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 B

would need special status, access to military intelligence, and its own secluded training ground. Stirling was suggesting “a new type of force, to extract the maximum out of surprise and guile.”
    With hindsight the plan seems obvious. At the time it was revolutionary.
    Many middle-ranking officers in the British Army had fought in the First World War, and clung to an old-fashioned, classical conception of warfare: men in uniform clashing on a battlefield, and then fighting until one side emerged victorious. So far, although the battlefront had moved back and forth, the war in North Africa was following this pattern. What Stirling proposed would leapfrog the front line and take the battle directly into the enemy camp. In the eyes of some, this was not only unprecedented, but unsporting, like punching a chap when he is looking the other way. Blowing up planes in the middle of the night and then running away, some felt, was a job for saboteurs, mercenaries, and assassins, not for soldiers of His Majesty’s armed forces. It was not war, as they knew it, and it was not cricket. Worse than that, Stirling’s idea represented a threat to the very concept of rank. The chain of command is sacrosanct in every army, but Stirling was proposing to bypass that too, and report only to the most senior commander—in this case General Sir Claude Auchinleck, the newly appointed commander in chief of Middle East Command. Stirling was a mere lieutenant, and an undistinguished one at that, who was proposing to subvert centuries of military tradition by speaking directly to the top boss, in order to create and command what looked suspiciously like a private army. To the traditionalists among his superiors, this was more than just impertinent; it was positively insurrectionary.
    Stirling had no illusions about how his plan would be received by the staff officers at Middle East Headquarters. He was openly contemptuous of the mid-level military bureaucracy, which he referred to, variously, as “a freemasonry of mediocrity” and “layer upon layer of fossilized shit.” If his idea was to have a chance, he would need to get the proposal directly into the hands of the most senior officers, before anyone lower in the hierarchy had a chance to kill it. If it passed through the normal channels, the plan would perish on the desk of the first staff officer who read it. Stirling’s radical approach to the “fossilized shit” was similar to his attitude toward the front line: he did not intend to try to go through it, but to go around it. How he did so has become the stuff of myth.
    British Middle East Headquarters was housed in a large block of commandeered flats surrounded by barbed wire in Cairo’s Garden City. Still on crutches, Stirling hobbled up to the entrance, only to find his way barred by two guards demanding he show a pass, which he did not have. So, waiting until a moment when the guards were preoccupied, he climbed through a gap in the fence. As he was entering the building, the guards spotted his abandoned crutches and gave chase. Going as fast as his stiff legs would carry him, he flew upstairs and burst into a room marked “Adjutant General.” There he found himself confronted by a red-faced major, who just happened to be one of his former instructors at Pirbright. The senior officer remembered Stirling as one of his least attentive students and swiftly sent him packing: “Whatever lunatic idea you have, Stirling, forget it…Now, get out.”
    In the corridor, hearing the guards thundering upstairs, he entered the next room, which turned out to contain General Sir Neil Ritchie, the deputy chief of staff. Stirling handed over his proposal, which he had condensed into a short paper. Ritchie leafed through it with, according to Stirling, growing interest. Then he looked up: “This may be the sort of plan we’re looking for.” The adjutant general was summoned from next door and instructed, to his astonishment and barely