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The SAS in WW2: everything you wanted to know
00:51:11
Joshua Levine tackles listener questions about the origins of Britain’s most famous special forces unit
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- [00:01]
Jack Bateman
This episode is brought to you by Google Gemini. With the Gemini app, you can talk live and have a real time conversation with an AI assistant. It's great for all kinds of things, like if you want to practice for an upcoming interview, ask for advice on things to do in a new city, or brainstorm creative ideas. And by the way, this script was actually read by Gemini. Download the Gemini app for iOS and Android today. Must be 18 to use Gemini Live.
- [00:26]
Joshua Levine
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John Baucum
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- [01:28]
Joshua Levine
On ebay where I go for all.
- [01:29]
John Baucum
Kinds of things I love.
- [01:30]
Joshua Levine
And there it was, that hologram trading card. One of the rarest, the last one I needed for my set.
- [01:36]
John Baucum
Shiny like the designer handbag of my dreams.
- [01:39]
Joshua Levine
One of a kind.
- [01:40]
John Baucum
Ebay had it and now everyone's asking, ooh, where'd you get your windshield wiper?
- [01:45]
Joshua Levine
Ebay has all the parts that fit my car. No more annoying, just beautiful. Whatever you love, find it on ebay.
- [01:53]
Jack Bateman
Ebay Things People Love welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. The second series of SAS Rogue Heroes is set to hit our screens later this week on the 1st of January on BBC1. So we thought this was a perfect time to bring you an episode from 2023. Joshua Levine all about the SAS in the Second World War. Joshua examines who was responsible for the creation of the sas, what its original purpose was, and reveals the impact that a parachuting padre had on the morale of its men. Here he answers listener questions in conversation with John Baucam.
- [02:44]
David Stirling
Now, we've got a lot of questions to get through, but let's start with a relatively straightforward one, which has been submitted by Hayley Hales on Instagram and that is, how was the SAS formed?
- [02:55]
Joshua Levine
Maybe straightforward, but it's quite a big question because there's a tendency in stories like this to oversimplify and say, well, it was one person. Of course, that's not the case with this. As with so many things, it was a lot of influences. A lot goes into the DNA of the wartime SAS. So you can look back to, for example, T.E. lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, and you know, he was carrying out sabotage behind enemy lines. In the First World War, he was described somewhere as drift, drifting about like a shapeless gas somewhere in the silent desert. So clearly you can see how he would have been an inspiration to what the SAS later became. After Lawrence you had the Long Range Desert Group. This was a unit founded by a man called Ralph Bagnold. He was between the wars, a signals officer in Egypt. He became a desert explorer and he invented all kinds of different ways of kind of driving through the desert, of surviving in the desert. And then he founded this long range desert group, the lrdg, which was a very sort of meritocratic reconnaissance unit of tough guys who went out into the desert to find out information and also to carry out raids. So that's another big strand, a direct strand of DNA. You've got the commandos and the early officers and men of the wartime SS came from Layforce, which was a commando unit, a kind of composite commando unit which was sent out to the Middle East. But it then achieved very little and left all these people with basically nowhere to go, nothing to do except to be sent back to their units. And they became the nucleus of the wartime sas. So there you've got the less direct parts of the story there, or some of them. More immediately you've got a man called Dudley Clark, who's actually become quite well known in recent years and features in a lot of different media accounts. But he was, well, he was the man who basically created the idea of strategic deception during the Second World War. And he created a fake unit known as the first SAS Brigade. And his reasoning was they captured an Italian officer whose diary said that the British have parachute troops here in the Middle East. Now, Clark realized that by creating a fake parachute unit to convince the enemy, he was pushing an open door. If they already believed it, then it wouldn't be. It wouldn't take much to really reinforce that belief. So what he did was to create this fake. He called it the Special Air Service Brigade, Special Air Service Battalion. And one of the things, one of the major strands of this deception was to take a couple of ordinary Soldiers from a yominary regiment in Palestine, to bring them to Cairo to put them basically in fake uniforms festooned with parachutes and to give them a script to deliver. So to send