One Drink Book Club | Rogue Heroes by Ben Macintyre

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to another edition of the One Drink Book Club. Today we're going to be discussing Rogue Heroes, the history of the SAS, Britain's secret Special Forces unit that sabotaged the Nazis and changed the nature of war. A book by Ben Macintyre.

[00:00:24] My guest tonight is Ken Braun, an old colleague and friend who has recommended several great history books and books about the military to me in the past. And as the incredibly long and descriptive title of this book tells us, it is about the

[00:00:37] start of an unconventional British commando group that conducts a guerrilla war against the Germans and the Italians with the action occurring in North Africa and throughout Europe. Welcome Ken, thanks for joining me. Happy to be here Jamey, glad I made the cut and passed the audition.

[00:00:55] Well of course you did. As I mentioned, you have recommended several great books to me in the past. Usually on a topic that I had very little knowledge of. So I always enjoy kind of learning some new stuff when I read things.

[00:01:10] Yeah, well I mean I generally with a couple of exceptions read books on topics that I have very little knowledge of and this was certainly one of them. So just a general impression, what did you think of this? Oh I loved it, it was a lot of fun.

[00:01:25] It reminded me of a couple of other historical books of actually a later era that I've read regarding the Vietnam War which we can get into a little bit but it dovetailed nicely with the storylines and some of those.

[00:01:39] Yeah, it really felt like a novel and not necessarily like a historical recording of true facts. I mean some of the stories inside there were incredible and the characters too were straight out of Hollywood and so it didn't surprise me that they've now

[00:01:56] kind of turned this into a series. I don't know if you've seen that. I haven't until you referenced it earlier today to me, I didn't even know that but I will definitely check it out. I did read Ben McIntyre's A Spy Among Friends probably shortly after it came

[00:02:10] out and that was turned into a mini series with Damian Lewis playing Philby's friend from the novel and that was done very well so I'm looking forward to this. Yeah, I've actually read several of Ben McIntyre's books, The Spy Among Us,

[00:02:24] A Spy Among Friends, I mean yeah, The Spy and the Trader and Agent Zigzag I think are the ones that I've read and he's got a lot more. He does incredible research and I think he puts these together really well.

[00:02:35] I can't imagine how tough it is to read all these war diaries, all these official reports about things and then craft narrative. And as you said, Spy Among Friends also came off very novel like not dry history

[00:02:50] but he really brought the story alive and secondary difficulty in what you're saying but in a lot of cases he's writing about people who are still alive or just recently passed and have family that could contradict him if he screws something up so it makes it extra hard.

[00:03:07] Oh totally, the other big question that needs to be answered is what did you make as your drink tonight? Yeah, that one, so I've given the insane drinking that Patty Main did I could never match that but I was trying to think of something

[00:03:23] that would come close enough, fortunately I'm older than the 40 years old that Patty Main made it to and have calmed down a bit. So I looked it up, you know he was from Ireland, he was an Irish Protestant and I thought I was right

[00:03:37] but Guinness was founded by an Irish Anglican so I got Guinness extra stout which is the heavier version of it just to meet Patty halfway. You know I was also tempted by Patty Main and so I looked at doing an Irish car bomb

[00:03:53] which seemed to be kind of very apt for his personality but I also just didn't want to make a giant mess over my desk so I rethought it and decided to go with the quintessential British drink and made myself a gin and tonic. Oh okay.

[00:04:10] So the only fancy part of my gin and tonic is that I used a lime that I grew myself on my lime tree. Oh nice, very good. I always feel like, I mean gin and tonics are always so refreshing.

