ONE TO WATCH
Desert warriors
SAS Rogue Heroes / BBC One & BBC iPlayer, starts Sunday 30 October
In the early months of 1941, the British situation in the fight against Germany and Italy was perilous. At the same time as the Luftwaffe pummelled Britain’s cities during the Blitz, the war in North Africa, crucial to protecting supply lines, was going badly. How were troops from Britain and its empire going to turn the situation around?
One unconventional young commando officer had a bright idea. David Stirling (1915-90) reasoned that a small group of highly trained soldiers, travelling rapidly using mechanised transport, could cause havoc behind enemy lines by attacking several targets over the course of a single night as they criss-crossed the desert. Thus the Special Air Service (SAS) was born.
In précis, this seems a simple story. In reality, creator Steven Knight, makes clear, it’s testament to Stirling’s inability to take no for an answer that the SAS ever came into being. In a series based on Ben Maeintyre’s book, also called and which saw the author gaining an unusual amount of access to the SAS archives, it goes on to tell the story of how Stirling and his colleagues pioneered a new kind of guerrilla warfare - largely by engaging with the enemy.
