The UK is very besotted with its SAS | Daily News Byte

New BBC mini-series SAS Rogue Heroes – based on the best-selling book by Ben McIntyre – depicts the 1941-42 North African adventures of Scottish nobleman Major David Stirling and the desperadoes he recruits to form a Special Air Service regiment. The series’ musical accompaniment is modern rock: The Clash’s “I Fought The Law” as Sterling’s vehicles roar past an enemy airfield.

My cousin Stephen Hastings – a real-life SAS veteran of the era – also wrote about Stirling’s band in his autobiography The Drums of Memory. “Here was a distinguished collection of people, officers and men with minimal differences between them, whose only bond was the reflection of the personality of their extraordinary commander. Leaning slightly in his desert boots at six foot five inches, and with an eager open face, furrowed brows, beneath a coarse service dress cap, David radiated urgency and confidence.” No soundtrack required.

Sterling’s men’s line has become one of our best-selling brands alongside Monarchy and James Bond. Many other nations’ covert warfare, bodyguard and counter-terrorism groups adopt the SAS doctrine – and are supported by personnel from the regiment at their Hereford base.

More contemporary fighters burnished the SAS’s place in modern British folklore. In May 1980, six terrorists seized the Iranian embassy in London, holding 26 employees and visitors as hostages in exchange for prisoners in Iran. On the sixth day of the siege, after killing one hostage, masked and black-clad SAS soldiers shot and grenaded the face of the building, freeing all but one fatality, and killing five soldiers. Six terrorists. All this in front of mesmerized viewers on live TV. The attack was authorized by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and contributed to her Iron Lady legend. The SAS motto – “Who dares wins” – became world famous.

Still, it’s frankly odd that the SAS sticks to the 21st-century British public. The latest book reveals not only “the definitive history of the SAS” but also “sensational insights into Britain’s true role in the world over the last 50 years”. Forget trade, industry, science, culture. Europe’s offshore island is best defined by its elite warriors. Such a scenario is, of course, crazy. Yet few Britons sincerely accept it.

The legendary toughness of the SAS comes with a reputation for brutality. Like its Australian counterparts and some US special forces, the British regiment has been the focus of embarrassing scrutiny following several alleged shootings of civilians and prisoners.

On March 6, 1988, in front of a filling station on British-ruled Gibraltar, a team from Hereford in civilian clothes confronted three members of an Irish Republican Army cell and shot them all. The IRA operatives proved to be unarmed. SAS men will testify that they believed the terrorists were reaching for weapons or bomb switches. Several witnesses testified that at least one IRA man was shot repeatedly while prostrate on the ground. It is undisputed that the IRA was preparing for a bomb attack on a British parade. A clue found on a corpse led to a vehicle in a Spanish car park. It was packed with explosives.

Misbehavior has been part of the unit’s story since its inception. In 1980, while preparing a book, I interviewed an SAS veteran who vividly described his love for the regiment and his awe at the courage of his comrades. He told me of an episode during a long, heated firefight on an Italian hill in 1943, when he shared a slit-trench with a former professional boxer commando. The boxer saw a group of women sheltering under a bridge 50 yards away. He got out of the trench, ran into the hills amid a storm of German fire, and, in the words of my interviewer, “had a woman among them and was back within three minutes.” This was not a defense narrative but a plausible narrative of rape.

A veteran I spoke to also thinks highly of another SAS comrade, Ulsterman Paddy Mayne, who won several medals for destroying German planes in Libya. Played by Jack O’Connell in the BBC series, Mayne became notorious for allegedly killing hostages. On TV, Sterling (played by Connor Swindells) explains Maine’s behavior, saying, “In war we are allowed to be the animals that we are.” His companion Lieut. Jock Lewis (Alfie Allen) has a similar perspective, “Some men are recognized by war as its natural executors. They take matters into their own hands.”

Some soldiers have always believed that the SAS’s shoot-to-kill tactics were unethical. Senior officers have often complained that the regiment, and especially its NCOs, are a law unto them, borne of prestige and multiple secret commitments, almost unanswerable to the normal Army chain of command. The US The Army’s Delta Force was formed in 1977 by Captain Charles Alvin (“Chargin’ Charlie”) Beckwith as an exchange officer with the SAS in Malaya. However, American commanders were historically skeptical of special forces.

Some special forces personnel from 1939-45 lost sight of their rightful job – that is, to help win the war – amid their delight in adventure for adventure’s sake. I suggested in one of my books that after D-Day in June 1944, all such armies should be disbanded and their fighters reinforced regular units. The final phase of the war was based on its heavy metal, not on pirates who enjoyed much when the Western Allies had no major campaigns underway.