[00:04:22] I would have gone with that if I'd have thought of it. Yeah that's, I like those. So you read a lot, do you tend to read or do you listen? Prior to podcasts such as this awesome one becoming more of my routine

[00:04:38] I used to read or listen to books and read them now almost exclusively I read them and read them on my Kindle. Nice. Overall I'm super impressed with the quality of voiceover talents on these books. Ben McIntyre decided to read this particular book himself

[00:04:56] which I generally frown on the author doing that. The authors tend to be very good at writing. They aren't always really good at reading out loud. I'd say my one big exception on that is Rob Lowe's book because clearly Rob Lowe knows how to do a voiceover

[00:05:13] and how to do that. So the only, I listened to it. It was totally fine but I think it would have benefited from a true voiceover talent and I think he did because I listened to a spy among friends and I think he did have somebody who was,

[00:05:28] I don't think that was him. Well as I mentioned in the intro you are definitely somebody if I'm thinking of a friend who likes historical records and especially military related stuff I definitely think of you. Are the recommendations that you've read recently

[00:05:45] that you would say hey definitely check this out? So I guess this book which we can discuss why but it was kind of the inverse of something. I didn't read it recently but I've read it recent enough that I remember the gist of it.

[00:05:59] It was a biography of General William Westmoreland called Westmoreland, The General Who Lost Vietnam by Lewis Sorley and General Westmoreland is about as polar opposite of everyone involved in the making of the SAS that you can possibly imagine. Very conventional thinker, not a terribly curious man

[00:06:21] really really into following the rules and he was just a terribly boring conventional person. He became the head of cadets at West Point and really showed his later proclivity for charts and graphs and record keeping because one of his proudest accomplishments and he could prove it

[00:06:42] with the data was that he got the West Point band to lose weight. Real exciting guy like this tried to ban Playboy subscriptions from being mailed into West Point because it was lascivious and licentious content he said until he was informed that even the superintendent

[00:07:00] of West Point could not interdict the US mail. So compare him to Patty Maine and Dave Sterling and that crew who didn't really have any respect for rules at all. I found that a good pairing book to put with that. One that I actually did read recently

[00:07:16] that for one reason or another made me think of this book was called Off the Wall, Death in Yosemite. It was about all of the creative ways people managed to kill themselves since Yosemite National Park was created written by a former park ranger

[00:07:30] and another I think the guy was a rock climber wrote in conjunction with it. Relation to this book, there were lots of stories in this that related to it, but one of them the authors had a lot of respect for rock climbers

[00:07:43] who generally safer people even though dangerous pursuit don't like bass jumpers at all. And they told one story of a bass jumper who has made himself famous for not being captured after he had done these things. So naturally he decides to do this off of El Capitan

[00:07:59] in Yosemite Valley which literally has like one exit point, one road that you can get out of. This guy makes his jump and he gets surrounded and decides still not, you know, makes the jump safely. The parachute unlike some of the other folks in the story

[00:08:14] don't get, doesn't get tangled up. He doesn't hit a tree, anything like this gets surrounded, takes off high tails and this is only a few years ago and ends up jumping in the Merced River which is another way to escape because that flows rapidly out of the valley

[00:08:31] somewhat too rapidly he got trapped against a rock and drown. That sounds like a delightfully uplifting book. Oh, it's, I could go on and on about it. It reminded me of this one only because kind of lack of attention to rules that the bass jumper had

[00:08:49] plus the fact that in this book even those is about paratroopers they get most successful when they get, when they quit using the parachutes and it seems like every time they jump out of parachutes throughout the entire book something bad happens.

[00:09:03] They get, they get dropped behind, you know into the middle of enemy troops that grab them. They break things, they get lost, they get separated. The, you know horrible things happen whenever these guys jump out of parachutes even though they're paratroopers. So yeah.

[00:09:17] The special air service was a bad name for the group. Exactly. Anytime that they use the air they ended up really messing things up. I thought that was funny. Exactly, exactly. On a scale of one to five what would you rate this book? It was surely a four.

[00:09:32] I enjoyed it. I wouldn't credit it as oh my gosh one of the greatest books I've ever read but there's been a lot of them and it's a small list. It certainly kept me entertained. I was sad to see it done.

