Dan Snow's History Hit - Secret Origins of the SAS

Episode Date: August 30, 2023

In 1974, a pioneer of the SAS and master of military deception, Dudley Clarke, passed away. His death went almost entirely unnoticed by the British public, despite the fact that he carried out some of the most dramatic deception campaigns of World War Two. He waged a covert war of trickery and misdirection across Europe, which ended up getting him arrested by Spanish authorities while dressed as a woman. He also helped to found one of the world's preeminent special forces; the Special Air Service, or the SAS. His contribution is often overlooked, but without it, the SAS may well have never existed.So who was Dudley Clarke? What were some of the most audacious acts of subterfuge he carried out? And why is he not better known? Dan is joined by former SAS Troop Commander and author of Speed, Aggression, Surprise: The Secret Origins of the SAS, Tom Petch, to answer these questions and more.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world-renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW. Download the app or sign up here.PLEASE VOTE NOW! for Dan Snow's History Hit in the British Podcast Awards Listener's Choice category here. Every vote counts, thank you!We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. In 1974, an obscure brigadier died. The passing of Dudley Clark was largely unnoticed by the British press and public, but they should have paid attention. Dudley Clark was responsible for some of the most dramatic deception campaigns in the history of warfare. Among other things, the birth of the SAS, the Special Air Service, the elite British unit that still forms the core of Britain's Special Forces SF capabilities. Clark had the most extraordinary wartime career. It's a story that he wished to write up in a book called The Secret War, but he was not allowed to publish it. It was thought to contain information so valuable to the new competitors, the new enemy, the Soviets, that its publication was suppressed.

But now, Dudley Clark is finally getting a little slice of the limelight. He was featured prominently, played by Dominic West in the recent smash hit TV show, SAS Rogue Heroes. And he's been the subject of a book written by Tom Petsch, a former soldier who spent eight years in the British Army. He was both the tank commander and he was a troop commander in the SAS. He's written a book called Speed, Aggression, Surprise, The Secret Origins of the Special Air Service. As a baby, Dudley Clark survived the siege of Ladysmith during the Boer War in South Africa, and it seemed like that drama in his life never really let up. He joined the Royal Artillery in the First World War as a teenager, was found out to be far too young.

He was moved to Egypt for training with the Royal Flying Corps, where he came under the influence of Lawrence of Arabia, who was completely taken in by his charisma and his ideas about warfare. He took part in many forgotten conflicts between the two world wars. And by the time the Second World War broke out, he was the right man in the right place to provide a desperate British government with some wild ideas about a strike back against the dominant axis. He came up with the idea of the commandos. He came up with the idea of the SAS and he ran some massive deception campaigns

right across the Mediterranean, including bringing a lookalike for General Bernard Law Montgomery down to the Mediterranean just as the D-Day operation was about to launch in the summer of 1944, confusing the Germans about Allied intentions. He had an extraordinary career and here's Tom Petsch to tell us all about it.

Enjoy. T-minus 10. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Tom, thanks very much for coming on the podcast.

No, thanks for having me, Dan. It's great to be here. Dudley Clark, we should have heard of Dudley Clark, right? He sounds like he's instrumental in sort of laying the foundations of everything we think of as of modern special forces. He is indeed, and actually the reason we've never heard of him is because he was sworn to secrecy after the war and was not able to publish the book he wanted to publish, which was called The Secret War,

which would have outlined the creation of special forces and then how he used them in deception. But there were little hints, the earliest book about the creation of the SAS, which is Virginia Cowles' Phantom Major, which was published in the 50s. She has one line in there saying, General Cloud Affleck turning to David Sterling, who we assume started the SAS, and saying, whatever happens to your project will greatly relieve Clark's burden.

