Sublime

That task fell to Britain’s SAS, and its operation was almost exactly what we’d planned. A force of nearly 700 commandos was helicoptered in to Iraq’s western desert. They were equipped with Land Rovers, and armed with anti-tank missiles and laser targeting capability. They could also call in attack helicopters and F-15 jets if necessary. Still, th

“Their stated object was a crusade against the infidel,” wrote Sa’id Mubarak Shah, “their real one was plunder.

His Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of U.S. Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan (Stanton 2009),

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 mas

Lieutenant-Colonel Dudley Wrangel Clarke was forty-one that late 1940, having been born in Johannesburg on April 27, 1899.