In many ways, the formation of the SAS was an accident. It was the brainchild of one officer, a man called David Stirling, who was a commander in the Middle East in 1940.

The parachute experiment

Stirling was bored to death in the Middle East. He found that he wasn’t getting the action and adventure he signed up for. So, he took matters into his own hands and stole a bunch of parachutes from the dock in Suez and launched his own parachute experiment.

It was a ludicrous idea. Stirling simply strapped the parachute on, tied the ripcord to the leg of a chair in a completely inappropriate plane, then jumped out of the door. The parachute snagged on the plane’s tail fin and he plummeted to earth, very nearly killing himself.

The ill-advised parachute experiment damaged Stirling’s back very badly. It was while he was lying in a Cairo hospital recovering from the accident that he began to think about how parachutes might be used in the desert war.

David Stirling with an SAS jeep patrol in North Africa.

He came up with an idea that may now seem very simple but which was extremely radical in 1940: if you could parachute into the deep desert, way behind the German lines, you could then creep up behind the airfields that were strung out all along the North African coast and launch hit-and-run raids. Then you could simply retreat back into the desert.

Today, these kinds of special operations seem sort of normal – it’s how war is very often fought these days. But at the time it was radical enough to trouble a lot of people at the Middle East HQ.

A lot of the middle-ranking officers in the British Army had fought in World War One and had a very static idea of how war was conducted: one army approaches the other on a fairly level battlefield and they duke it out until one gives up.

A powerful advocate

The ideas that fed into the creation of the SAS did have one very powerful advocate, however. Winston Churchill became a keen supporter of Stirling’s ideas. Indeed, the kind of asymmetrical warfare that the SAS is aligned with was very much Churchill’s baby.

Randolph Churchill’s account of his experience during an early SAS operation fired his father’s imagination.

Churchill’s involvement is one of the more extraordinary aspects of the formation of the SAS. It came through his son, Randolph Churchill, who was a journalist. Though Randolph wasn’t a very good soldier he signed up for the commanders, where he became a friend of Stirling. Randolph was invited to go on what turned out to be a spectacularly unsuccessful SAS raid.

Stirling hoped that if he could enthuse Randolph then he might report it back to his father. Which is exactly what happened. While recovering in a hospital bed after one of Stirling’s abortive attempts to attack Benghazi, Randolph wrote a series of effusive letters to his father describing the single SAS operation. Churchill’s imagination was fired and, from that moment on, the future of the SAS was assured.

We now associate the SAS with extraordinarily fit, efficient and muscular people but the original SAS members weren’t like that. A lot of them were actually very unfit. They drank to excess, smoked all the time and they certainly weren’t paragons of male masculinity. However, they had something going for them: they were pretty bright.

The first SAS mission was a disaster

Nonetheless, bright though the likes of SAS founder David Stirling might have been, the organisation’s first raid, Operation Squatter, was a disaster. In fact, it probably shouldn’t have been allowed to go ahead.

The idea was very simple. Stirling would take 50 parachutists out into the North African desert and drop them about 50 miles away from the coast. They would then proceed to creep up on a series of coastal airstrips, armed with portable bombs and time bombs, and blow up as many planes as they could find. They would then run away, back into the desert.

David Stirling in North Africa during World War Two.

The first problem struck when they set off, and encountered one of the worst storms the area had seen for 30 years. Stirling was given the opportunity to call off the operation decided against it. This decision proved to be a bad mistake: only 22 soldiers came back.

The men landed in the desert in the midst of a howling gale. Some of them were literally scraped to death along the desert floor because they couldn’t unclip their parachutes. It was a disaster. It had been badly thought out and badly planned.

Stirling partially defended his decision

Nonetheless, Stirling always maintained that if the operation hadn’t gone ahead then the SAS would have never happened. It’s true that the SAS was in a very fragile position at that point. It was a fledgling unit and it was very unpopular among the top brass. It’s plausible that Stirling was right and that the whole thing could have been called off completely if he’d pulled the plug on Operation Squatter.

Nonetheless, given the outcome it’s hard not to conclude that he made the wrong decision. A more seasoned commander would probably have concluded that the odds were simply too high.

They conducted a series of night raids across the North African coast

After the disaster of Operation Squatter, Stirling made the wise decision to change his tactics.

After a raid, his men were met at desert rendezvous points by a reconnaissance and intelligence gathering unit called the Long Range Desert Group. The LRDG were very experienced at driving across huge distances of desert and it occurred to Stirling that if they could take his men out to the desert then they could surely take them in again too.

The SAS then teamed up with the LRDG and began a series of raids all across the North African coast. These were remarkable hit-and-run operations carried out over huge distances. They’d drive in at night and then crawl onto the airfields and blow up hundreds of planes.