So she was aware of it. They were aware of it. It was just a secret. And let's go back into his personal history, because the South African milieu is just such an interesting one, right? The end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century, the Boer War, so many men who had gone to have very prominent careers in special forces through, frankly, through the First and Second World Wars, emerged from this tough landscape and political situation. Yeah, I mean, what's interesting about that, of course, Clark was an infant during the Burr War. So the interesting part of that story really is he's found him at the siege of Ladysmith, which is broken by the Burrs. And then we should have then beaten the Burrs, instead of which they ran off into the veldt on ponies, rode around and

formed bands called Commandos, which we obviously now know is the name he chose when he wanted a brand for his special forces in 1940. He chose the name Commandos, and that was his pitch to then Jack Dill, Chief in Charge of the General Staff. We should have these guys, send them back across the Channel and break up the Germans. That experience, that memory, even though he was a baby, that memory of the Boer, the nature of the fighting, the difficulties caused to regular units by highly trained fighting men with fantastic fieldcraft, bush skills.

That was obviously something lingered in his memory. Yeah, I don't think that was the memory. That was the brand name. He chose the Commandos because he needed a name that encapsulated his ideas. His concept, which he developed, it was based on his experiences. So, for example, in the first war, he'd met Lawrence of Arabia. After the war, he'd been a journalist in the Rift War, which is a little-known campaign in northern Morocco in the 1920s. But that was led by a Berber insurgency leader called Abdul Karim,

and he went on to become the template for Che Guevara from Mao Zedong. They all imitated his techniques. Then he was involved in the Palestinian Intifada, so when the Arabs revolted. So at the start of the Second World War, he thought, rather than fight the Germans face to face, direct action, what we should do is something he called subliminal methods. What we need to do is use what I've seen the Arabs do against us, use what, you know, Abdul Karim was doing with the Berbers, use what the commandos used against us in the Ber war, send small groups of men back across the Channel and dissipate the strength of the German army. And that was the pitch that he, the night after the Dunkirk evacuation, you know,

strength of the German army. And that was the pitch that he, the night after the Dunkirk evacuation, you know, when Churchill's giving a speech, you know, wars are not won by evacuations. And General Jack Dill, who was a general he'd worked for in Palestine, so both of them knew about the Palestine insurgency. And Jack Dill's in the Whitehall office going, look, what are we going to do? How are we going to get back across the channel? And Clark goes, look, I've got this idea. We'll create our own insurgency groups. We'll call them the commanders. We'll send them back across the channel. And of course, Dill loves that. And also what he really knows is Winston Churchill, who's an ideas man, will jump on this.

And he gets him to draft it up that night. Next day, chief of staff's meeting. Dill pitches the commando idea. And by lunchtime that day, they're in business. Three weeks later, they're back across the channel throwing grenades into a hotel in Lutuke and killing German officers. It's a very crude concept. It also, it's a very, I don't know,

it's a transgressive one. Because the British Empire traditionally has been the force against which insurgencies form, right? And now here's the British Empire, not back on its heels, embracing the tactics, the doctrine of the underdog. Absolutely. And British staff officers hated the name. They hated the name commandos. They tried to disband the name as fast as they could, which in fact is where the name the SAS comes from. Because Clark created a parachute commander. He thought, okay, going over the channel boats is great. What would be better? So we parachuted small units into France, and they came back by submarine. Because the thing about parachute forces is they're very hard to defend against. You've got to take troops out of the front line and put them behind you to defend, you know, strong points, headquarters, fuel dumps.

And then that will dissipate the strength faster. So he created this parachute unit called 2 Commando. But there was a bit of a power struggle between the RAF who were training them and the army who wanted to get rid of them because they didn't like the fact that these troops weren't going to get used basically. So the RAF took command of them and when they transferred from two commando out into the regular army they became what was called special service troops and a staff officer probably with glee typed special air service in brackets in about November 1940 and that was the creation of the SAS back before Sterling and everyone arrived on the scene. What sort of role did Clark play? Because he was in the prime of life. He was in his early 40s by this point. What kind of leader was he? So Clark's not your David Sterling,

Jock Lewis, Paddy Mayne kind of shoot him up kind of guy. He's a 40-year-old bombavere. He's a cross-dresser, which we can talk about. He loves life. He spends a lot of time in London, in the Ritz and places like that. He's a good time guy, but he's very well connected. He's very bright. He's very, very Machiavellian in his thinking. And the senior officers love him and they go to him with all their problems.