them into cafes, into restaurants, to the zoo, to the pyramids, to cabarets all around with this story that they were members of parachute unit called the sas. Now, it was a really difficult acting job, actually, because what they had to do was to. Basically, people were coming up to them the whole time and saying, well, you know, what are you? You, you parachute? You know, we didn't know we had any parachute troops and they would have to, first of all, push these people away. So, I'm sorry, I really can't say anything at all. And then maybe I can say something and, you know, sort of drip feed the story of the SAS to these curious people. And the idea was that this story would then kind of get out because people spoke to each other and it would get out to enemy agents, it would get out to the enemy. So that was a particular strand of this story. Now, while I was writing this book, I went into the National Archives to find the file relating to this deception called Operation Abeam. I found pictures of the two men in Cairo and their names. One was called Smith. I was never going to find him. The other was called Gurmin, G U R M I N, which is quite a distinctive name. And he came from Wolverhampton, so it's not really detective working, you know. I just went on the Internet to look for Gurman, Wolverhampton, and lo and behold, there's a taxi firm run by a man called Gurman in Wolverhampton. So I phoned up on the off chance I got through to man called David German who thought I was phoning for a taxi, but I wasn't. I was phoning to ask him strange questions about his father and the Middle East. And it turned out his father had been in the Middle east during the war and he was the same man. But what he told me was that his father had been a member of the real sas. And so, just digging deeper, what I found was that Gurman had been sent to do this deception job. He'd done it so well, so successfully, that he'd been singled out for promotion, he'd been commissioned, he'd gone into the Commandos and then in 42, become a member of the Real SAS. So he joined all the sort of legends like Sterling and Maine, none of whom ever knew that he had been a member of the SAS before. They had. So then, I mean, the story as it's always been Said is that Sterling set up the sas. Basically Layforce failed the commando's unit failed various members who were, you know, these people with a lot of initiative, a lot of drive, a lot of energy. They tried to get other things off the ground, other sort of commando style units. One of the men was Jock Lewis who, who tried to form parachute unit in the desert. His efforts stalled, wasn't taken up. But one of the men who jumped with him was David Stirling who kind of renewed the effort to get this parachute unit going. And so along with his brother who was close to Auchinleck, the commander in chief he streamlined it into a small group who would be dropped by parachute at night and would approach a target and strike very quickly, hard and quickly and then kind of sneak away back into the desert night. And Stirling had to get the support of the higher ups. And what he was, was like a persuader, a schmoozer. He was a charmer who had the, was also very well connected, had the ears a lot of people and he got the go ahead. He brought Jock Lewis who had had the original unit back into the fold to become training officer and the two of them kind of worked together to set up this sas. Sterling did the outside work, the political work using his connections, using his persuasion. Lewis did the kind of practical day to day military organization. The training, the setting it up. He later said, actually in an interview, I think he said I fashioned the SAS from the inside, David from the outside. I mean you were beginning to see there were a lot of different people involved in different ways in getting the SAS off the ground. So how was the SAS formed? There's an answer of a kind and there's a lot of information in there. But clearly it wasn't just a sort of simple, you know, one man had an idea and two days later, you know, was sent a load of parachutes and it wasn't that simple. Fantastic.
- [09:43]
David Stirling
That's an excellent summary. Now SAS stands for Special Air Service. What made the SAS special?
- [09:50]
Joshua Levine
I suppose there's two ways of looking at this. I mean first of all, you know, strictly speaking in terms of terminology the word special was already being used. I mean from late 1940 commando battalions were known as Special Service Battalions. So the word special, you know, wasn't particularly applied to the sas. It wasn't Dudley Clark's idea that then David Stirling decided yes, we are special. It was a word that was around. But beyond that the fact was that the SAS did do a very distinct job. A very specialized sabotage unit with distinctive skills. So I Don't think it's too much of a stretch or too much of a misnomer to say that the SAS deserved the title Special Air Service.
- [10:33]
David Stirling
Great. So what was the SAS's first mission?