The main impact upon the enemy was psychological

Of course, it’s very difficult to measure this kind of warfare because the impact is partly psychological – no territory is gained and no soldiers are lost. However, Stirling was very foresighted in this respect.

He saw the morale-sapping effect of such operations on the enemy, who never knew when his men were going to appear out of the darkness and blow them and their planes up. As a direct consequence of these early operations, lots of front-line German soldiers were brought back to defend their airfields.

Another positive impact was the psychological impact that the SAS had on British troops. The war was going very badly for the Allies at that point, and what was really needed was some sort of morale-boosting moment, which the SAS provided.

These romantic figures with their bushy beards and their turbans were like characters from Lawrence of Arabia: suddenly, there was another generation of rugged, butch British soldiers charging across the desert, whose existence had a pretty dramatic effect upon morale.

This article is an edited transcript of World War Two SAS Veteran with Mike Sadler, available on History Hit TV.

I met up with SAS founder David Stirling in Cairo. He intended to get into southern Tunisia and do an operation, possibly on the way to joining up with the First Army and the second SAS, which had both landed there.

We joined up with the Americans and the French – General Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque and his division – who were coming out from Lake Chad.

David Stirling’s brother was in the embassy in Cairo, and he had a flat that David tended to use as his unofficial headquarters. He asked for me to go there to help with the planning of this operation.

Halfway through the meeting, he said, “Mike, I need you as an officer”.

SAS founder David Stirling.

So we then planned this operation, which involved a long desert journey along the inside of Libya to the south of Tunisia. We then had to go through a narrow gap between the sea and a big salt lake, the Gabes Gap, which was only a few miles wide and was a sort of holding point for a possible front line.

We would then join up with David’s brother and give them the benefit of our experience.

Travelling through enemy territory

It was a long journey. In order to get there we had to take some extra Jeeps loaded with petrol cans and then leave them in the desert having removed any useful bits.

We were to meet up with the French SAS unit south of the Gabes Gap.

We drove through the Gabes Gap at night time, which was a nightmare. We suddenly found aeroplanes appearing around us – we were driving across an airfield that we didn’t even know existed.

Then, early next morning, at first light, we drove through a German unit that was gathering its wits by the roadside. We wanted to get to our destination so we just whizzed past.

We knew there was a coastal road, and we knew that there was a route along the south side of the lakes. We kept on driving towards some nice hills in the distance as the sun rose, and we drove across all sorts of scrubby desert fields, thinking we would find shelter of some kind in those hills.

Sherman tanks advance through the Gabes Gap, where the operation started to get hairy.

Finally we found a lovely wadi. I was in the first vehicle navigating and drove up the wadi as far as possible and we stopped there. And then the rest of them stopped all the way down the wadi.

We were absolutely dead because of the long journey and a hard, sleepless night, so we fell asleep.

A narrow escape

Johnny Cooper and I were in sleeping bags and, first thing I knew, I was being kicked by somebody. I looked up and there was an Afrika Korps fellow poking me with his Schmeisser.

We couldn’t reach anything and we had no weapons with us so, in an instantaneous decision, we decided we had to make a break for it – so we did. It was that or end up in a POW camp.

Johnny and I and a Frenchman we’d been allotted from the Lake Chad party scarpered up the hillside. We got to the ridge more dead than alive and managed to hide in a little narrow wadi. Luckily a goat herder came around and shielded us with his goats.

I think they must have looked for us because they knew we’d got away. In fact, oddly enough, a little while ago, I got an account from somebody from a German unit who claimed to have been involved in capturing David. And in it, there was a little description from the chap who wrote it of kicking a man in a sleeping bag and poking him in the ribs with his gun. I think it was me.

We only had what we jumped out of our sleeping bags with, which was nothing. But we did have our boots on. Luckily, we hadn’t removed them.

It was wintertime, so we had some rudiments of military clothing, battledress top and probably a pair of shorts.

We had to wait until sunset, until it got dark, then started moving on.

I knew that if we got about 100 miles along to the west to Tozeur, it might, with luck, be in French hands. We had a long walk but we did eventually manage to get out.

Along the way we met bad Arabs and good Arabs. We were stoned by the bad ones but the good ones gave us an old goatskin full of water. We had to tie up holes in the sides.

We had that leaking goatskin and we had a few dates that they gave us.

“Have these men covered”

We walked more than 100 miles and, of course, our shoes fell to bits.

We arrived, staggering the last few steps towards the palm trees, and some African native troops came out and captured us. And there we were, in Tozeur.

The French were there and they had jerrycans full of Algerian wine, so we had a fairly good welcome!

