Cover image of "SAS Ghost Patrol,"

When Winston Churchill launched the storied Special Operations Executive (SOE) on June 13, 1940, just a month had passed since he moved into 10 Downing Street. Yet France had fallen to Hitler’s minions and the British Expeditionary Force had barely escaped annihilation at Dunkirk. But the SOE came into existence rapidly. Three existing secret units merged on July 22, 1940. Soldiers, secret agents, and analysts of the Foreign Office, the War Office, and MI6 constituted the backbone of the new organization. Within days, they launched operations in France, Norway, and North Africa, making them the first examples of guerrilla warfare in World War II. The most dramatic of these took place in Egypt and Libya. There, British forces attempted to prevent Field Marshal Erwin Rommel from seizing the Suez Canal. They’re the subject of Damien Lewis’s breathless account, SAS Ghost Patrol: The Ultra-Secret Unit That Posed as Nazi Stormtroopers.

A blow-by-blow account of guerrilla warfare in World War II

Lewis details how SOE was just one of several units engaged in irregular warfare in North Africa. The Special Air Service (SAS), Special Boat Service (SBS), and Commandos had all come into existence during the same period as the SOE. They shared the mission of taking the fight to the enemy. Yet each had its own unique character, complicated by the addition of the Special Interrogation Group. The SIG consisted of native German speakers dressed in Nazi uniforms (chiefly German and Austrian Jews) who had fought in Palestine.

The combination of these disparate groups led to tension that verged on open conflict when men from all five organizations came together in a bold (not to say reckless) mission to capture Rommel’s strategic base at Tobruk. It lay hundreds of miles behind the lines, across what seemed an impossibly long stretch of open desert. Lewis relates their progress as six separate columns, trudged step-by-step, across the barren reaches of the Sahara. SAS Ghost Patrol is an adventure story that’s all the more exciting for having been true.

SAS Ghost Patrol: The Ultra-Secret Unit That Posed as Nazi Stormtroopers by Damien Lewis (2018) 347 pages ★★★★☆

Photo of special operators of the SOE in China,
Most tales of the Special Operations Executive and its sister organizations dwell on their efforts behind enemy lines in France in collaboration with the maquis. But from their earliest days the organizations were active worldwide. The SOE fighters pictured here were in China, operating a smuggling and currency manipulation scheme that gained the present-day equivalent of $2.5 billion for the British treasury. Image: Warfare History Network

One dramatic mission within a long list of others

It’s easy for a casual British or American reader to get the impression that World War II in Europe was fought largely in France. After all, the bulk of popular accounts involve tales of daring operations by the SOE, the American OSS, and the maquis and the story of the Normandy invasion. Of course, any reader with even a cursory knowledge of the war’s true scope understands that that’s nonsense. Even discounting the war in the Pacific, World War II qualified as a worldwide conflict, with the Allies and the Axis facing off in Africa, South America, and the Middle East, as well as Western and Eastern Europe. Yet many of us who consider ourselves well-informed about the war can still carry with us a distorted view of the conflict.

For example, the (almost) full list of SOE operations shows dramatically how wide-ranging was the organization’s use of guerrilla warfare in World War II. It included countless top-secret missions across the breadth of Europe, from Albania and Austria to Sweden and Yugoslavia. But Damien Lewis, with the instinct of the novelist he might otherwise have been, focuses in SAS Ghost Patrol on one of the largest and most audacious missions Churchill’s secret warriors undertook in the course of the war. It’s a terrific starting point for understanding the dynamics of the efforts by the SOE and its similar organizations to “set Europe ablaze.”

About the author

Damien Lewis. Image: Audible

Damien Lewis—not to be confused with the actor of a similar name—is a British author and filmmaker. He has written more than 20 books on military subjects, including both biographies and memoirs and thrillers, and has produced 20 films. He has also reported from conflict zones around the world. Lewis was born in 1966.

I’ve reviewed the first and fourth of the books in the author’s series on Britain’s special operations in World War II: The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: How Churchill’s Secret Warriors Set Europe Ablaze and Gave Birth to Modern Black Ops (The story of the world’s first Special Forces) and Churchill’s Hellraisers: The Secret WWII Mission to Storm a Forbidden Nazi Fortress (A thrilling British special forces mission in WWII Italy).

I’ve reviewed another World War II book on a closely related topic by the same author: Churchill’s Shadow Raiders: The Race to Develop Radar, WWII’s Invisible Secret Weapon (How German radar technology helped Britain win World War II).

And I’ve reviewed a somewhat similar book by another prominent author: Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain’s Secret Special Forces Unit that Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War by Ben MacIntyre (The story of the original special forces).

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