Dan Snow's History Hit - SAS Founder: Warrior or Phoney?
Episode Date: May 26, 2022David Stirling was an aristocrat, innovator and special forces legend that earned him the nickname 'The Phantom Major'. His formation of the Special Air Service in the summer of 1941 led to a new form... of warfare and Stirling is remembered as the father of special forces soldiering. But was he really a military genius or in fact a shameless self-publicist who manipulated people, and the truth?For his new book 'David Stirling: The Phoney Major' military historian Gavin Mortimer extensively interviewed SAS veterans who fought and worked with him and poured over declassified government files that paint a very different picture of the glittering legacy Stirling has secured.In this episode, he gives Dan an explosive analysis of Stirling's complex character: the childhood speech impediment that shaped his formative years, the pressure from his overbearing mother, his fraught relationship with his brother, Bill, and the jealousy and inferiority he felt in the presence of his SAS second-in-command, the cold-blooded killer Paddy Mayne.Produced by Mariana Des ForgesMixed and Mastered by Dougal PatmoreIf you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.
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Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History.
We've got a controversial subject today.
We've got a revision.
Gavin Morton, he's been on the podcast before, he's a historian.
He has written a new biography of the phantom major,
David Stirling, the man who founded the SAS. Gavin Mortimer says he's the phony major.
Was Stirling a military genius, a maverick thinker, or was he just a master manipulator,
good with spin, wrote his own legacy? As Churchill once said, history will be kind to me because I intend
to write it. Is that what Stirling did as well? Stirling was a Scottish aristocrat. He came from
a very military family who descended from a long line of Highland warriors. And he was instrumental
in the founding of the Special Air Service, the SES, an organisation which helped to pioneer
really special forces operations. The idea that a small number of highly motivated, well-armed, highly
trained and efficient troops can have a disproportionate impact on the wider battle
in the theatre in which they're operating. And in this episode, we discuss the formation of the SES,
we discuss Stirling, we talk about his older brother, but we also talk about the legendary Robert Blair, aka Paddy Mayne. Paddy Mayne was from Northern Ireland. He died in
a car crash aged 40. We talked about him on this podcast, so please go back and listen to previous
episodes. Paddy Mayne had been to South Africa in 1938 as a member of the British and Irish
Lions rugby squad. He was an exceptional athlete, an exceptional soldier. And when you
do talk to those early veterans, the special forces of the Long Range Desert Group, of the SAS,
they do tend, in my experience, to talk about Paddy Mayne more than Sterling. But Gavin Mortimer has
conducted a far more systematic investigation into the genesis of the SAS. And what he has to say is actually
quite shocking. If you wish to listen to those other SAS podcasts, we've got lots of them,
actually. They're all available on History Hit TV. You may have seen in Vogue the other day,
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But in the meantime, folks, here's Gavin Mortimer talking about David Sterling.
Enjoy.
Gavin, thanks for coming on the show.
A pleasure to be here, Dan.
You're really going for it on this one.
It's controversial stuff. It is, but it's the story that needs to be told. And I am revising
the revisionist, the revisionist being David Sterling, who has got away for more than half a
century with this portrayal of himself as a daring, dashing guerrilla genius.
And that is not the case.
Well, let's talk about what we think we know about David Sterling.
Characterise his reputation for me.
His reputation is one of the most fearless guerrilla fighters of the Second World War,
perhaps of British history.
A man who obviously founded the SAS and then led it fearlessly and with great skill throughout the Western Desert from November 1941 until his capture in January 43.
until his capture in January 43, and was the man who had the ear of Churchill,
who even stood up to Montgomery and was charismatic and the scourge of the Nazis, the phantom major, the man who Rommel wanted to capture above anyone else.
And it's just not true.
We're going to get tweets on this one, buddy. We're going to get tweets.
Who is responsible for that account of Sterling's career? Is that something he wrote about after
war or his comrades? It's himself. He was a wonderful self-publicist. Humble brag, I think,
is the modern vernacular. So he was someone who would always say, well, I don't like to talk about
myself. But he did. That was his favourite hobby.
