HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
date: 2026-01-27T12:06:45.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: The SAS played a vital role in defeating Hitler – so why did Britain disband them?
items: Gertrude Ederle: the first woman to swim the English Channel
items: The battle for Normandy: what happened after D-Day?
items: Desert raiders: the Long Range Desert Group in the Second World War
items: “Their name liveth for evermore”: the difficult task of locating, identifying and honouring the dead of WW1
items: How the early SAS became heroes of the Second World War
items: The history of the SAS
items: David Stirling: SAS hero or fraud?
items: Creating fake Paris: how one man built a mock city to fool WW1 German bombers
items: Johnny Hopper: a nerveless Nazi-killer

The SAS played a vital role in defeating Hitler – so why did Britain disband them?
type: item
date: 2026-01-23T15:30:41.000Z
creator: Gavin Mortimer
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Historical people
subject: Second World War battles
subject: Soldiers
subject: Wartime Britain
description: Britain’s War Office thanked the SAS for its remarkable efforts in WW2 by abolishing it – yet soon realised the error of its ways. Gavin Mortimer tells the story of how the elite unit reinvented itself to confront the challenges of the postwar world
encoded: “Light-hearted banditry”, “ruthless pirating”, a “phantom army” – it’s fair to say that the Special Air Service (SAS) didn’t always attract the most complimentary headlines. In the white heat of the Second World War, when this and other British special forces achieved unlikely successes through a series of daring raids, disparaging press reports could be discarded as merely tomorrow’s chip paper. Nonetheless, they fuelled the impression that the SAS operated outside the rules of the regular British army, and were used as ammunition by some who aimed to whip special forces into line – or even shut them down altogether. That threat became a reality after the conflict ended. David Stirling, the founder of the SAS, coined a description – “freemasons of mediocrity” – for a certain kind of staff officer who looked upon his men with suspicion and, in some cases, hostility. These ‘freemasons’ regarded the SAS and other irregular outfits – the Long Range Desert Group and the Chindits – at best as private armies, at worst “café gangsters”. This view extended to the Special Boat Squadron (SBS), which spent the spring of 1944 waging a bloody guerrilla campaign in the Aegean to tie down German troops ahead of the invasion of France. Its actions prompted a sharp exchange between Winston Churchill and Simon Wingfield Digby, the Conservative MP for West Dorset. “Is it true, Mr prime minister,” enquired Wingfield Digby, “that there is a body of men out in the Aegean Islands, fighting under the Union Flag, that are nothing short of being a band of murderous, renegade cut-throats?” “If you do not take your seat and keep quiet, I will send you out to join them,” retorted Churchill. One could argue that Churchill was the founding father of Britain’s special forces. It was he, shortly after coming to office in May 1940, who instructed the formation of a commando force to launch a “vigorous, enterprising and ceaseless offensive” against the Axis. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/p…

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Gertrude Ederle: the first woman to swim the English Channel
type: item
date: 2024-05-28T10:15:07.000Z
creator: Gavin Mortimer
subject: 20th Century
subject: Period
description: In 1926, 19-year-old New Yorker Gertrude Ederle made history by becoming the first woman to swim the English Channel – and in a faster time than the five men who had already achieved the feat. As Daisy Ridley stars in film Young Woman and the Sea, Gavin Mortimer shares the remarkable story of Ederle’s swim and how she inspired a generation of sporting women…
encoded: The 1920s was a decade made for explorers and adventurers. After the horrors of the Great War, the world needed heroes as it entered a glamorous new age – and it found them in the likes of Charles Lindbergh, Percy Fawcett, George Mallory and Amelia Earhart, whose exploits remain vivid more than 100 years later. But one such hero has faded from memory: Gertrude Ederle (pronounced ‘Ed-er-ly’), a shy 19-year-old New Yorker who was the most famous woman in the world in the summer of 1926. Who was Gertrude Ederle? Gertrude Ederle was the first woman to swim the English Channel – an achievement in itself, and one made all the more impressive by the fact that she swam it faster than any of the five men who had gone before her. Although her feat has become commonplace today, she deserves recognition for inspiring a generation of young women. What drove Gertrude Ederle to attempt to swim the Channel? Ederle was a gifted swimmer who represented her country in the 1924 Paris Olympics. It was during this time, as the American team's ship sailed up the channel, that Ederle had the idea to swim across it. The previous year in 1923, Henry Sullivan had become the first American to swim the 21 miles that separated Dover from Calais, although he had actually swum more than 50 miles because of the strong currents – a factor that accounted for the 1,000 failed attempts by 200 swimmers since Matthew Webb's historic first crossing in 1875. Read more | 9 people you didn’t know made history swimming in the River Thames There were other challenges, too – such as the debilitating temperature of the water and the capricious weather – but the main problem was the fact that the tide shifted direction every six hours. This meant that anyone brave enough to take on the channel would need to swim in a zigzag fashion, changing direction with the tide. When did Gertrude Ederle first try to swim the English Channel? Ederle first tried to swim the channel in 1925, but after nine hours she was pulled f…

