Damien Lewis’s latest book on the famed SAS focuses on the Italy campaign in 1943/44.
It describes how the SAS’s wartime leader, Irish solicitor Blair Mayne – former British Lion and Irish heavyweight boxing champion – had his ‘eyes opened’ by Wire’s coach when watching Wigan v Warrington just before the Second World War.
What he learnt became key to his brutal fitness and training regimes and it remains core to the SAS’s selection procedure to this day.
The book, the latest from the best-selling author, goes on to credit it with the SAS’s effectiveness throughout the war, and thereafter.
During the height of training in Azzib, the book explains how Mayne had been challenged to explain why he was pushing his men so hard.
And he explained how a chance encounter watching Warrington had made all the difference.
The book states: “When playing as a rugby union international, Mayne explained, he’d reckoned that he and his teammates were at the peak of sporting prowess. But then his eyes had been opened.”
Going to watch league he had noticed far fewer stoppages, a relentless intensity of play and described how ‘sheer physical fitness’ was key to winning.
The book added: “Mayne described how he had believed he and his teammates were supermen’, before watching that Wigan versus Warrington match.
“In the surprise of his life he realised how either team could have run rings around the Irish team, and even the Lions themselves.
“It was the sheer strength, speed, stamina, cunning and controlled ferocity that astonished and confounded him.
“How had they managed this, he’d wondered? What was their secret?
“He’d asked the Warrington coach those very questions. It was all in the training, the, coach had explained, which focused on raw stamina and fitness, combined with targeted strength training.
“It was then that Mayne had realised there was always a higher level to aspire to.”
