Original subtitles

Close to midnight on July 26th 1942

a convoy of heavily armed jeeps

rumbled across the pitch black of the North African desert.

BEN: Their mission was to destroy one of the Nazis' most highly prized airfields

on the Egyptian coast.

The jeep force was massively outnumbered

their vehicles unarmoured. Only surprise was on their side.

Success would make these men legends

failure would mean the death of their highly secret and radical new combat unit.

BEN: The convoy stormed onto the airfield.

This was the most daring mission yet for the men of the SAS.

By 1942 Hitler had dominated Europe

and was seeking to conquer North Africa.

Armed with superior air power, his star General Erwin Rommel

had launched a lightening strike

driving the British back to their last stronghold. Egypt

and to the brink of disaster.

Egypt had to be held at all costs.

David Stirling had created the SAS

to attack the enemy from deep behind their lines

but now his missions would have to grow ever more ambitious and dangerous.

With unprecedented access to the secret SAS files

unseen archive footage

and exclusive interviews with its founder members

this series tells the remarkable story

behind the world's most extraordinary fighting force.

They'd have been Viking raiders, without a doubt, I think, most of them.

Listen, I'm sorry, you've had it, you're just numbers.

My own assessment... I thought this is the end of us.

In early June 1942

a nervous young army doctor reported for duty

at a remote camp in the North African desert.

27-year-old Malcolm Pleydell had been assigned to a highly secret unit

and had absolutely no idea what he was letting himself in for.

All he knew was that the force was hidden deep in the desert. far from British HQ

and commanded by a young daredevil officer.

The newly-promoted Major David Stirling.

Stirling greeted him warmly, shook his hand

and then there was a series of deafening explosions.

Stirling was apologetic and remarkably polite,.

The men, he explained, would shortly be going out on a party

and all those horrible bangs were in preparation

for a series of night attacks on enemy airfields.

"And by the way," Stirling asked, "have you had lunch?"

Pleydell had been expecting a man of blood and steel

a ruthless trained killer.

Instead, he'd been made to feel as if?

He'd been invited to a particularly jolly beach party

with bombs.

Malcolm Pleydell decided he was going to enjoy being part of 'L' Detachment, SAS.

The original men of the SAS have long since passed away

but in 1987 a handful of them told their story on film.

MAN: 57, take 1.

At the heart of this unique collection is an interview with their leader, David Stirling

On whose philosophy the unit was based.

First was the exploitation of surprise to the greatest degree.

A form of technique that would take the Germans from behind.

Our proposition was the effect that we could knock out...

the entire German fighter force

cos they had control of the air at that time.

The SAS was formed by David Stirling in 1941

as a crack Commando force

to attack aircraft deep behind enemy lines.

The work was hard, dirty and dangerous.

And Stirling came to realise that he needed a Medical Officer.

By extreme good fortune, he was allocated Malcolm James Pleydell.

Pleydell was a gentle soul. Earnest, sensitive and a little solemn.

Like all the best doctors. Pleydell was a keen student of human nature

and would emerge as the most astute observer and chronicler of the SAS.

Scribbled in pencil between missions, Pleydell's notes survive

as a powerful eyewitness account of the desert war

and the SAS men who fought in it.

It did not take Pleydell long to realise he had joined a most peculiar outfit.

There was none of the spit and polish he had encountered in the regular army.

This. he wrote. was a ruffianly-bearded, unkempt and ill-clothed mob.

My father was a young man, hungry for adventure

and I think he felt that every young man should do what they could for their country.

And I think he was quite surprised

when he found himself surrounded by a very motley crew

I think you could probably describe them.

I think he found it quite difficult

because, of course, he was way out of his environment

and there were a lot of very tough guys, who'd been doing a lot of training.

MAN: 13, take 1.

In 1987. those surviving ruffians of the SAS

also gave their unique testimony.

ALMONDS: They'd been Viking raiders, without a doubt

I think, most of them.

Drink and be merry boys, and so on, was very typical of the attitude

in which the Vikings sailed across the North Sea

to ravish the coast of Britain and Europe.

I hated the the existence of too much poly on your boots

and being turned out impeccable.

