How the SAS was forged from the dregs of the our public schools ...and prisons
THAt boy Stirling is mad, quite mad.’ that was Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s verdict on the maverick officer David Stirling, after he came looking to recruit Monty’s best
men to join his private army and sneak behind enemy lines to blow up airfields and oil installations, and break the stranglehold the
German and Italian Axis had in North Africa.
Monty, ever the disciplinarian, with a dislike of anything that smacked of the dishonourable and furtive, turned him away with a flea in his ear. But he did have the good grace to acknowledge in private that ‘in war there is often a place for mad people’.
And it was in that context that the most famous of all British army units, the SAS, was formed in 1941.
these were desperate times. With German general Rommel’s tanks on the move from Libya to Egypt, something different had to be tried to break the enemy’s momentum in the desert or the Allies would face inevitable defeat.
What Stirling — along with fellow SAS pioneer Jock Lewes — proposed was to
stop trying to punch the enemy in the face and instead kick him up the backside.
the Germans were masters of Libya’s Mediterranean coastline and all attempts from the sea to disrupt and dislodge them
had failed. So why not come at them from the rear, from where they least expected it — across the Great Sand Sea, 30,000 square miles of desolate desert dunes?
From a suspicious military hierarchy, he got a reluctant nod. It was, though, the expectation of many of his superiors
that he and his rabble of outsiders, misfits and reprobates — ‘the sweepings of the public schools and the prisons’, as one former SAS officer described his comrades — would fail miserably before being ignominiously disbanded.
And fail they very nearly did. the first raiding parties — beginning with a
disastrous parachute drop and then long-range driving overland for hundreds of miles in specially-adapted 4x4s — were more hitand-miss than hit-and-run.
But there were also successes to chalk up: scores of aircraft incinerated on the ground, supply depots sabotaged and communication links cut. Not to mention terrifying the seemingly invincible Rommel’s troops (while also tying up thousands of them on sentry duties).
All this proved just about enough to keep the naysayers off Stirling’s back.
Significantly, too, their flamboyant outlaw mentality — along with the Arab headdresses and bandanas they wore — added a much needed dash of colour and glory to offset the grinding war effort.
And so, by the skin of its teeth, the SAS lived to fight not just another day, but into the annals of
military history. In the end, the men not only did their bit to help win World War II, they were also the proponents of a new type of warfare, the prototype for special
forces across the world, such as the u.S. Delta Force and Navy Seals.
Now, those early years are about to be portrayed on our tV screens in SAS Rogue Heroes, a gritty
six-part series written by Steven Knight, creator of Peaky Blinders.
He has based it on the superb
book of the same name by author Ben Macintyre, which, in turn, was based on secret SAS archives he was given access to, making it in effect the regiment’s authorised history.
those archives were not just the dry official military reports you might expect, but many hundreds of pages of never-before-seen private letters, diaries, memoirs; the human elements which bring to life the extraordinary personalities and deeds of the ‘Originals’, as Stirling and his men dubbed themselves.
Macintyre discovered that heroes are not the cardboard cutouts they may be presented as; they have feet of clay. He concluded: ‘the SAS has become a legend, but the true story contains
darkness as well as light, tragedy and evil alongside heroism.’
What could be a better cocktail for historical fiction? And so, with Macintyre’s blessing (and, one presumes, that of the SAS, too), Knight has recreated that history as drama.
the series begins on BBC1 tomorrow and stars Connor Swindells as Stirling, Alfie Allen as Lewes and Jack O’Connell as
Paddy Mayne, the most controversial of the SAS Originals.
though based on hard fact, it is presented as a ‘fictionalised’ account. However, when it came to it, rather than hyping any of the
stories to add to the drama, Knight found himself toning some of them down. the reality of what these men did was sometimes so extraordinary he feared the viewers would simply not believe it.
there was an incident when Stirling wanted the use of a snooker table to lay out a map of the Sahara
as he plotted his first mission. the snooker players were reluctant to stop their game so Stirling pulled out a grenade and hurled it on to
the table. the room quickly cleared.
On screen, the grenade turns out to be a dummy, a smoke bomb, because Knight didn’t think viewers would accept that anyone could behave in so dangerous and stupid a manner.
On another occasion, Stirling and Mayne were on their way back from separate attacks on airfields when Mayne disputed Stirling’s claim he had just blown up 20 enemy aircraft. So, rather than let the matter drop and get back to base, they turned around and headed back into the live battle zone, just so Stirling could show Mayne the burnt-out wrecks and prove his point. Again, Knight reckoned viewers would refuse to believe it, so he left the incident out. the tall (6 ft 6 in), gangly and physically awkward Stirling typified these larger-than-life characters. He had wrong ’un written all over him. Scion of one of Scotland’s grandest families, the Lovats, whose ancestral seat was Keir House, near Stirling, he grew up happily enough, stalking deer, hunting rabbits and fighting. But adult life threw him. He couldn’t settle to it.