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The battle for Normandy: what happened after D-Day?
type: item
date: 2023-06-07T07:04:00.000Z
creator: Gavin Mortimer
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: HistoryExtra Academy
subject: HistoryExtra Academy D-Day and the Normandy Campaign course
description: By the time D-Day had drawn to a close on the night of 6 June 1944, the Allies had secured a hard-won foothold in northern France. But the fight was far from over. Here, Gavin Mortimer explains how the battle to liberate France raged on as Allied forces were tested to their limits by fierce German resistance while they attempted to push through the Normandy countryside
encoded: Field-Marshal Erwin Rommel had little sleep on the night of 6 June. He had spent the day in his staff car, urging his driver to keep his foot on the accelerator as they drove the 500 miles between his home in Herrlingen, south-west Germany, and his HQ in La Roche-Guyon. But before dawn had broken on 7 June, Rommel was already in conference with General Geyr von Schweppenburg, commander of Panzer Group West. The Allied landings the previous day had caught the German military unawares; the führer’s unshakeable certainty that the invasion would be in the Calais region had been shattered. Rommel blamed Hitler and his equally inept chief of operations, Colonel-General Alfred Jodl, for their failure to release the two reserve Panzer divisions that, if they had been sent straight to the beachhead, might well have pushed the invaders back into the chill waters of the English Channel. Read more | D-Day on screen: 5 TV and film depictions of the Second World War operation Not that Rommel was in a position to berate his superiors; he was embarrassed at having left France on 5 June to celebrate his wife’s birthday. Such a miscalculation would be difficult to live down among his growing number of detractors within Hitler’s inner circle. But 7 June was not the time for recriminations. Only action would suffice and Rommel had already identified from the map of the invasion zone what he believed was the Allies’ most vulnerable point. He had considered attacking the Omaha beachhead, which the American V Corps had secured at such a terrible price, but instead settled on launching his counterattack around Caen. The British had failed in their objective of capturing the city on D-Day, but only just, and should they seize Caen, only 125 miles of flat, unobstructed countryside would lie between them and Paris. Read more | Your guide to D-Day: what happened, how many casualties were there, and what did it accomplish? General Bernard Montgomery, in command of Allied ground forces, had arri…