I liked a bit of fun. I liked the booze.

Don't forget, there's a war on

and that's what you went into the army for.

Only one man gave Pleydell pause -

the new second in command, Captain Paddy Mayne

a hulking, brooding figure and a prodigious drinker

who always seemed to want to pick a fight.

Mayne was the unit's best warrior

with the biggest tally of destroyed enemy aircraft to his name.

But his methods were brutal, even by the standards of the SAS.

Mayne 's execution in cold blood of 30 of the enemy during a desert raid

had established him as a man without mercy.

In his diary, Pleydell wrote: "Fighting was in Mayne's blood.

For him there were no rules."

Paddy Mayne, who my father always said rather affectionately

was completely mad

was somebody who was just gonna go out and fight the war whatever it took

and however you did it.

I don't think nerves or self-preservation ever came into it.

Medically, he would have done what he was told

to a certain extent, if it suited him.

Pleydell quickly learned that this hand-picked band of unconventional fighters

was a lethal force with an ability to think and act independently.

It perfectly suited their commander's vision for a new kind of war.

The men held David Stirling in the highest regard.

There was about him a charm which it would be impossible to describe. noted Pleydell

and this made him very difficult to deny.

I think one of the great things about David was he never sat still.

He always had a project on of some kind.

He was always trying to make something happen

or to further something or put his ideas into practice.

David being - as he was - dyslexic, he looked at things differently.

He had a vision of what he wanted to do.

Everything that happened was David's plan.

He clearly believed in what he was trying to do

and, you know, that's very beguiling.

Stirling had founded the SAS on the principles of independence

a fighting force, free to attack whenever and wherever they wanted.

But to get to the targets

Stirling still had to rely on the trucks of the Long Range Desert Group

or LRDG - an army unit expert in navigation deep in the desert

which had ferried his men to and from their missions.

Stirling decided that it was a very good idea to do our own transport.

So he had heard...

that there were some jeeps coming to the Middle East

and he... to use a word, borrowed some.

BROADCASTER: Meet the jeep.

Smooth easy riding on this kind of surface is one thing

but this is quite a different story.

Britain 's American Allies were now supporting the war effort

including the supply of a brand new utility vehicle

the Rugged Willys jeep.

BROADCASTER: The jeep might well be called a motorised terrier.

As the first jeeps arrived in North Africa

Stirling persuaded High Command to give him a few

and began the transformation of his unit.

SAS engineers installed water condensers to aid engine cooling

added extra fuel tanks to increase the range

and. crucially, armed the vehicles with machine guns

capable of firing up to 1,200 rounds per minute.

The firepower coming from the troop was terrific, absolutely terrific.

Now Stirling's men could stay behind enemy lines for weeks. even months

driving themselves straight to the enemy airfields

to strike harder and faster than ever before.

The hugely valuable partnership with the LRDG was now nearing an end.

With their own fleet of jeeps, the SAS now needed their own navigators.

One of their best navigators. Corporal Mike Sadler

had proved vital in guiding the SAS to their targets.

Now aged 96

he's the last man alive to remember Stirling 's missions in the desert.

You had joined the LRDG but then you transferred to the SAS.

Tell us how that happened. - That's right.

David Stirling had had a limited experience of me as a navigator, I suppose

so he got hold of me from the LRDG

and the machinery was put into motion for transferring me into the SAS.

Stirling appointed Sadler the unit's Senior Navigator

and without any official authorisation, promoted him,.

SADLER: "Mike, I want you to be an officer.

Go down the bazaar and get yourself some pips"

which I did.

Sadler was - sartorially, at least - transformed into a Lieutenant.

I got back to Cairo some long time later

and I don't think the paperwork had been attended to

and the military secretary sent for me and he said

"I hear you've been masquerading as an officer.".

But somehow they sorted it all out

and I was lucky enough to be promoted at that stage.

Armed with his new jeep force and expert navigation

it was time for Stirling to go hunting.

Rommel's advance into Egypt was supported by fighters and bombers

operating from airfields along the Egyptian and Libyan coasts.