So, you know, Jack Dill gets him to start the commandos. And then, of course, what we know happens a bit later on or shortly after that is the commandos basically outgrow their usefulness in Britain because Churchill gets very ambitious for the commandos. So he wants 2,000 parachuting commandos, a flying tank. And we're fast forwarding to the commando raid on Dieppe here, the idea that you can go across the channel and hold a piece of ground for a period of time. So Clark kind of gets moved out of that job because an admiral takes over, at which point a previous boss of his in Palestine, who's General Archibald Wavell, gets in touch and says,

look, the Italians are running around in North Africa. I can't cope. And he knows Clark. So get Clark out here. I need Clark to start deceiving the Italians. And then Clark goes out to Africa to repeat what he's done in Britain, which then leads to the creation of the Special Air Service in North Africa. So it's actually a second iteration of the Special Air Service in North Africa. So it's actually a kind of a second iteration of the Special Air Service, I guess.

Yeah, it is. I mean, the story of the creation of the SAS is more complex than the one we know from sort of TV recently and the books, in that all those stories start in 1941 with the creation of what's called L Detachment SAS. But actually, the SAS had carried out a combat operation before that in southern Italy. In early 1941, they were parachuted into southern Italy. So this is the outfit Clark created in the UK to take out an aqueduct. And it wasn't a particularly successful operation.

But what Clark had by then done is got to North Africa. And he decided that he wanted to create fake airborne forces to threaten the Italians. And the Italians actually thought we had airborne forces because at that point, the long range desert group were running around and no one was quite sure how they were getting behind the lines. The Italians thought it was by parachute. And they actually captured a diary, British intelligence got a diary which said, look, the Italians think we have parachutes.

This Italian officer saying, last night, British parachutes landed close to our lines. So Clark got that bit of intelligence. And then he found out we were going to parachute in southern Italy. He went, hang on, this is brilliant. Because actually, an SAS operation in southern Italy would logically get launched from Egypt. Logically, it's closer. It wasn't. It went from RAF Mildenhall to Malta, and then they landed in southern Italy.

It was an extraordinary long-range penetration in those days. So he then creates a fake SAS brigade. And worse than that for Mussolini, because his ideas are all about what he calls subliminal, subliminal methods. How can I mess with the mind of the enemy commander? And he thinks, what would terrify Mussolini is if I thought, if I pretend the SAS are training insurgents, so that's Abyssinian who are Ethiopians, to parachute into southern Italy to start an insurgency, which is not logical. It's not a logical, but he's playing into the mind of a dictator who's scared, who is persecuted and created a genocide against his people. So he stages a fake photo shoot and stages a lot of intricate deceptions to create this illusion that there's an SAS brigade operating in Egypt.

And then when that real operation goes off, Muzzali freaks out, goes, oh my word, they've really got SAS parachutists in North Africa. They're really training insurgents. They're really going to drop them in southern Italy. It's all fake. The whole thing's fake. And is that, you mentioned he was a cross-dresser. He loved drama. He loved taking part in amateur dramatics. He cross-dressed. Is this one of the great examples of these, well, these hugely creative, eccentric minds finding their role, having their moments in this war of deception? Absolutely.

I'm convinced he would have been a filmmaker, screenwriter had he not been in the military. His brother, in fact, Tibby Clark, became an Oscar-winning screenwriter for the Ealing comedies. But he, Clark, if you look, he was into amateur dramatics. If you look at photographs in his family files, in every play in the military where there's a female role, Clark is doing the female role.