- [10:37]
Joshua Levine
Actually, you know, you could look at this a couple of ways. I mean, in some ways the SAS first mission was actually a raid on a British airfield called Heliopolis whilst they were still training. Because David Stirling, while they were training had taken up this £10 bet with RAF officer. His men couldn't sneak onto an airfield and plant fake bombs, stickers on British airplanes and then get away and do it without the sentries catching them. And he took up this bet and so his men basically traipsed across the desert and then laid up and then actually did manage to get onto the airfield and did manage to put the sticker. So he won his bet. And it was also extremely good pre operational training for the SAS. Except one person, man called Owen McGonagall who instead of marching his men across the desert for four days, what he did was basically to hold up a train. He shot a torch at the train driver, held up the train, train stopped and took his men very quickly down the line where they then stole an army vehicle and took them the rest of the way. So in most other units I think he'd have been in a lot of trouble for doing that, for basically cheating, completely cheating on the task. But if you think about the sort of unit the SAS was, you know, he showed immense initiative. So, you know, he wasn't actually going to be reprimanded. He was probably going to be congratulated. So this raid, this training raid was a success. And that led to the first real raid, the first real mission known as Operation Squatter which was against two Axis held airfields. One was called Gazala and one was Tamimi. And the truth is it was a complete disaster, total and utter disaster. 216 Squadron, these five Bristol bomb bays of 216 Squadron carried the men, they parachuted out as was the plan, as the idea of the Special Air Service. And they got caught basically in freak weather conditions. It was the heaviest storm that the area had seen for many, many years. So it was a total disaster. Not a single party even made it to their target. The men were killed, men were captured. And barely two dozen of the men who set off actually even made it back safely. Well, it looked in the aftermath of that as though the SAS would simply be disbanded before it had even begun. So David Stirling had to be very careful to, well, two things really, to keep the SAS out of the way. He took it off to a quiet where basically it wouldn't get the attention of anybody who could disband it. But beyond that, on the way back he also started to question whether it should be parachuted in, whether the desert was really the right place for parachuting into position, and whether in fact it wouldn't be better to enlist the help of the Long Range Desert Group. I mean, Long Range Desert Group had picked them up from the meeting point to take them away. Well, why not get the Long Range Desert Group also to drive them in to a point from which they could make their way on foot and then wait and then attack, and then be waiting for them when they came out from the attack again. So that's really what was learned from that first disastrous raid.
- [13:43]
John Baucum
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- [15:14]
David Stirling
And that ties really neatly into this next question from Waterfist on Instagram, which is yeah, what impact did the Long Range Desert Group have on the effectiveness of the early sas?
- [15:24]
Joshua Levine
I've already talked a bit about the Long Range Desert Group and how it was kind of in the SAS's DNA already. To boil that down a bit more, I think it was in terms of methods, very important. So the SAS would end up using its own vehicles and it was using methods like the sun compass and the sand mats and the sand channels and the clothes and the rations, all the things that had sort of originally been worked out for the desert by the Long Range Desert Group. I think you can also say it took its discipline, almost a style of discipline from the Long Range says it group. It was very. Both very meritocratic organizations where there was a quietly understood discipline rather than a sort of loud imposed discipline where first names might be used, where anybody could offer a solution to a problem. Didn't matter who you were, you could pipe up and say, look, I think it should be done this way, and you'd be listened to. People almost lived in the desert as equals, really. You know, its discipline when it was at its base was perhaps a little bit more. But when it was out in the desert, it was very meritocratic, you know, in terms of raids. I mean, the LRDG was mainly a reconnaissance unit, but it also did carry out raids. And the SAS then did that clearly at the beginning and for quite A while, the LRDG was the SAS's taxi service. You know, it took them to raids and it brought them back from raids. And it was only after a while that the SS decided, you know, it wanted to be able to drive itself. And then in terms of personnel, probably the most successful and gifted of the SAS navigators, desert navigators, a man called Mike Sadler, who's still alive aged 103 and who I've been to see many times now and is absolutely fantastic company. He was effectively poached by David Stirling from the lrdg. He was an Englishman, but he'd gone out, not much more than a boy, to work in Rhodesia, where he became a farmer, then joined Rhodesian army and the artillery, joined the lrdg, met some LRDG men in a bar and from there started, you know, he was navigating the SAS and doing other work, but also sometimes navigating the sas. And Sterling and the others were so impressed with him that they basically nabbed him. He said there was never a point when he joined the sas, it just sort of happened because if Sterling wanted something, he tended to get it. So they really are very tightly Linked to the point that when a few SAS men, including Sadler, gave an interview to the New Yorker magazine in early 1943 about what they did, one of them, Johnny Cooper, actually said, and there's also an organization called the Long Range Desert Group. He actually just mentioned it because to him it naturally came almost in the same breath as the sas.
- [18:02]
David Stirling
Fantastic. Now we've been in North Africa, let's go to Europe. What role did the SAS play during the Italian campaign?
