Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War Read Online Free PDF Page A

demeanor, great professionalism, and experience. According to one version of the story, he had got wind of what Lewes was up to and deliberately sought him out in the officers’ mess. Others say the conversation was purely accidental. Either way, the ideas of Lewes and Stirling were converging.
    There was, however, another, secret side to Jock Lewes that might have given Stirling pause, had he known about it: Lewes had flirted with Nazism.
    On a cycling tour to Germany in 1935, Lewes had been deeply impressed by the organization and strength of the nascent Third Reich. “England is no democracy and Germany far from being a totalitarian state,” he wrote to his parents. “Dazzled” by National Socialism, he visited Germany several times in the following years, returning home more smitten from each visit: he mixed with German high society, attended a 1938 ball where Hitler and Goebbels were guests of honor, and fell in love with a young German woman, Senta Adriano, an enthusiastic member of the Nazi Party. He mooned over Senta’s “frankness and sincerity,” her “golden hair, eyes greeny blue and well spaced, fine delicate eyebrows—not plucked.” Plucked eyebrows would have been a mark of frivolity.
    Then came Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, as Nazis rampaged through Germany and Austria, smashing and looting Jewish shops, businesses, and synagogues. Jock Lewes may have been politically naive, but he was not a fool: the events of November 1938 provoked in him a violent and painful change of heart. Suddenly, with horrible clarity, he understood the true nature of the regime he had appeased, politically and emotionally.
    “I have been struggling to retain my belief in German sincerity but only a fanatic faith could withstand the evidence they choose to put before us,” he wrote. “I swear I will not live to see the day when Britain hauls down the colours of her beliefs before totalitarian aggression.” He broke off his engagement to Senta, and became, almost overnight, a ferocious opponent of Nazism. “I shall willingly take up arms against Germany,” he wrote. He felt he had been duped, both by the Nazis and by the fascist woman he loved. “He took the lie personally”; he was out for revenge.
    Lewes’s determination and ruthlessness, his utter dedication to the task of fighting Germany, was the reaction of a man who has been wronged by a faithless lover, one who has made a terrible mistake and needed to make amends.
    The light was already fading when Lewes, Stirling, and four other men climbed into an elderly biplane to perform the world’s first desert parachute jump: for Stirling, a jaunt; for Lewes, the next stage in his campaign of revenge against Nazi Germany. The Vickers Valentia, on loan to the Royal Air Force, was used to deliver mail; it was almost comically unsuitable for parachuting. The parachutes purloined by Lewes were designed with static lines to be clipped to a steel cable, attached fore and aft. As the parachutist left the plane, the line would pull out the folded parachute until fully extended, at which point a connecting thread would snap and the parachute canopy would fill with air. There were no parachute instructors in the Middle East, but a friendly RAF officer advised them to “dive out as though going through into water.” The team practiced by jumping off the plane wings, a fall of about ten feet. By way of a test, Lewes tossed out a dummy parachutist, made from tent poles and sandbags, at a height of eight hundred feet. “The parachute opened okay, but the tent poles smashed on landing.”
    Lewes and Stirling agreed they were ready to go: they would simply tie the parachute lines to the legs of the passenger seats, open the door, and dive out. The pilot took off from the small airfield fifty miles south of Bagush, circled once, and then gave the signal to jump. Lewes and his batman went first, followed by a volunteer named D’Arcy and then Stirling. D’Arcy later