This latest offering by the author recounts 6 short stories of SAS activity during WW2, which do not merit dedicated books, but collectively illustrate a broad picture of the experiences of a few determined special forces servicemen during the war.
I have a problem with the publishers narrative on the fly leaf ‘SAS Great Escapes Two recounts the hitherto untold stories…….’ And then lists in the bibliography and Acknowledgements of the book, much earlier books which highlight the stories, and for a couple I’m sure are the primary source of the accounts ‘recounted’.
The chapters concerned;
1) Bill Fraser and his teams escape from an early desert raid in 1941
2) George Jellicoe and his teams raid on an airfield in Crete during the tense months of June 1942
3) Malcolm Pleydell’s desperate evasion from the compromised raid on Benghazi in Sept 42
4) Johnny Cooper and 2 colleagues unique evasion to achieve the first recorded junction of Eighth and First Armies in North Africa in Jan 43
5) John Tonkin’s decimated Bulbasket team’s survival and extraction from western France in the immediate days after D-Day
6) Herbert Castelow’s survival from the Garstin stick’s compromised drop, which featured in an earlier dedicated Lewis book
The preceding books that recount these stories are all classics of SAS folklore, but as usual the author manages to update where possible and energise the accounts to give them appeal to a 21st Century reader. It’s been a while since I read them, therefore it was a pleasant romp thro classic special forces action - for although the book is framed as great escapes, the chapters predominately covered the intended raid and the participants evasion (chapter one being the exception).
There were 2 notable errors in the book, which merit mention. The first I put down to the publishers, which cringingly repeated the misspelling of Bill Fraser throughout chapter 1. Bill was a proud Scotsman, and would hate to have been recorded under the English spelling of his name, therefore the publishers computer spellchecker was probably to blame (I noted this modern type of error recently in another recent SAS account) - where was the copy editor ?
The second error was a minor one, but worthy of highlighting, which concerned the POW history of David Stirling, with the author highlighting on p197 that he was incarcerated in a Rome prison camp, when in fact he was sent to the impregnable Gavi camp in northern Italy. Stirling, along with Jack Pringle, were the only British POW’s to spend time in both Gavi and Colditz camps, considered the most secure camps of the Axis countries.
An easy read, with generous acknowledgement to sources, I enjoyed this.
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