[00:09:45] I envy anybody who's picking it up the first time. That's to me the standard of a good book. I wasn't, you know, when's this gonna be over with? I bought it and invested time in it. I mean that's more than half of the books

[00:09:56] I read are drudgery like that. But like I said, I read the, I read another book from the same author. I think I enjoyed a spy among friends, tad bit more but this is certainly a piece of history I was unaware of and like I said,

[00:10:09] reminded me a lot of the Vietnam histories I've read from the one that I just mentioned but the SAS look pure Viet Cong in their actions and in their foibles as well. The thing that I often if I'm reading nonfiction

[00:10:25] there are times where I feel like I'm taking my medicine where I, you know, that it's like I'm getting ready for a test. I'm gonna be really glad to get it done and then I'm gonna read something I enjoy and this one didn't have that feel

[00:10:37] and none of Ben McIntyre's have had that feel. The fact that he is able to craft a narrative in a storyline that makes it feel more like a novel I think is a real talent for sure. Yeah, I don't read a lot of nonfiction

[00:10:49] and plots kind of disappoint me a lot of times but you're correct. The nonfiction books especially history books even when I'm interested in the subject and getting good stuff out of it there aren't a large number of very talented writers

[00:11:04] like this one McIntyre who can hold your interest all the way through and you don't feel like you're working to finish it because you started. You've done a lot of the history, you've done a lot of Vietnam. I've done a lot of historical fiction about World War II

[00:11:18] as well as some nonfiction about World War II but I had no idea A about the SAS and I also had no knowledge of the North African aspect. If you haven't read this book a lot of the beginning of the SAS revolved around

[00:11:35] the fact that the Germans and the Italians had essentially taken all over all of North Africa and the British and the Allies were kind of stuck in Egypt around Cairo and they were trying to move west and take over these air bases

[00:11:51] and some of the supply lines they had in North Africa because the Axis powers could attack Europe and attack the Mediterranean from these bases in North Africa and the big idea that David Sterling founder of the SAS was that hey, we could get airplanes to drop us

[00:12:11] in the desert that is south of these air bases and they would never expect us to attack from their southern flank and so we could surprise them and we could blow up airplanes on the ground and cause some havoc and as you mentioned, once they discovered

[00:12:27] they had kind of an epiphany because when they got dropped from airplanes people ended up getting off, you know, off target they'd get lost in the desert they would break their legs, all sorts of things there was this long range motorized group that would come pick them up

[00:12:42] they had figured out how to drive jeeps and other trucks through the desert by deflating the tires and doing these modifications to the engine and they finally thought, well, jeez if these guys could pick us up when we get dropped by the airplanes

[00:12:56] maybe they could just drive us in and we don't have to drop out of airplanes and that was kind of a big epiphany there which was a cool aspect but did you know much about the North African part of the World War II?

[00:13:08] Just what I saw in Patton, I guess I mean, I haven't read a lot of World War II history and I knew the SAS were the British special operators knew nothing really about their history I mean, I think I can say now I know

[00:13:21] as much or more about the British special operators history than I do about the American version so as you said, these guys didn't were complete rogues in the title is a great title the rogue heroes in that they had no respect for authority at all

[00:13:40] and they were able to talk their way into getting kind of this separate group that was not really accountable to anybody and they just kind of hung out in the desert and beg borrowed and stole equipment and went in and wreaked havoc in some of these air bases

[00:13:58] for the Germans and the Italians there were so many great little like many missions that they did that I thought were really just unbelievable were there any that stood out from you in the story that you thought, oh my gosh I can't believe they did that

[00:14:12] Yeah, so the first half of the book is about their adventures in the desert that you're mentioning and their first adventures and in that case, the book really read like a combat version of MASH and it's just audacious craziness they weren't really suffering big casualties

[00:14:33] they were pulling off amazing raids and the signature event was their unsuccessful raid attempt to raid Benghazi when they decorated up their truck to look like a German vehicle and or it was a German that painted it up and basically rode their way into Benghazi

[00:14:51] speaking German at the Italian supposed allies convinced the Italians that they were Germans and warning them of the British that we're gonna raid the base i.e. them pretending to be the Germans and became so convincing that they eventually had Italian troops following them looking for them

[00:15:09] not realizing that they were and just bluffing their way through and dressing down the border you know the guards on the base bluffed their way all through this town and out the back and never got caught I really enjoyed that one

[00:15:24] I could not believe the amount of bluffing they would do they would you know pretend they were Germans pretend they were Italians I mean they were just so cocky they got away with it at one point they discover a giant collection of these heavy machine guns