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Desert raiders: the Long Range Desert Group in the Second World War
type: item
date: 2022-11-14T12:08:33.000Z
creator: Gavin Mortimer
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
description: In June 1940, a science writer named Ralph Bagnold was authorised to create a British special forces unit which would operate in Italian-occupied Libya during the Second World War, gathering intelligence and carrying out raids behind enemy lines. Bagnold called the unit the Long Range Desert Group – and it would become a vital part of the 8th Army's desert operations. Writer and historian Gavin Mortimer explores the formation of the innovative unit…
encoded: Ralph Bagnold was not your typical special forces commander. Slight of build, studious by nature and in his early forties in 1939, he was earning a living as a science writer when the Second World War began. Yet within a year he had raised Britain's special forces unit, the Long Range Desert Group, and earned a reputation as an intrepid innovator of warfare. Bagnold had explored large swathes of the North African desert in the late 1920s and early 1930s when he was stationed in Cairo with the British army. Travelling into the brutal terrain in Model T Fords, he and a small group of like-minded adventurers had been the first Europeans to penetrate into the heart of the Libyan Desert. When he was recalled to the army on the outbreak of war, Bagnold was posted once more to Egypt and he quickly saw the possibility of forming a small reconnaissance force to enter Italian-occupied Libya and spy on the enemy. When was the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) formed? Authorised by Middle East Command in June 1940 to raise such a unit – which Bagnold called the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) – he recruited his men from the ranks of the New Zealand division and stipulated that: "Every vehicle, with a crew of three and a machine gun, was to carry its own supplies of food and water for 3 weeks, and its own petrol for 2,500 miles of travel across average soft desert surface, and each patrol was to carry a wireless set, navigating and other equipment, medical stores, spare parts and further tools." The LRDG embarked on its first patrol in August 1940, reconnoitring Italian positions in the Libyan desert (roughly the same size in land mass as India) and so successful were the missions that followed that in November that year, Bagnold was promoted to acting Lt-Colonel, given permission to form two new patrols and instructed to launch a series of hit-and-run raids against Italian targets in Libya. For his new recruits, Bagnold turned to the British army, forming two new patrols from the G…

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“Their name liveth for evermore”: the difficult task of locating, identifying and honouring the dead of WW1
type: item
date: 2022-11-10T15:20:39.000Z
creator: Gavin Mortimer
subject: First World War
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Death
subject: Remembrance Day
description: The First World War forever changed not only how wars were fought, but how nations honour their fallen soldiers. Gavin Mortimer explores how this was down to one man who wanted to ensure that the dead would never be forgotten...
encoded: On 18 November 1918, one week after the armistice had finally brought an end to the First World War, George Macdonogh, the Adjutant-General of the British Army, chaired a conference to examine how best to locate and bury the hundreds of thousands of war dead. One measure agreed at the meeting was to divide the Western Front into sectors: the Canadians would be responsible for searching the Albert/Courcelette area and Vimy Ridge; the Australians for Pozières and Villers-Bretonneux; the French for the Aisne/Marne battleground of 1914; and the British would take charge of the rest. It would be grisly work, stated Macdonogh, so volunteers would paid an extra two shillings and six pence a day. The exhumation companies, who with the customary dark humour of the British Tommy dubbed themselves ‘Travelling Garden Parties’, were composed of squads of 32 men each. Their tools were “two pairs of rubber gloves, two shovels, stakes to mark the location of graves found, canvas and rope to tie up remains, stretchers, cresol [a poisonous and colourless compound] and wire cutters.” Read more | Remembering the First World War: blood, poppies and poetry The men who volunteered for the exhumation companies had all fought in the trenches, so they knew the tell-tale signs of where bodies may be found. They looked for grass that had turned slightly blue indicating a body underneath, holes in the ground made by rats digging out a bone, or the butt of a rifle just visible in the mud. When they located a corpse, the men retrieved the identity discs and personnel effects, then placed the remains on a canvas sheet soaked in cresol. “Working in the fields digging up the bodies, a very unpleasant job,” wrote Australian Private William McBeath in his diary on 15 April 1919. Two days later, he described how his work was interrupted by an unwelcome visitor: “Working in cemetery. An English lady came over to see her son’s grave, found him lying in a bag and fainted.” The English poet and writer John…

