“Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain’s Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War”, by Ben Macintyre

400 pages, Broadway Books, ISBN-13: 978-1101904183

Ben Macintyre has written a history of the Special Air Service called Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain’s Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War (really, you couldn’t parse that title?) Anyway, Rogue Heroes purports to be the “authorized but not official” history of the SAS and tells the story of the founding of what Macintyre claims to be the forerunner of all modern Special Forces. So let’s begin there, shall we? This claim that the SAS is a pioneer of today’s commando units – small teams of specially trained men that parachute or otherwise infiltrate behind enemy lines to inflict damage and cause mischief – is, on its face, factually incorrect. Macintyre must not be much of a military historian if he doesn’t know of the that the Boer farmers and burghers in 19^th Century South Africa who successfully fought the traditionalist armies of the British Empire to a standstill fighting as irregulars (indeed, the first appearance of the word “commando” was taken from the Dutch Afrikaner guerilla units known as “Kommandos” in South Africa during the Second Boer War. You’re welcome). There also were the slap-dash groups of renegade Union and Confederate soldiers during the U.S. Civil War – Quantrill’s Raiders, anyone? You can go back earlier than that to, say, the American Revolution, where small groups of unpredictable, independent colonists picked off the red-coated, regimented Brits; Native American Indians fought like guerrillas, too; you can also point to commando-style Italian, German and other troops in World War I, not to mention the French Foreign Legion. Doubtless there were rogue bands of barbarian attackers who helped bring down the Roman Empire. In short, the SAS may have been unusual, but it was not unique, nor was it a new idea.

Aside from Macintyre’s failings as a military historian, his Rogue Heroes has many other faults. For one thing, it has no narrative arc. It is primarily a series of episodic stories about fight after fight, battle after battle, differing little, and all in the end boring to read (although not of course boring if you were there in the middle of the action). Neither does this book have a central character or even a group of central characters; although there are a handful of SAS leaders who appear and reappear throughout the 380-page work – such as David Stirling, arguably the founder of the SAS, or the violent, alcoholic Paddy Mayne, referred to often as repressed homosexual (with no proof, mind you) – most of the book consists of a portrait consisting of paragraph or a sentence of the hundreds of different individuals who appear…and then disappear. It is simply too much for the reader to keep track of. Macintyre is at his best in the first portion of the book as he describes the activities of the newly established “L Detachment” – the precursor of the SAS and then still only tenuously a part of the British military – in hit-and-run desert campaigns in North Africa; later in the war, as it grows in size into a multi-national regiment and moves on to Sicily and then up Italy to spearhead attacks against the now-retreating Germans, although with the only difference being the change in scenery; the battles in Europe resemble the battle in Africa, with less sand.

Rogue Heroes will be of considerable interest to those with a keen history in WWII military history, and probably to those who are interested in military special forces, whether they be SEALS or Green Berets or other elite commando groups, although the SAS never considered its ragtag band of desert rats, misfits and pirates an elite group, seeing as it was replete with the usual British eccentrics and their mysterious motives. Worth the read, although the actual story is a minor part of the larger theatre; it just didn’t quite grab me and hold my interest as really good history does, and I found myself reading it more out of obligation than pleasure. Although some sections were quite entertaining and, generally speaking, the founding of SAS is historically interesting and it adds a dimension to the campaign in North Africa, there is probably a better history of the SAS out there. Somewhere.