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

wrote: “I was surprised to see Lieutenant Stirling pass me in the air.” But not half as surprised as Lieutenant Stirling. His parachute had snagged on the tail of the plane and badly ripped. Realizing that he was not so much parachuting as falling, he closed his eyes and braced himself for the impact.
    Stirling did not regain consciousness until he awoke, half paralyzed, in a bed at the Scottish Military Hospital. “I was a bit unlucky,” he said, with resounding understatement.
    Lewes, predictably enough, had “made a perfect landing,” and felt moved to write a poem about the romance of parachuting.
Green for Go! Now! God, how slow it is!
The air doesn’t rush and earth doesn’t rise
Till you swoop into harness and know it is
Over, look up and love the white canopy
Steadfast above you, an angel in panoply
Guarding the skies.
    Stirling did not feel that way. His first experience of parachuting had been extremely unpleasant. He would suffer back pain and migraines for the rest of his life as a result of his spinal injury. The fall had almost killed him, but it had given him a very good idea.
    It was eight weeks before Stirling could walk again. In that time, he gathered every map of the coast and inland area he could lay his hands on, jotting down notes on airfields, roads, rail lines, and enemy positions along the coast. When Lewes visited him in hospital, Stirling laid out his plans: “I believe it would be possible, not too difficult in fact, to infiltrate small numbers of men into selected German positions from the desert flank. I think we could then have a pretty dramatic effect on their efficiency and morale by sabotaging aircraft, runways and fuel dumps.”
    With typical generosity, Stirling would later credit Lewes with much of the thinking behind this plan. Yet at this stage Lewes was skeptical. How would parachutists be able to carry sufficient explosives to do real damage? Who would authorize such an operation? And how would the raiders get away after an attack across hundreds of miles of sand? “Have you thought about training for walking in the desert?” he asked. Lewes’s doubts may have had less to do with the feasibility of the plan than with misgivings about the character of Stirling himself, a man with a rakish reputation and many of the traits Lewes despised. He may also have felt that Stirling was interfering with his own plans. Lewes was heading back to besieged Tobruk. They agreed to discuss the concept of parachute raiding once more when he returned. “If you manage to get anywhere with the idea, talk to me again,” said Lewes, as he got up to leave. “I don’t hold out much hope.”
    By mid-July, Stirling had written the outline of a proposal, giving credit to Lewes and noting that the plan was “largely based on Jock’s ideas.”
    Stirling’s original memo was handwritten in pencil, and does not survive in the SAS archives. Its outlines were straightforward: Rommel’s eastward advance along the North African coast had swung the battle in favor of the celebrated German commander, but it had also created an opportunity, leaving the enemy supply lines extended and coastal airfields vulnerable to attack. Most were only thinly defended. Some even lacked perimeter fencing. On a moonless night a small group of highly trained commandos could be dropped by parachute, as close as feasible to enemy airfields; they would then split into small teams, each no more than five strong, which would penetrate the aerodromes under cover of darkness, plant time bombs on as many aircraft as possible, and then retreat back into the desert, where they could be picked up by the Long Range Desert Group—the British reconnaissance unit that, Stirling had learned, was capable of driving deep into the desert. Up to thirty separate attacks might be launched in a single night. To maintain security and secrecy, such an operation would have to be approved by the commander in chief in the Middle East. The new unit