Inside New Zealand's SAS

Researching his latest book, historian Ron Crosby got a rare chance to get up close and personal with the SAS, writes SONIA O'REGAN.

Researching and writing the history of New Zealand's Special Air Service was "hellishly interesting", says Marlborough historian Ron Crosby.

His latest book, NZSAS The First Fifty Years, lifts the veil on the super-secret elite army corp to the extent the SAS allowed that blanket to be lifted, at least.

The first chapter details the first contact with the enemy in Malaya in 1956 and the last reported contact in Afghanistan 2004, where Willie Apiata VC famously carried a wounded comrade to safety.

Mr Crosby, formerly a partner and then consultant at Gascoigne Wicks law firm, retired in 2007 to focus on writing historical and military books.

He was pleased to be asked to write the authorised history of the SAS, despite the need for "necessary compromises" which would not normally be faced when doing an objective historical assessment.

The book was authorised and censored by recently departed SAS commander Jim Blackwell and the last 2 1/2 decades had to be researched against a background where documentation was still classified as secret and unavailable to the author.

Mr Crosby said he was told the unit would not allow anything that was going to prejudice operations to be printed.

"To the blokes, they said, `You answer what questions he's got', but to me they said `Don't waste time writing stuff you know I'm going to cross out'."

In the end the commander had only a few pages dropped from the book.

Mr Crosby was granted access to patrol reports, interviewed former members, observed a selection course, and stayed at SAS headquarters on a number of occasions.

He travelled the length of the country and talked to the men.

Were they challengingly reticent?

"It really was a matter of spending long periods of time with them. It wasn't at all uncommon to spend three or four hours and then go back the next day."

Mr Crosby was very aware he was not a military man or a member of the unit.

"It was always clear to me that one can only be part of this tight-knit group of men by dint of long, hard, shared experiences," he says.

He was pleased to find that he seemed to have similar interests to those interviewed, a similar sense of humour, and generally shared their respect for the same institutions and aspects of social character.

"Their whole training and operations are so intense. There are groups of four or five, living and sleeping and, on operations, fighting together. You'd get to know the other bloke extremely well."

The SAS story begins in Cairo 1941.

"A very tall young British lieutenant by the name of David Stirling managed to bluff his way into the office of the Deputy Chief of Staff of the Middle East, General Ritchie, even as he was being pursued by the sentries he had burst past at the entrance to headquarters."

Lieutenant Stirling wanted to propose the idea of parachuting a small new special unit behind enemy lines to attack enemy airfields. He was promoted to captain and authorised to raise and train his special force to do so.

The New Zealand version was first formed in 1955 to meet the request of the British in Malaya, fighting the "communist terrorists" during the Malayan Emergency. (Chinese who were denied Malayan citizenship by the British after World War II formed the Malayan Races Liberation Army which embarked on a guerrilla campaign against the British, often involving acts of terrorism against civilians as well as military forces).

Then prime minister Sid Holland announced the plan to form an elite army corp, and called for volunteers. About 800 applied. The Originals operated from 1955 to 1957 before being disbanded, then resurrected in 1959 as a very small unit with no specific operational role.

Since then, Mr Crosby writes, the SAS has grown to its present form.

"It is now vastly more diverse and sophisticated in terms of its special warfare capability compared with the early jungle warfare role it performed from 1955 to 1971 in the jungles of Malaya, Thailand, Borneo and Vietnam."

While Kiwi contributions to Malaya and Thailand were much publicised parents would read of their sons' triumphs in the newspaper a veil of secrecy fell over the SAS' third overseas deployment, to help Malaysia fight an Indonesian-backed insurgency in Borneo in 1965.

Soldier Peter Rutledge recalls chief of general staff Leonard Thornton telling them their activities would be "basically illegal, as they involved operations in another country's territory without a state of war existing", Mr Crosby writes.

"Politically he said they were a real hot potato and we had to be very careful to do everything absolutely right. If we were caught, we needed to know that the government would say we were there without authority."

One soldier's solo mission over two days through jungle, after his patrol was ambushed, stands out for Mr Crosby as epitomising the self-reliance of the SAS soldier.

He also met Victoria Cross winner Corporal Willie Apiata. So what's he like?

"He's the epitome of what the SAS aim for absolute natural bloke. I didn't interview him at any great length because there was no point to me of retelling a tale that had already been told."

New Zealand SAS troops have just been sent back to Afghanistan, their fourth deployment to the country since the 2001 attack on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington DC.

The Cabinet agreed this month to their return after a request from the United States and up to 70 SAS soldiers will be deployed there for up to 18 months, in three rotations.

We are unlikely to hear what they get up to there, but we can get a glimpse of what their predecessors have done in Mr Crosby's book.

While the security issues prevent disclosure of details, there was still scope for a few cracking yarns. Mr Crosby writes about how the earlier SAS deployments modified American Humvees and borrowed some 640cc Austrian-made KTM motorbikes from German Special Forces and set off on intelligence-gathering trips into the desert, travelling 1000 kilometres, sometimes 2000km.

A story from one of these occasions stands out.

A patrol from the Kiwi base in Kandahar came under heavy fire from a village. It returned fire and destroyed a mud wall and the enemy's positions.

The next day a meeting with a local warlord turned into a dangerous confrontation between the patrol and a force of perhaps 100 heavily armed men. The commander, "a big and quite fat bloke, advanced right up to me and literally bumped aggressively into me with his chest", the patrol commander told Mr Crosby.

"I held my ground firmly and pushed his chest back with my hand. The man said they had come to attack and kill us all, and they would do so. I replied that we were part of the Coalition which had come to help Afghanistan, and that he should remember we owned the skies."

A US Spectre AC-130 gunship "with its massive firepower made a low run over us at that very moment. All the bad guys looked up, and you could see their whole demeanour immediately change."

Mr Crosby's chapter on lessons learned through the SAS' 50 years reveals smoking is even more potentially deadly when the habit is indulged on patrol.

Back in the 50s it was recognised that at night the glow created a beacon, but it took a while before it was recognised the smell carried in the day and revealed positions. It was also not a good idea to use soap or shaving cream or aftershave before going on patrol.

Snoring could also compromise your life. After a particularly noisy night, one soldier was instructed that if he snored the next night the patrol would move about 250 metres away from him for its safety and leave him on his own.

They did not hear him snore again.

- The Marlborough Express