The History of the SAS, Britain’s Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War

By Ben Macintyre

After several minutes of pumping, the boat showed no sign of inflating. Somehow, on the journey to Benghazi, it had developed a puncture. They went back to get the other boat, and found Rose and Churchill maneuvering the car into a tiny, half derelict garage. The operation now threatened to dissolve into dangerous farce: Stirling returned to the shingle and, finding it deserted, went off to look for the others; they, on returning to the same spot, were alarmed to find that Stirling and Alston had not returned, so Maclean went to look for them. Almost the entire unit was now wandering around in the dark. Cooper began pumping up the second boat, only to discover that this too was punctured: “It was heart-rending.” One by one, the team reassembled.The last to appear was Stirling, who explained that he had run into a sentry but had got past him by “mumbling incoherently and pushing him aside.” All the coming and going on shore had attracted yet more attention from the night sentries aboard the boats, who again quizzed the party, through the darkness, as to what, exactly, they were doing. Maclean replied testily that he was very bored with being challenged and they were to shut up.” It was now growing light, and the sound of “metal doors slamming and excited shouting” from the ships indicated that their crews were now thoroughly suspicious. Clearly, the mission would have to be abandoned, yet again. The men packed up the infuriating dinghies and headed back toward the perimeter. Maclean was nearing the fence when he found himself face-to-face with a very large African soldier from Italian Somaliland. The sentry grunted, and by way of inquiry prodded Maclean in the stomach with his bayonet. Maclean launched into a flood of Italian, of which the sentry plainly understood not one word. “It seemed,” he wrote with fine understatement, “a more intractable problem than we had hitherto encountered.” But Maclean had a very simple, and very British, solution. “I have always found that in dealing with foreigners whose language one does not speak, it is best to shout.” This he now did, while gesticulating extravagantly, in a first-class impersonation of an irate and pompous officer who has been interrupted in the performance of important duties by an insolent underling. The sentry, browbeaten, eventually lowered his bayonet and backed off with “an expression of injured dignity.” But as they filed off into the darkness Maclean realized that the party had miraculously expanded; two more Italian sentries, alerted by the commotion and apparently thinking some sort of drill was under way, had joined the line of men and fallen in at the back-one of the very few occasions, perhaps the only one, when Axis and Allied soldiers had marched together. 

(Macintyre 2016, 113-114)

References

Macintyre, Ben. 2016. Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain’s Secret Special Forces Unit that Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War. N.p.: Crown.

ISBN 978-1-101-90416-9