SAS Rogue Heroes
Ben Macintyre draws on newly opened SAS archives to tell the Regiment’s audacious wartime story from desert raids to disbandment.
- Author
- Ben Macintyre
- Publisher
- Penguin Viking
- Price
- £25
- ISBN
- 9780241186621
- Published
- 2017
SAS Rogue Heroes by Ben Macintyre
Published to mark the Regiment’s 75th anniversary, Ben Macintyre’s SAS Rogue Heroes benefits from unprecedented access to wartime diaries, reports, photographs and correspondence now opened by the SAS. Interviews with surviving originals add colour, resulting in a tale of daring, fearlessness and occasional recklessness that reads like fiction yet is meticulously sourced.
The narrative begins in Cairo in the summer of 1941 when Lieutenant David Stirling, restless and determined, conceived a plan to strike far behind enemy lines in North Africa. Unwilling to be slowed by military protocol, he slipped into Middle East Headquarters, bypassed the chain of command and persuaded General Sir Neil Ritchie to forward his idea. Three days later Stirling found himself in front of General Auchinleck, and the Special Air Service was born.
Macintyre follows the unit through brutal desert operations, clandestine raids with the Long Range Desert Group, and the evolution of tactics such as jeep-borne strikes that remain SAS trademarks. The story spans every theatre in which the Regiment fought—North Africa, the Mediterranean, occupied Europe and beyond—highlighting the men’s ingenuity, their losses and their camaraderie.
The book closes on 1 October 1945, when the wartime SAS was formally disbanded alongside many other special formations. By then, its legacy was secure. Macintyre’s access to primary sources and the voices of the founders delivers an authoritative, gripping history of Britain’s most celebrated special forces unit.
ISBN 9780241186621. Penguin Viking. £25.