Stirling 's mission was to drive his entire force deep behind enemy lines

and launch lightening raids on Rommel's airfields

before disappearing to a secret camp

deep in the desert.

On July 4th. the convoy passed through the frontline of the 8th Army at El Alamein

and headed into the No Man's Land beyond

with no plans to come back for at least a month.

Pleydell sensed the importance of their mission.

In his diary, he wrote:

"The line holding Rommel in check before the very gates of Alexandria

looked so frail and thin."

Night after night, Stirling's men attacked completely unsuspecting enemy airfields

all along the coast.

They planted time bombs on every plane they could find

then ran for the darkness of the desert

knowing that at first light the enemy would give chase,.

Getting out, you had to clear the fighter zone.

Put your foot down

and make sure that you was a bit out of fighter range, at least.

As dawn broke. the sky filled with squadrons of aircraft hunting the desert.

Any jeep caught out in the open faced a battle to survive.

SEEKINGS: Fighters could only make about one pass at you

and then they'd gotta return to base to refill.

If you could see a little bit more one wing than the other

you knew he was going right or he was going left

and you knew exactly where the fire was going.

If you saw full width of wing

equal with the wing on each side of the fuselage

you knew that you'd had your chips.

The records of those first jeep missions are contained in the secret War Diary -

a unique collection of combat reports, compiled by the men themselves.

The diary lists the extraordinary destruction Stirling 's raiders caused.

In one week alone. they destroyed over 100 enemy aircraft.

But while the tally mounted, so did the toll of SAS men killed by enemy fire.

Pleydell tended to the wounded at the desert hideout

quietly noting the names of those who had not returned.

"How strange the desert war seemed," wrote Pleydell

"the way we travelled over vast tracts of wilderness

in order to search out and kill one and another."

The men almost never talked about their dead comrades.

He noted: "To suggest a person was worried in the slightest degree

was equivalent to the vilest form of abuse."

To turn round and say "Oh, I'm gonna get the chop"

sure as hell you'll get the chop, cos you're wishing it upon yourself.

You forget that side, that's a that's a risk that you accept as a soldier.

That's what it should be.

I mean, we joined to fight the war, we knew what it was about.

KERSHAW: "If your name's on the bullet, you'll get it."

That's a load of rubbish, that is.

We were given a job to do

and we simply did it.

Between missions the men would spend their nights by the campfire

in their remote desert hideout.

In his diary, Pleydell noted:

"As it grew darker, the men began to sing.

At first slightly shy and self-conscious

but growing in confidence as the songs spread."

MEN SING: 'Lily of the Lamplight'

"The bigger and burlier the singer," he noted

"the more passionate and heartfelt the singing."

SONG CONTINUES

"There was something special about that night.“ Pleydell wrote

"an expression of feeling that defied the vastness of the desert."

ALISON: I always remember him saying that when the boys had been out on operation

it was always a huge relief when everybody got back safely.

They cared a lot for each other

and I think they all became naturally quite close.

SINGING CONTINUES

GERMAN RADIO PLAYS

Tales of the SAS had begun to spread on both sides of the frontline.

It was said that German radio had even bestowed a nickname

on their shadowy commander - 'the Phantom Major'.

Rommel had been bitten hard.

"These Commandos have caused considerable havoc," he wrote.

But notoriety came at a price.

COOPER: The Germans had to increase their security.

Well, to begin with, they started putting one man on every plane

or three men on every plane

and then, of course, they started putting certain wire barriers round the outside

and putting defences, so we had to change our tactics

otherwise we would have taken a lot of casualties.

In the summer of 1942, military intelligence alerted Stirling to a major new target.

Rommel's frontlines were being supplied by transport planes

from Sidi Haneish Air Base.

Consequently. it was one of the most heavily guarded airfields

of the Nazi war effort,.

Sneaking up to the airfields and bombing the planes on foot was no longer an option,.

This time Stirling proposed to go in with all guns blazing.

18 jeeps in two columns would storm the airfield and shoot up the aircraft.

Stirling was confident that the wall Of fire from his 68 guns

would destroy everything before the enemy had time to react.

This would be a high-speed hit-and-run attack.

On the night of July 26th 1942

Stirling and his massed jeep force set out on their mission.