[00:15:37] that I think are supposed to be mounted on airplane they figure out that they can mount them to their American jeeps and they turn these jeeps into these crazy weapons where they drive down the runways of these air bases they break into the air base

[00:15:52] and then just shoot up every plane that's sitting on the tarmac there and it was unbelievable with anti-aircraft guns mounted on vehicles that they're driving like at almost stall speed for the jeeps and yeah just parading down I mean I was hoping at some point

[00:16:09] that I'd hear jokes of them putting you know the little air to air kill stickers on the outside of the jeeps I mean these were supposed to be paratroopers I put a note in the book you know we started out jumping out of airplanes and planning bombs

[00:16:22] and now these guys are just driving slowly across airfields firing anti-aircraft guns directly at empty planes and the evolution of their success and the level of it was just maddening I mean that you know 70 planes destroyed one guy you know springed an ankle or something crazy would happen

[00:16:41] yeah the first half of the book was not gory and a lot of fun absolutely and it was like a giant commercial for jeeps too I mean it made jeeps seem like the most indispensable awesome tool in the the British Armory some of the characters too

[00:16:58] clearly the SAS wouldn't have come about without David Sterling you mentioned Patty Maine who was also another really interesting character it's unbelievable to me that somebody who was so irreverent and hated authority like Patty Maine and had obviously was an alcoholic and had a huge temper

[00:17:17] was able to rise to a level where he was commanding at one point I think he was the the leader of a battalion like it was insane yeah and and kind of bristling it at his own authority at that point insisting on jumping in and joining his

[00:17:33] troops when he was being told to stay home I think you know it what doesn't get brought out enough in the book I mean not the author's fault but it kind of gets overshadowed by the rest of Maine's personality is that he was a very care apparently

[00:17:47] a very charismatic person and people just love to follow him also he was a lawyer he was very well read all of these things are listed in the book but you kind of forget them as you're hearing about the bombastic and violent temper

[00:18:01] and all the rest of it I mean clearly a just boundlessly intelligent man who kept learning compare him to West Moreland who throughout that book you are repeatedly reminded that West Moreland didn't like to read period was kind of proud of it

[00:18:17] so that I think is an important caveat to Patty Maine's character is that he had a lot more going on that didn't necessarily fit the battlefield in all cases yeah I think towards the end they mentioned that he ended up being one of the most decorated soldiers

[00:18:32] during World War II in the British Army and he seemed almost unstoppable his ability to not die in a number of situations where somebody was trapped and he went and rescued them or he would there's a scene in it where he basically opens the door of a hut

[00:18:48] that has you know 30 or 40 guys in it and just stands there with a Tommy gun and throws in a couple of grenades and just stands there in the doorway shooting I mean it was it was kind of an Indiana Jones type character for sure

[00:19:00] yeah definitely as I recall that was during the desert campaign portion of the the story where not a lot of I mean a lot of a lot of equipment is getting destroyed but not a lot of enemy contact is happening that was a a complete obverse of

[00:19:18] that it was an instance where Patty Maine just decided to jump in and initiate contact I think he ended up it was a bunch of pilots that he took out to if I remember that particular story right so he really did his fair of damage to equipment as

[00:19:31] well in that they didn't have anybody to fly the planes that were being destroyed and then replaced so but yeah one man wrecking crew that he was was there anybody else character wise that that stood out to you as memorable yeah I liked Roy Farron

[00:19:49] the foreign office employee who as the war starts gets irritated that the foreign office won't release him from his employment because this was considered really important to something and there were regulations to be followed and because of his family position he discovered that he

[00:20:07] had a darn good chance of running for parliament and winning and once winning he a member of parliament was immediately dispatched from any commitments to things like working for the foreign office so he literally ran for office and won the office because he wanted to go to war

[00:20:24] which is sort of the opposite we think of as for the why people become politicians and then that personality was proven out later on when he was leading commanding troops and ordered to stay back and not to go out into the field