- [18:11]
Joshua Levine
So the SAS reorganised itself after it had been in the desert and in Tunisia it changed itself quite significantly. One arm of the now first Special Air Service Regiment became known as the Special raiding squadron, the SRS. So in July 1943 it was basically sent in advance of the main invading force to be used as an old style commando unit, basically as shock troops thrown at the enemy to knock them off their defences, to basically knock out artillery before the arrival of the main invading force. And in Sicily and Italy that's what this Special Raiding Squadron did. They jumped ashore and stormed enemy positions and they carried out street fighting. You know, they did all the kinds of things, all the kind of commando actions that David Stirling was really trying to get the SAS away from. I mean, that was the commander's jobs and yet it was never meant to be the SAS's jobs. But to keep it going, to find a role for it. Paddy Mayne, who was then in charge of the srs basically had to agree that that's what it would do. And actually Paddy Mayne was keen to get in a fight. So I'm not sure he really minded particularly that if he was seeing action, his men were seeing action. You know, that was something. But it was basically the only way to keep, keep the SAS going was to agree to that. And there was a second SAS regiment which was commanded by David Stirling's brother and that did carry on doing more sabotage style roles. And not always initially with a great deal of success but mainly on Sicily and in Italy it was really a kind of commando unit and as I say, not particularly what they'd been SAS had been trained for. But also one of these actions terminally was probably the fiercest fighting the SAS ever experienced during the entire war. This was after the Italians had surrendered and basically the Germans moved to occupy the country. And so the German resistance was kind of immensely fierce. So this was really hard fighting, really hard commando style fighting, but carried out immensely effectively.
- [20:18]
David Stirling
Sure. And then in 1944 we have D Day. What role did the SAS play then?
- [20:24]
Joshua Levine
The SAS in France basically reverted to something much closer to its original role, the role that Stirling had set it up to do. The idea was that it would be parachuted behind enemy lines, where it would set up bases and it would attempt to stop the Germans or to slow the German move towards Normandy, where it would relieve the forces fighting in Normandy. So that was the basic idea. I mean, beyond that sort of specific, it would also just cause as much difficulty, as much damage to the German war machine behind the lines as it possibly could. So Operation Titanic was a plan to drop people on D Day itself. And these men were going to be dropped with dummies known as Ruperts, and they were going to simulate, basically, parachute troops coming in in large numbers in areas other than the areas where the real parachute troops were to be dropping to make the Germans think that the attack had begun already. And these Ruperts, these dummies, which were about smaller than real people, would also have lots of explosives attached so that when they landed, it would make the noise of paratroopers who were attacking. So that was one thing. But the idea also was to drop people further inland to set up various bases. The idea was to start sabotage almost immediately to stop other troops, German troops arriving to help out those already in Normandy. So there was a lot that was going on, and it was a kind of reversion to the original idea of the SAS as a sabotage unit, as a unit that actually would work behind the lines to really get at them.
- [22:03]
David Stirling
And then how did the SAS come to be involved in the liberation of Belsen?
- [22:08]
Joshua Levine
So the SAS were moving through Germany. They were in the belly of the beast, if you like, and they were simply the first ones there. And what they found was basically horror beyond description, horror beyond understanding. I mean, some did try to describe it and did as well as they possibly could. One man, John Tonkin, who was there. I mean, there's some dispute and debate about who was actually first there, but it really. It doesn't particularly matter. It was. The fact is, the SAS were there and John Tompkin arrived, and as far as he was concerned, and I got pictures he took at the time in the book, he was arriving at what seemed like a very, you know, nicely maintained military camp. And he got there and there was a German guard outside who smiled at him and he smiled back. He just thought he'd arrived at a. At some camp, and then when he got in, he couldn't believe what he was seeing, the horror. Just minutes before, he'd been smiling with a guard outside, and now he was in the jaws of hell. He was in some kind of gehenna. And they did. I mean, people did describe what he saw. Well, this is something that Tonkin actually wrote himself. Better he says it than I say it. He says the place was guarded by Romanian Nazi troops. And while we were there, they were still just shooting prisoners. And we got hold of all these officers and we lined them up, and I said, unless that shooting stops immediately, you're all going to die very horribly. And the shooting stopped. And that was the only way to deal with it. And what one person with him saw was, for example, was a female prisoner reach under a fence to get hold of a rotten turnip. And this is in front of the sas. They were just watching. The guard saw the woman doing this and just shot her in the head. And so it was, though, the place was so inured to this kind of behavior that nobody there even noticed that it was wrong or there was any problem with it. And they were greeted by Joseph Kramer, Bisted Belson, the man in charge, the commandant, and by Irma Greaves, who was the female commandant. And again, Kramer just sort of greeted them in a very friendly fashion and more or less said, oh, you know, it's not very nice here, but not much I can do about it. So it's extraordinary, brutal. And bear in mind, these were SAS men who. These were the toughest people you can imagine. I mean, you know, they had the things they had already been through, and they were shocked. They were wholly shocked, horrified by what they saw.
