The painful birth of the SAS
The SAS is one of the most fearless and effective military units in the world. But it began as the brainchild of a lazy, ill-disciplined Scottish aristocrat. In his new book, Ben Macintyre recounts how a band of misfits and reprobates made history
The wind had reached gale-force as the five aircraft neared their target, bucking in the storm and threatening to flip over. Driven sand and pelting rain covered the cockpits. The pilots strained to see ahead into the dark sky over the North African desert. Suddenly, German searchlights picked them out and flak began exploding around them in blinding flashes. A shell ripped through the floor of one plane and missed the auxiliary fuel tank by inches. In the back of each aircraft sat a “stick” of 11 British parachutists, 55 soldiers in all; almost the entire strength of a new, experimental and intensely secret combat unit. The fledgling Special Air Service – the SAS – was on its first mission behind enemy lines.
All of a sudden, the pilots signalled them to jump – though in truth, they were now flying blind, navigating by guesswork. First, canisters containing explosives, Tommy guns, ammunition, food, water, maps and medical supplies were tossed out. Then the men hurled themselves into the seething darkness. First out was Captain David Stirling, the creative genius behind this whole new enterprise. Seconds later, he hit the desert floor with such force that he blacked out. When he came to, he was being dragged along by his parachute “like a kite” in a 40mph wind. He struggled to release himself and staggered to his feet, covered in lacerations and pouring blood. It took him two hours to gather what remained of his team. One man had vanished completely. Another had broken an ankle and could not stand. A sergeant broke his back on landing and could not even crawl. The supply canisters were nowhere to be found, leaving Stirling’s unit armed only with revolvers, a handful of grenades and barely a day’s supply of water. As an attacking force, they were now useless.
Just five months earlier, in the summer of 1941, the 25-year-old Stirling, an officer in the Scots Guards, had come up with his revolutionary plan while lying paralysed from the waist down in a Cairo hospital after an accident during commando parachute training. A scion of one of the oldest and grandest families in Scotland, Stirling was not a conventional soldier. He lacked basic military discipline, could not march straight and was so lazy his comrades nicknamed him “the Giant Sloth”. The hospital nurses knew him well, for he often popped in during the morning, whey-faced and liverish, to request a blast from the oxygen bottle to cure his hangover. Fellow officers found him charming, but senior commanders thought him incompetent and irritating.
As he lay in bed recovering, Stirling did a great deal of thinking about how commandos in North Africa might take the enemy by
surprise by attacking not from the Mediterranean – where they were expected to launch any raids – but from the other direction. The Great Sand Sea, the ocean of dunes that makes up about a quarter of the greater Libyan desert, “was one sea the Hun was not watching”. If small, mobile teams of highly-trained men could infiltrate the enemy’s desert flank, they could sabotage airfields and communication lines and then slip back into the embracing emptiness of the desert.
In the eyes of some in the British Army – who clung to the classical conception of warfare in which men in uniform clashed on a battlefield until one side emerged victorious – this was unsporting, like punching a chap when he is looking the other way. Worse still, Stirling’s idea threatened the concept of rank. A mere lieutenant, he insisted on going directly to the commander-in-chief to create what looked suspiciously like a private army. Stirling knew the resistance he would meet if he went through proper channels. Military bureaucracy – that “freemasonry of mediocrity”, as he called it – would bar his way. So, still on crutches from his accident, he wormed his way into Eighth Army headquarters in Cairo and burst unannounced into the office of General Sir Neil Ritchie, the deputy chief of staff. The general glanced at the paper Stirling thrust into his hands and then announced: “This may be just the sort of plan we’re looking for.”
Three days later, Stirling was summoned back to see the commander-in-chief, General Sir Claude Auchinleck – who just happened to be an old family friend from Scotland. Auchinleck liked the proposal. He was planning a major counteroffensive to hit back at Germany’s Field Marshal Rommel and reverse the tide of the desert war, and Stirling’s band of raiders might just hamper enemy airpower at a critical moment. If it didn’t, all that would be lost was a handful of adventurers. At the end of the meeting, Stirling was promoted to captain and authorised to raise an initial force of six officers and 60 men. The new unit’s name was provided by a little-known military genius, Colonel Dudley Clarke, whose job was strategic deception: concealing the truth from the enemy and planting lies instead. He’d already invented a fake paratroop brigade he called the 1st Special Air Service Brigade, which appeared in false documents leaked to the enemy. For Stirling’s crew he came up with the designation of L Detachment, Special Air Service Brigade – the letter “L” meant to imply that detachments A to K were already in existence. The SAS thus came into being as part of a larger contingent that did not actually exist.
Stirling had a clear idea of the sort of men he needed – those with an ability to think and react independently, something not normally highly prized in the Army. “I always hoisted on-board
“One recruit walked 40 miles across the desert in stockinged feet rather than fall out after his boots gave way”
guys who argued,” he said. They would also have to be willing to kill at close quarters, and not merely for the sake of killing. “I didn’t want psychopaths.” He sought outsiders, misfits and reprobates with an instinct for covert war and little time for convention. Stirling’s ideal SAS man was exceptionally brave but just short of irresponsible; disciplined but also independent-minded; uncomplaining, unconventional and, when necessary, merciless. Part soldiers, part spies, these rogue warriors were, as one former SAS officer put it, “the sweepings of the public schools and the prisons”.
