Customer Reviews

Special Boat Squadron Pb

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First published in 1983, this book took advantage of the resurgence of interest in the SBS after the Falklands War to get published. It's a history of the Special Boat Squadron in the Med in WW2, and again, it's very much a history of the unit. (And incidentally, the Special Boat Squadron in the Med was very much a child of the SAS, commanded originally by Lord Jellicoe, who was tasked with the seaborne element of the SAS in the med). At 230 odd pages, it's not a lengthy book. It's broken down into 5 main sections (1-Early Days 1940-42, 2-Reorganisation 42-43, 3-The Dodecanese Disaster 1943, 4-The Aegean Island Raids 43-44, 5-ops on the Italian Mainland 44-45) and a 10 page Epilogue which is largely concerned with the resurgence of the SAS and their Boat Troop, with a brief 2 or 3 pages given over to the Royal Marines Special Boat Service.

There's a good collection of b&w WW2 photos as well as some maps. All in all, quite readable and a good account of the SBS in the Med. in WW2. Best read in comjunction with John Verney's Going to the Wars: A Journey in Various Directions, G B Courtney's Sbs in World War Two and James Ladd's Sbs, the Invisible Raiders: The History of the Special Boat Squadron from World War II to the Present (Ladd's book gives a pretty good picture of all the different units which formed the historical origins of the current Special Boat Service). The only gripe I have is the cover photo - from the Falklands War, which is barely mentioned in the book except for the epilogue. A case of misleading marketing, understandable given when the book was actually published.

The author, Barrie Pitt, was born in Galway, Ireland, on July 7 1918 and educated at Portsmouth Southern Grammar School before becoming a bank clerk. He seemingly deliberately kept his wartime career shrouded in mystery but dropped hints at various times about having served on operations with the Special Boat Service in the eastern Mediterranean and of having been captured in civilian clothes after serving with the Royal Sussex Regiment in Normandy. He also claimed to have been a sergeant in the Royal Army Medical Corps and to have spent three years in German prison camps, in one of which he said that he had met PG Wodehouse, who asked him to read the manuscript of his novel Money in the Bank.

Following the Second World War Pitt worked as a surveyor, joined 21 SAS (TA), with whom he rose to the rank of sergeant, and started to write for the magazine Adventure. This led him, in 1958, to produce a novel, The Edge of Battle, and then Zeebrugge, an account of the First World War raid on the German U-boat base in Belgium. Coronel and Falkland: Two Great Naval Battles of the First World War, about the 1914 naval engagement in the South Atlantic, was followed by 1918 : THE LAST ACT (Pen & Sword Military Classics), an introduction to the climax of the fighting on the Western Front. Pitt worked for a time as an information officer at the Atomic Energy Authority establishment at Aldermaston, where he demonstrated a talent for turning scientific information into readable prose, and became one of Liddell-Hart's young protegés. He then made his name as a researcher for the BBC television series The Great War, during which he had some comically vituperative exchanges with its associate producer John Terraine.

He was a highly capable editor of popular histories, and the workmanlike author of "The Crucible of War", a vivid three-volume account of the desert war(The Crucible of War: Western Desert 1941, The Year of Alamein, 1942 - The Crucible of War (Pitt, Barrie//Crucible of War) and The Crucible of War: Auchinleck's Command: The Definitive History of the Desert War - Volume 2. In The Crucible of War, Pitt demonstrated a strong narrative drive and a perceptive eye for character, recounting O'Connor's dashing success in the Western Desert against a much larger Italian force in late 1940, the shambles in which Wavell and Auchinleck struggled with contradictory instructions from a hard-pressed Winston Churchill, and finally Montgomery's success in wearing down the Germans by weight of numbers at Alamein. Under the overall editorship of Sir Basil Liddell-Hart, he was also responsible for the first major part-work, Purnell's History of the Second World War, a 96-instalment mass circulation series which was launched in 1966 at the Imperial War Museum. After this success he proved a generous patron of younger historians as the editor of some 100 small volumes in Ballantine's Illustrated History of World War 2.

After his account of the desert war came out between 1980 and 1982, he wrote this book, The Special Boat Squadron, and then The Chronological Atlas of World War Two with his third wife Frances. Barrie Pitt died on April 15 2006 aged 87.