He's in the dress, you know, at Sandhurst and everywhere. I think he loved women and he loved women's clothes. And the problem that he hit on was he was using women's clothes in the war as part of his disguise. Quite often he went undercover and he was picked up in Madrid. This is where people who do know this story will know there's a picture of him in a dress and him in a suit. And that was in Madrid where he was trying to deceive the Germans about the timing of an attack in the desert, which was called Operation Crusader. And he kind of went in there alone and he got picked up in a dress.

And of course, then, you know, the proverbial hit the fan because Churchill went, what's this guy doing? You know, Churchill knows exactly who he is. He's been captured by the fascist Spanish police. They have to hand him back. But at that point, Churchill wants him back in the UK

to face the music. General Cloud Alkenegg, who's his commander in Cairo, wants him back out there. And Churchill wins. And in that tussle, he's shipped back to face the music in the UK,kenek, who's his commander in Cairo, wants him back out there. And Churchill wins. And in that tussle, he's shipped back to face the music in the UK, which in those days would have been risky because, you know, if they confused cross-dressing with homosexuality,

so he could have faced a jail sentence. He could have been cashiered, anything. But as luck would have it, he was being shipped back to the UK when the ship was taken out by a torpedo. He was rescued, sent back to Gibraltar, but didn't tell anyone he survived. Got on a Catalina flying boat and flew back through the gale that Sir David Stirling parachutes into the desert. Now, his fake essays are becoming real as he flies through this gale back to Cairo. And then, of course, when he gets back to Cairo, General Claude Engle doesn't care

if he wears a dress. He just thinks he's doing a brilliant job. That is amazing. I love that. And one of the reasons that Wavell loves him, presumably, is this extraordinary moment, his kind of first big success, which is also a bit of a failure, this fake invasion of Italian Somaliland. Yes, absolutely. So Wavell's problem is he's putting out fires all over around the Mediterranean, all around North Africa. The Italians have got too many troops.

The first thing he gets Clark to do is create a fake invasion force of East Africa, which is incredibly successful, but slightly misfires because the Italians think they're really coming, then start to move their troops in an unexpected direction. So it's a brilliantly successful deception that causes the British a few problems. But it clearly indicates to Clark that he can sell into the Italians the idea that we have forces we don't have, and we're moving forces in a direction that we're not doing. And then that will lead shortly to the creation of the Special Air Service Brigade. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about the man behind the birth of the SAS. More coming up.

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Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. let's come on to that now because then people have seen this recently and until they have had about it it's on the podcast but also seen it on big smash hit tv shows and stuff so it's may 1941 clark comes across daviding, who's a frustrated... He was a commando, right? So he was a product of an earlier Clark idea. Yeah, so the commandos...

Clark has left the commandos behind in England. They are commanded by Admiral. They've outgrown his initiative. So the commandos are not really now what I'd call a special force. They're big battalions, brigade groupings. Churchill wants them sailing around and smashing up German-Italian coastlines. And he ships out a group of them under command of a guy called Bob Laycock to North Africa to carry out those sort of operations.

The problem is by the time they get to the Mediterranean, the Luftwaffe are completely dominant. So the commanders cannot go by sea. Their ships get blown up. And this leads to a group of them, who are nicknamed the Blue Bloods, Eight Commando, who are basically Bob Laycox

recruited them through the Club Whites in London. They're his mates. They're people like George Delaco, David Stirling, Karen Mather. The fittest man off the boat, by his own description, is a guy called Jock Lewis, who has no time for the rest of them.