Now, immediately after the war, for 10 years after the war,
Sterling had nothing to do with the army, nothing to do with the SAS.
And what changed was the death of Paddy Main in 1955.
A quick resume of Paddy Main.
Blair Main was his name, but he was known as Paddy Mayne throughout the army. He
was a rugby international before the war. And he was everything that David Sterling wanted to be.
He was the fearless guerrilla fighter, the genius in war. And Sterling resented this fact.
He became embittered and he was particularly embittered with Maine. Maine didn't take David Sterling seriously as a guerrilla fighter. And this really caused in Sterling, as I said,
a great resentment and need for revenge in a way. And this was possible after Maine's death in a
car crash in December 1955. And that's when Sterling, who at the time had been living in Southern Africa,
in what is now Zimbabwe, he returned to the UK and he hired the services of Virginia Cowes,
who was a society author who'd written a biography of Winston Churchill to great acclaim. And he
really said to her, right, your job is to portray me as the buccaneer, as the man that we've just described.
And Virginia Cowles, she was an American and was slightly in awe of the British upper class, which is very much what David Sterling was.
He was a minor aristocracy. And so the book that came out, The Phantom Major, Sterling would have us believe this is what the Germans nicknamed him
during the war, the Phantom Major. Utter nonsense. The person who came up with the nickname the
Phantom Major was his great friend Randolph Churchill, a journalist by trade who in August
1942, the war in North Africa wasn't going very well. In general, it wasn't going very well.
wasn't going very well. In general, it wasn't going very well. And he came up with this idea of the Phantom Major with the connivance of his father, Winston, who always had a soft spot for
guerrilla fighters. And Sterling, as I said, he had charisma and he was a very good salesman. He
was great at selling the idea of himself as this wondrous fighter. And so in September 1942, there were a slew of articles
in the British press, the Phantom Major, who's got the Germans by the shortened curlies. And this was
the title of the book in 1958. And it came out, Dan, it was a very fortuitous timing. Not only
was Maine dead, the last officer who could really challenge this new narrative of the SAS.
But more importantly, Britain needed a hero. The Suez debacle had been 18 months earlier.
The umpire was disintegrating. Britain's self-esteem was low. And then suddenly,
along comes a reminder of the glorious deeds of the war. And Stirling was very much portrayed as the new Elizabethan,
as a buccaneer, like a 16th century Raleigh or Drake. And it worked. And the British public
fell for it, helped by Stirling's coterie of upper class, very well-connected friends,
many of them in politics or the diplomatic service. And that's the myth that we've had
today. And that's a myth that I'm
challenging. Right, well, let's get into it. What do we know about his early life? Talk me through
Sterling's birth and up to the outbreak of war. Okay, well, let's start then with the first
fallacy. He was not born in Scotland. That's a received opinion. He was born in London in November
Scotland. That's a received opinion. He was born in London in November 1915, the son of a brigadier general. And his mother was a formidable woman, an alpha female, Margaret, the daughter of a 13th
Lord Lovett, who was aide-de-camp to Queen Victoria in the 1880s. And quite an important aspect of Sterling was that he had a speech
impediment. And this was only solved when he was about five years old. And so for the first five
years of his life, he was in a world of his own. He struggled to communicate. And this, I think,
formed his personality. He lived in a little bit of a fantasy world. He became sulky if people
couldn't understand him.
He was irritable and he was insecure. And these were characteristics that he would take throughout his life.
He was sent at an early age to Ampleforth College, sometimes described as the Catholic Eton.
Another thing I should point out, which is quite important, I think, is that his mother was a very devout Catholic.
point out, which is quite important, I think, is that his mother was a very devout Catholic.
And he was homesick at Ampleforth. Unlike his two elder brothers, Bill Sterling and Peter Sterling,
who flourished and excelled academically and athletically, David was rather lost and overawed at Ampleforth. And he was homesick and he really didn't thrive the way that his brothers did.
