The secrecy shrouding the SAS has led to the elite special forces outfit achieving a semi-mythical status.
But one person who knows a bit more than the average person about The Regiment is author Dom Utton, whose new book SAS Battle Ready delves into some of the most remarkable exploits of the feared and respected unit.
“Once I started researching I realised that the thing about the SAS is that their history really is just a collection of incredible adventure tales,” he told the Daily Star, and in particular, he added, “some of the earliest WW2 missions are incredible for the fact that they really were a bunch of mavericks making it up as they went along”.
Probably the best single story he found concerned Operation Tombola – a mission to rally support from Italian resistance fighters and a group of escaped Russian POWs and create mayhem behind the German lines in the March and April of 1945.
Dom says that the mission commander, Major Roy Farran,”assembled a rag tag army of Italian partisans and escaped Russian POWs, and, most brilliantly, a bagpiper from the Highland Light Infantry.
“Every time they raided a German position, they’d have the bagpiper blast out the Highland Laddie – not only to scare the hell out of the Nazis, but to reinforce the point that it was definitely the British attacking, and so spare the local Italians from any reprisals”.
“There’s another incredible story from Oman in 1972,” Dom adds, “when just nine SAS men held back an attack by 250 heavily armed rebel fighters for seven hours – and lost just two men.
“I mean, that kind of stuff is proper Boys Own adventure stories," he says, "and it’s actually real.
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Dom’s account of the 2005 Basra prison raid, in particular, reads more like an action film than an actual military operation.
Twenty members of ‘A’ Squadron, 22 SAS, along with a platoon of paratroopers from the Special Forces Support Group, attacked a police station in southern Iraq to rescue two of their comrades that had been locked up after a mission went south.
The men had been operating deep undercover, Dom writes, “working to expose corruption and brutality in the Basra police force. Disguised as Iraqi civilians, complete with fake tan and hair dye, they had been tailing a senior police officer from a borrowed taxi when other policemen challenged them.
"A scuffle broke out, punches were thrown, the officers drew their weapons … but the commandos drew theirs first…”
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At least two Iraqi policemen are believed to have been shot in the melee and after initially making a hair-raising escape, the two SAS men decided to give themselves up to avoid further escalation.
But the Iraqis didn’t see it that way, and accused them of being terrorists.
So a rescue mission was launched that was, says Dom, “a great example of the modern SAS still holding true to the ‘rogue heroes’ ethos that defined its inception in 1941.
“The lieutenant colonel commanding that operation – whose name remains redacted – took an extraordinary risk in deciding to rescue his men despite what was pretty much a direct order from Downing Street not to do so – but because he did so so successfully, the government had no choice but to back down and eventually save face by claiming to have sanctioned it all in the first place.
“It’s a great example of doing the right thing as opposed to what might have been the politically expedient thing”.
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The book covers almost the whole history of the Regiment, concussing with Operation Jubilee the daring 2012 rescue of of British aid worker Helen Johnston who had been captured by Afghan rebels – but, we asked Dom, were there any missions that are still too secret to cover?
The WW2 operations are all very well documented,” he said, “ with names of everyone involved and so on… but then as you get into Northern Ireland, Bosnia, and post 9/11 operations there’s an awful lot of redactions going on.
“The world right now is going through a period of frightening instability and I think we’d all be very surprised if the SAS were not active right now in some capacity in places like the Ukraine
“But the very nature of the force means that there’s absolutely no way we’re hearing about it for a long time yet…”
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