Mike Sadler, 103; intrepid desert navigator led WWII night raids against Axis bases
Major Mike Sadler, a World War II navigator on the trackless Sahara of North Africa, who guided Britain’s first special forces across sand seas on daring behind-the-lines night raids that blew up enemy aircraft on the ground and troops in their billets, died Thursday in Cambridge, England. He was 103.
The death, in a nursing home, was confirmed by John Allcock, the secretary of the Special Air Service Regimental Association, a welfare organization for veterans of the elite task force of the British army that Mr. Sadler had belonged to.
Mr. Sadler was one of the first recruits and the last surviving member of the SAS from the year of its founding, 1941. Like a navigator at sea, he used stars, sun, and instruments to cross expanses of the Libyan Desert.
Compared with the commandos he guided on truck and jeep convoys — volunteer daredevils who crept onto Nazi airfields; attached time bombs to Messerschmitt fighters, Stuka dive bombers, fuel dumps, and pilot quarters; then sped away as explosions roared behind — Mr. Sadler was no hero in the usual sense. Comrades said he might not have fired a single shot at the enemy in North Africa.
But he got his men to the targets — and out again. Without him, they said, the commandos could not have crossed hundreds of miles of desert, found enemy bases on the Mediterranean Coast, destroyed more than 325 aircraft, blown up ammunition and supply dumps, killed hundreds of German and Italian soldiers and pilots, or found their way back to hidden bases.
“His navigating skills were legendary,” wrote Sean Rayment, the author of the book “Tales From the Special Forces Club: Mike Sadler’s Story” (2013). He said Mr. Sadler’s skills had “helped to ensure the success of some of the S.A.S.’s most spectacular missions during the North African campaign.”
Mr. Sadler, who grew up in England, was working on a farm in Southern Rhodesia, a British colony in southern Africa (now Zimbabwe), when the war began. He joined a Rhodesian regiment and in 1941 was posted to a British army anti-tank unit in the desert near Egypt’s border with Libya, preparing to meet the German invasion of General Erwin Rommel’s new Afrika Korps.
On leave in Cairo, Mr. Sadler met members of a new unit, the Long Range Desert Group, a small band of adventurers who conducted reconnaissance behind enemy lines and were training to ferry SAS raiders on combat missions. Intrigued, Mr. Sadler won permission to join the desert group.
The SAS had already tried a parachute attack behind the lines, but its planes were spotted, the element of surprise was lost, and the mission failed with heavy losses. The SAS commander, Lieutenant Colonel David Stirling, had another plan — to stage raids with trucks.
The North African war was being waged mostly along coastal areas, where Axis airfields and bases were strung out. Since Axis defenses were largely focused on Allied attacks from the sea, Stirling believed that a small, mobile force coming out of the desert at night could surprise the enemy — provided it could find its way.
Mr. Sadler was intrigued by desert navigation. “What amazed me,” he told Rayment, “was that even with the vast, featureless expanses of the desert, a good navigator could pinpoint his exact location by using a theodolite, an air almanac and air navigational tables, and having a good knowledge of the stars.”
He spent weeks studying navigation techniques, including use of a theodolite — a telescopic device, with two perpendicular axes, used mainly by surveyors, for measuring angles in the horizontal and vertical planes. It was not unlike the sextant used by mariners to fix positions at sea.
Mr. Sadler’s first attack mission was a truck convoy in December 1941. “It was the SAS’s first ground operation after the earlier failed mission, so a lot rested on it,” Mr. Sadler recalled. “My job was to navigate from the Jalo Oasis to the German airfield at Tamet.” It took two days and three nights to cross 400 miles of desert. The team reached its target without being detected.
In the dark, the commandos sneaked onto the airfield and attached bombs with timing devices to 30 aircraft. Afterward, they planted bombs at ammunition and fuel dumps and at a building housing 30 Italian pilots and an unspecified number of German pilots, then met Mr. Sadler at a rendezvous. The explosions began as the saboteurs sped away. Intelligence reports later said that 24 aircraft had been destroyed and that virtually all the German and Italian pilots had been killed in their quarters.
Mr. Sadler was recognized as one of the heroes. He was promoted to corporal, awarded the Military Medal and assigned to Stirling’s SAS planning staff as the principal navigator for future missions, including attacks on airfields at Sirte, El Agheila, and Nofilia and supply dumps along Rommel’s lengthening advance eastward.
Willis Michael Sadler — known to friends as Mike — was born in London on Feb. 22, 1919, to Adam and Wilma Sadler and was raised in Stroud, a village in Gloucestershire about 110 miles to the west. His father was the manager of a plastics factory. Mike attended the Oakley Hall School in Cirencester and the Bedales School in Hampshire. After graduation in 1937, he moved to Southern Rhodesia. With family connections, he got a job on a tobacco farm, where he worked until the war broke out.
After his North Africa adventures as a desert navigator, Mr. Sadler returned to England and in 1944 parachuted into France after the Allied invasion of Normandy. He participated in sabotage operations against German occupation forces and won the Military Cross for bravery in action behind enemy lines.
His first marriage, to Anne Hetherington, in 1947 ended in divorce. He married Patricia Benson in 1958. She died in 2001. He is survived by a daughter from his second marriage, Sally Sadler.