SAS: The Illustrated History of the SAS

2

THE WHISPERERS

In June 1941, several weeks after Mick Gurmin wandered around Cairo introducing the Middle East to British parachute troops, a small article appeared in the Daily Mirror and various other newspapers worldwide.

Small groups of British paratroopers, flying from southern England, had dropped onto Berck-sur-Mer airfield in the Pas de Calais. Taking the Germans by surprise, they destroyed 30 aircraft on the ground and took prisoners, before boarding motor torpedo boats moored nearby and speeding home to England. This was a brilliantly successful Special Air Service-style parachute raid – but the SAS did not yet exist. So who had carried it out?

The answer was nobody. The raid never took place. It was a story invented by a secret government organisation designed to create fake news. The Sib Committee (from the Latin sibilare, to whisper) was a group of bowler-hatted British worthies who met regularly in the incongruous splendour of Woburn Abbey. They received ideas from spy chiefs before working them up into full stories to be passed around the world by rumour-spreading agents or friendly news agencies. They worked with ‘a mixture of bureaucratic solemnity and schoolboy zest’ to turn fictions like the Berck-sur-Mer raid into apparent facts that might enhance the British war effort.

Fact or fiction, the story’s existence suggests that much of the thinking that would inform the soon-to-be-real SAS was already in place. Dudley Clarke’s carefully curated Middle Eastern scheme was only one link in a chain leading towards the development of ‘Stirling’s Mob’.

An extract from the Daily Mirror, 19 June 1941.

‘Paratroops Hit Nazis’ 19 June 1941, Daily Mirror/Mirrorpix

3

LAWRENCE IN ARABIA

A vital early link in the chain was T.E. Lawrence and his band of Great War desert guerrillas.

The adventures of ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ became the stuff of popular legend after the First World War. A presentation, playing to 10,000 people a day at the Royal Albert Hall, followed by the publication of Lawrence’s exotic memoir, spread the word. With its mix of military adventure, colonial confidence and spice-scented Arabian Nights,* Lawrence’s story served as an antidote to the folk-memory of misery and mass slaughter on the Western Front.

T. E. Lawrence.

T.E. Lawrence, IanDagnall Computing/Alamy

Mohammed El Kadhi, one of Lawrence’s guides.

Poster, public domain

Camels © IWM

By the start of the next war, any mention of ‘the desert’ was liable to turn British thoughts to the legend of Lawrence and his free-spirited warriors. Influential figures were keen to cite him as an inspiration, among them Sir Archibald Wavell and Winston Churchill.

Yet there was plenty of truth behind the legend. Seated on camels, as the SAS would later use trucks and jeeps, Lawrence led self-supporting units of carefully chosen men. His groups were small, though larger than the subsequent four- or five-man SAS teams. And he preferred – at least, usually – to avoid pointless risk or loss of life. ‘To me,’ he wrote, ‘an unnecessary action, or shot, or casualty was not only waste, but sin.’

The railway bridge across the Yarmuk Gorge, which Lawrence and his men tried to destroy in November 1917.

Hejaz Railway, 1908 © IWM

The railway passed through a deep cutting near El Akhthar.

Deep cutting near El Akhthar © IWM

In November 1917 Lawrence mounted a sabotage raid on a railway line passing over the Yarmuk Gorge near the Sea of Galilee. This was a dangerous mission, far behind enemy lines, but it would greatly assist the coming British assault on Beersheba. The plan was to blow a bridge supporting the railway line. Gelignite was to be attached to the girders and a thousand yards of lightweight electric cable were to lead from the explosive to a hand-operated detonator. In the event, however, Lawrence was provided with a much shorter length of inferior cable which would place the detonator just 250 yards from the bridge. But even this was never used. As the raiding party edged towards the bridge, a rifle was dropped with a loud clatter. Enemy guards reacted quickly – and Lawrence’s men had to run for their lives, leaving behind most of their precious cable.

