Mike Sadler, desert navigator who guided WWII commandos, 103

In mid-December 1941, a group of British commandos gathered in the Libyan desert outside an enemy airfield west of Sirte. They had crossed 400 miles during more than two days, driving stripped-down vehicles through wadis and wind-packed sand from an oasis deep in the Sahara.

Their guide, navigator Mike Sadler, was on his first mission, learning to use the sun, stars and surveyor-type instruments to traverse expanses with no roads and few landmarks. “A lot rested on it,” he recalled.

Earlier that year, a British team dropped by parachute suffered heavy casualties against German Gen. Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps. This time, the special forces were attempting a surprise ground attack from the desert.

The British force surged into the Tamet airfield and gunned down German and Italian pilots and crew. At least two dozen planes were destroyed or disabled. A fuel depot was set ablaze. A simultaneous British attack was underway at an air base in Sirte.

Both teams slipped back into the desert night, meeting the navigator at a rendezvous point. The successes set in motion a new guerrilla-style campaign in North Africa by a handpicked group of British munition specialists, gunners, crafty scroungers — and a newly minted navigator who may never have fired a shot.

“Nowadays the SAS has a fearsome reputation,” said Sadler, who died Jan. 4 at 103, “but I don’t remember ever wanting to kill anybody.”

Sadler was believed to be the last of the founding members of the SAS, or Special Air Service, the special forces unit of the British army. He also was the only surviving link to the Long Range Desert Group, the roaming expeditionary force that helped the Allies win the battle for North Africa.

Sadler once even had to use his navigation skills to save his own life. He and two British sergeants escaped after their 15-member unit was captured by a German patrol in January 1943. The trio, with little water, trekked 110 miles in five days to reach a Free French garrison. They were turned over to U.S. forces on suspicion of being German spies.

“We had long hair and beards and were looking very bedraggled,” Sadler recalled. “Our feet were in tatters. I don’t think we looked very much like soldiers.”

A group of reporters, including New Yorker correspondent A.J. Liebling, were with the U.S. forces when Sadler and the two others arrived in camp. “The eyes of this fellow were round and sky blue and his hair and whiskers were very fair,” Liebling described Mr. Sadler in a New Yorker piece. “His beard began well under his chin, giving him the air of an emaciated and slightly dotty Paul Verlaine,” Liebling added, tossing in a reference to the 19th century French poet.

An American intelligence officer, who interrogated Sadler and the two others, carried a bottle of whiskey. “Which was an excellent idea, because they were pretty well done in by that time,” Liebling wrote. “After half an hour, he climbed out and told us that he thought they were all right.”

Sadler had arrived in North Africa as an antitank gunner. At a Cairo bar on leave, he met some of the early recruits to the Long Range Desert Group. He was first considered for the unit because of his weapons experience. On the way to the base, Sadler became fascinated by celestial navigation. He was offered the role as navigator.

He had just weeks to learn how to use a theodolite, a device used by surveyors, and how to read celestial charts.

“Desert navigation, like its equivalent at sea, is largely a matter of mathematics and observation, but the good navigator also relies on art, hunch and instinct,” author Ben Macintyre wrote in “Rogue Heroes” (2016), a nonfiction account of the SAS operations. “Sadler had uncanny, almost unerring ability to know where he was, where he was going, and when he would get there.”

The desert attack group was dubbed L Detachment — a small ruse to give the impression there were detachments A through K. “I was so tickled,” Sadler told the BBC History Magazine, “by the idea of being able to find where you were by looking at the stars.”