Churchill: Walking with Destiny

After being briefed by Stirling on an impending attack on Benghazi, and the way that the SAS represented ‘a new form of warfare’ which had ‘awesome potential’, Churchill quoted to Smuts the lines from Byron’s Don Juan: ‘He was the mildest-mannered man / That ever scuttled ship or cut a throat.’ The next day, he summoned Stirling to the Embassy to d

After being briefed by Stirling on an impending attack on Benghazi, and the way that the SAS represented ‘a new form of warfare’ which had ‘awesome potential’, Churchill quoted to Smuts the lines from Byron’s Don Juan: ‘He was the mildest-mannered man / That ever scuttled ship or cut a throat.’ The next day, he summoned Stirling to the Embassy to d

Randolph joined a parachute detachment of the Special Air Service (SAS) formed by Major David Stirling to fight behind enemy lines in the Western Desert.

The RND kept naval ranks, customs, language and traditions. They wore beards, drank to the King’s health seated, had battalions named after admirals such as Nelson, Drake, Hawke and Hood, and so on – differentiating them from the Army divisions in the BEF. Churchill, ever attuned to the warrior psychology, noted that it was ‘strange how men . . . c

On 8 August, on his second visit to the front, Churchill made seven speeches to four armoured brigades in six hours.60 Back in Cairo for dinner at the Embassy with the two SAS heroes David Stirling and Fitzroy Maclean, he challenged Smuts to see who could recite the most Shakespeare. After a quarter of an hour Smuts lost, as Churchill churned on. A

On 10 December 1941, the battleship HMS Prince of Wales, which had taken Churchill to Placentia Bay, and the cruiser HMS Repulse were sunk by Japanese bombers and torpedo-aircraft off Malaya. Churchill knew the commander of the Force Z flotilla, Vice Admiral Sir Tom Phillips, as he had been vice chief of the Naval Staff when Churchill had been firs

The division was ultimately to see action in many of the bloodiest engagements of the war, including Gallipoli, the Somme and the Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele).

Royal Naval Division (RND), a new infantry force under the control of the Admiralty rather than the Army.

Special Operations Executive, or SOE, after weeks of inter-departmental wrangling, ‘to coordinate all action, by way of subversion and sabotage, against the enemy’. ‘And now,’ Churchill told Hugh Dalton, its first director, ‘go and set Europe ablaze!’111 Churchill disliked Dalton personally, but thought him effective, and approvingly dubbed him ‘th