And we know that he is instrumental in creating the real SAS. Anyway, but yes, David Stone's kicking his heels. Jock Lewis realises that we're not going to get behind the lines on boats. The timeline's difficult because we don't have actually diaries to support this. But from what happens, it looks like Jock Lewis first goes to Bob Laycock and goes, can I parachute? Now, the thing about Bob Laycock, Bob Laycock at that time is working with Clark. They are in a co-located headquarters virtually. And Bob Laycock clearly goes to Clark, can we get some parachutes? Now, Clark is faking the SES and he's only too happy to sponsor

Jock Lewis to carry out, you know, a parachute training jump because he wants real parachutes parachuting over Cairo. He's already got fake parachutists parachuting over Cairo, now he wants real ones. So the parachutes Jock Lewis uses belong to something called K-detachment SAS. A little bit complicated, but that is a fake outfit that fakes balsa wood gliders and throws bundles out of aeroplanes. And it's Jock Lewis who goes up to a place called Fooker Airfield to carry out that jump. However, Sterling gets in on this act, presumably through the hotel, Shepard's Hotel network. And he also goes up there having spoken to Clark and the two of them then become instrumental now in creating the real unit,

the real SAS. And so this is a strange story, isn't it? It's a unit that comes into being initially as a deception, as a complete fake. And if you look at the first meeting of the SAS, so Sterling drafts up a memo, which is actually in Clark's abeam file. But so that's the fake SAS file, which is the pitch for the SAS. And the primary purpose of the SAS, what becomes called LDAT, is it's a training outfit. Clark doesn't give a stuff whether this outfit ever carries out an operation. What he wants is the illusion that we are training parachutists outside Cairo. And so then there's

a meeting in general headquarters Cairo, attended by Clark and Sterling, in which this discussion goes ahead. You can imagine staff officers going, oh, we can't support this, you know, all this sort of rubbish. The RF don't know anything about it. It's a typical sort of high up staff officer type meeting of the era where everyone's trying to block the creation of the SAS. But in that meeting, what's very clear that has been sponsored is that a training unit is going to get created. It's going to carry out parachute training down by Suez. And that's what's going to happen. Sterling obviously has greater ambitions and that then leads to what then happens next. obviously has greater ambitions, and that then leads to what then happens next.

And then once the SAS comes into existence, again, a bit like the Commandos, does it outgrow Clark fairly soon? Does he lose any kind of operational control over them? Yeah. So the operational control, and this is very, really important for special forces, operational control always rests with the Force Commandos. So from the day that Clark walks into Jack Dill's office in Whitehall, to the day that he creates the SES with General Claude Achenbach and Sterling in Cairo, the control of the special force is always with the force commander. And really, that is something I think people don't fully comprehend is the idea that what's important about this unit is it's really tough. Yes, they're really tough. And obviously, we go on to have selection and things like that. But what's unique about a special force is its command and control, that it's a strategic unit. So you're right, the command rests with the force

commander. Clark is still heavily involved, though, in terms of using their operations in deception and also sometimes where they are going to carry out operations. And so he's watching his baby grow and develop and leave home. What else is Clark up to? He does this extraordinary, another big deception campaign, doesn't he, in North Africa? Is it Cascade? Yeah. So what Clark realises straight away, having created the SAS brigade and got the Germans to swallow the fact we have roughly 500 parachutes, 1,500 glider troops in North Africa. So they've swallowed this. It appears in German's intelligence and the Axis intelligence, the Italians believe it.

He thinks, well, this is good. What would be better is to build this out. How about some fake tank regiments? So he rolls out three. Basically, what happens in the war is every time there's a crisis, British command go, Clark, get over here. So Rommel's advancing. And I guess Clark gets called to the office, go, we've got over here. So Rommel's advancing. And I guess Clark gets called to the office, go, we've got to stop him. We can't stop him. Clark, what can you do? Clark goes, well, I could create some fake RTR units, Royal Tank Regiment units, stick them behind the front line. That might slow him down. It's a bit of a rush job. You can only build 150 fake tanks. But then he thinks, well, hang on, the Germans hide their Panzers in Bedouin tents.

So if they do that, they might believe we do the same. So he tie-dyes a load of tents black, ships them up to the front line, sticks like fake guns out of them, and puts them all over the place. And the German assessment is we have 300 tanks, which we just don't have at all, waiting behind the front line.

