Force multiplier

Few institutions in the world can hope to begin their history with the classic opener: "It was a dark and stormy night..." It says much for the Special Air Service, better known by its initials SAS, that it can legitimately lay claim to that cliche if it wanted to.

The night in question was a testing one in November 1941. In that year, the Allies were in danger of being overrun by the Axis armies under the shrewd generalship of Edwin Rommel in the deserts of North Africa. The SAS's first mission was to infiltrate German lines to destroy aircraft on the ground and secure Allied supply lines.

A fearsome storm blew up just before the mission, but the 65 men on it insisted on going ahead in the full knowledge that few would return. They did so only because they knew that backing out would have meant the end of a radical new concept in special operations.

In the event, only 21 men made it to the rendezvous. Three months later their number was down to 12. This "Dirty Dozen" as SAS's founder David Stirling called them, became the kernel of the world's most famous elite commando force.

Despite its magnificently understated name""far less racy than, say, the US's Delta Force, which was modelled on the SAS"" "the regiment" redefined the rules of special operations that endure to this day. "Who Dares Wins" was more than a macho regimental motto, it was a credo on which the SAS was predicated.

Much of the SAS mystique has been built around the swashbuckling lives of its men, as romanticised in Andy McNabb's brashly entertaining books as much as Ken Connor's Ghost Force, one of the most definitive recent histories of the SAS.

The Originals continues that tradition but roots it in authenticity. It is the oral history by the Dirty Dozen (plus some honorary Originals who joined later) of those early days when opposition from the traditional army was fierce and the odds against victory looked high.

The SAS was really little more than a brigade. It started out as an idea conceived by Stirling while recuperating from a special ops accident. His concept combined the advantages of airborne operations, which were only beginning to dawn on military strategists after brilliant German demonstrations in France and Greece, with the flexibility of small, disruptive forces of highly trained commandoes. Stirling conceived of the SAS as an elite force that would minimise hierarchy and maximise efficiency.

Stirling realised that had he introduced his proposal through the normal channels, it would die a certain death in "layer upon layer of fossilised shit" at Middle East Headquarters. As he recounts it, "I wanted something to make 'em sit up and pay attention because they wouldn't appreciate a second lieutenant having the gall to present to the commander-in-chief as to how he should handle the coming campaign."

True to form, Stirling decided to deliver it in person to General Ritchie, deputy chief of general staff under General Auchinleck, Allied commander-in-chief of Middle Eastern operations (he was later to become C-in-C of the Indian Army).

He did so by pure chicanery, using his crutches as a ladder to vault the barbed wire around the HQ and barge into General Ritchie's room to present him with his grubby, pencilled memo. Luckily for Stirling, Ritchie, deputy chief of general staff, had the imagination to appreciate the proposal and gave him provisional approval to put together a force that was initially labelled L Detachment, SAS Brigade.

The SAS proved spectacularly successful both during and after World War II because it contradicted most of the rules of conventional army warfare and organisation. The Originals were men who operated not quite outside the purview of the law but not too far inside it either.

Stirling's two right-hand men were a former Oxford rowing Blue and a rugby international. Equipment and supplies were mostly pinched from other regiments (including building up a huge bar bill at General Montgomery's expense).

With the generation of World War II veterans rapidly passing on, subaltern accounts such as The Originals are invaluable additions to the vast body of war literature. Its value is not limited to its authenticity as the only oral early history of the SAS. It has a straight-from-the-gut quality that re-creates the heat and dust of the war and adds a fresh dimension to the accounts of battle tactics and strategies that proliferate. The result reads like an extended Commando comic""with the additional virtue of being true.

The Originals
The Secret History of the Birth of SAS In Their Own Words

Gordon Stevens
Random House; Price: £12.99; Pages: x+342