In 1942, the battle between the British forces and Erwin Rommel's Afrika Corps in North Africa had reached a stalemate. The chief British base at Alexandria and the German base at Tripoli were separated by a thousand miles, and connected by only a few roads. Every advance by either force stretched its supply lines to the limit, so the fighting surged back and forth, as if the combatants were attached to their supply bases by an elastic band.
A British officer, David Sterling, realized that Rommel's supply line could be attacked, but raids from the sea had failed because "the enemy was too alert," as Robert Powell's narration informs us. That admission is typical of the honesty of this superior series. It's not a flag waver. The enemy is not stupid. He can make mistakes but so can we.
The headquarters for the Middle East, in Cairo, was something of a bureaucratic nightmare. Papers got lost; orders were misfiled. So Sterling sought the general in charge for permission to form a special air service, recruited from commandos and paratroopers, not subject to the rules of the regular army and responsible only to the Commander-in-Chief, Middle East. He got a handful of officers and about sixty men. Their mission was not to attack in the old-fashioned way but to infiltrate enemy lines and destroy what they could. This small unit was dubbed The Special Air Service Brigade, though they hardly constituted a brigade.
Unlike today's SEAL teams, the SAS were trained to survive in groups of four deep within German and Italian lines. They were all put through an improvised jump school and became experts in enemy weapons. Like the Green Berets of Vietnam, they were cross trained in different specialties like medical care and explosives.
At first the results of their raids were mixed; then, with experience, they successfully attacked airfields and supply dumps; then the Germans caught on and beefed up their guards, blunting the force of the raids. Sterling was captured and sent to Colditz. In Italy, the SAS was expanded to several thousand men and more or less absorbed into the British Army.
It's a fine documentary, using mostly contemporary footage, stills, one or two talking heads, and a prudent measure of good CGIs.