And the indication is, Rommel stops his advance on Tobruk, and Clark, in his own assessment, thinks that might be because of his deception. I think he's possibly right. It's extraordinary, isn't it? And we know from the American Civil War, and First and particularly Second World War, with the deception campaign before D-Day, the giant fake army group in Kent, deceptions could have a very real impact on the course of the war. And this was a bit of a discovery in my research, because I did not know this.

Cascade is basically the start of what becomes the 12th Army. So the 12th Army at the time of the invasion of Sicily, we pretend we have a fake army. Well, Clark starts that in 1941 and he builds more and more units. It gets out of hand. He has to send out memos around the Mediterranean to tell everyone which fake unit is where. He does a monthly distribution of where the fake unit is. The Germans are going, why haven't they used their parachute division parachute division of parachutists? Why is that still in the Eastern Mediterranean? So cut to like Operation Mincemeat, which we know about, which is the deception of the body to deceive the Germans that we are not going to land on Sicily. That is part of a much bigger

deception, because what's really important is that it's believable that we can land in Greece at the same time as the Western Mediterranean. And that is all Clark's fake army, fake army, fake double agents. And he's got special forces running around. The SBS are up in Peloponnese busting stuff up. The RF are gunning down shipping around the Greek islands. He sends an SAS team into Sardinia. So like Sardinia is part of the deception. So that's all great. So he draws all the attention away from Sicily. He doesn't really agree with Mincemeat because he thinks the problem with Mincemeat

is the Germans are going to twig the moment we go ashore, they've been duped, which they do. But what's great about his deception is Hitler still believes we're going to go to Greece and he sends Rommel down there, even after we're ashore in Sicily. And that's Clark's deception,

what started with the cascade, yeah. There must be some senior officers who just thought this man Clark is running amok. You can't start armies. And I mean, he's like pulling the strings right across the Mediterranean. He must have been, in a way, quite a difficult figure to manage. This is the interesting thing, because obviously there are difficult figures in this story. You know, Sterling's obviously an absolute maniac in terms of he's all over the shop. But Clark's not like that. You look at, I think the senior officers just know that he is the man to go to for the alternative solution, for the indirect approach, for what he calls his subliminal methods. So if you take an example of like, after we land in Italy,

Alexander is then stuck. We get stuck at the southern hill of Italy, basically, that winter. And they call in Clark. They go, well, we're going to land in Anzio Clark what can we do and Clark goes well logically you wouldn't land in Anzio you'd land further north so I'll fake an invasion of the north of Italy and he plays directly into the hands of the Germans because Rommel's own assessment is we will cut Italy off across the Po Valley which is right to the north of Italy and that will circumvent the whole war in Italy, basically, which is take out the whole of Italy out of the war. And because the Germans, often Clark's plans are better than the real plans. So Anzio's a one step deal. Clark steps one step further and Rommel thinks we're going to go to the top. So the Germans buy that

and move all their forces north. And of course, we know we go short Anzio for two days, nothing happens. The Germans are in the wrong place. Now, we know that all goes wrong because we don't move, but that's not Clark's fault. And I think there's a thing where Clark must have got frustrated because he delivers these solutions, these amazing deceptions, and then on the ground they get slightly messed up because nobody moves quite fast enough, not as fast as his mind does anyway. It's interesting that Clark is good at using the assessments of the enemy to provide them with evidence for those. Yes. And he says the Germans are easier to deceive than the Italians, probably because the Italians, you know, Machiavelli was an Italian. So the Italians are much more suspicious than the Germans. I think what's good about the Germans' assessments, they quite like, for example, there's another fake he does early in the war where he promotes a brigadier to a general. Well, in the German intelligence assessment,

a general commands a division. You would not promote a man to a rank he does not hold for troops he doesn't command. And this guy was the commander of Cyprus. But Clark knows he commands virtually nothing, but he makes him a general because that's going to work in the Germans' minds. And similarly, he creates a fake Monty.

