Tough Heroes

In the summer of 1941, at the height of the Western Desert War, a bored and eccentric young officer, David Stirling, had a vision of a new way of waging war – attacking the enemy where they least expect it; behind his lines.

Despite great opposition from the British High Command, Winston Churchill personally gave Stirling permission to recruit the toughest, smartest, and most ruthless soldiers he could find. And so begins the most celebrated and mysterious military organization in the world – the SAS.

Drawing on unprecedented access to secret SAS records, previously unseen film footage and exclusive interviews with founding SAS members, Tough Heroes tells the remarkable stories behind the extraordinary fighting unit and the immense cost of bringing this vision to reality.

The British Special Air Force – SAS – was the brainchild of David Stirling, a young, flighty aristocrat whose aimlessness in early life was at odds with his remarkable strategic thinking. Where most of his colleagues looked at a map of the battlefield in Africa and saw protracted clashes with Rommel' s desert troops, Stirling saw opportunity. If he had a small number of elite, well-trained men, he could parachute them behind enemy lines and destroy their planes and materiel. Stirling, along with his natural opposite, the disciplined pedant Jock Lewes, has assembled a revolutionary battle group that will change not only the balance of war, but the very way war is fought. He faced considerable opposition from those who considered his tactics ungallant or unacceptable, but in the SAS' s remarkable exploits against the Nazis in Africa and then Europe can be found the seeds of almost all the special forces that would follow.

The book is the literary basis for the TV series " Pluk miserů".