Desperate to salvage something from the botched raid, Lawrence moved south to another stretch of railway line. Near the village of Minifir, explosive was laid beneath the track. Only 60 yards of cable now remained, reaching a solitary bush. As a train passed, Lawrence, hidden behind the bush, pushed down the handle of the detonator – and nothing happened.

Adjustments were swiftly made until, after an agonising wait, another train appeared. This time the explosion was huge. All manner of debris rained down on Lawrence, perched behind his bush:

Between my knees lay the exploder, crushed under a twisted sheet of sooty iron. In front of me was the scalded and smoking upper half of a man. When I peered through the dust and steam of the explosion the whole boiler of the first engine seemed to be missing.

As he came to his senses, under fire from soldiers further down the train, a sentence appeared in Lawrence’s head: ‘Oh, I wish this hadn’t happened.’ Chanting it aloud in the style of a Buddhist mantra, this most unorthodox of British officers stumbled away to safety. His men shot up what they could, suffering casualties in the process, before finally making off into the desert.

For all his obfuscating legend, Lawrence was a truly inventive military thinker. His operations almost invariably took the enemy by surprise. Rather than engaging and attempting to deliver a knockout blow, his men would materialise suddenly to harass lines of communication. This led to opponents being pulled from forward positions to protect the flanks. And in the process, the enemy would come to fear the shapeless threat ‘drifting about like a gas’ somewhere in the silent desert. The psychological effect was profound.

The remains of Lawrence’s sabotaged train, photographed in 2017.

Train, image from gbfilms.com/11th-november-1917

Lowell Thomas, an American journalist who popularised Lawrence’s story after the Great War.

Lowell Thomas, Marist Archives and Special Collections, New York (Ref.1508.1b)

A 1922 portrait of Lawrence by William Roberts. By now, Lawrence was in the Royal Air Force under the name ‘Ross’. The following year he changed his name to ‘Shaw.’

T.E. Lawrence by William Patrick Roberts, © Ashmolean Museum/Estate of John David Roberts. By permission of the Treasury Solicitor/Bridgeman Images

There were fundamental differences, of course, between the Arab force and the SAS as it later developed in the desert. Lawrence’s focus, for example, was on tactical operations while the SAS was intended as a strategic force. But Lawrence’s influence on the wartime SAS would be demonstrated many times in its future activities. From his emphasis on surprising the enemy to his experimentation with new kinds of explosives, the parallels are marked.

Lawrence, for example, was not a man who blindly followed the existing rules. He always looked to adapt theories and practices – as would the SAS throughout its wartime existence. (Although the SAS, as we shall see, would sometimes find itself reacting to the enemy, and sometimes to interference from its own side.)

Yet, similarities aside, Lawrence had another, less obvious but very real impact on the creation of the SAS. He was, as Lord Carver – chief of the general staff and wartime tank commander – has observed, a strong influence on Wavell and Churchill’s preference for irregular methods. Sir David Hunt, a former private secretary to Churchill, goes even further. He notes that the attitudes of senior army officers towards irregular operations in the early part of the Second World War were strongly influenced by memories of two colonels – Lawrence and Blimp. ‘They were like two figures in an allegory,’ writes Hunt, ‘representing Hope and Fear.’ Senior figures knew that, courtesy of Lawrence, the British public approved of unorthodox officers. And they knew that, thanks to the fuddy-duddy cartoon character Colonel Blimp, the public believed regular officers to be alarmingly stupid. These two cultural totems, argues Hunt, made it dangerous for High Command to turn down any unorthodox project.

Colonel Blimp as drawn by David Low.

Colonel Blimp, Bill Brandt/Getty

On this reading, by 1941, the late Thomas Edward Lawrence (or Shaw, as he became to distance himself from celebrity) was practically holding the door open for the SAS.

* Not to mention a whiff of Tutankhamun’s tomb, discovered by Howard Carter in 1922.