[00:20:41] and as close as they would let him go is to ride in the airplane with the guys when they were going to jump and he claimed to have accidentally fallen out of the plane and ended up running around Europe with them disobeying orders flagrantly to not do things

[00:20:55] ended up blowing up and destroying a whole lot of valuable Nazi equipment which ended up even though he was disobeying orders horribly he was highly successful and narrowly avoided a court martial so yeah typical to the other leadership characters in the book incredibly successful and not at all

[00:21:13] taken with authority I can't imagine trying to manage the group of people that they put together they mean clearly they were picking people who hated authority wanted to do their own thing and we're pretty smart too so it was it really did not follow any of the rules

[00:21:29] of normal military and it gets more cumbersome as they you know they've won the first sas ends up with 2,500 guys at one point I mean once you get that you start getting big you become a logistical problem that you don't have when you're that small raiding party running

[00:21:45] around in the desert and all of the things that makes it work start to cause more problems than perhaps they they solve yeah I think one of my other characters that I liked outside of the David Sterling Patty main crowd was Mike Sadler who was

[00:22:01] the desert navigator who is almost clairvoyant in his ability to navigate these wide stretches of desert and basically put everybody exactly where they need to be and do it by the stars by very little information and a lot of this area that they were traveling in was actually

[00:22:20] unmapped like nobody had been there everything looks the same except when it doesn't because the sand is constantly changing the terrain and yeah I mean I can't follow my way around a national park without a gps mapping thing and here's this guy running

[00:22:34] around a desert that looks different depending on how hard the wind blew the night for and yeah amazing stuff I thought he was impressive to me I thought the book had about two distinct areas there was the David Sterling the start of the sas and then

[00:22:49] all of the the activity in Africa and then David Sterling not to give anything away but he gets captured and is no longer in the leadership and then all of the action moves to Europe so it's a whole different theater of war the style changes

[00:23:04] is there one of those sections that you liked more than the other I thought the first section was a lot more fun like I said more more moments of comic levity are happening in that section more just I thought it was unrealistic

[00:23:18] I mean I know it really happened but as far as how warfare usually works it doesn't come off that clean I mean they were in a really unique place in history there they really weren't in the theater of war they were they were able to just

[00:23:32] make these raids they had this desert between them and their and their pursuers and they just had a very unique opportunity that Sterling correctly discovered and made the most of it when they get into Europe it becomes more of what warfare is

[00:23:48] and they see children dead on the sides of the streets there were no children in Africa they're taking heavier casualties they are a k you know they're being redeployed as recon forces rather than as these raiding parties that are kind of making their own decisions

[00:24:04] in some cases they have to fight offensive actions then when they get into Germany they've got literally children fighting against them McIntyre is very good at talking about that transition and how it really begins to weigh on some of these guys in ways that wasn't happening

[00:24:21] in the earlier part of it so I found the second half of it much more conventional is not the way I mean it's it's a say it's an amazingly well told story I wasn't having just as much rah rah fun reading it it it ceased being a comedy

[00:24:34] and it was now more of a a very serious war drama so it was a very useful thing I guess I enjoyed them both equally but for just vastly different reasons yeah you're right there was more lightheartedness in the first half they were almost like fraternity guys

[00:24:50] out at a party and make it right yeah yeah and it got really clearly people were dying I mean they had colleagues that died and in the africa section but it got a lot more brutal when they got into europe and when they saw some of the abuses

[00:25:05] that the nazis were doing to citizens as you mentioned the kids and everything else and citizens that were just getting you know mowed down who were non-combatants and things like that by that point the nazis were also hitler ordered every sas captured was going to be put down

[00:25:20] weren't gonna take prisoners which I suspect was more counterproductive than successful as a way of deterring them I mean make someone a fight harder if they're near to being captured but yeah it was it was much more serious business the closer they got to Germany

[00:25:34] and then once they got in Germany I mean they liberate a concentration camp I mean it's it's rough stuff that was that was an amazing scene it was a good way to kind of close out the book is that they liberated this concentration camp

[00:25:48] to hear their reports of what they saw and how amazed they were at the brutality when they found that camp that was still being guarded the the guards were still there and the commandant of the camp was still there and did not seem