And on leaving Ampleforth, he went up to Cambridge to study architecture. He lasted three terms
there and then quit. And this is another feature of his personality. He was prone to quit,
to walk away when things got tough. His brother Bill and his mother got him a job in an Edinburgh
firm of architects. But when he realized he had to start at the bottom and work his way up,
that didn't agree. So he left there. And eventually, in desperation, his mother and Bill
Sterling, who by this time had inherited the family land and the estate, a very large estate at Keir near
Dunblane. They sent him to America to ranch. A family friend had a ranch in El Paso. And this
is where David was when war was declared. So he came back to the UK in late September 1939.
He was commissioned into the Scots Guards where he gained a reputation for
laziness, for indolence. He was nicknamed the Giant Sloth. And it was really yet again Bill
Stirling who came to David's rescue. And Bill Stirling really is the unsung hero of the SAS,
that he really is the brains behind the SAS. And in May 1940, he established the
Special Training Centre in the northwest of Scotland on land owned by Lord Lovett, the 15th
Lord Lovett, the Stirling's cousin. And Bill Stirling and Lord Lovett were the chief instructors.
It was dubbed the Guerrilla training school. It was where throughout
the summer and autumn of 1940, hundreds of newly formed commandos were trained in the basics of
guerrilla warfare. And David actually was one of the pupils. The myth is that he was one of the
instructors. No, no, no, no. He was just one of the pupils. Bill had been in the Scots Guards. He was asked to rescue
David because David and the Scots Guards were incompatible. And he brought David up to Loch
Islet, where the special training centre was. And he was actually his adjutant for a while
before eventually he joined Number 8 Commando in November 1940.
for eventually he joined Number 8 Commando in November 1940.
Let's get ahead to the founding of the SAS,
the Special Air Service that people usually associate with David Stirling.
The first mission was a bit of a disaster, wasn't it, for the SAS?
And you're suddenly making me think it might not be just unlucky.
Ah, no, absolutely it wasn't unlucky. Now, Bill Sterling, he was in Cairo in the summer
of 1941. And with David, it was the two of them who founded the SAS. The joke was that the SAS
stood for Sterling and Sterling. November the 3rd, 1941, Bill was recalled to England and that took away David's intellectual and emotional crutch
a fascinating letter that I quote in the book that he wrote to his mother on the eve of that
first operation and he admitted that he hadn't been this homesick since he'd been at Ampleforth
so that was his emotional state and he cited one of the reasons being that Bill was no longer in Cairo. Now, the first mission, as you alluded to, Dan, was a disaster of the 55 men who went on it. 34 were killed or captured.
the operation to abort it because they knew that what would be one of the worst storms in a generation was moving across that part of Egypt and into Libya and absolutely not conducive to
a parachute operation of this type. The operation was that they would parachute behind German lines
and attack a string of airfields. Stirling was given that choice, but he decided to press ahead
of it. I've no doubt that had Bill Stirling still been in Cairo, he would have said, no, it's too risky.
Let's live to fight another day.
And the mission went ahead and it was a disaster.
The SAS came very close to being disbanded at that stage.
That it wasn't was down to the genius of Paddy Main.
Paddy Main was one of the first recruits into the SAS, an unbelievable soldier.
He's definitely had his demons, extraordinary bouts of anger.
I've met people that served alongside him.
He was terrifying to friend and enemy alike.
Why was it that Paddy Mayne was so important in this early stage?
Well, he was someone made for guerrilla warfare.
He was both mentally and physically exceptionally agile. I've spoken to men who served with Paddy. And of course, he wasn't fearless, but he had a very good control of himself.
Parachutes Raid in November 1941, it was decided to partner with the Long Range Desert Group. Now,
these are the pioneers, if you like, of special forces warfare in the desert, but their speciality was reconnaissance more than raiding, and they were wonderful navigators. So they transported
in their trucks, the SAS, the 21 remaining soldiers, to two airfields at Tamit and Sirte, quite close to the
Libyan coast. And Maine and Stirling divided and took two raiding parties. Stirling had no success.
Paddy Maine destroyed 24 aircraft with his five men and also shot up an officer's mess, if you like, an air crew's mess and destroyed
a fuel dump. Two weeks later, both raiding parties returned to the same airfield. Stirling again
had no joy. Paddy Main this time destroyed 27 aircraft. So in the space of two weeks on two
raids, Main and his small band of raiders had destroyed more than 50 German aircraft.