They would need to approach Sidi Haneish as stealthily as possible

and so rode across the desert by the light of the moon. guided by the stars.

Crossing a vast desert in the middle of the night

with no headlights and no reliable map

was the sort of task that only a navigator who was either brilliant or mad

would have undertaken.

Navigator Mike Sadler was tasked with getting them to the target on time

but Stirling was becoming impatient.

SADLER: He thought that we should be there.

I think he basically felt that we should have arrived

so at the last occasion, he came to ask me where where it was

I said "I think it should be about mile ahead"

and just at that moment, they switched on the landing lights

and they stretched right across the front of us

just about a mile ahead.

That was a very exciting moment.

That really gave one quite a boost.

The convoy smashed through the perimeter, sending the defenders scrambling.

The first plane exploded with such ferocious heat

the men felt their eyelashes and beards singe.

The defenders had been taken by surprise, but soon they were fighting back.

Johnny Cooper was in the lead jeep with David Stirling.

Suddenly there was a hell of an explosion, and we stopped.

Stirling said: "Why won't it go, why won't it go?"

Reg said: "Well, don't get out and look, but we haven't got an engine."

Of six on either side, we were in the centre

we were the only one to be hit but fortunately we weren't hit

but it was an act of God, perhaps, that we were missed.

Picked up by another jeep

Stirling and his men hurtled through a gap in the barbed wire

leaving behind 18 enemy aircraft destroyed

and many more severely damaged.

At a time when Rommel threatened to dominate the battlefield

Stirling 's raiders added a dash of exotic adventure.

Like Lawrence of Arabia

they were playing the part of swashbuckling desert fighters.

Stirling returned to Cairo, the master of hit-and-run.

Pleydell reflected that he had never been so content.

"I fell asleep," he wrote

"wondering if I should ever be able to grow a decent beard

like some of the other chaps."

News of Stirling 's triumph was not greeted warmly by everybody at HO.

There were many who saw the SAS as little more than a thuggish private army,.

So there was a core of mediocrity, which wanted to defend itself

against having to make things more difficult.

And anything as unconventional as 'L' Detachment

which came out of no text book

they really got together in disliking.

They wanted to disband us

or they wanted to take... not part of our glory

but they wanted to get rid of us

a small band of people

which were doing so much damage to their pride

because they hadn't been able to do it themselves.

On August 8th, David Stirling shaved, bathed

climbed into a borrowed dinner jacket

and prepared to mount an operation of a different sort -

a charm offensive against Winston Churchill.

News Of Stirling 's exploits had reached the Prime Minister

and he was keen to learn more about the famed desert warrior.

In the space of a few days

David Stirling had gone from blowing up planes in the desert with machine guns

to dining with Prime Ministers and Generals in evening dress.

It was a strange war.

At a table set with silver and laden with the best food

David Stirling dazzled the Prime Minister with his tales of near-death escapes

fast cars and derring-do.

ARCHIE STIRLING: Churchill dressed in his evening boiler suit

pink-faced and ruddy and holding forth

and he described David when he went, he said:

"The mildest mannered man who ever scuttled a ship or out a throat."

And that, in fact, was from Lord Byron's Don Juan.

Before leaving. Stirling asked Churchill and the Generals to sign a piece of paper

as a souvenir of the evening.

For Stirling. the dinner party had been a complete success,.

And he'd obtained a blank sheet of paper

with the autographs of three of the most powerful people in the war.

On it he would type:

"Please give the bearer every possible assistance."

Stirling had no qualms whatever about this blatant forgery.

Churchill had become a staunch supporter of the unit, he explained

and so, in a sense, it was authentic.

The SAS had pioneered a new sort of war based on stealth and economy.

Small groups of men achieving disproportionate results,.

But the next mission would force Stirling to compromise the founding ideals of the SAS

and place the very future of the unit in jeopardy.

On August 13th. Churchill appointed General Bernard Montgomery

to plan an attack of such scale that it could turn the tide of the desert war.

To punch Rommel where it would hurt most

Stirling was ordered to capture his biggest port of supply

Benghazi in Libya.