The new detachment showed its mettle from the start. Arriving at their training grounds in the desert, the men found just three ragged tents, a single ancient lorry and a couple of chairs. So they stole equipment from a nearby regiment, slipping into their camp at night and making off with tents, bedding, tables, chairs, a gramophone, cooking equipment, hurricane lamps, rope, washbasins and tarpaulins. They even took a piano and table-tennis set. By morning, they had one of the best-appointed small camps in the Middle East.
The training was intense, the “hardest ever undertaken in the Middle East”, according to military records. The men went on 100-mile marches in full kit and load and with virtually no water. Anyone who could not cope was out. There were no second chances. A note in SAS files records that one private soldier “walked 40 miles across the desert in stockinged feet rather than fall out after his boots gave way”. As numbers were whittled down by death, drop-outs, illness and rejection, another kind of bonding began to emerge among these smelly, dirty, sunburned men: the sense of belonging to an elite unit barely 100 strong, tested by trial, selected for survival.
The first operation in November 1941 – code-named Squatter – ought never to have taken place, given that 30-knot winds were predicted – twice the maximum speed for safe parachuting. But Stirling himself took the decision to go anyway, believing it was now or never for the SAS. The objective was to parachute into the Libyan desert behind enemy lines, enter five airfields on foot and plant explosives on 300 German and Italian planes, and then flee south to a rendezvous point in the desert where they would be picked up by trucks of the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG), a deep-penetration reconnaissance unit whose rugged, experienced drivers were known for good reason as the “Libyan Taxi Service”.
Operation Squatter was an unmitigated disaster. Of the 55 men who parachuted into the gale on 16 November 1941, just 21 returned. The rest were dead or injured, missing or captured. Afterwards, analysing what had gone wrong, Stirling realised the main problem had been the weather. Strong winds wrecked the parachute jump, then torrents of rain washed out any chance of reaching their targets. But what if next time he and his men went in overland? The LRDG had managed to get the survivors of the first mission out of the desert without difficulty, so there was no reason why they shouldn’t drive them in as well. It was a glaringly obvious conclusion. The only question was whether he would get another chance to put into action his unorthodox scheme.
What came to Stirling’s rescue was the desperate plight of the British Army in that winter of 1941, with Rommel’s tanks on the move from Libya into Egypt and a major defeat on the cards. Some sort of strike-back was urgently needed. The bigwigs of the Eighth Army decided, on balance, that the SAS would be given the opportunity to redeem itself. Its target would be the enemy airfields strung out along the Mediterranean coast of North Africa. Once, these had been sleepy tuna-fishing villages. Now they were vital aerodromes from which fighters and bombers harried British lines and attacked Allied convoys. But intelligence suggested they were so far from the main battlefield they were lightly defended, with a perimeter fence, a handful of sentries and a few land mines. Juicy targets – if only raiders could get there.
Stirling’s second-in-command, Paddy Mayne – a brilliant soldier but a troubled soul with a very short fuse – secured the first SAS victory. He drove with a dozen men to the airfield at Tamet, where dozens of planes were lined up. The raiders slipped onto the airfield undetected and came across a large hut, from which a light shone and sounds of merriment could be heard. A party was going on. Mayne and two of his men crept up to the door, guns drawn. Mayne recalled kicking open the door and seeing about 30 men inside: “The Germans stared at us. We were a peculiar and frightening sight, bearded and with unkempt hair. For what seemed like an age we just stood there looking at each other in complete silence, until I said: ‘Good evening.’ At that, a young German arose and moved slowly backwards. I shot him, turned and fired at another some six feet away. Then the submachine-gunners opened up.”
That night, Mayne and his men planted bombs on 14 planes, and then climbed into the cockpits of ten more and shot up the dashboard controls. Mayne even tore out one cockpit panel with his hands. “What lovely work,” murmured one of his men as they drove away into the desert night. But was it really? Killing highly-trained pilots was, arguably, an even more effective way of crippling enemy airpower than destroying the planes themselves, but it veered away from sabotage and close to assassination. Stirling was shocked when the scale of the carnage was reported back to him. “Paddy had overstepped the mark,” he later wrote, “I was obliged to rebuke him for over-callous execution in cold blood of the enemy.” Nevertheless, the success of the mission built a new team spirit. Over the next six months, Stirling and his men raided all the most important German and Italian aerodromes within 300 miles at least once, and some of them as many as four times. The founding theory of the SAS was surely vindicated. It was making a dramatic and demonstrable contribution to the War. Stirling noted the “enormous self-confidence and exhilaration” that swept over his men.
Relishing this new confidence, he set about establishing a sense of identity, stability and superiority for his band of marauding rogues. Rather than “L Detachment”, the men now called themselves the SAS. They acquired a distinctive sand-coloured beret. A sergeant came up with the idea of a cap badge depicting a flaming sword of Excalibur. (This would later be interpreted, wrongly but permanently, as a “winged dagger”.) But the same sergeant’s suggested motto of “Strike and Destroy” was rejected as too blunt, while “Descend to Ascend” seemed inapt since parachuting was no longer the main method of transport. Finally, Stirling settled on a motto that seemed to strike the right balance of valour and confidence: “Who Dares Wins.”
A longer version of this article first appeared in the Daily Mail. Extracted from SAS: Rogue Heroes by Ben Macintyre © 2017, published by Viking at £8.99 (www.penguin.co.uk).
“Part soldiers, part spies, these rogue warriors were, as one SAS officer put it, ‘the sweepings of the public schools and the prisons’”