You know, I was Monty's Double was one of Clarke's plays, again, in Italy. Well, tell us about that. What's he do? He creates a lookalike for Montgomery. Yeah, he's in a cinema, again, in Italy. This is just after. He's created the Anzio fake landings.

And then he's in a cinema, and he's watching, I think it's called Three Braves Past Cairo. And he sees on the screen a Royal Tanks officer. He goes, bloody hell, that looks like Montgomery. I could cast him, have him wander around the Mediterranean, and around the time the Normandy land, they'd probably buy that. And they do. Clark meets him in Gibraltar and makes sure that the major German spy in Spain

is in the embassy as he arrives. So Montes Cortes pulls into the British embassy, and the spy runs out to tell the Germans that Monty's just arrived in the Mediterranean. They're definitely landing in the Med first. And then that story runs. And then he has to hide him and smuggle him back to England. But that is a true story. And that was Clark's. I imagine the post-war Clark's life would have been rather boring. I think it was. And also, I think, sadly frustrating, because he's done all this great stuff. And he does publish one book, which is called Seven Assignments. Some of that is redacted. So he goes in that book,

he goes on a mission to a neutral country, which everyone assumed was Spain, was actually Ireland. And that book stops in 1940 when this starts to get really interesting. And he wants to write a subsequent book called The Secret War. And he's prevented from doing it by the war office. They go, no, we want this for the Russians. And it's a bit like the Enigma Code, which is the fact we broke the Germans' code. That wasn't declassified until the 1970s, and neither was Clark's stuff, but it was never really published. No one wrote about it. No one assessed it. And so he just got frustrated watching, you know, Operation Mincemeat become a movie. It was back then called The Man Who Never Was. And then he sees, you know, the amount is doubled. That actor writes a book, then it becomes a movie. And he's just sitting there on the sidelines

going, well, this is my stuff, and it's all coming out, but I'm getting no credit. Well, I'm glad that he's now getting the credit he deserves. I mean, this is just a great example of a historian going back and reviving people's reputations in the past who died in obscurity. Yeah, I mean, I hope that my book in some small way has lifted his profile. I think he deserves a lot more credit. And also, hopefully, things will spin out. More books, more films, whatever comes from this. It'd be great to see more of him.

Tom, can I ask a question? You were a tankie. You served in tanks, but you're also in SF. We're so obsessed with people like Clark and Sterling and special forces during World War II. Do we forget about the poor buggers who drove tanks from A to B? It's all very well with the deception and this, that, and the other, but someone's got to drive a tank up a beach and secure some territory, right? And fight for that hilltop town in Sicily or grab hold of those day

one objectives in Normandy. How do you feel having lived both those two roles in the armed forces? Where's the balance? How should we think about the Second World War? Yeah, I think people are attracted to the very interesting, glamorous special forces role. People love the spies. But in a way, Clark's own story, I mean, the reason he created all of this

was he had lost a lot of friends in the First World War. So he wanted to avoid the mass friends in the First World War. So he wanted to avoid the mass casualties of the First World War. So his whole idea here was to do things a different way. Rather than fighting directly against the Germans, he thought he could save the lives of the tankers of the infantry going ashore at Anzio and Sicily by using these indirect methods. So that was his entire motivation. So kind of what I think is, we obviously want to commemorate, want to talk about the tank commanders, but this was a revolution in warfare that occurred during the Second World War. This was a completely new way of fighting wars. And if you look at what happened post-war, special forces became the main play really,

because, and deception, because we couldn't have big standing armies. Governments don't like putting boots on the ground. That's a terrible idea generally anyway. And special forces and deception operations have become much more popular politically. So yeah, it's an interesting question, Dan. Well, Tom, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. What is the book called? It's called Speed, Aggression, Surprise, The Secret Origins of the SAS. Thank you very much indeed, Tom, for coming on. Thanks, Dan. Thanks very much.