Clara’s Verdict
Damien Lewis has built a formidable reputation narrating the secret histories of British Special Forces, and SAS The Great Train Raid may be his most astonishing discovery yet. The mission it describes – a 1943 SAS operation in which a small team hijacked a train, raided deep into Axis-held Italy, and liberated a concentration camp – is so audacious that it reads like fiction. The fact that it has remained largely unknown for eighty years, buried in classified files and the fading memories of the men who carried it out, makes Lewis’s unearthing of it all the more valuable. This is genuinely important history, told with pace and feeling.
About the Audiobook
Autumn 1943. Allied forces have recently landed in southern Italy but the campaign is grinding and brutal. Into this chaos, a small SAS unit is deployed on an operation that defies conventional military logic: they are to ride a hijacked Italian freight train deep into enemy territory and liberate Pisticci, a concentration camp that had come to the Allies’ attention – one of the first such camps to do so.
Lewis has reconstructed this mission from first-hand testimonies, personal letters, and long-hidden archival files. The result reads with the urgency and intimacy of a novel while carrying the authority of serious historical research. He is particularly good at capturing the personalities of the soldiers involved – their backgrounds, their humour, their extraordinary physical courage – without turning them into cardboard heroes. The dangers they faced were real and serious, and Lewis never lets the reader forget that. At eleven and a half hours, the audiobook has room to develop both the tactical detail of the mission and the human stories around it.
The Narration
Matt Bates narrates, and his delivery is well-suited to the material. Military history audiobooks demand a narrator who can sustain tension across operational sequences, handle the geography of an unfamiliar theatre of war, and convey human feeling without becoming mawkish. Bates achieves all of this with a measured authority. His pacing through the more technically demanding passages – the logistics of the raid itself – is clear without being mechanical, and he gives the testimonial sections the weight they require.
What Readers Say
Rated 4.6 out of 5 from 254 Audible UK listeners – a substantial and meaningful sample. The response is consistently enthusiastic. Listeners who had followed Lewis’s previous work on Special Forces history describe this as maintaining “the same excellence,” and those coming to him fresh are uniformly impressed. One reviewer described the mission as “totally crazy” and “absolutely astonishing,” adding that they read the book cover to cover immediately after hearing about it on BBC Radio 5 Live. The Sunday Express called it “a staggering feat of bravery kept secret for decades.” Several reviewers note Lewis’s research expertise as the defining quality of the book – the sense that every detail has been verified, sourced, and treated with appropriate seriousness.
Who Should Listen?
Essential for anyone with an interest in the Second World War, Special Forces history, or the Italian campaign specifically. This is also a fine choice for readers who enjoy narrative non-fiction with the pace of a thriller but the credibility of serious scholarship. Lewis’s other SAS titles are worth exploring once you’ve finished this one – the output is substantial and consistently strong. Start with SAS The Great Train Raid on Audible UK.
