SAS: Rogue Warriors

Many of us have met some wingnut in a pub claiming he ‘used to be SAS’.
(Image credit: BBC/Matthew Whiteman)

Many of us have met some wingnut in a pub claiming he 'used to be SAS'...

Many of us have met some wingnut in a pub claiming he 'used to be SAS'. How perfect, then, that the soldier who actually started what was originally ‘L Detachment, Special Air Service Brigade’ was thought by the British Army to be something of a liability, a loser and almost terminally 'undisciplined'.

David Stirling was that man, and in Ben Macintyre’s brilliantly researched opener to his history of the SAS, Ben details the early days – from Stirling’s audacious suggestion to the top brass of a crack ‘band of vagabonds’ to cause mayhem behind enemy lines, to their first Northern Africa sortie in 1941