Elite Forces

In September 2000, 11 British soldiers were captured by a notorious militia gang in Sierra Leone. The so-called 'West Side Boys' had subjected their part of the country to a long reign of terror, murdering, kidnapping and mutilating anyone who stood in their way. Now British soldiers were at their mercy. Surrounded and hopelessly outnumbered, any resistance would have seen them all killed, yet their hopes of a quick exchange soon faded.

From his cage in a putrid, overcrowded Indian jail, Paul Jordan reflects on a life lived on the edge. His childhood, marred by the loss of his father and brother, produces a young man hell-bent on being the best of the best - an ambition he achieves by being selected to join the elite SAS. The Easy Day Was Yesterday is fast paced, brutally honest, raw and laced with dark humour. The core of Paul Jordan's eventful life, it shows the ability of the human spirit to survive even in the direst adversity.

Lieutenant Bill Fraser and the six SAS men he led were listed as Missing in Action (MIA) after their failure to return from a raid. Nine weeks later they emerged from a death-defying sojourn across the Sahara Desert, after evading and confounding the enemy.

From the best-selling author of true military classics Zero Six Bravo, The Nazi Hunters and Churchill's Secret Warriors. In the Spring of 1940, as Britain reeled from defeats on all fronts and America seemed frozen in isolation, one fear united the British and American leaders like no other: the Nazis had stolen a march on the Allies towards building the atomic bomb. So began the hunt for Hitler's nuclear weapons - nothing else came close in terms of priorities.

British and American commanders first used modern Special Forces in support of conventional military operations during World War II. Since then, although special ops have featured prominently in popular culture and media coverage of wars, the academic study of irregular warfare has remained as elusive as the practitioners of special operations themselves.

The top Billboard Hot 100 single of 1966 wasn't The Rolling Stones' "Paint It Black" or the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine" - it was "The Ballad of the Green Berets", a hyper-patriotic tribute to the men of the Special Forces by Vietnam veteran, US Army Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler. But Sadler's clean-cut, all-American image hid a darker side, a Hunter Thompson-esque life of booze, girls, and guns. Unable to score another hit song, he settled in Central America, ran guns, and allegedly trained guerrillas.

Throughout history there has always been a need, in military forces, for special units. In the past, these units have usually been ad hoc formations that were disbanded after their mission was complete. It has only been since the early 1950s that such units have remained active, but even in recent times special purpose, special mission units have been organized and used for a period of time or for a specific mission and then either deactivated or replaced by other units.

A captain in 29 Commando, Johnny Mercer served in the army for 12 years. On his third tour of Afghanistan, he was a joint fires controller, with the pressurized job of bringing down artillery and air strikes in close proximity to his own troops. Based in an area of Northern Helmand that was riddled with Taliban leaders, he walked into danger with every patrol, determined to protect them. Then, one morning, in brutal close-quarter combat, everything changed....

In 2014, H was back in Afghanistan, providing security for the Japanese Embassy in Kabul. In 2021, when the chaotic evacuation of the Afghan capital began, it was a tough call for the Japanese government to leave behind their significant investment in Afghanistan’s future. When H finally got the go-ahead to extract the embassy’s diplomats and staff, he was leading the only security team remaining in a city rapidly filling with Taliban fighters.

It takes a tough mind-set to be a successful sniper, to be able to dig in for days on your own as you wait for your target, to stay calm on a battlefield when you yourself have become the target the enemy most wants to take out. Craig Harrison has what it takes, and in November 2009 in Afghanistan, under intense pressure, he saved the lives of his comrades with the longest confirmed sniper kill - 2,475 metres, the length of 25 football pitches.

The history of the modern SAS is one of the great successes of postwar Britain. Since it was revived in 1950 to combat Communist insurgents, the Regiment has gone from strength to strength, fighting covert wars in Oman, Borneo, Northern Ireland, the Falklands, the Persian Gulf and beyond. In the process, it has become one of the most indispensable, and at times controversial, units in the British army.

For three decades one of the most secretive units in the British military has been a mystery force known as X Platoon. Officially there was no X Platoon. The forty men in its elite number were specially selected from across the Armed Forces, at which point they simply ceased to exist. X Platoon had no budget, no weaponry, no vehicles and no kit - apart from what its men could beg, borrow or steal from other military units. For the first time a highly decorated veteran of this specialised force - otherwise known as the Pathfinders - reveals its unique story.

In mid-2017, whispers from Australia's most secretive and elite military unit reached Walkley Award-winning journalist Nick McKenzie. McKenzie and veteran reporter Chris Masters began an investigation that would not only reveal shocking information about Australia's most famous and revered SAS soldier but plunge the two reporters into the defamation trial of the century.

Arguably the greatest sniper in modern warfare, Simo Hayha accumulated over 800 confirmed kills during the course of his war service.

The story of an extraordinary campaign in the Vietnam War - fought in a 200-mile labyrinth of underground tunnels and chambers. The campaign in the tunnels of Cu Chi was fought with cunning and savagery between Viet Cong guerrillas and special teams of US infantrymen called 'Tunnel Rats'. The location: the 200-mile labyrinth of underground tunnels and secret chambers that the Viet Cong had dug around Saigon.

As a married man and Stanford graduate student nearing thirty, Christopher Donner would likely have qualified for an exemption from the draft. Like most of his generation, however, he responded promptly to the call to arms after Pearl Harbor. His wartime experiences in the Pacific Theater were seared into his consciousness, and in early 1946 he set out to preserve those memories while they were still fresh.

It's a story of how the shock of defeat propelled an unlikely group of renegades into the frontline of the war. An adventure that reaches back from the trenches of the Western Front to high piracy in the deserts of North Africa to the final assault on Germany. It's a story that comes together in the corridors of headquarters, on long nights at the long bar in Shepherd's Hotel in Cairo, and on the deadliest battlefields in history, around a cast of insubordinate mavericks who didn't fit into the tight military hierarchy.

In Who Dares Wins, Big Phil Campion reveals his chequered past, from terrible abuse suffered in a string of kids' homes to psychological abuse suffered at a top public school. Phil guides you through his soldiering career, from the so called 'green army' to the brutal trial of SAS selection and all that followed. This includes years spent providing private military services across war-torn and risk-laden Africa; in between he was body-guarded the likes of Led Zep, Oasis, Kasabian, Dizzy Rascal and Pro Green.

June 1942. The Third Reich is victorious everywhere. In desperation, Winston Churchill and his chief of staff form an unusual plan: a new commando unit made up of Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria who escaped to Britain just before the War. Many have lost their families, their homes - their whole worlds. And now, in the crucial final battles against the Nazis, they will stop at nothing to defeat them. Trained in counterintelligence and advanced combat, this top secret unit becomes known as X Troop.

Dawn. 19th July 1972. A force of nearly 300 heavily armed, well-trained guerrillas launches a surprise attack on the small fishing village of Mirbat. All that stands in their way is a troop of just nine SAS, aided only by an elite band of fighter pilots overhead. Two years earlier, a Communist rebellion had threatened the Arabian Peninsula, in the strategically critical Sultanate of Oman. Following a covert intelligence mission, 22 SAS deployed their largest ever assault force against the rebels. But this was to be a bitter and hard-fought campaign culminating the Battle of Mirbat.