But they couldn’t keep us because we were in the American zone and they wouldn’t accept responsibility for us. So, later that same night we were carted off and surrendered to the Americans.

That was a funny occasion, too. There was an American war reporter at the local headquarters, and he spoke French. So, when the French people explained our situation, he went up to get the local commander from upstairs and he came down.

We were still clutching my goatskin bag and were really tattered beyond belief. When the commander came in he said, “Have these men covered.”

But he decided we couldn’t stay. It was such a heavy responsibility. So he loaded us into an ambulance and sent us off that very same night to the American headquarters in north Tunisia.

David Stirling, the founder of the SAS, with an SAS jeep patrol in North Africa.

We were followed by this correspondent, who has written a little description of our arrival in a book of his. There was one Jeep full of correspondents, including this chap, and another Jeep full of armed Americans, in case we tried to escape.

Because the area was about 100 miles away from the British or from the Eighth Army, which was the other side of the Gabes Gap, he thought we must be German spies or something.

I was then sent to the headquarters of General Bernard Freyberg and the New Zealand division, which was leading the march on Gabes. I was sent to see him because, having beaten through the country, I knew it well. So I had a couple of days with him. And that was the end of North Africa for me.

We heard that the Germans had bottled up the party in the wadi. David was captured, but managed to escape. I think he escaped in the early days. We were always told that the best chance of escaping was as soon as possible after you’ve been captured.

Unfortunately, having escaped, he was recaptured. I think he then spent time in a prison camp in Italy before eventually ending up in Colditz.

This article is an edited transcript of World War Two SAS Veteran with Mike Sadler, available on History Hit TV.

The first SAS mission took place in North Africa during World War Two and was a disaster. Its men tried to parachute into the desert in a high wind, in the dark, and all with very little experience.

The Long Range Desert Group, a reconnaissance and intelligence gathering unit which I was in at the time, picked up a few survivors, but more than half of the men who took part were killed.

David Stirling, the mastermind of the SAS, was very keen to do another operation as soon as possible so that his unit wouldn’t be dismissed as a disaster and wiped out.

He managed to arrange for the LRDG to take them to their targets for their first successful operation.

It was the first time that we had met the SAS. We drove up from Kufra in southern Libya to Jalu, which was halfway up towards the coast, and met this ragged team of survivors.

We were then allocated a team to go to various airfields. I got Blair Mayne, one of the legendary figures of World War Two in the British Army.

An SAS unit in North Africa. Navigation in the desert was “like being at sea”.

We set off for quite a long westward journey to Tamet. I think it took two or three days.

That part of it was all great fun in those days. I loved the desert and I loved the navigation.

It was a voyage of discovery because the maps, except in the very coastal regions, had nothing much on them except longitude and latitude lines and the odd dotted line marking a camel track or something. It was entirely like being at sea.

When we arrived at Tamet, there was a very long, deep wadi leading up to where the airfield was. We got down in there and Mayne’s men set off on what proved to be a very successful raid. I think they planted bombs on about 30 aeroplanes.

Getting away

That was the most successful of those early SAS raids. On another, Jock Lewes was hit by a striking aircraft. That was the snag about such raids, you were always chased afterwards.

Lewes was hit and killed. He was one of the co-founders of the SAS with Stirling, so he was a great loss.

Escaping the raids was a matter of both hiding and getting out of there as fast as you could, because you couldn’t get that far away.

On one of the raids, my duty was to go to one corner of the airfield while the others drove Jeeps around, shooting up the aircraft. I had to wait until dawn in case somebody had been lost. So I only got away from the airfield at dawn, after the raid, and found myself driving through a German column that had set out into the desert to look for us.

I drove through the column from the back and nobody noticed. I don’t think they expected anyone to be behind. They’d stopped to have a cup of tea on the roadside, and I drove on and out.

Luckily, I then joined up with somebody further down. Everything tended to rely on a bit of luck back then, because we didn’t really know what was going on most of the time.

It was outdoor life and it was quite exciting, if rather alarming at times. I wasn’t all that keen on being shot at, but who was?

David Stirling with an SAS jeep patrol in North Africa.

It was a very hard life. We didn’t have enough water or food for quite long periods. But still, I personally enjoyed it on the whole. You forget about the bad moments to some extent.

I can remember the good times, like camping in the evening when we got a little ration of rum and lime last thing in the day to restore our spirits. And, if you put it in a plate under one of the cars, the breeze would cool it down and make a very nice drink. That’s the sort of thing I remember with pleasure.

This article is an edited transcript of World War Two SAS Veteran with Mike Sadler on Dan Snow’s History Hit, first broadcast 21 May 2016. You can listen to the full episode below or to the full podcast for free on Acast.