Stirling had nothing to show for his efforts.
You listened to Dan Snow's History Hit.
We're talking about the birth of the SAS and David Stirling.
More coming up.
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As we go on, you argue that he jeopardised his men's lives on those raids and later raids.
Have you got any other examples?
Obviously, that first raid in November 1941, he was very reckless in pressing ahead with that.
The best example is the Benghazi raid of September 1942, when Sterling, who, how can I put it?
1942 when Stirling, who, how can I put it, he was not the most discreet when it came to military secrets. And it was well known that the raid on Benghazi, which was ill thought out,
ill prepared, far too large, a force of 200 traveling from a desert oasis to the Libyan port of Benghazi. And the GHQ warned Sterling that
the intelligence showed that the enemy were waiting for them. Sterling ignored this. He
pressed ahead with this attack. Interestingly, the long range desert group who were accompanying
the SAS on this raid withdrew, decided that they were too
late in arriving. They believed that the raid had been compromised. So they refused to press on
with the raid on the outskirts of Benghazi. But Stirling went ahead with it and they ran straight
into an ambush. About half a dozen men were killed. Another dozen or so were wounded or captured. And it was a complete fiasco. And again, this was an example of Sterling's ill discipline and his recklessness and his pursuit, not of glory, but it was an adventure. He was an immature man, I argue in the book. And in contrast, Paddy Mayne, frequently I heard veterans tell me that Paddy Mayne, far from being the reckless gung-ho character that is latterly being portrayed, was very judicious and carefully examined every operation prior to its launch to ensure that
all possible risks had been eliminated. Sterling wasn't like that.
He must have had something because he stayed in command and there were successes. What do you put
those down to? Was it all Paddy Main? Was it all the officers and other staff work?
all the officers and other staff work? I would say it was mainly Maine, another officer,
Bill Fraser, and they had very good recruits. When the SAS was formed in August 1941,
there were six officers and 60 men. The men came from the commandos and they were some of the best guerrilla fighters in the British Army at that time, the likes of Red Sea Kings, Johnny Cooper, Bob Bennett, Pat Riley. And David Sterling was physically brave because he was not cut out for guerrilla warfare, as I said, temperamentally or physically. And he really withdrew from the SAS, both physically and psychologically. And by that,
I mean, increasingly from about October, even before the first operation, he was spending most
of his time in Cairo. And there was another brother, Peter, who I mentioned earlier, who
worked as a secretary at the British Embassy in Cairo and had a flat in a very swanky district.
And so David based himself there. And it was Paddy Main who really was the leader of the SAS
at their base at Cabrit, 80 miles to the east of Cairo. David Sterling recognised this. I quote
him in the book as he says that he saw that Paddy Main was becoming the de facto leader of the SAS.
So one way Sterling did try to claw back some measure of control was in January 1942.
He appointed Paddy Main the training officer.
They had a new 50 recruits from the Free French arrived who turned out to be formidable soldiers, but they needed training. And he tasked Paddy Main with that. Absolute absurd decision, bearing in mind that
in the previous month, Paddy Main had destroyed over 50 German aircraft. Sterling had a big fat
zero to his name. So what did he do? He takes his most effective fighter, his officer, and appoints him training officer. And of course, Sterling then went off in another couple of raids to the port of Borat and to Benghazi. This was his first Benghazi raid. Came up empty handed again and so was obliged to bring back Maine. And what did Paddy Maine do? In his first raid back, he destroyed 15 aircraft. So I think that had Main not returned
from that first raid in November 1941, the SAS would have disintegrated. It was Main who kept
it alive. And David Stirling really was a peripheral figure. This is electrifying stuff.
There'll be many who revere David Sterling. Tell me about him
being captured and actually Paddy Mayne then formally taking command of the SAS. Well, I suggest
in the book, Dan, that David Sterling subconsciously probably wanted to be captured. It was his way out.
In September 1942, the SAS had expanded from a unit to become a regiment.
And David Sterling was really out of his depth here.
And in November 1942, he was admitted to hospital suffering from conjunctivitis and desert sores, which is actually a much nastier condition than it sounds.