- [24:42]
David Stirling
I've got a question here from Susie 1340 on Twitter. And this concerns training. How highly trained did they have to be for the missions they were sent on?
- [24:51]
Joshua Levine
The SS training is very, very interesting. From the beginning, you know, they had to do parachute training even. Even when they weren't parachuting for, you know, much of the. The desert contest, they still trained. In fact, you know, the first two men to died were called Duffy and Warburton, and they died in a parachute accident while training. So the parachuting had to be done. And also, you know, this was all set up. The training originally was set up by Jock Lewis and. And, you know, he didn't really know what he was doing. He had to create his own training regime. So people jumped from large platforms that had been built by one of the men. They jumped off the back of trucks. You know, these trucks would be going at 30 miles an hour, and they jump backwards off the. Off the trucks. And there was one man who read his account and said, I was so pleased when I didn't have to jump backwards off the back of a truck anymore because I really thought this was going to kill me before I ever got into action. He it was that dangerous. They did long marches with very little water in the desert, with very heavy packs and, you know, anybody who couldn't keep up or anybody who tried to steal somebody else's water, they were out immediately. They did initiative tests, memory tests. One man remembers sitting at a table of objects for 30 seconds and trying to remember as many of those objects as he could. And then, you know, he was taken out and had to list what they were. It's almost a game show. They had to be what was known as S minded, sabotage minded. So in other words, they would be able to, I don't know, look at a bridge and know immediately, instead of looking at that bridge and thinking, that's very nice, that's very, well, interestingly built, Know immediately how to destroy it, sort of instinctively, the best way to destroy that and the best way to put aircraft out of action, the best places to sabotage rail lines, all this kind of thing. So there was a great deal of very distinctive training that went in. So a lot of it was. Was, you know, to do with endurance, a lot of it was to do with weaponry. But, you know, a lot of it was also initiative and very specific to the role.
- [26:52]
David Stirling
Now, this might sound like a slightly odd question, but did every member of the SAS actually fight?
- [26:59]
Joshua Levine
No. People assumed that the SAS was a fighting unit. The SAS was a fighting unit, absolutely. But certainly not the case that, you know, every member of the SAS fought. The fact is that there were, I can think immediately of three, well, two and a half incredibly important members of the SAS who weren't there to fight. Now, I say half because, you know, the navigator, Mike Sadler, actually did fight. He did quite a lot of fighting, but his primary role wasn't to fight. His primary role was to get people, navigate them to the raid, to where they actually had to fight, and then bring them back. They simply couldn't do their job without him doing his job superbly well. You had the SAS doctors, the medical officers. The first one was Malcolm Pleydell, who actually wrote a book and left diaries behind and lots of different accounts which are in the Imperial War Museum. And he is a fascinating man because he really. He had a fascinating view of the sas and he would basically be taken on the raid and then he would wait at the assembly point and wait, and people would be brought back and they would be wounded, some badly, some not so, and he would have to deal with them. And you can see what's in common is that these people were immensely respected, even almost sort of worshiped by the fighting men because they simply couldn't do their jobs without them. And the one who's most striking to me is the padre, a man called Fraser McCluskey, the chaplain. Now he was parachuted into France with other members of the SAS onto Operation Houndsworth. He parachuted in. Now, before he went, he was really nervous because he couldn't imagine what he would do, what possible use he would be in a camp behind the lines when all these people were fighting for their survival. What could he add to it? Surely they would. And these were not religious men, by the way. The SS tended not to be religious men. So, you know, surely he'd just get in the way. I mean, he. Anyway, he was parachuted in and he caught in the upper branches of a tree. He had with him hymn books, he had a large cross, he had sort of all the paraphernalia to hold a service, you know, a lot of different stuff. He caught in the upper branch of a tree and basically then fell 40ft down to the bottom of the tree and knocked himself out. And he woke up and was sick. And so that was a great start. I mean, very nearly killed then, you know, once he was there, he started giving these open air services. Very nervous that no one would want to do it and it would just be a pain. And what he found was that people really wanted to go. People loved him, absolutely loved him to the point where he considered carrying a gun. But people said, no, no, no, you mustn't. The fighter said, please don't. Because they basically wanted him to be a reminder of why they were doing it. He was a man of peace. He was a reminder of home, a reminder of what they were going back to, a reminder. And he also, in these sort of situations, people become religious. You know, people who have no interest in religion suddenly latch onto religion. I mean, that's a known thing. And here he was sharing the same risks that they were sharing and holding these outdoor services, going around the different camps, and they loved him for it. You know, he became immensely important. So in the same way that the navigator, in the same way that the doctor allowed them to go about their business, so the padre allowed them to go, gave them the freedom to fight for whatever it was worth fighting for. So these people were immensely important and they haven't really, I think, got their due in the past because they were as important as the fighting men. Obviously the Fighting men, you know, the sharp end was the point of the sas, but these support staff, if you like, were immensely important.