I was working in Rhodesia at the start of the war and got into the army there. I went up to Somaliland as an anti-tank gunner before then being sent up to North Africa, to Suez, and ended up digging trenches around Mersa Matruh.

I got a few days of holiday and went to Cairo, where I met a lot of Rhodesians. They mentioned the LRDG, the Long Range Desert Group, which I’d never heard of.

We were drinking in various bars and they asked me if I’d like to join. They needed an anti-tank gunner, which I happened to be at the time.

They told me about the LRDG, a reconnaissance and intelligence gathering unit. It sounded exciting and interesting.

So I suppose I joined the LRDG by virtue of drinking in the right bars.

People tend to think of the LRDG as the forerunner to the SAS, but it wasn’t really, because at the time the SAS was already being formed, and I didn’t know anything about it.

An LRDG truck patrols the desert in 1941.

It was being formed by David Stirling down in the canal zone and the LRDG headquarters at the time were in Kufra, southern Libya.

On the journey down to Kufra, I was so fascinated to see that they had to shoot the stars to find out where we were. I sat out with them during the night to see what they did.

And when we got to Kufra, the first thing they said was, “Would you like to be a navigator?”. And I thought, “Oh, yes”.

I never looked into another anti-tank gun after that.

I became a navigator and learned the business in a fortnight in Kufra and then went out on our patrol. From then on I was the navigator in the LRDG.

At that point the LRDG’s role was mostly reconnaissance because nobody knew anything about the desert.

For some time it was believed in the Cairo HQ that the deserts were more or less impossible and that therefore there was no possible threat coming from the Italians in Libya.

We also did a road watch. We positioned ourselves a long way behind the front lines and sat on the roadside, recording what was travelling up towards the front. That information was then transmitted back that night.

Two chaps would walk down every night to the roadside and lie behind a suitable bush until the following day, recording what went to and fro on the roads.

The first SAS mission had been a disaster, due to the hazards of parachuting in a high wind in the dark, all with very little experience. The LRDG picked up a few survivors, and David Stirling was very keen to do another operation as soon as possible after his initial failure, so his unit wouldn’t be dismissed as a disaster and wiped out.

He managed to arrange for the LRDG to take them to their targets for their first successful operation, and I happened to navigate Paddy Mayne, who was the star operator, to the furthest west airfield in Libya, Wadi Tamet.

Paddy Mayne, the SAS’ star operator, near Kabrit in 1942.

This article is an edited transcript of SAS: Rogue Heroes with Ben Macintyre on Dan Snow’s History Hit, first broadcast 12 June 2017. You can listen to the full episode below or to the full podcast for free on Acast.

Blair “Paddy” Mayne was one of the pillars of the early SAS.

A man of extraordinary nerve but equally a man with a problematic temperament, Mayne epitomised the qualities you’d look for in an SAS operative. But there were undoubtedly aspects of his personality that would cause any commander to doubt his suitability.

Indeed, David Stirling, the founder of the SAS, had real doubts about him at times.

Like adopting a wolf

Mayne was remarkably brave, but he was also not far short of being psychotic. He was the very definition of a loose cannon.

On the battlefield, he had extraordinary nerve – he would do almost anything and people would follow him.

But he was dangerous. If Mayne was drunk then you avoided him like the plague because he was tremendously violent. There was an inner fury to Mayne that was quite remarkable.

Mayne’s story is both tremendously uplifting and also very sad in lots of ways. He was one of those people who thrives in wartime but struggles to find a place for himself in peace. He died very young.

An SAS jeep patrol in North Africa, 1943.

For Stirling, bringing on Mayne was like adopting a wolf. It was exciting but it probably wasn’t that sensible in the end. Mainly, it was extremely dangerous.

Mayne was actually imprisoned for thumping a senior officer when Stirling recruited him. He was that kind of person.

Insane bravery

For all his volatility, Mayne was one of the most highly decorated soldiers in the war. He should really have won the Victoria Cross.

One of his final actions provides a fine example of his insane bravery.

Towards the end of the war, Mayne was driving into Germany. Some of his group were pinned down by enemy machine gun fire in a culvert by the side of the road. He got a volunteer to drive him up the road with a Bren gun while he blasted out the machine gun nests. Mayne was of one of those people who just don’t seem to feel normal fear.

In many ways, Mayne was a critical emblem of the SAS and did much to foster the regiment’s fearsome reputation.

On one night raid, he noticed that a party was going on inside a mess hut in one corner of an airfield. He kicked the door down and, together with two other soldiers, killed everybody inside.

Mayne was simultaneously a heroic figure in the British Army and a bogeyman to the enemy and, as such, he embodied the powerful psychological impact that the SAS had during World War Two.