[00:26:04] they were so used to the situation that they didn't act either embarrassed or shameful or anything they just kind of were standing around it was bizarre in one case killed a prisoner who was breaking the rules in in the presence of the the commandos that were taking the

[00:26:22] camp I mean clearly there and taking over the camp yeah I that was that was surreal um I think an entire book could be written just about that day yeah you know it would always strikes me about especially World War II things where you had

[00:26:37] a pretty massive draft a lot of people who were in the army that would not necessarily join the military right now we have a professional military people who joined the army fit into a certain class either age or profession more so than when you had an open

[00:26:54] draft or you had a lot of the the population and listing and it always makes me kind of wonder I think about the people I work with the people I know all right if we were all shoved into a an army brigade you know what would be the

[00:27:07] personalities how would these people act who would be the successful soldiers who would not be and I guess you know you really never know how people would react to that kind of stress that kind of situation until you're there but it's it strikes me as so bizarre

[00:27:21] to take a school teacher a lawyer a construction worker and then say okay now you're all soldiers and you are going to be in these life-threatening situations and now you have to be brave you have to be creative you have to be aggressive it's just kind of a

[00:27:38] bizarre situation yeah so my dad was drafted into Vietnam at the ripe old age of 26 he did everything he could to avoid it until and as a result of doing everything he could to avoid it by going to college and getting married

[00:27:51] and whatnot when by the time he gets drafted age 26 it's late 19 he gets sent to Vietnam just in time for the Tet offensive but he's able to you know he can type he's he's a company clerk for actually some special operators but he you know has

[00:28:05] guys under him that are in charge of supplying things and whatnot most of them are younger than you know a lot younger than he is he's a sergeant at this point so after spending all this time doing everything he can to avoid

[00:28:15] this my mom says when he got back took him a long time to adjust to not having the responsibility anymore for and he wasn't in combat situations all the time really at all he was being brought into situations after battles were over to

[00:28:32] set up supply stuff and whatnot but with people working underneath him that he was responsible for making sure they didn't do something stupid and then came home and civilian life even after a year civilian life was you know slower and less responsible so yeah yeah well

[00:28:49] clearly we have started to pay a lot more attention to that kind of transition and try to help people come out of those situations with the mental health treatments that they need and the adjustments they need but my dad became a repo man in

[00:29:06] Detroit when he got home so I don't know if it worked well i think it was still pretty bad in the 70s and i think there's a long way to go now but i think it's at least acknowledge that it's a bigger problem well do you

[00:29:20] have anything on your nightstand ken that you're looking forward to reading what's your next book i guess the the contemporary things going on right now uh the biography Elon Musk that Walter Isakson is coming out with uh sometimes soon is interesting to me just because talk about

[00:29:39] personality i guess i'm drawn to personalities that don't like rule following elon's definitely that and it's done done wondrous things for him so that's the only thing that springs to mind off hand that i think i'll get as soon as it comes out well i just

[00:29:52] finished a book and i'm going to be doing a podcast on it called the last kings of Shanghai and it's about two Jewish families that both had emigrated from Baghdad they were Iraqi Jews in the 17 and 1800s became British citizens were hugely involved in the

[00:30:11] opium trade when China was being opened and abused by the west and then were largely responsible for in the 1930s and early 40s the development of Shanghai a lot of those old art deco buildings one person um Victor Sassoon was at the

[00:30:31] time probably the richest person in Asia if not the world and he had incredible real estate holdings in china and shanghai they did textiles they did they're still we're doing some opium but just had this incredibly huge network of industries and then it

[00:30:52] talks about those two families and then what happened during World War two is Jews were trying to escape Europe Shanghai was one of the few places they could go without a visa and the two families helped those people so it's really fascinating book i'm looking

[00:31:06] forward to talking about it but i think you'd probably enjoy it yeah i've heard nothing of this the story on the book all right for if you're listening please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts we're trying to do these about every two weeks and ken

[00:31:23] thank you so much for taking the time and uh we enjoyed the book and i enjoyed talking about it with you likewise looking forward to my next assignment jaymean spent fun