- [30:44]
David Stirling
Absolutely fascinating. I have a question here from andresito83 on Instagram, and that is, how secretive were the SAS?
- [30:53]
Joshua Levine
They obviously were very secretive in the sense that to go about their business, they had to be totally secretive in that nobody could know what they were doing. I mean, they were, as Lawrence was, this gas blowing about in the desert and had to arrive unannounced. And an element of that secrecy, or rather a consequence of that secrecy, was that they were feared, terribly feared, because they were attacking all of these aerodromes along the coast. And of course, the more successful, when the Axis was moving forward, that left a far longer trail behind them, a supply trail. And so the SAS had this. All of these different targets that they could go for. And the Axis troops were very, very nervous. They didn't know where they were going to strike next. So they had to be secretive in that sense, but also they had to be known about for the enemy to fear them. So, you know, it's a kind of, yes, they had to be secretive, but they also had to be known about. So one time, when it went too far, the SAS were basically about to carry out a whole series of raids, the biggest raids they'd ever carried out on a whole series of airfields along the Mediterranean coast. Because there was going to be an attempt to send ships to relieve Malta, and these ships would be attacked by airplanes from these bases along the Mediterranean coast. So the SAS was going to go ahead in advance, attack these bases, and try and put all the aircraft out of action. Now, the fact that these SAS raids were about to be carried out was sent back as a message by the American military attache back to, basically, President Roosevelt back in Washington. The American military attache, a man called Bonnar Fellows, was getting almost complete information from the British, and he was sending it back to Roosevelt, who was absolutely fascinated with what was going on. So he sent back a message saying that the sabotage troops are going to raid lots of airfields. And unfortunately, and what wasn't known was that his messages, his code, had been cracked by the enemy and his messages were being read by the Germans. So Rommel would know by lunchtime the next day whatever had been sent back. So he knew that these raids were going to be carried out. And so these raids were compromised, and a lot of them were dealt, even though it didn't say exactly where they were coming. Basically, the enemy were waiting for them. Now, clearly, that's the kind of secrecy that had to be maintained. But the sort of wider secrecy, the fact that the ss, in fact, really early on, even a few days before the SS first raid, before Operation Squatter, a Pathe newsreel team went and recorded, filmed the SAS in training, and this was shown back at home to British audiences. Now, they weren't called the sas, but of course, it had come out of the sas, had come out of Dudley Clark's Deception. So they wanted it known. They actually wanted it known that parachute troops were in the area. So, you know, it's a balance, isn't it? On the one hand, yes, absolutely. They have to be well known. On the other hand, they have to be a secret organization. It's not straightforward.
- [34:02]
David Stirling
Alex Plotkin on Facebook asks, were there any foreign SAS units and what were their greatest achievements?