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How the early SAS became heroes of the Second World War
type: item
date: 2022-10-26T13:00:57.000Z
creator: Gavin Mortimer
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Second World War battles
subject: Soldiers
description: Gavin Mortimer explores how Britain’s daring commandos brought down Hitler’s empire in the Second World War
encoded: It was only fitting that a unit that would finish World War II as a byword for boldness began its life with an act of audacity. In July 1941, a tall, slender Scots Guards officer limped up to the front gate of Middle East Headquarters (MEHQ) in Cairo. Lieutenant David Stirling wasn’t long out of hospital, and he still carried the scars of a parachute accident the previous month. The 25-year-old officer had spent his convalescence working on an idea that he now intended to present to General Claude Auchinleck, commander-in chief of the Middle East Forces. The trouble was that Stirling didn’t have a pass to present to the sentries stationed outside the entrance to MEHQ. And no pass meant no entry. Having failed to sweet-talk his way past the guards, Stirling shuffled away in dejection, but then something caught his eye. A flap of the wire fence that encircled the headquarters was loose. Was it big enough to squeeze through? Nothing ventured, nothing gained, thought Stirling, and in an instant he was through the flap and making his way as fast as he could into MEHQ. Pitching in Once inside, Stirling located the office of General Neil Ritchie, the deputy chief of staff and a family friend of long-standing. The breathless young officer saluted, handed Ritchie the memo, and briefly explained its contents. The General ran an eye over the memo, then over Stirling, and said he would show it to Auchinleck. Three days later, Stirling was summoned to MEHQ. This time he did have a pass, and an appointment with General Auchinleck. He wanted to know more, so Stirling elaborated on his idea. “I argued the advantages of establishing a unit based on the principle of the fullest exploitation of surprise and of making the minimum demands. on manpower and equipment,” he wrote shortly after the war had finished. “I sought to prove that, if an aerodrome or transport park was the objective of an operation, then the destruction of 50 aircraft or units of transport was more easily accomplish…

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The history of the SAS
type: item
date: 2022-10-26T12:59:51.000Z
creator: Gavin Mortimer
subject: 20th Century
subject: 21st Century
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
description: How was Britain's elite special forces unit formed, and what part has it played in history? Gavin Mortimer discusses the SAS's role over the previous 80 years...
encoded: What is the SAS? The SAS (Special Air Service) is Britain’s elite special forces unit, formed in the summer of 1941 by two Scottish brothers, David and Bill Stirling, who were stationed in Cairo. The war in North Africa was not going well for the British, and the Stirlings came up with the idea for a small parachute unit of volunteers to undertake guerrilla raids deep inside enemy territory. The first operation was launched on 16 November 1941, but it coincided with a fierce storm, and of the 55 men who parachuted into Libya to attack German and Italian airfields, 34 were killed or captured. Undeterred, David Stirling changed tactics for their next raid in December and hitched a lift to the target in lorries driven by the Long Range Desert Group, another special forces unit which was adept at reconnaissance. This time, the SAS destroyed 24 aircraft and a petrol dump on Tamet Airfield without suffering any loses. What made it ‘special’? Although the British Army had in 1940 formed a parachute battalion in the UK (which would become the Parachute Regiment), the SAS was ‘special’ because it was much smaller in size and focused on guerrilla warfare, such as attacking enemy airfields and disrupting their lines of communication. Military parachuting was still in its infancy, but the Germans had demonstrated its potential during the invasion of the Low Countries. The SAS learned to parachute at its base 90 miles east of Cairo. Read more | Opinion: Why December 1941 was the most important month of the Second World War But, as the failure of the inaugural raid showed, the desert was not suitable for parachuting at this time. However, a second SAS regiment formed in 1943 and undertook several successful parachute operations in enemy territory in Italy. Both 1SAS and 2SAS parachuted into France after D-Day to support the Maquis (rural French Resistance fighters) in their guerrilla warfare. Where did the SAS go after North Africa? After the Allies’ defeat of the Axis forces in …

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David Stirling: SAS hero or fraud?
type: item
date: 2022-07-06T11:31:57.000Z
creator: Gavin Mortimer
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
description: Special forces historian Gavin Mortimer casts a critical eye over David Stirling, who is renowned as the founder of the SAS in World War Two
encoded: Special forces historian Gavin Mortimer casts a critical eye over David Stirling, who is renowned as the founder of the SAS in the Second World War. Speaking to Rob Attar, Mortimer argues that Stirling’s wartime record was far less impressive than he claimed and that his legend has obscured the achievements of those around him. Gavin Mortimer is the author of David Stirling: The Phoney Major: The Life, Times and Truth about the Founder of the SAS (Little Brown, 2022) Buy now on Bookshop.org Buy now on Amazon Buy now on Waterstones

