Hard Won Victories in WWII

BOOK REVIEW: FORGED IN HELL: The Gripping True Story of the Special Forces Heroes Who Broke the Nazi Stranglehold

By Damien Lewis/Citadel Press

Reviewed by: C. “Kit” Turner

The Reviewer — Christopher “Kit” Turner worked for 25 years as an undercover CIA officer in East Asia, South Asia, and Europe. After one risky deployment, he was awarded the Intelligence Star, a rare commendation for valor. Turner is the author of “The Children of Outer Darkness” (Warpath Press, 2024), an historical espionage novel set during the final year of the Cuban Revolution, and “The CASSIA Spy Ring” (McFarland & Co., 2017), a nonfiction book about an ill-fated coterie of agents handled by the US Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s forerunner.

REVIEW — In his new book, Forged in Hell, Damien Lewis treats readers to another chapter in the lore of the British Special Air Service. After racking up successes and sacrifices in the trackless desert, where the fledgling regiment harassed Rommel’s Afrika Korps and thrashed Luftwaffe airfields, the unit is tapped to spearhead the Allies’ push into Europe through Sicily.

 A name leaps from the opening lines: Blair “Paddy” Mayne, an original stalwart of the SAS and four times a recipient of the Distinguished Service Order. Long renowned among the world’s special operations community, the indomitable Paddy Mayne was introduced to a wider audience in Ben McIntyre’s Rogue Heroes (2016) and through the eponymous television series (2022) that it inspired.

While Lewis keeps Paddy in steady focus—after all, with the Germans’ capture of SAS founder David Stirling in 1943, Mayne has taken the regiment’s reins—the story is by no means a biography. Instead, Lewis describes a broad cross-section of the men under Paddy’s command. What emerges is a compelling story of heroism, loyalty, death, and the psychological toll that savage combat visits on all soldiers. Not even the elite warriors of SAS are immune.


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Lewis hits his stride in tracing Mayne’s background—a proud Irishman, several times a member of Ireland’s national rugby team, a champion boxer, a voracious reader, and a hard but compassionate leader. Here, the writing takes on a deeper hue, distinguished from rip-roaring passages on combat operations.

Also well rendered are the scenes between the action, lulls where a narrative might easily flounder or founder. But Lewis is equal to the task and evocatively depicts bouts of arduous training and the snatches of time the regiment spent recuperating, lounging, and engaging in mischief and fellowship. These are spots where the reader becomes acquainted with the men behind the uniforms. Some were adventurers, others worldlings, still others tradesmen, but all shared great courage, skill, and patriotism.

The book’s battle sequences evince a stylistic shift. To convey the fever-pitch of battle, often fought at close quarters, Lewis sets a breakneck pace and employs rousing—and on occasion florid—vocabulary, which as a matter of preference readers may find engaging, adequate, or off-putting. But there should be consensus that these crucial scenes are fully realized.


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Another matter of preference will be the absence of endnotes. Apart from attributions within the narrative (such linking quotes to the SAS “War Diary” or to soldiers’ memoirs and letters), Lewis makes no further effort to sort out his research, save for appending a list of “Sources.” For example, I was unable to follow up directly on a cited German airborne major in Termoli or on the source(s) for quotes from German General Kurt Student. For some readers, this omission will be a quibble. For others, a deficiency.

 But the story’s subtext overrides concerns about word choice and research rigor. Ineptitude and inertia from outside elements stalked the early SAS. David Stirling was well aware of these persistent dangers, once writing that his headquarters was packed with “mediocrities from the First World War who were opposed to the methods of the SAS.” And in a prewar military assessment, Mayne, arguably one of the war’s finest battlefield leaders, was described as “unpromising material for a combat regiment” and as “generally unreliable.” Such is the small thinking of entrenched bureaucracies, both military and civilian, which value preservation over innovation and safety over boldness.

 Not in words but in deeds did SAS threaten those milling around the command post or lolling in the rear echelon. Stirling and Mayne led from the front on some of the war’s most dangerous missions, never asking a subordinate to do something that they themselves would not readily do—that in fact they had not done many times before. It was in example and standard that SAS’s leaders evoked feelings of inadequacy in their regular counterparts.

 But, as Lewis documents, history has settled the debate. Those who fail to heed its outcome do so at their peril. Countries need unorthodox people and their singular ideas to win wars. Those countries that can’t cope with such eccentricities are doomed to neglect or suffocate the very purveyors of derring-do on which their survival may one day depend.

Forged In Hell earns an impressive 3.5 out of 4 trench coats

3.5

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