This time, instead of a stealthy night attack

he would be leading an army of more than 200 men

in a convoy of 80 vehicles, including two tanks.

Stirling claimed to have had deep misgivings about the operation from the start

but he made no official objection.

An added incentive may have been the suggestion

that the unit would be expanded if the raid proved a success.

SEEKINGS: There was a lot of controversy about this

because it was an operation on such a large scale

for the main party going into Benghazi was more like a, you know...

...a regimental or brigade attack, sort of thing?

And a lot of people disagreed with it.

But the thing was we had a job to do.

In early September 7942. Stirling 's force of 200 men

trucks. tanks and 40 jeeps set out.

The group was in good spirits.

Pleydell was told that within a week he'd be running the hospital in Benghazi.

But in almost no time, the tanks were stuck in the sand.

The convoy hit mines hidden in the desert tracks

and reports were coming in from spies in Benghazi

warning that the date of the attack was being freely mentioned.

Stirling sent a wireless message to Headquarters

warning that the mission might have been compromised.

He was ordered to ignore such gossip.

The operation would go ahead.

We even...

It felt that they'd been deliberately leaked, which I don't think for one minute it had

but it certainly appeared to the ordinary soldier

that something had.

The main raiding party descended the escarpment

and trundled along the road into Benghazi.

At the head of the convoy was the SAS Sergeant. Jim Almonds

affectionately known as 'Gentleman Jim'.

ALMONDS: When we finally arrived at Benghazi

it was getting dangerously close to dawn

and we arrived at this...

...laneway leading up from the desert into the town

and then it became barb-wired either side, so you couldn't turn off the lane

and eventually we came up to a road barrier.

I suppose I got to within about 40, 50 paces of this

when the firing started.

They had driven straight into ah ambush.

Almonds and his gunner were stranded when their vehicle was hit.

BEN: They could hear the enemy troops approaching.

Within moments, they would be surrounded.

ALMONDS: I said to Fletcher:

"Well, if they catch us like this, we're gonna be shot.

Our only chance is for me to stand up

if you're agreeable, and say "Right, we're here"

and we'll see what happens.

And I stood up and they closed in.

We were in the bag.

For the rest of the men, the ordeal had just begun.

For the next two days

the force was mercilessly attacked from the air.

Between attacks. Pleydell desperately tried to save the wounded.

He later noted that "Many were far beyond any crude help I could give.“

I remember him saying that it was really horrible

having to do a major operation in those conditions.

I'm talking about amputating half a leg or something like that

when everything was very primitive.

With most Of the vehicles destroyed by the enemy

only a few of the wounded could be transported home,.

Reg Seekings. a former boxer and one of the toughest men in the unit

took a typically brutal line.

Oh, I had to turn round and make the hardest little speech I'd ever made in my life.

I said: "I'm sorry, you've had it, you're just numbers."

I said "I've got 12, 14 men there, they're fit

they're ready to fight another day.

If I can get 'em clear, they can carrying on fighting.

You can't. I'm sorry."

I hated doing that..

I absolutely hated it, but it was my job.

It's got to be... you've got to. If you're doing a hard job, and a tough job

you've gotta be hard and tough yourself.

You've got to make yourself callous, otherwise you're not going to survive.

You can't survive, you'll go round the bend.

After all, what is it all about? It's winning a war, isn't it?

So you've got to do these sort of things.

Against his better judgement

Stirling had led a massed raiding force head on into Benghazi.

He returned having lost more than a quarter of his men.

None of the wounded left behind survived.

A few months earlier, such a failure might have spelt doom for the SAS

but there was little appetite to give Stirling the blame.

He now had friends in very high places.

These are Stirling's top secret messages to Winston Churchill

outlining the thoughts he had shared with the Prime Minister over dinner.

"I venture to submit the following proposals.

The scope of the SAS should be extended

to cover all functions of special services in the Middle East

control to rest with the officer commanding 'L' Detachment

and not with any other outside body."

Stirling's proposal amounted to nothing less than a power grab

and Churchill was happy to oblige.

On his return to Cairo, Stirling was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel

and told that the unit was being granted exactly what he had always dreamt for it.

