initial challenges getting started, and provides great stories of brave men breaking new ground in warfare,  conducting daring operations behind the lines in World War 2, the likes of which I have never heard of or read before.  There have always been daring commando units; what was new here, was small units over months and years, successfully applying stealth, surprise, and hit and run tactics to destroy supply lines and disrupt enemy operations,  against an enemy as powerful and sophisticated as the Wehrmacht, in an environment as unforgiving as the North African desert, in a war with new technology on both sides.   

MacIntyre was the first author given access to the SAS war diaries for his research.  He not only had access to the facts, the archives, and other documents, and did extensive additional research not only on the operations conducted, but on the individuals who conducted them.  And importantly, he is a great story teller.  This book is a great read and was hard to put down.  

In the early days of the SAS, there was a steep learning curve.  Parachuting was a new tactic, and they made a number of serious and sometimes tragic mistakes in learning how to apply it to their needs.   Using vehicles to insert commando raiding forces over hundreds of miles of desert required learning new lessons from the beginning, many the hard way.  They also established their own operating bases behind enemy lines and operated out of them for weeks, vulnerable to air reconnaissance and attacks, as well as betrayal from indigenous herders.  They lost many men in learning their painful lessons, but they kept at it, focused on the mission, the enemy, and learning from their mistakes.  Eventually they started racking up enormous successes, way out of proportion to the size of their force.  And they never stopped having to fight the traditionalists in the British Army who felt that what they were doing was somehow not proper, not sporting, not….military.  

MacIntyre gives us a look at the men who made up the SAS in these formative years – their quirks and strengths, their fears, and weaknesses, their backgrounds and personalities – and this makes his stories that much richer.  We follow several heroes until they are killed or captured – and only a few of the originals were leading and fighting with the SAS through to the end of the war.   Many of them then struggled after the war to find a life and an environment that was as engaging as being an SAS commando fighting alongside similarly motivated men, against an evil foe.  Navy SEALs and Army Special Forces operators often have the same challenges upon leaving the military – some adapt well, many do not. 

At the conclusion of the North Africa campaign, the SAS had to shift focus to support the main allied effort against the Nazis in Europe.  It took the SAS some time to adapt their desert tactics to fighting the Nazis in Italy and France – in much closer proximity to conventional forces and civilian population centers.  They played key roles in support of conventional operations in Sicily, and afterward in support of the allied campaign to defeat the Germans in Italy.  Then later, MacIntyre gives us stories of SAS teams parachuting behind German lines in support of the Normandy invasion, and then continuing operations in different parts of France supporting the French Maquis – the French Resistance – attacking supply lines and creating havoc in the Wehrmacht’s rear, as Allied forces drove the Wehrmacht out of France and across the Rhine into Germany.   This was a very different type of warfare, and it took some time to learn to  fight along side and in support of  maquis operations.   Developing trust with the maquis was often a challenge – there were informers everywhere, and they were often compromised with tragic results. 

Hitler’s Kommandobefehl issued in October 1942 directed that any allied forces captured doing commando operations behind German lines were to be immediately executed, even if in uniform and surrendering.  This meant that any captured SAS operator had no Geneva convention or POW rights, and many SAS operators were executed under this order.  The Nazis were also exterminating entire villages in France as reprisals for SAS operations, on the assumption that French Resistance had assisted.  This did not inspire the SAS to take prisoners or treat German prisoners with Geneva Convention protocols, though they often did.  At this phase of the war, the Nazis were increasingly desperate, and the killing became more vicious, cruel, bloody and brutal.  

Some of the parts of this story that resonated with me and my time with the SEALs (though I have never been, nor have any SEALs I know ever been in a war as all-encompassing and brutal as WW2).

• RESISTANCE from CONVENTIONAL FORCES. David Stirling faced stiff resistance from the staffs of conventional forces to his proposal to create a specialized commando raiding force.  He referred to these staff officers as a “freemasonry of mediocrity” and “layer upon layer of fossilized shit.”  Establishing the SAS required General Auchinleck, Commander in Chief of Middle East Command, to over-ride his staff officers, who hated that an upstart young 1st Lt would be allowed to create a unit of what they saw as renegade, ill-disciplined commandos, not required to submit to the rigid standards of in-garrison military discipline. This challenge is familiar to all special operations forces and inhibited the development of Navy SEAL forces for decades.  Just like for the SAS, the establishment of the Navy SEALs required a few imaginative senior leaders to over-ride the resistance of their conventional staffs.  This story for the Navy SEALs is beautifully told by Ben Milligan in his book:   By Water Beneath the Walls.  
• THE MEN WHO VOLUNTEER –  The men who volunteered for the SAS knew they were volunteering for hazardous work against a brutal enemy, to operate often unsupported behind enemy lines, and while in garrison, receiving poor logistical, food, billeting and other support, and few of the amenities that are available to most conventional forces.  This has been the case when volunteering for special forces in the US and in the case of all elite forces I have worked with, especially in Europe. 
• SCREENING and THE NATURE OF THE TRAINING. Screening of potential SAS operators didn’t appear to be very sophisticated.  Most importantly they had to volunteer, and have a reasonable idea what they were volunteering for.  Many were recruited based on personal reputation and connections with those already within the SAS, and  a brief interview.  It didn’t appear that there was a physical or fitness test.  Physical and mental fitness were determined during prep training – those who were not be mentally or physically fit enough or otherwise didn’t fit, either dropped on request, or were not allowed to go on operations. This is not unlike the screening in the early days of UDT and SEAL training, or as I understand it, Special Forces training.   A candidates performance during basic training was the primary screening tool.  Today most Special Ops Forces have  extensive and sophisticated screening protocols to best determine who will succeed as a Special Operations operator or leader PRIOR to beginning basic training. 
• ETHICS ON THE BATTLEFIELD – The SAS killed or wounded hundreds of Wehrmacht soldiers during their operations.  MacIntyre related several cases when they did killing that some felt was not strictly necessary,  and there were mixed feelings about that – many were uncomfortable with killing that wasn’t critical to the success of the mission. Later, when fighting in Europe and after Hitler’s Kommandobefehl was in full force, it became more difficult for SAS leaders to enforce discipline on SAS troops when taking German prisoners.  MacIntyre notes how “The distinction between rough justice and murder was blurring” and “an eye for an eye brutality <was> met by greater brutality…The gentlemanly, jovial, dangerous, and exciting warfare pioneered by Stirling was evolving into something harder and cruder under the pressure of  long and horrific conflict.” p271
• POST TRAUMATIC STRESS – MacIntyre concludes the book with a chapter entitled “Afterlives” in which he gives us brief post-war biographies of the many SAS operators who survived the war.  Many did not do well adapting to peacetime and civilian life.  Many had internal demons which gave them the energy and drive they harnessed to fight and survive against an implacable enemy during the war, but which after the war, were much more difficult to deal with. Paddy Mayne, one of the SASs’s key leaders had, according to MacIntyre, “enough internal demons…to populate a small hell,” (p272) and after the war “drank far too much, and not happily.” (p346  He was not atypical.  This has been an issue after any war; Britain had struggled with this phenomenon after the first World War, as soldiers in the US, Australia and other countries are struggling with it now after nearly 20 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.  

This book is not only a great compendium of stories of acts of heroism by brave men in war, but also a clear-eyed look at the types of men who repeatedly volunteer for and conduct very high risk operations in small groups, unsupported in the enemy’s back yard.  It is an excellent look at the beginnings of one of the world’s premier special operations units, but also a look at special operations in general – capabilities, limitations, and possibilities.