SOF

All of these special operators made critical use of modern inventions such as the airplane and radio. But they were also inspired by the timeless lessons of history. SOE’s first leaders, the army officers J. C. F. Holland and Colin Gubbins, had fought against the IRA. In addition, Holland had served with the Arab irregulars in World War I and had

Niven had pulled over and changed into uniform, so he could proceed relatively unmolested. Unfortunately, two eagle-eyed Home Guard officers had spied him doing so, overpowering Niven before his change of clothing was complete. Clarke had duly taken a call from Scotland Yard, but had managed to convince them that their prisoner was indeed the

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

It was at the bar of White’s, one of the most exclusive gentleman’s clubs in London, that Stirling first learned about a form of soldiering that seemed much closer to the adventure and excitement he had in mind: a crack new commando unit intended to hit important enemy targets with maximum impact. Stirling’s cousin Lord Lovat had been among the

On 7 November David Stirling was posted to No. 8 Commando, then at Largs on the Ayrshire coast.

Beyond the great captains of irregular warfare, a few key supporting characters make recurring guest appearances in the pages that follow. The most frequent is Winston Churchill, who appears on the scene at the outset of the Boer War in 1899, returns to support T. E. Lawrence’s pan-Arab policy goals after World War I, develops a friendship with

Another supporting character who comes close to Churchill’s half-century-plus of involvement in irregular matters is Jan Smuts, who started out as a Boer insurgent but later ran the British East African campaign against von Lettow-Vorbeck during World War I. He reappears again during World War II as a bureaucratic thorn in the side of Britain’s

To Clarke, they were the antithesis of modern European armies, and the stories of their thrilling exploits were burned into his mind. As Clarke reflected upon such memories, it occurred to him that the Boer Commandos could be ‘reborn’ in Britain, to aim ‘mosquito stings upon the ponderous bulk of a German Army’. Hurriedly, he noted down the main