Proudly displayed in the War Diary, his order, number 14521

granting 'L' Detachment full regimental status.

"The unit has had conspicuous success," it says, "and morale is high."

At the age of 26

Stirling had become the first man to create his own new regiment

since the Boer War.

With over 600 men now under his command

he could launch more of his lightening raids than ever before.

But as Stirling celebrated

Rommel was getting ever closer to identifying the Phantom Major.

After being captured in Benghazi

'Gentleman Jim' Almonds had been dragged through the streets

spat at and abused.

DOOR BANGS

Now in a military jail

Almonds was being pumped for information by the enemy.

We were chained up, two hands chained down to one foot

which is an awkward position to either sit in or anything else.

And were interrogated.

Their method of interrogation... it varied enormously.

Sometimes you were browbeaten and bullied and threatened and so on

and another time they laid on a bath and gave me a fine meal and everything

a packet of cigarettes and all sorts of luxuries of that sort.

And although they didn't get what they want

I got a jolly good meal out of it.

And later on we were taken down and put in the prison camp.

Almonds discovered he was sharing a cell with another British prisoner

who identified himself as Captain John Richards.

Richards claimed he'd been captured while escaping across the desert

but Almonds observed that he didn't seem tired

and he was wearing a brand new pair of Italian boots.

Captain Richards was not the British officer he appeared to be.

He was a stool pigeon.

One of the oldest and nastiest species of spy.

His real name was Theodore John William Schurch

a defector from the British army and a committed fascist.

His job was to prowl the prisoner of war camps

impersonating a friendly officer

and gaining vital information about the SAS.

Almonds gave nothing away, but other prisoners were less cautious.

Slowly German intelligence was putting together an accurate picture

of the strength. organisation and leadership of the SAS.

Rommel sent out specialised troops to hunt them down.

The greatest threat to Stirling's unit now came from a spy

who looked and sounded like a British officer.

MAN: Fire!

On October 23rd. Montgomery launched his great counter-attack at El Alamein

hurling nearly 200.000 men and a thousand tanks

at Rommel's Panzer army.

As the British pursued Rommel from the east

a new battlefront was opened up in the west.

On the 8th of November. Anglo-US forces landed in North West Africa

driving the Nazis into Tunisia.

Rommel was trapped in a vice that would soon close with crushing force.

The final chapter of the desert war was about to open

and Stirling was determined to write himself into it.

Stirling proposed to use the SAS to harry the retreating Germans

but for himself, he had a more dramatic role in mind.

He planned to drive through the German lines

and become the first Desert Rat to greet the advancing Americans.

But in between the two Allied armies

lay largely uncharted desert, a huge force of Axis troops

and an enormous, impassable salt marsh.

Success might yield further expansion of the regiment. perhaps to brigade status.

In Stirling's imagination, the SAS might even swell to three separate regiments

operating in the Eastern Mediterranean. Italy and into Northern Europe.

But the SAS doctor, Malcolm Pleydell

was deeply concerned about Stirling leading the mission.

To his trained eye. Stirling looked far from strong.

He had migraines, he had this blacking out

and at one stage he was covered in desert sores

and he should never have gone out.

He just had sulphur tablets, no proper medication.

He wouldn't see doctors, he wouldn't go to hospital

and then he'd go out again.

Pleydell was in no doubt

Stirling was no longer fighting fit

and his plan was nothing short of madness.

This unique footage shows the men of the SAS preparing for action.

Ahead of them lay 300 miles of largely uncharted territory

a distance that far exceeded the range of the jeeps.

Stirling turned to his Senior Navigator. Mike Sadler, for a solution.

SADLER: We couldn't cover the journey

except by sacrificing a certain number of vehicles.

This was loading a certain number of jeeps up completely with petrol

with a view to dumping them

once their petrol could be transferred onto other ones

and just leaving them in the desert.

On January 16th 1943

Stirling 's column of five jeeps split away from the main force

and set off into the unknown,.

SADLER: To get into Tunisia, we had to go through the Gabès Gap.

We didn't have much information about that Gap.

Sharing navigational duties was SAS original Johnny Cooper.

