Summary of Ben Macintyre's Rogue Heroes , livre ebook

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38 pages

English

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Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 Lieutenant David Stirling was not a conventional soldier. He had suffered a parachute jump accident, and was paralyzed from the waist down. He had spent much of his time in Cairo’s bars and clubs, or gambling at the racecourse.
#2 The British commandos were intended to be Britain’s storm troops, volunteers selected and trained to carry out destructive raids against Axis targets. But the concept was not working. The soldiers were too large and cumbersome to launch an assault without being spotted, and the element of surprise was lost.
#3 David Stirling, the second in command of the Scottish independence movement, was not a hardy child. He grew at an astonishing rate, and by the age of seventeen was nearly 6 feet 6 inches tall. He did not have any talent for painting, but he did have a beret and a yen for the bohemian life.
#4 David Stirling was a strange mixture of parts. He was ambitious but unfocused, and he suffered from depression. He had little desire or need for physical intimacy, and he was afraid of women.

Sujets

True Crime

Espionage

Informations

Publié par	Everest Media LLC
Date de parution	31 mai 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9798822525290
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0150€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Insights on Ben Macintyre's Rogue Heroes
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Lieutenant David Stirling was not a conventional soldier. He had suffered a parachute jump accident, and was paralyzed from the waist down. He had spent much of his time in Cairo’s bars and clubs, or gambling at the racecourse.

#2

The British commandos were intended to be Britain’s storm troops, volunteers selected and trained to carry out destructive raids against Axis targets. But the concept was not working. The soldiers were too large and cumbersome to launch an assault without being spotted, and the element of surprise was lost.

#3

David Stirling, the second in command of the Scottish independence movement, was not a hardy child. He grew at an astonishing rate, and by the age of seventeen was nearly 6 feet 6 inches tall. He did not have any talent for painting, but he did have a beret and a yen for the bohemian life.

#4

David Stirling was a strange mixture of parts. He was ambitious but unfocused, and he suffered from depression. He had little desire or need for physical intimacy, and he was afraid of women.

#5

Stirling was extremely self-confident, and he was determined to create the SAS. He was bored by the logistics of mountaineering, and he found the practical preparations for war extremely tedious. He rebelled against the military regime.

#6

Stirling was a natural leader, with an understated but adamant faith in his own decisions. He was extremely bored and frustrated while he was waiting for the commandos to be deployed in action.

#7

Stirling began to miss parades, and made excuses. His claims of ill health were not entirely untrue. He was struck by a nasty bout of dysentery. He began to spend his days at the American hospital in Cairo, claiming to be suffering from fever.

#8

Lieutenant John Steele Lewes was a paragon of military virtue. He was athletic, rich, patriotic, and handsome. He seemed destined for a career in politics or the upper reaches of the army.

#9

The light was already fading when Lewes, Stirling, and four other men climbed into an elderly biplane to perform the world’s first desert parachute jump. The parachutes were designed with static lines to be clipped to a steel cable, attached fore and aft.

#10

Stirling’s first experience of parachuting was extremely unpleasant. He would suffer back pain and migraines for the rest of his life as a result of his spinal injury. The fall had almost killed him, but it had given him a good idea.

#11

The plan was to blow up planes in the middle of the night and then retreat back into the desert, where they could be picked up by the Long Range Desert Group. It was a revolutionary idea that threatened the traditional conception of warfare.

#12

Stirling’s plan was to get the proposal directly into the hands of the most senior officers, before anyone lower in the hierarchy had a chance to kill it. He knew he could argue with a general if he needed to.

#13

The British government decided to disband Layforce, but Stirling was given permission to raise an initial force of six officers and sixty men from the remnants of the unit. The new unit needed a name, so they turned to Colonel Dudley Wrangel Clarke, who had a unique talent for deception and subterfuge.

#14

The SAS was formed as part of a larger contingent that did not, in reality, exist. The name of the unit was meant to imply that detachments A to K were already in existence.

#15

The first recruit to the SAS was Jock Lewes, a hard-minded and demanding Welsh Guards officer who had been fighting a series of bloody skirmishes in besieged Tobruk. He brought with him some of the toughest soldiers in the British army.

#16

The SAS was formed in 1941, with the intention of being a special assault team that would drop in behind enemy lines. It attracted many rough and fierce individuals, but it had two men who were anything but intemperate: older, married NCOs who were keen to fight but who also knew how to calculate the odds.

#17

The Commandos were looking for men who were exceptionally brave but just short of irresponsible. They wanted disciplined but also independent-minded soldiers.

#18

The SAS was formed in July 1940, and was given the difficult task of capturing a radio operator for the British army. They had to steal a camp, and they did. The story has become an SAS founding myth, combining many of the elements that would define the regiment: bold, successful, and joyfully breaking all the rules.

#19

The training camp was designed to be as tough as possible, and it was. It was also designed to create a force capable of landing in the desert and operating there for far longer than anyone had done before.

#20

Lewes Marches were a particularly good example of the man’s constructive brutality. He would set off alone, transferring a stone from one pocket to the other every 100 paces, and calculating the resulting overall distance on the basis that one stone was equal to 83 yards.

#21

The final recruit was Paddy Mayne, a rugby player and insubordinate insomniac who had been in prison for thumping his commanding officer. He was truculent, troubled, and unpredictably violent when drunk.

#22

Paddy Mayne was a deeply literate man who had a strong aversion to the use of foul language. He was also extremely secretive about his emotional life, as he was about much else. His sexuality has no bearing on his qualities as a soldier.

#23

The first real parachute jump was scheduled for October 16, 1941. The RAF 216 Squadron agreed to provide a Bristol Bombay aircraft, which was not ideal for parachuting, but safer than the Vickers Valentia from which Stirling had so disastrously jumped four months earlier.

#24

The SAS was created to be a unit of parachute raiders, and they made it clear from the start that failure would not be tolerated. Anyone who did not fit in or prove unable to reach the demanding standards of the unit would be ejected.

#25

As the men were whittled down, by death, drop-outs, illness, and rejection, another kind of bonding began to emerge: the sense of belonging to an elite unit, barely 100 strong, tested by trial, and selected for survival.

#26

By October, the men had been training at peak intensity for two months, without having a clear idea what they were training for. The waiting exacerbated the tension. Stirling was anxious that Paddy was emerging as the natural leader.

#27

The men were divided into five groups, and each group carried a pack containing rocks equal in weight to the weight of a full complement of explosives, along with four pints of water, half a pound of boiled sweets, biscuits nicknamed sand channels because they were hard enough to drive a jeep over, and some raisins.

#28

The plan was to parachute 55 men into the desert on the night of 17 November, 12 miles from the coast. They would then attack five forward airfields in the vicinity of Timimi and Gazala, with the aim of destroying as many aircraft as possible.

#29

The five sticks of parachutists were led by Stirling, Lewes, Mayne, McGonigal, and Bonington. Each group would split into smaller units of between four and six men, before moving on to attack the five separate airfields.