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David Stirling - The Phoney Major: The Life, Times and Truth about the Founder of the SAS (Hardcover)
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David Stirling - The Phoney Major: The Life, Times and Truth about the Founder of the SAS (Hardcover)
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Aristocrat, gambler, innovator and special forces legend, the life
of David Stirling should need no retelling. His formation of the
Special Air Service in the summer of 1941 led to a new form of
warfare and Stirling is remembered as the father of special forces
soldiering. But was he really a military genius or in fact a
shameless self-publicist who manipulated people, and the truth, for
this own ends? In this gripping and controversial biography Gavin
Mortimer analyses Stirling's complex character: the childhood
speech impediment that shaped his formative years, the pressure
from his overbearing mother, his fraught relationship with his
brother, Bill, and the jealousy and inferiority he felt in the
presence of his SAS second-in-command, the cold-blooded killer
Paddy Mayne. Stirling lived until old age, receiving a knighthood
and plaudits from military forces around the world before his death
in 1990. Yet as Mortimer dazzlingly shows, while Stirling was
instrumental in selling the SAS to Churchill and senior officers,
it was Mayne who really carried the regiment in the early days.
Stirling was at best an incompetent soldier and at worst a
foolhardy one, who jeopardised his men's live with careless talk
and hare-brained missions. Drawing on interviews with SAS veterans
who fought with Stirling and men who worked with him on his
post-war projects, and examining recently declassified governments
files about Stirling's involvement in Aden, Libya and GB75,
Mortimer's riveting biography is incisive, bold, honest and written
with his customary narrative panache. Impeccably researched and
with the courage to challenge the mythical SAS 'brand', Mortimer
brings to bear his unparalleled expertise as WW2's premier special
forces historian to dig beneath the legend and reveal the real
David Stirling, a man who dared and deceived.
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