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IT WOULD be interesting to know just what were the motives that prompted men to join the Special Air Service : the reasons that made a man in a company or battalion want to leave the friends and associations he had made for something new and so entirely uncertain. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
IT WOULD be interesting to know just what were the motives that prompted men to join the Special Air Service : the reasons that made a man in a company or battalion want to leave the friends and associations he had made for something new and so entirely uncertain. Read the first page
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
When i first started to read this book i was a little dismayed to see it was written by a doctor & not a soldier
but within a few pages i soon realized that this doctor had every much a right to call himself a soldier & one of the originals(founding members of the sas) as anyone else he fought with ,& that this is not another run of the mill history of the sas but a real account of how it was from someone who lived it.
The author slept,ate trained,killed & grieved alongside David stirling,Blair mayne,Jock lewis,Bill cumper & the rest of the original & founding members of L detachment sas.
After the first two parachute jumps the sas made both resulted in death ,he & the rest of his colleagues still queued up the next day to try again!
They suffered the intense heat & the freezing cold that made up an average day in the desert,training hard & longing for action.
Sometimes humorous and sometimes harrowing this account tells the story of a unique bunch of men desperate for adventure,romance,action & escape from the stfling slowness of British army command.
The accounts of battle are often not first hand but malcolm james was uniquely placed as squadron doctor to hear the tales of battle from men who rarely spoke about the death & destruction they witnessed,stories that would no doubt have gone untold.
He keeps the reader enthralled with the minutiae of day to day living in the western desert with stories of occasional visits from birds,pet lizards & even naming rocks,in essence all the things that help pass the long hot boring weeks waiting in camps behind the enemy lines for patrols to return from attacks on axis airbases
All in all an excellent book full of action & as true and detailed an account of the birth of the sas in the deserts of north africa as you will find,once you've read this book you will feel as if you were there too.
but within a few pages i soon realized that this doctor had every much a right to call himself a soldier & one of the originals(founding members of the sas) as anyone else he fought with ,& that this is not another run of the mill history of the sas but a real account of how it was from someone who lived it.
The author slept,ate trained,killed & grieved alongside David stirling,Blair mayne,Jock lewis,Bill cumper & the rest of the original & founding members of L detachment sas.
After the first two parachute jumps the sas made both resulted in death ,he & the rest of his colleagues still queued up the next day to try again!
They suffered the intense heat & the freezing cold that made up an average day in the desert,training hard & longing for action.
Sometimes humorous and sometimes harrowing this account tells the story of a unique bunch of men desperate for adventure,romance,action & escape from the stfling slowness of British army command.
The accounts of battle are often not first hand but malcolm james was uniquely placed as squadron doctor to hear the tales of battle from men who rarely spoke about the death & destruction they witnessed,stories that would no doubt have gone untold.
He keeps the reader enthralled with the minutiae of day to day living in the western desert with stories of occasional visits from birds,pet lizards & even naming rocks,in essence all the things that help pass the long hot boring weeks waiting in camps behind the enemy lines for patrols to return from attacks on axis airbases
All in all an excellent book full of action & as true and detailed an account of the birth of the sas in the deserts of north africa as you will find,once you've read this book you will feel as if you were there too.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
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2 reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Classic British Understatement
3 Nov 2001
Format:Paperback
At a period when Britian stood alone, in Northern Africa a group began harassing Rommel and the Axis behind their lines. They lived off the land, evaded capture after every raid, and were so far over the top the only TV series made about them was considered too unbelievable (The show was called "The Rat Patrol"). To hide the group they were given a meaningless name - Special Air Services, and a series of unit id's that hid the real size. This is about the early days in the SAS by the original medical officer. It was written at the end of the war but the events were still very vivid to him. His descriptions of the people involved with the SAS and the day-to-day activities are enlightening. Compared with today's exploitation books, reading stories about how they would blow-up 40 planes in an evening then only report 25 so they weren't accused of overstating their accomplishments and the ways the German's would always hunt them down after a raid, make me appreciate how brave these people were compared with the false bravado of today's books about the special forces.
Highly recommended.
Good story of a doctor's WWII SAS experience
10 Mar 2008
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Born Of The Desert by Malcolm James is a personal account of Dr. Malcolm James Pleydell's time spent as the medical officer for the 1st Special Air Service (SAS) during the World War II battles in North Africa during 1942 - 1943. It is a very good book to read about the experiences of both SAS and Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) personnel in the hostile desert as they returned from raids against the Italians and Germans or prepared for their next ones. As the raiders' only doctor and thus too valuable to participate directly in their raids, Malcolm cannot describe the attacks first hand but can only convey what he learned from those who returned. He does an excellent job on the few he reports on but I had hoped that he would have covered more of them and to greater detail. However, Malcolm does describe his experience and the terror of enemy searches for fleeing raiding parties. He won a Military Cross (MC) for his treatment of wounded SAS personnel during the straffing and bombing of Axis airplanes seeking revenge for the frequent and often successful attacks on their airfields. Malcolm does a fine job of conveying the beauty and wonder of the harsh desert encountered during his trips from SAS headquarters outside Cairo to hidden SAS base camps. I think his book would make an excellent movie! I gave it 4 of 5 stars only because it primarily covered the behind the scenes activities of the SAS in North Africa and did not fully cover all of the SAS military actions. Of course, Malcolm wrote the book during the latter part of the war years and so perhaps he had to keep hush on some of the things I would have liked to have read about.
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