SBS: Special Boat Squadron
Iain Gale is a military historian, and he assures his readers that Special Boat Squadron is ‘based on historical fact’. However, I am unconvinced that when the British evacuated Crete in 1941 they left behind the plans for the Anglo-American invasion of Italy in 1943 in a safe at the Heraklion air base and that this was never discovered by the Germans. Yet the premise of this book is that the British sent a mission into occupied Crete in 1942 to retrieve the lost document.
On the other hand, I am sure that the account that Gale gives of the organisation, recruitment, training and operational methods of the Special Boat Squadron (a special section of the Special Boat Service) is fully authentic. So, if you can suspend disbelief as to why all this is happening, you are left with an exciting military action/adventure story.
The debt to the James Bond novels is fully recognized, and Ian Fleming himself has a cameo role. There is even a token Bond girl in the last few pages, although Gale admits that women do not figure greatly in the annals of the SBS. The action is brisk and tense, but it takes a while to get going. The mission does not land in Crete until page 142, but from then on it is a rattling good yarn.