4

MOSQUITO ARMY

Clearly the SAS was not the first irregular British unit – or ‘private army’ – to operate in the Middle East. But it was not even the first to operate there during the Second World War. In 1940, Ralph Bagnold (another man heavily influenced by Lawrence) had formed the Long Range Patrol.*

During the 1920s, Bagnold, a signals officer stationed in the Nile Valley, drove off into the desert, and fell in love with it. He was soon leading regular desert expeditions to unmapped regions, culminating in a series of epic motor journeys into the heart of the Egyptian-Libyan desert. He crossed the Great Sand Sea, an arid wilderness of shifting dunes almost as large as Ireland, dismissing it as an area ‘where the careless might well get lost’. Such muscular understatement, reminiscent of a John Buchan hero, obscures the reality. Bagnold and his colleagues were true pioneers whose imagination and hard-won expertise would shape the war in the Middle East and beyond.

During their explorations, Bagnold’s team developed numerous desert tools and techniques. They reduced their tyre pressures, and stripped their cars of unnecessary weight, such as canopies, bonnets and radiator covers. They condensed steam as it boiled out of their radiators, ensuring that engines needed little supplementary water (making more available for drinking). Bagnold even developed his own ‘sun-compass’ to plot a course through an environment without landmarks where no life existed beyond a few lost, starving birds. This daylight compass, which allowed the party to remain on a course set each night by starlight, proved extremely accurate.

After a hundred-mile trek, following the shadow cast by the needle, the expedition would seldom find itself more than a mile off course.

Bagnold also developed a specialised style of driving. The Sand Sea consisted of endless sandy waves, similar in appearance and behaviour to ocean waves. Noticing regular gaps of tightly packed sand between them, Bagnold found that these could be climbed if charged at high speed. He described the experience to armchair explorers in a series of features in The Times newspaper:

Once upon this firm sand all feeling of motion ceases, and even the eye fails, through lack of any detail in the great golden curves, to register speed, direction, or gradient. Only the speedometer, creeping up steadily to 50 or 60 miles an hour tells one to beware. Then – crash! The car stops up to its axles in sand . . .

The group had to learn how to free their vehicles using metal sand channels and canvas sand mats. They had to work out the most suitable clothes to wear and the best rations to carry for weeks away from civilisation. Taken together, these tough lessons gave Bagnold and his colleagues a remarkable degree of self-sufficiency. They would also give the Special Air Service a platform from which to build.

Ralph Bagnold.

Ralph Bagnold, Churchill Archives, Cambridge (Ref. BGND E55)

A Second World War-era sun-compass as originally designed by Bagnold.

Sun compass, National Army Museum

Desert film stills © Royal Geographical Society/Courtesy of the BFI National Archive

Stills from a film documenting Bagnold and his team’s 1929 explorations into the Great Sand Sea.

Bagnold was captivated by his surroundings from the earliest days. He recalls the thrill of ‘driving into unknown and unmapped country where perhaps no one had been since Stone Age people left due to lack of water [and] finding oneself alone among their implements and the ashes of their ancient hearths’.

Many other desert travellers and soldiers shared this excitement. Some were struck by the freedom, others by the romance. George Lloyd, companion to T.E. Lawrence and future colonial secretary, effused in his diary about meeting an Arab sheikh who, in the moonlight, reminded him of ‘some modern Saladin out to meet a crusade’. Ahmed Hassanein, an explorer of the Sand Sea, felt a passion that alternated between joy and despair:

It is as though a man were deeply in love with a very fascinating but cruel woman. She treats him badly, and the world crumples in his hand; at night she smiles on him and the whole world is a paradise. The desert smiles and there is no place on earth worth living in but the desert.

Yet, captivated as he was, Bagnold remained a practical soldier, able to view the desert in level-headed military terms. One evening he found himself camped hundreds of miles south of Cairo alongside an Italian army detachment. Over dinner he chatted with Major Orlando Lorenzini about their shared passion for desert motoring. At the time there was no prospect of war, so Lorenzini felt able to tease Bagnold. What fun it would be, he said, if he were to drive his battalion directly across the southern part of the desert to capture the Aswan Dam. Britain’s command of the region would be jeopardised – yet what could the British possibly do to stop him?