- [34:10]
Joshua Levine
Yes, there absolutely were some very, very effective foreign SAS units. So, for example, there were French SAS regiments, there was a Belgian SAS regiment, there was a Greek Sacred Squadron, and there were lots of individuals, you know, within the SAS who were so, you know, veterans of the Spanish Civil War. In fact, two men with Spanish names, Spanish men, tried to change their names. One tried to change it to Francis Drake, and he was told by the War Office that he couldn't change his name to Francis Drake, but. Because that was ridiculous. Anyway, so there were quite a few, you know, a large number of foreign units and foreign individuals. In fact, there were even German soldiers. Well, there was, first of all a group of Jewish German troops who had already spent time basically dressed in German uniforms behind German lines, doing sabotage, doing reconnaissance. And then they were sort of taken on by the SAS to do a series of particular raids. And they were joined by two German POWs, so two people who had been fighting with the Wehrmacht until very, very recently. It had been decided in POW camp that both of them could be now trusted. And so they were sent out with these German Jews to carry out sabotage in the Middle east on particular airfields. And one of these men, once he got to the basically main gate of the airfield, went up to the office and went in and said, look, I'm a German. The only way I could get my freedom was to join the British Army. I'm here with a bunch of sabotage troops and we're about to go in and so, please, can you send your men out and surround these trucks? And at first he wasn't believed, and then he, you know, really went on and they did. And lots of men were killed. And that particular raid was betrayed. And that man was given a medal by Rommel. I mean, There's a lot of different stories. Yes, the SAS did have all kinds of foreigners, including Germans.
- [36:04]
David Stirling
Now we're getting towards the end of the list. Joshua, One of the last questions I had was why was the SAS disbanded after World War II?
- [36:12]
Joshua Levine
The SAS disbanded at the end of the war very simply because it was felt they'd served their purpose. But it's arguable the SAS wasn't really ever disbanded after the war because little strands of the SAS actually did continue. So there was a war crimes investigation team led by a man called Bill Barkworth, which carried on its work after the main body of the SAS was disbanded. Other SAS mobile teams were sent into Greece to investigate the role of civilians, local people who rescued Allied servicemen. And these all kept going. And then in 1947, the SAS name and the SAS idea was resurrected with the formation of the 21st SAS Regiment. So you could say that, I mean, yes, the SS disbanded, but perhaps you could also argue that reports of the SAS's death were slightly exaggerated.
- [37:05]
David Stirling
Now, I have quite an interesting question here, which is, who deserves the praise for the formation, development and progress of the sas? It's been submitted by an account set up in tribute to Paddy Main on Twitter, so I think they may already have an answer in mind.
- [37:20]
Joshua Levine
Well, would it be easier if I just said Paddy Mayne? Well, as I suggested before, it's not straightforward. Lots of people do. You can go all the way back to. You can say Dudley Clark deserves some, you can say Bill Sterling deserves some, you can say David Sterling and Jock Lewis. You know, that's the formation for the development. I mean, I think Sterling and Lewis each had qualities that the other didn't have. So Sterling was a persuader, a politician, a man who could, you know, with connections, who could get the SAS off the ground. In that sense, Lewis was a technician, a man who could train people up, who could improvise to train people up, who could get the sas, you know, off the ground as a working entity. Then, in terms of progress, I think absolutely, Paddy Mayne was just a tremendous inspiration. You know, first of all, he was, you know, a great fighter himself, but he was an inspiration to the people around him. And you have endless accounts from other, other members of the SAS who basically talk about the fact they had to live up to Paddy Maine. You know, so much of what they did was an attempt to show him that they could begin to do what he could do. So he was immense inspiration to the point that when David Sterling sort of turned him into, or tried to make him into the training officer, because Jock Lewis was killed in 41 and Sterling tried to replace him as training officer with Paddy Mayne. Sterling immediately realized he'd made a terrible mistake. You know, it's arguable he actually did it in order to. Because he had a kind of rivalry going with Mayne. Mayne was getting a lot more obvious success than he was in on the raids. And, you know, maybe there was an element of jealousy in sort of trying to sideline him as training officer. But anyway, it certainly wasn't a good idea because he was the person that everybody wanted to emulate. There was no good him just telling people what to do. He had to lead from the front. So in terms of the development, I think Maine was arguably the most important. But these are three different things. Formation, development and progress. And there are so many answers, names that could be answered to those questions.
- [39:28]
David Stirling
Yeah, I mean, out of interest, you talked about the sort of. The differences between David Stirling and Paddy Maynard's people. I mean. I mean, how did their lives before the war shape their military careers?
