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entrepreneurs like you. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup. Hello and welcome to the latest episode of the Battleground 44 podcast with me, Saul David.

Today I'm talking to Tom Petch, who, since leaving the British Army in 1997, has forged a highly successful career as a writer,

director and producer. Before doing so, Tom was a member of the Special Air Service, or SAS,

and among other things, led small teams gathering intelligence on the Khmer Rouge in the jungles

of Cambodia and persuaded the Bosnian Serbs to accept peace, no easy task, I suspect.

In 2022, Tom published Speed, Aggression and Surprise, the untold origin story of the SAS.

And today we're discussing the role of the SAS in D-Day or the Normandy campaign more generally.

Tom, welcome to the podcast. Thanks, so I don't

think I can credit myself individually as sway that the Bosnian serves to accept peace. That might

be on my pay grade. I think there was a lot of people involved in that. Yeah, I took that straight

from your website, Tom. I thought that was a rather grand claim, but I was going to include it

anyway. Yeah, good quote. Okay, let's set the scene, shall we? Most listeners will know, of course,

that the SAS was founded by amongst others. There's a lot of current debate about who actually

founded the SES, but amongst others, of course, David Sterling, the first commanding

officer in Egypt in the summer of 1941. Just to get us up to speed, Tom, can you give us a quick

summary of what's happened since then? How big the SAS has become and how its role has changed

from those early days? Yes, as you alluded to there, it has a very mixed heritage.

...