Tim Jones - SAS Zero Hour: The Secret Origins of the Special Air Service

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The Secret Origins of the Special Air Service

Tim Jones

Foreword by Sir Ranulph Fiennes

A Greenhill Book

First published in 2006 by Greenhill Books, Lionel Leventhal Limited

www.greenhillbooks.com

This paperback edition published in 2017 by

Frontline Books

an imprint of Pen & Sword Books Ltd,

47 Church Street, Barnsley, S. Yorkshire, S70 2AS

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Copyright Tim Jones, 2006

ISBN: 978-1-52671-351-3

eISBN: 978-1-52671-353-7

Mobi ISBN: 978-1-52671-352-0

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.

CIP data records for this title are available from the British Library

Dedicated to

Ray, Joy, Janet, Bessie, Louisa Mary and Vi

Robert Rogers, founder of Rogerss Rangers

Lawrence of Arabia

General Allenby

Light Car Patrols in the Middle East during World War I

Roger Keyes

Winston Churchill

Mike Calvert and Orde Wingate during the Chindit operations

Whites Club in Piccadilly

Pirbright Barracks

Fairbairn Sykes Commando knife

Going ashore from landing craft during training at Lochailort

Commando instructors at Lochailort in 1941

Training at Ringway

2 Commando in training

Generals Auchinleck and Wavell

J. C. F. Holland, co-founder of SOE

Group Captain Michael Devlin at RAF Helwan in May 1941

Ralph Bagnold, founder of the LRDG

E Force near Jalo fort in August 1941

Dudley Clarke

General Freyberg

RMS Glengyle

Alexandria port

Grey Pillars, site of MEHQ in 1941

Shepheards Hotel

Cairo military hospital

General Neil Ritchie

RAF Kabrit

RAF Heliopolis

Bristol Bombay aircraft

E Force lorry at the Great Sand Sea fringe

RAF Helwan

Luftwaffe aerial photo of Derna port

Siwa Oasis in 1941

Sergeant Curry at Jalo fort

A desert landing ground south of Tobruk

An SAS patrol in Cairo in 1942

David Stirling, founding father of the SAS, in 1941

Like his previous books on the SAS, Tim Joness SAS Zero Hour deals with an area of the regiments history that has been much neglected. Indeed, he looks primarily at the SASs pre-history the events leading up to its creation in mid-1941 by David Stirling. The book raises important questions about how Stirling came up with his idea for a strategic small unit behind the lines raiding force, asking exactly what factors influenced his thinking? Was he at all influenced by recent military operations, or those of the past, or both? What role did his fellow officers and men and others involved in Middle East special operations play?

SAS Zero Hour presents for the first time as complete a picture as we are likely to get. It introduces a host of overlooked characters who played a part by shaping the ideas and actions of Stirling and those who assisted him create the SAS. It pieces together evidence from neglected sources that reveals that there is far more to the story of the founding of the SAS than has been presumed. SAS Zero Hour argues that important factors include the Stirling clans military pedigree of raising unorthodox military units; his interest in desert warfare; his schooling in Commando methods in 194041; Layforces mainly stillborn raiding programme of the spring of 1941; concurrent paratroop operations in the Mediterranean on both the Axis and Allied sides; and the deception activities of Dudley Clarke, the co-founder of the Commandos. SAS Zero Hour presents a compelling case that he and his immediate superior, Wavell, were the driving force behind a Middle East paratroop experiment that led to Stirlings own SAS raiders.

The roles of Auchinleck and Ritchie, and the factors making them favourably disposed to Stirling, are recounted as never before, including family connections and shared experience of paratroops and special forces. The role of Stirlings own brothers, and colleagues like Laycock, Lewes, Lovat, Courtney and Ran Churchill, is also assessed, especially regarding certain individuals knowledge of precedents provided by Robert Rogers and T. E. Lawrence. Likewise, the impact of Admiral Keyes, General Allenby, Winston Churchill and Orde Wingate, as well as Stirlings contemporaries, such as Peter Fleming of the SOE and Ralph Bagnold of the LRDG, is weighed.

SAS Zero Hour offers the most comprehensive and enlightening version of these seminal events yet and, as such, is of interest to anyone wishing to know how the worlds number one elite military unit came into being.

Ranulph Fiennes

The Special Air Service Regiment (SAS) has been stamped into the popular psyche as the worlds leading military special force and rightly so. On the big screen, thriller writer Tom Clancy depicted the SAS in Patriot Games calmly wiping out a terrorist training camp in northern Africa, with neither mercy nor loss, many years before SAS soldiers entered the Registan region of Afghanistan in search of Al Qaeda militants in November 2001. The computer game heroine, Lara Croft aka Tomb Raider , played by Angelina Jolie also dared and won in that debut movie with a helping hand from the regiment. This blockbuster even implied that Lara was a female holder of the coveted, legendary winged dagger. The SAS never had been so sexy! The list goes on and on, and it is the same story when it comes to books about the SASs exploits, especially as they prove themselves time and again to be the most effective elite military force in the world, as in Iraq in 2003 (although accusations of an extra-judicial killing by a member of the SAS were strenuously denied in spring 2005, and an undercover operation sparked riots in September), and in their role in the raids carried out during the investigation of the London bombings of July 2005 and the Manchester and London bombings of 2017.