Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War (19 page)
Authors: Ben Macintyre
Tags: #World War II, #History, #True Crime, #Espionage, #Europe, #Military, #Great Britain
Baron Markus von Lutterotti di Gazzolis und Langenthal, the aristocratic German doctor captured by the SAS.
In the desert. Left to right: Bob Lilley, Malcolm Pleydell (with paperback in hand), and Johnny Wiseman.
Preparing for action in the desert camp at Bir el Quseir, summer 1942. Graham Rose and Jimmy Storie, two of the early recruits to L Detachment.
Chris O’Dowd, the twenty-three-year-old Irish recruit: piratical, irrepressible, and indestructibly cheerful.
Jack Sillito after his solo 180-mile foot-slog across the desert from Tobruk to the SAS camp in the Great Sand Sea.
Mike Sadler, the SAS desert navigator with an unerring ability to know where he was, where he was going, and when he would get there.
Sadler after his 100-mile, five-day trek from Gabès to the oasis at Tozeur.
Winston Churchill in the garden of the British embassy in Cairo with Field Marshal Jan Smuts, South Africa’s prime minister and a member of the Imperial War Cabinet (seated), and (standing, left to right) Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder and Chief of the Imperial Staff Sir Alan Brooke.
Note from Sir Leslie Rowan, Churchill’s private secretary, passing on the prime minister’s request for David Stirling to outline his plans for the SAS.
Stirling’s reply, laying out his ambitious ideas for expanding the SAS and placing all “Special Service Units” under his sole command.
Stirling’s reply, laying out his ambitious ideas for expanding the SAS and placing all “Special Service Units” under his sole command.
The five Italian soldiers manning the roadblock into Benghazi were surprised when a German staff car with half a dozen passengers pulled up at the barrier at 11:15 in the evening of May 21, 1942. The car and its occupants did not seem particularly worthy of attention—the Germans were always rushing around at odd hours—but the noise it was making most certainly was: a strange, high-pitched metallic scream, audible from a distance of half a mile, that died away as the car came to a stop. Something had knocked the wheels out of alignment, and the bearings were protesting at maximum volume. The car was being driven with full-beam headlights, even though German regulations stated that all cars driven at night should have dimmed lights to reduce the danger of aerial attack. The man in the front passenger seat spoke with a strong foreign accent.