SAS: Band of Brothers

Why another book about the Special Air Service? This was my first reaction on seeing Damien Lewis’s latest work. There is no shortage of titles about the best-known of all British special forces (the author, an acknowledged expert on the SAS, has written several), but given readers’ apparent insatiable appetite for the subject, it is no surprise that they keep coming. Yet, from the outset, this is a history with a difference. Set in the aftermath of D-Day, it concerns SABU-70, a 12-man SAS raiding party. Following an aborted attempt two days previously, the raiders were landed on 16 June 1944 at La Ferté-Alais, south-east of Paris, and went on successfully to attack the railway a