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Creating fake Paris: how one man built a mock city to fool WW1 German bombers
type: item
date: 2022-05-17T06:35:41.000Z
creator: Gavin Mortimer
subject: First World War
subject: Period
description: As German aircraft attacked Paris during WWI, one man had an idea: what if you could fool the enemy into dropping their bombs elsewhere? Gavin Mortimer tells the story of an audacious wartime ruse...
encoded: Tucked away in a British newspaper called The Globe in its edition of 4 October 1920 was a short story with an intriguing headline: “A Mock Paris: French Plan to Hoodwink German Raiders.” The ruse, explained the paper, had only just come to light, and it was almost too fantastical to be true. “Camouflaged streets, factories, dwelling houses, railways, with stations and trains complete, and in fact a camouflaged capital, was the gigantic task on which French engineers were engaged when the Armistice put an end to military operations,” ran the report. It was the brainchild of an electrical engineer called Jacopozzi; a way to draw German aircraft away from the capital and onto a fake conurbation where bombs could fall without causing death and destruction. But the Germans sued for peace as the city began to take shape and Jacopozzi’s ingenuity was never put to the test. Paris was first bombed by German aircraft on 30 August 1914, the first time that a capital city had been attacked in such a manner. Four small bombs were dropped from the hands of Ferdinand von Hiddessen and his observer from their Rumpler Taube monoplane. The casualties were minimal, but the wider psychological damage was profound. A little over a decade after the Wright brothers had made the first brief flight in an airplane, the Americans’ invention was a new and terrifying weapon of war. The home front was now a battlefront, and women and children were no longer safe from enemy fire. Death from above There were other sporadic attacks in the 18 months that followed, including the first attack by Zeppelins (named after their inventor, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin) in March 1915. The airships came from their bases in Belgium, but none caused serious casualties. However, on 29 January 1916, two Zeppelins appeared in the grey winter sky over the French capital. Their bombs wreaked havoc, killing 24 and wounding 30. The funerals of the dead were held on 7 February 1916 in a service that brought Paris to a…

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Johnny Hopper: a nerveless Nazi-killer
type: item
date: 2021-11-02T07:05:00.000Z
creator: Gavin Mortimer
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Historical people
description: As part of our occasional series profiling remarkable yet unheralded characters from history, Gavin Mortimer introduces Johnny Hopper, the British lone-wolf fighter who embarked on a campaign of violence that made him one of the most wanted men in Nazi-occupied France...
encoded: Johnny Hopper and his wife, Paulette, arrived at the cafe on the rue Beaubourg on schedule. They chose a table at the end of the long narrow cafe, their backs to the wall and with an unobstructed view of the entrance. It was Paris, 8 May 1942, a dangerous place to be for an Englishman who was the subject of a nationwide manhunt having slain two policemen the previous year in Caen. Hopper ordered two coffees and waited for the arrival of a doctor, a member of the Resistance. He claimed he had information about Paul Cole, a former British soldier who had been captured in 1941 and turned by the Gestapo into one of their agents. The doctor arrived on time and Hopper rose to greet him. But as he advanced he noticed another man coming into the cafe. Then two soldiers came into view on the street outside. Hopper reached for the pistol in his pocket; at the same time the man accompanying the doctor went for his weapon. Within seconds, shots were being exchanged across the cafe as terrified customers dived for cover. Hopper felt a blow to his arm. “I didn’t know at first how badly I was wounded,” he recalled. “I ducked back through a door next to our table, to take stock and to get a fresh gun unstrapped from my leg. It was only a sort of closet back there, but the Germans must have assumed it was a rear door to the alley. I had hit all of them more or less badly, and when I kicked my door open, they were all running out the front door to get help.” Hopper glanced round the cafe. Everyone was still hiding under their tables. Everyone except his wife. She was slumped in her seat, blood flowing from her mouth. They had been married three years, had a young son and were deeply in love. Hopper examined her wound. It was almost certainly fatal, yet he couldn’t bear to think of her in the hands of the Gestapo. He placed his pistol to her temple and fired. “I have relived that moment every day of my life,” he said 48 years later. “Always asking myself the same question.” Read more …

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