Bagnold’s dinner in the desert with Major Orlando Lorenzini.

Bagnold’s dinner, from Ralph A. Bagnold, Sand, Wind & War: Memoirs of a Desert Explorer, University of Arizona Press (1990)

Bagnold knew that the answer was nothing. The Egyptian-Libyan desert below the coastal corridor, an area almost as large as the Indian peninsula, was of no interest to the British military authorities. There were no plans to set foot in it. And there the matter rested for almost a decade, until the outbreak of war and the now-retired Bagnold’s recall into the British Army.

It would have made sense, in 1939, for Bagnold to be posted to Egypt, but he was sent instead to East Africa, an area about which he knew nothing. On his way to Kenya, however, his troopship was involved in a collision, and he was landed temporarily at Port Said. Taking advantage of the opportunity, Bagnold made a quick detour to Cairo to catch up with old friends. While there, he was recognised by a news reporter who filed a report:

Major Bagnold’s presence in Egypt at this time seems a reassuring indication that one of the cardinal errors of 1914–18 is not to be repeated. During that war, if a man had made a name for himself as an explorer of Egyptian deserts, he would almost certainly . . . have been employed digging tunnels under the Messines Ridge. Nowadays, of course, everything is done better.

The piece (possibly more ironic than it appeared) was spotted by the Daily Telegraph in London, which published its own version. More important for the sake of British wartime prospects, it was spotted by Wavell, the recently appointed Middle East commander, who summoned Bagnold to the shortest of meetings. The result was a posting to a signals unit in Egypt – where Bagnold found the military authorities just as indifferent to the desert as they had been years before.

Given its scant resources, the army’s lack of interest was perhaps understandable. If the Italians were ever to attack Egypt, they would likely mount an assault from Libya along the coastal corridor. Their forces, vastly outnumbering those of the British, would then be met by a single armoured division. But what if Lorenzini, or a similarly desert-minded officer, had already drawn up plans to attack along the southern frontier? Bagnold was disappointed, but hardly surprised, to find that the army had given no thought whatsoever to the vulnerable south. He quickly came up with a plan inspired by his old expeditions. A small force, using adapted American vehicles, could patrol large, otherwise unobservable parts of the desert.

Bagnold’s force would cost very little in financial or manpower terms yet promised to keep a watch on a large area. He sent his plan up the chain of command in late 1939 and again in early 1940, but on both occasions it was rejected before reaching Wavell.

Mussolini declares war on Britain and France from the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia in Rome.

Mussolini declares war, Alinari/TopFoto

Archibald Wavell (far right) makes a point in the desert.

Wavell in the desert, Fotosearch/Getty

In June 1940, however, Italy entered the war in alliance with Germany. The Mediterranean Sea was all but closed to British traffic and the only practicable means of reaching Egypt from Britain was an epic sea voyage around the Cape of Good Hope. An Italian attack on Egypt seemed inevitable.

Leaving nothing to chance, Bagnold now exploited a mutual contact to make sure that a copy of his plan was placed directly in front of Wavell. An hour later, standing in front of the commander-in-chief, Bagnold finally had the chance to sell his idea. He began by explaining that his vehicles could travel anywhere in the desert to observe the Italians. Wavell was unconvinced – so Bagnold tried another approach. ‘How about some piracy on the high desert?’ he asked. Wavell smiled. ‘Can you be ready in six weeks?’

Archibald Wavell, cutting through giant knots of red tape, had just issued Ralph Bagnold, a man who had landed in Egypt by accident, with his own private army. But how would it function, given the likely opposition of the army establishment, and the inevitable obstructions that would be placed in its way? The answer came at once.

New Zealand members of the Long Range Patrol (as it was still known in the Autumn of 1940).