COOPER: You've got the salt marsh almost up to the main road

and from the main road to the sea you've only got about another 500 yards

so it's a very narrow gap.

Going through there, we found ourselves driving across an airfield

which we didn't know existed.

And at dawn, we motored down the main road, the metal road

through a German armed division, all getting out of bed.

And David said, "Well, we've gotta get off the road"

and we went off to the left into these very deep ravines

and we split up and we put one jeep down this wadi

one jeep down that wadi.

SADLER: After we had done all the camouflage and the rest of it

we mistakenly thought we were well concealed.

Exhausted after 36 hours driving

the men settled down to sleep.

Before turning in. Sadler and Cooper were sent to scout the area.

COOPER: We looked down and there were lots of troops getting out of vehicles

and we thought they were all getting out just to have a pee

and they would get back in again.

And we stayed there for some time

and we were so damn tired, we didn't think.

Cooper and Sadler reported back that there was nothing to fear.

They had no idea that Rommel's units were out hunting them.

SADLER: The next thing that I knew, I was in in my sleeping bag

and heard some footsteps

looked up and there there were two German parachutists.

There was nothing much one could do

because our guns were all camouflaged

underneath the netting and the tarpaulins and so on

and so we were really stuck.

The Germans made a gesture to us to keep on lying there

and moved on down the wadi.

David said: "Now, every man for himself.".

COOPER: Mike and I ran up the wadi.

David went the other way.

Stirling and most of the men had made the wrong choice,.

They ran headlong into more than 500 enemy troops.

Sadler, Cooper and an SAS sergeant

were the only ones not caught in the Nazi snare.

I've never run so hard or for so long until I just couldn't go any further

and we then got down into a little wadi.

The sound of gunfire echoed up the valley.

Cooper and Sadler believed their comrades had already been shot.

They were certain they would be next.

I said: "What's the word for surrender?"

We were saying: "Well it's 'camarade'" or whatever it was

and a flock of goats came round our little hole.

GOATS BLEAT

Whether an Arab was grazing the sheep up there

and whether it was intentional

or whether it was the sheep's inclination to stand round us, I don't know

but they gave us a degree of protection.

We heard a lot of shooting, we heard all our vehicles started up

we heard the evacuation, the German paratroopers came right through the area

and we waited until night.

At dawn, alone in the vast desert

the remaining SAS men would have to use all their training to survive.

SADLER: We decided that the only thing to do

was to set out for where we hoped we might find the Americans

which was in Tozeur, about 100 miles to the west of where we were

along the edge of the Great Salt Lakes.

COOPER: We had a one in a million map

and a compass, no water, no food, no arms.

From dusk to daybreak

they trudged across mile upon mile of featureless desert.

They were brutally attacked by tribesmen, their clothing torn to rags.

Salt water drunk from a marsh threatened delirium.

By the fourth day, they were nearing collapse,.

TYPEWRITER TAPS

In the sleepy outpost of Gafsa, the forward point of the American advance

a journalist gazed out over the desert hoping for a scoop.

A.J. Liebling, the celebrated war correspondent

for The New Yorker magazine

thought this was the most likely place for the two Allied armies to connect-

a moment he wanted to witness.

The story did not arrive in the form he had expected.

The great event occurred when an officer of the French Foreign Legion arrived

followed by a trio of tramps.

"Their shoes were wrapped in rags," wrote Liebling.

“Their feet must be a mass of blisters.

All three were wearing khaki battledress

from which great swatches of material were missing

evidently to make bandages.

And their eyes seemed preternaturally large

and in one case really protuberant."

Liebling was incredulous. So were the American generals.

"Are you really from the Eighth Army?"

He didn't like the look of us, cos we'd been walking then for three days and nights

and crawling over the salt lake and avoiding Arabs and so on

and we were in a very poor way.

But he thought we looked suspicious.

I don't think they really understood what we were doing

or how we went about it.

They were mesmerised

and they just didn't believe us for a long, long time

until the signal came from Cairo, saying: "Yes, yes, they're alright."

Linking up with the Americans after such a heroic feat of endurance

and then being celebrated in The New Yorker

would have delighted David Stirling

if he'd been around to see it.