Cambridge sent him down for persistent bad behaviour — the
master of his college listed no fewer than 21 misdemeanours that merited expulsion — and he failed to study anything other than the racecard and his betting slips at nearby Newmarket.
After which he donned a beret and tried becoming an artist in Paris (where he lost his virginity but developed a life-long suspicion of women). Painting proved not to
be his thing, however, any more than architecture, his next choice.
With the outbreak of war he joined the Scots Guards, his father’s old regiment, as a junior officer, but was a disaster as a soldier: disobedient, arrogant, always in trouble. And bone idle.
In the officers’ mess, they labelled him ‘the Great Sloth’ because he was often half-asleep after nights of drinking and gambling.
‘He regarded rules as nuisances to be ignored, broken or otherwise overcome,’ Macintyre says of him. ‘He showed no deference whatever to rank. His manner seemed vague and forgetful.’ He transferred to the newly formed strike force, the Commandos, and was posted to Cairo, but was frustrated when one
combat mission after another was cancelled. He reverted to his old ways, drinking and partying, and his commanders wrote him off as impertinent, incompetent and profoundly irritating.
But it was action and adventure he craved, and he found it when he ran into fellow Commando Jock Lewes, described revealingly by Macintyre as ‘as self-disciplined and uptight as Stirling was dissolute and nonchalant’.
Their differences meant the two were never close friends but, nonetheless, with their disparate talents, they were to create a formidable team
Lewes had just surreptitiously acquired a stock of parachutes and was keen to try one out, even though he had never jumped before. Nor had Stirling, but he
joined him as they plunged into the desert from a small plane.
Stirling’s chute snagged on the plane’s tail fin and ripped, and he hit the ground at twice the recommended speed. He woke up
in a hospital bed paralysed from the waist down, and with every prospect that he would never walk
again. At 25, this most restless of men appeared to be finished, his active life over.
Miraculously, he not only recovered but in the weeks that he lay immobilised in bed, barely able to wiggle his toes, he and Lewes worked on and filled out their daredevil scheme to take the fight to the enemy in the desert. They
concocted a proposal for ‘a new type of force, to extract the maximum out of surprise and guile’.
As soon as he was up and able to hobble about on crutches, Stirling touted his plan around the military
bigwigs of the Eighth Army. With his society connections, he managed to bypass official channels and go straight to the top.
The then Commander-in-Chief, General Sir Claude Auchinleck — who just happened to be an old friend of the family — agreed to see him and then jumped at the idea. It wouldn’t cost much in terms of manpower and equipment, and there was always the outside chance it might turn the tide of the desert war.
Stirling set about recruiting his troops, six officers and 60 men. He was very particular about
who they should be — clear thinkers but doers. They also had to be prepared to kill at close quarters with machine gun, knife or bare hands. ‘I didn’t want
psychopaths, though.’
SoLdIErS selected for training were sent on 100mile desert route marches in full kit until they were hallucinating from dehydration and on the verge of collapse. one recruit tramped 40 miles in his socks after his boots fell apart, rather than give up and be ‘rTU-ed’ (‘returned to unit’ — rejected).
‘Never run away,’ they were ordered, ‘because once you start running, you’ve stopped thinking.’ This was distilled into the motto Stirling chose for the new unit: Who dares Wins. on their cap badge was a flaming Excalibur, the legendary sword of King Arthur.
As for the new unit’s name, that was provided by an intelligence colonel. To fool the Italians, he’d already invented a bogus paratroop brigade he called the ‘1st Special Air Service Brigade’. 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.
In just a few months, Stirling had assembled his unit and the SAS was poised for its first foray into enemy territory. At Stirling’s side was Jock Lewes, whom he had persuaded to join as his number two.
Also close by was Paddy Mayne, recruited by Stirling despite his reputation for volcanic explosions of temper and sometimes violent insubordination. According to Macintyre, he was ‘truculent, troubled and dangerously unpredictable, particularly when drunk, which was often.’
A former international rugby player, it was not unknown for him to pick up someone who had annoyed him and hurl them across the room. Whatever deep reservoir of anger drove him would produce outstanding heroics on the battlefield. But Stirling would always remain wary of Mayne’s ‘ferocity’. Macintyre likens it to adopting a wolf: exciting, certain to instil fear, but not necessarily sensible.
That phrase also neatly sums up what lay at the very heart of the foundation of the SAS — and why, more than 80 years on, it still makes a stranger-than-fiction story we want to hear time and again. SAS: Rogue Heroes — The Authorised Wartime History by Ben Macintyre, is published by Penguin at £9.99. To order a copy for £8.99 (valid to November 15, 2022; UK P&P free on orders over £20), visit mailshop.co.uk/ books or call 020 3176 2937.
THe first episode of SAS Rogue Heroes is on BBC1 at 9pm tomorrow. See Weekend magazine for an interview with the show’s creator, Steven Knight.