New Zealand members of LRDG, from Ralph A. Bagnold, Sand, Wind & War: Memoirs of a Desert Explorer, University of Arizona Press (1990)

Wavell issued Bagnold with a magic charm in the form of a typed memo. ‘To all heads of department and branches,’ it read, ‘I wish any request made by Major Bagnold in person to be granted immediately and without question.’ Bagnold was astounded by Wavell’s gesture. ‘What a man!’ he later wrote.

Bagnold began to assemble his force straight away. Chevrolet trucks were found and adapted. Tough, eager volunteers from the Second New Zealand Division were recruited. And every crumb of knowledge from Bagnold’s previous expeditions (from headdresses and radiators to sandals and sun-compasses) was applied.

The result was that, on 15 September 1940, as Italian forces invaded Egypt from Libya, a much quieter invasion was underway several hundred miles to the south. This tiny incursion, heading in the opposite direction, consisted of two of Bagnold’s patrols driving across the border into the Libyan desert.

Bagnold’s men were mainly focused on reconnaissance, but with an eye always open for ‘piracy’. Frank Jopling was a New Zealander with one of the patrols. Against regulations, he kept a diary, which forced him to hide himself away at intervals to record his thoughts. They reveal, above all, immense excitement to be involved in a unique adventure: ‘The map of this part of Africa is just a white sheet of paper with no markings on it at all – so I don’t suppose there has ever been anyone here except Major Bagnold in 1932.’

Jopling’s thoughts were confirmed when he spotted tyre tracks in southern Libya which turned out to be the imprints left by Bagnold’s expedition eight years before. As time went on, Jopling became enthused by many of Bagnold’s old enthusiasms. He was excited to find stone artefacts in the remains of an ancient village. And he could barely contain his wonder at the strangeness of desert driving:

Talk about thrills, it was great!! Travelling at 80kph up and down smooth sand dunes. I had to keep looking at the speedo to see if we were moving, to look at the sand in front you would think that we were standing still.

A feature of the diary is how strikingly, in its descriptions of the patrol’s daily existence, it anticipates the SAS. When a truck was stuck deep in the sand, for example, all ranks were encouraged to come up with a solution. The men were not sidelined. Eventually an ordinary trooper improvised a method for setting the truck free. In this unit, everyone had to be able to think for themselves, as Jopling understood: ‘When Major Bagnold decided on who to have on the trip, he wanted good daring drivers who could use their heads.’

Long Range Desert Group life in 1941. Note the man asleep on the truck.

LRDG life 1941, IWM 15623

Chevrolet trucks on their way to attack Murzuk.

Chevrolet trucks, from W.B. Kennedy Shaw, Long Range Desert, Collins (1945)

The result was increased responsibility, greater self-respect and less distinction between ranks. Jopling was surprised, one morning, to be served his morning tea in bed by his troop leader. ‘What a war!’ he marvelled. Traditional relationships and behaviours were shifting. The SAS would become noted for its relaxed, self-imposed discipline – but this was really an inherited trait.

The Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) also anticipated the SAS in its willingness to attack. A year before the SAS began operations, desert raiding was underway.

Twice in September, Jopling’s patrol tried to ambush Italian desert camps, only to find them abandoned. A number of trucks were captured, however, together with prisoners. Jopling’s patrol then raided an Italian fort on the western edge of the Great Sand Sea at Awjila. But the most ambitious attack came when Wavell gave Bagnold free rein to pick his own target. Bagnold chose Murzuk, an Italian garrison and aerodrome near the south-west corner of Libya, well over a thousand miles from Cairo. Jopling took part in the assault, which inflicted serious damage and heavy casualties. He then watched as enemy aircraft were soaked in petrol and set on fire.

By the spring of 1941, Wavell’s ‘mosquito army’ (as he privately described the Long Range Desert Group) was watching enemy movements, attacking their positions, capturing men and vehicles, destroying aircraft, transporting spies, rescuing lost souls, and ranging freely across unexplored desert. It would shortly accept another role – transporting Special Air Service men to and from raids.† This is how the LRDG and the SAS are most widely