Jock Lewes, Co-Founder of the SAS

Jock Lewes' death while World War II was still in progress has tended to obscure his role as a co-founder of Britain's Special Air Service. After distinguished years as student and athlete at Oxford, Lewes went to Berlin in the 30s to prepare for a job with the Foreign Office. In Berlin, Jock Lewes was briefly bedazzled by the utopian facade that cloaked the early National-Socialist movement, but his personal experience of the Nazi mind-set was to come in handy once war broke out.Lewes...
More Description

Jock Lewes' death while World War II was still in progress has tended to obscure his role as a co-founder of Britain's Special Air Service. After distinguished years as student and athlete at Oxford, Lewes went to Berlin in the 30s to prepare for a job with the Foreign Office. In Berlin, Jock Lewes was briefly bedazzled by the utopian facade that cloaked the early National-Socialist movement, but his personal experience of the Nazi mind-set was to come in handy once war broke out.Lewes was commissioned into the Welsh Guards on the outbreak of war and eventually was posted to North Africa. Frustrated by the deadlock in the conventional fighting, Lewes and fellow officer David Stirling founded a unique force of desert raiders, the Special Air Service. David Stirling survived the war and went on to considerable fame, but in fact Jock Lewes developed many of the characteristics SAS weapons and tactics, as revealed here by his nephew John Lewes, who has had full access to his uncle's extensive and vividly-written diaries and letters. This is an important and hitherto unknown chapter in the early history of the world's premier special forces unit.