- [39:39]
Joshua Levine
Oh, this is a very interesting question because David Stirling had spent part of the 1930s trying to succeed as an artist in Paris. He had wanted to be. He'd gone to the Left bank and lived as a, you know, that sort of struggling artist life. He had quite a lot of money, but he'd lived that life. And he tried to become. Really wanted to. I mean, this wasn't just a fad. This was. His dream in life was to do this. And he failed because he was told basically by the person who had taken him under his wing there that he just simply didn't have the artistic ability. He had imagination, he had creativity. He had all the things that went alongside. But what he didn't have was just the basic talent, the basic draftsman skills. And it devastated him. He said it was the biggest disappointment of his life. And he reacted to it by kind of going the other way. He went to try and conquer Everest. He wanted to be the first mountaineer to climb Everest. So he threw himself into this sort of immensely physical activity as almost to go the other way. And he was doing that when war broke out. And that kind of led to very indirectly to his role in the. In the sas. But this kind of physical life that he'd now chosen for himself. So you had that. You had the fact that Paddy Maine was a frustrated writer. Now, ME, if you, you know, look through all the different accounts and people may loved poetry at any gathering there would. Poetry would come out, songs would come out, you know, Irish Romantic poetry, all kinds of things. Always reading. So you see accounts of people. He. If he'd got back from a raid early or he was. Was lying around, he always had a paperback with him. You know, people cla Del just mentioned in passing he was reading Joyce at one point. You know, he's reading the latest, all these sort of. Sort of interwar novels. He's a voracious reader, and he wanted to be a writer. That's what he wanted to be. And we know that because there was this one extraordinary night when the two men, Sterling and Maine, basically got drunk together. This was after Sterling had come back from a raid and Maine had been back at the base. And Maine was incredibly frustrated that he hadn't. He wasn't out there, that he'd been sidelined like this. And they got drunk together, and what might normally be expected to happen was a fight, but it didn't. Wasn't a fight. What happened was the two of them started talking about their frustration and not being one of them an artist and the other one a writer. And they found they, you know, they really had this in common. And obviously it's a bit simplistic to say that, you know, these frustrations led directly to the formation of the sas. But the fact is, certainly two of the men most responsible for the SAS's legend and, you know, both of them were frustrated artists. And it's, you know, I don't think it's a coincidence.
- [42:26]
David Stirling
Fascinating. And finally, what are the biggest misconceptions about the SAS during World War II, do you think?
- [42:34]
Joshua Levine
Okay, so, one, we've already talked about the fact that, you know, this idea. They were all fighters. To be in the sas, you had to be fighting Superman. And clearly, you know, we've talked about the other kinds of people, the people who made it possible for the fighters to do their fighting. I think that another misconception is that the SAS were kind of. Well, they weren't Superman. We were invincible. And there were plenty of, you know, failed operations and failed raids and mistakes that were made. And I think, actually, coming to think of it, they had misconceptions about themselves. I mean, I found this one great story told by Fitzroy Maclean, who's a character who appears in so many different elements you know, around the Middle east around this time. But he says that he was basically in the desert behind enemy lines in 42 in a car with Sterling. And they were zipping along and they saw a truck in the distance. And they immediately. The truck raced away from. So they Assumed it was, you know, this is the enemy and they've seen us and they're going back to warn that we're around. So they chased, gave chase, and because they were quicker, they caught up with the truck. And two men got out of this truck they came across, and Sterling asked, you know, who are you? And one of the men in a foreign accent said, we're members of the sas. And Sterling was delighted because the officer already caught them. But second of all, how famous was his unit that, you know, the enemy are now pretending to be us? You know, that's how great we are, that the enemy's pretending to be us because, you know, we are the. The epitome of all that, you know, they would want to be. And not only are they pretending, they're doing it to me, to the man who created the sas, the beautiful irony of the this, anyway, they really were from the sas, from the South African survey. This was a unit that was out in the desert, sort of basically mapping the desert, and they were behind enemy lines and they were doing their job. So it's a great story because it represents a kind of hubris. You know, the SAS were doing what they were doing, but they weren't necessarily the only or even the first SAS in the desert. So, yeah, I'd say maybe you could say they even at times had misconceptions about themselves. So, yeah, it's an interesting story. It's a complicated story.
- [44:55]
Jack Bateman
That was Joshua Levine speaking to John Baucum in 2023. Joshua is the author of SAS The Illustrated History of the SAS. And if you want to watch SAS Rogue Heroes, the first episode drops on BBC One this Wednesday, the 1st of January. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Jack Bateman.