As Liebling's interview drew to a close. Cooper's face suddenly fell.

"Big Dave must have been killed."

Stirling had not been killed, although he had come very close,.

Left with no option but to surrender

he was bound and taken under heavy guard to the Italian headquarters.

There he was interrogated by an Italian military intelligence officer?

But refused to give anything away.

A few hours later, David Stirling was marched onto an aircraft

and flown to Sicily.

At last, Rommel had caught the Phantom Major.

He wanted to be dropped into Italy or wherever he was

and given a free reign, whether it took us weeks or months to get him out

so we fought and fought for this

but somewhere along the line

most probably some people wanted to see Colonel David where he was.

Most probably. I don't know.

There was the whole symbol

that had gone

and of course it left everybody worried what was going to happen.

My own assessment, David's loss, I thought this is the end of us!

After so many months of frenetic activity

Stirling found the inertia of prison life indescribably boring.

But among his fellow prisoners, he discovered a kindred spirit.

The man in the next cell introduced himself

as Captain John Richards.

Teddy Schurch had been flown to Rome

with orders to obtain all the information he could get

from this most important prisoner.

Stirling later claimed that he had known all along that Captain Richards was a fraud.

But Schurch remembered their conversation rather differently.

"I was told to obtain the name of Stirling's successor.

This I found to be Captain Paddy Mayne."

With Stirling a prisoner of the Nazis

leadership of the SAS was handed to his second in command

the fiery, inspiring and occasionally violent Northern Irishman

Captain Paddy Mayne.

He was beloved and respected for his fearless command in combat

but bravery is only one aspect of leadership.

Baffled and bored by paperwork and prone to drunken rages

Mayne lacked Stirling 's willingness to charm the top brass

many of whom believed the SAS had outlived its usefulness.

BENNETT: Paddy was a brilliant officer

but I think Paddy always needed an eye on him

and Colonel David was a man that kept an eye on him

and kept him, you know, on the ball.

SADLER: He was physically terribly tough

and a very nice and kind fellow most of the time.

Once he had gone beyond a certain point, drinking

he became somebody quite different.

SEEKINGS: We wondered whether Paddy had got the right connections

and he'd certainly ruffled a lot of feathers

and we wondered whether he could weather the storm.

The SAS had been forged in the heat of the desert

by a maverick young soldier

who had challenged conventional military thinking

and proven it wrong.

In a little over a year

David Stirling and the SAS had destroyed 324 Axis aircraft

terrorised the enemy and helped the Allies to defeat Rommel.

But as the SAS prepared to fight Hitler in Europe

they would be without the leadership of the man who had created them.

Stirling would spend the rest of the war as a prisoner of the Nazis

powerless to stop those in British High Command

who wanted to see his renegade unit disbanded.

They...

Regarded it as an opportunity, I think

of reeling the troublesome SAS in

and regularising it

Em...

and for a time, they apparently succeeded

but they didn't appreciate the heavy metal

that Paddy and his boys represented.

There was no way they were going to win.

With the future of the SAS uncertain

Malcom Pleydell took a new posting at the General Hospital in Cairo.

"Without Stirling, " Pleydell lamented, "this ship has ho rudder. "

The day that he had to leave the SAS was one of regret

because I think they'd all become quite close

and I think to leave people that you've spent 24 hours a day with

must be very difficult.

Pleydell had fallen in love with a regiment that broke all the rules.

He left them with a hymn of love to the desert,.

"Here in these little cliffs and caves that had been our hiding places

we had left our mark,.

We had matured. We had discovered our fears and our reactions to danger

and had tried to overcome them.

This was the bequest of the desert. Our time had not been wasted."

ALISON: He was very proud to have been in that unit.

He thought that those people were something else.

They were a really special...

...special group of men.

STIRLING: There was no way any ordinary individual in the army

any ordinary, well-qualified commanding officer

could command those blokes.

I mean, it was impossible.

Because they were past responding to the old type of regulations.

Ripped & Corrected By mstoll February 2017

Ripped & Corrected By mstoll March 2017 - Released on www.Addic7ed.com