History’s infamous moments and people immortalised

DON’T expect a sweeping analysis of the British Army’s most hyped and famous Special Forces when you read Gavin Mortimer’s inside story of the original SAS in World War II.

This is very much a collection of war stories and anecdotes, based on more than 60 interviews with members of the SAS who served in North Africa, Italy, France and Germany.

The focus is not just on the SAS’s founder, David Stirling, and his successor, the legendary Paddy Mayne (who clearly was psychotic), but on the troopers who did the hard yards.

Although the publisher’s dust jacket notes says it is not a story of derring do, that’s exactly what the author has produced in prose which lurches from Boys’ Own Annual clichés of killing the nasty Nazis to workman-like sentences that just tell the story.

There is no doubt that the soldiers who joined the SAS were not your run-of-the mill infantry – being able to operate independently, not being afraid of rank structures and more than average capabilities with weapons were crucial.

Stirling’s Men does show that what began as a typical school-boyish exercise gradually evolved into a regular Army unit that practised asymmetrical warfare long before some clever chap put an academic title on it.

Such was the German perception of the SAS that Hitler ordered any SAS trooper captured to be shot in cold blood.

For those who like stories of brave lads surviving training then doing their bit blowing up bridges, knifing the Hun and drinking themselves insensible while on leave, then this is for you.

– David Sibley

WHEN a book’s prose is crisp, chock-full of anecdotes, quotes and astute, concise judgments based on excellent research, then it’s hard to put down.

English journalist and historian Max Hastings is one such writer. He proves that military history should be written in such a way to engage the reader in an area of history which, at first, might not seem worth reading.

In Armageddon, Hastings tells the story of the fall of the Third Reich over the eight months following D-Day on June 6, 1944. His line of attack is to tell the story and highlight the reasons why the Wehrmacht fought so hard and had to delay the inevitable fall of Hitler’s demonic regime.

Don’t think that Hastings is a revisionist right-wing historian perversely dazzled by the Germans. Although he is very respectful and honest about the technical abilities of the German Army and judges it to be the most formidable of the armies which fought over Europe in terms of training, skills and dedication, his writing spares no Germans, especially the generals, over their moral cowardice, vacuity and willingness to be complicit in the terrible war crimes of the Nazis.

He also does not shirk from the horrific war crimes of the Russians in taking vengeance when they invaded East Prussia, the first German province to be destroyed by the Red Army. The systematic and dreadful raping of German women by Soviet soldiers is not ignored.

Hastings is particularly strong in analysing the mistakes of American and British senior commanders in prolonging the war on the Western Front. In particular, the Allied defeat at Arnhem and the American blunders in front of Aachen and in the Hurtgen Forest are examined.

But the strength of Armageddon is the balance between telling the battle narrative, the strategic overview and the ordinary stories of the soldiers and civilians of all sides in the last period of the war in Europe.

Armageddon is a welcome addition to any library on World War II.

– David Sibley