During the war, however, Winston Churchill promoted the doctrine and practice of a private army – which the SAS essentially is. Indeed, the UK has had a weakness for private armies since the 19th century. As a historian, I believe they did their best work when they were young. They stopped being cost-effective when they became bloated and self-indulgent.

Sterling became notorious after World War II for his efforts to mobilize private armies against foreign governments, including Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi. In Britain, he sought to create a secret organization funded by his billionaire friend James Goldsmith to combat militant trade unionism. Their activities are childish rather than dangerous, but they emphasize the plight of warriors who find themselves on the beach after their righteous wars are over.

However, the brave bits of the SAS were very brave. As a correspondent in Britain’s 1982 South Atlantic war, I saw a lot of it. One June night, I rode with his then commanding officer, Lieut. Colonel Michael Rose, for me, was a terrifying helicopter flight at zero feet through the darkness, landing with his men on snow-capped Mount Kent, the highest on the Falklands.

Chasing the darkness unable to move inside the hull amid a waist-high load of weapons and ammunition, I shouted to Rose amid the roar of the helicopter: “What if the Arges” — the Argentine forces — “start. Bombardment of the landing zone? He shouted happily: “Who dares to win!”

We actually got into a confusing little firefight with the Argentine troops which the British quickly won. I then spent the coldest night of my life, shivering constantly, until dawn finally came.

In the same campaign, the SAS made a brilliant attack on an Argentine airfield on Pebble Island, conducting close surveillance of enemy positions, and when a large helicopter loaded with 18 men crashed into the icy Atlantic, killing all on board. I was one of many who returned home with a lasting respect and affection for those men from Hereford.

My cousin Steven experienced similar adventures and sufferings in 1942. He wrote of a typical massed jeep night attack on parked Luftwaffe aircraft, in which “the whole shattering belch of the twin Vickers guns opened up above the medley line. I was at the wheel, trying to concentrate on the jeep moving slowly in front. was, silhouetted every few seconds against the crazy flashing streams of tracers.

“A great shape could be seen thirty yards to my right, a twin-engined Junkers 52. Bullets burst from its fuselage with a strange swishing sound as the guns exploded. The interior of the aircraft glowed red for a second; then there was a dull explosion. And the whole body burst into flames.

After that attack the SAS retired almost unscathed, but a few hours later their transport was destroyed by German air strafing. The survivors were obliged to spend weeks waiting for rescue under the merciless desert sun, and finally reached Cairo after an epic trek through the sands. Steve was tired and sick. After a long sick leave, he never returned to the SAS. He told me half a century later: “I was proud to serve with them, but they were too wild for me.”

I admire the SAS like most of the UK, and know how lucky we are to have such an elite force. Yet I am disturbed by the SAS-worship that has led to more books than any other on the history of the regiment, and now even a magnificent BBC series. One reviewer wrote that “it’s all a bit stilted and quite profanely enjoyable.” Others agreed. ‘This carnival of macho nonsense is full of gorgeous young men in aviators,’ she wrote. ‘It makes me feel strangely uneasy, because it is full of danger and violence.’

The wild, often drunken mavericks of Rogue Heroes contrast with the great 2001 US TV mini-series Band of Brothers, which portrayed the serious, almost entirely sober professionals of the wartime 101st Airborne Division. To my knowledge of today’s real-life regiments, some of Stirling’s old – at least as portrayed by the BBC – would have passed the modern selection course at Hereford, the toughest of its kind in the world.

Britain’s vice is nostalgia, which leads us to many follies, Brexit chief among them. Those of us who wish to live in a country with our exaggerated emphasis on the past built on some fantasy of military prowess return to the future. Britain in the 21st century faces economic, political and social challenges for which old-fashioned chivalry is no panacea. We should celebrate and brighten the resources at our scientific and technological centers that are underfunded. We should appreciate our brilliant creators, artists, technology geeks, doctors, teachers.

The SAS is a part of Britain’s Army and we can take justifiable national pride in its achievements. But I digress from its cult, of which Thug Heroes is only the latest incarnation.

More from Bloomberg Opinion:

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This column does not reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Max Hastings is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former editor-in-chief of the Daily Telegraph and the London Evening Standard, he is most recently the author of “The Abyss: Nuclear Crisis Cuba 1962.”

More stories like this one are available at bloomberg.com/opinion