It's really his skin condition becomes
inflamed and it can become quite serious so physically he was in a bad shape but mentally
he was in a bad shape too and in fact I discovered some signals sent from London sent from Mount
Batten instructing Sterling to come back to London because there was a reorganisation going on of not just the SAS,
but special forces in combined operations in general.
Sterling ignored that order.
He ignored that because he didn't want anyone in London to see just what a state he was in.
But he also feared that he was going to have his baby, if you like, the SAS,
the only thing that had given him any
purpose in life, taken away from him. So what he did was instead he went to the one place where no
one could contact him, up the blue, which was the slang for the interior of a desert. So he led a
squadron of the SAS into the desert. Paddy Mayne had been operating behind lines with great success
throughout October 1942, harassing the Germans as they withdrew west from El Alamein. And Sterling
came up with this harebrained idea of becoming the first unit from the Eighth Army to link up with the First Army, which had landed in November
1942 in Algeria, Morocco, Operation Torch, and was fighting its way east down through Tunisia.
And it was a pointless operation. There was nothing to be obtained by it. But Stirling,
really, there was little else for him to do. It was purely an ego trip, if you like.
And so off he sets.
There were five Jeeps, 14 men in January 1943.
They went through something called the Gabey's Gap, which is a sort of a narrow bottleneck,
not too far from the Tunisian coast.
And they, going along a desert road road they passed through one German column now
bearing in mind everyone's covered in dust so it was quite hard to identify who's who I spoke to
three men who were with Sterling on this patrol who said that the Germans certainly looked at
them quite quizzically and who are this small band of men a A few miles later, they turned off the road and drove into a wadi,
a dry riverbed, for a few hundred yards, dismounted from their jeeps. And Stirling said,
right, let's get our heads down and rest for a while. We've been driving through the night.
Now, inexplicably, he posted no sentries, despite the fact they knew that there were Germans
in the area. They were caught and caught quite easily.
The Phantom Major, the Pimpernel of a desert, as he liked to be known, was caught by the Germans
without a shot being fired. And that was the end of David Sterling's war. He then spent two and a
half years as a POW, where he once more imperiled the lives of his men with these crackpot escape schemes.
Not a fan. You're not a fan of David Sterling. I've interviewed some of the last surviving SAS
veterans. Who have you talked to to come up with this bold revisionist view of him?
Must have interviewed about 70, 75 SAS veterans, also several members of a long range desert group who didn't think very
highly of David Sterling or the SAS as it was in the desert days. It became a very effective
fighting force in Italy and France and Germany from 43 to 45. No coincidence that that was when
it was under the command of Paddy Main. So I've spoken to dozens of men, but I've also re-examined the operational reports of the SAS and also examined, more importantly,
the war diaries and the correspondence from the Long Range Desert Group, from GHQ. And there,
there is a treasure trove of information just detailing the lack of discipline,
the lack of organization, the poor logistics of Stirling. He drove Montgomery mad too,
in September 1942, because it wouldn't be accurate to say it was his background, because
his brother, Bill Stirling, was obviously from the same family and from the
same class. But he was a fine soldier and he didn't have David's conceit and willful arrogance.
It was just a characteristic of David. And I think, as I said, stemmed from his insecurity,
his immaturity. So it was putting that together, but also just rereading the accounts of other men,
whether it's Johnny Cooper's book, who was one of the originals, whether it was Malcolm
Cradle, the SAS medical officer in the desert, and reading between the lines. Because what one
has to understand is that there is now what I describe as the cult of the SAS. So they're almost
untouchable. And David Sterling was partly responsible for that. He created this aura,
this myth that didn't exist in the war and didn't exist immediately after the war. But David Sterling
was physically, he was quite an intimidating character. was about six foot four not particularly broad
but he had people have described his penetrating stare and this way that he would sort of stoop
over you and interestingly the word that kept cropping up in people's descriptions of David
Sterling and the effect he had of them was I fell under his spell. It was just something magnetic about him. And of course,
this didn't work on Bill Sterling, his brother, and it didn't work on Paddy Mayne. And they were
two of the only people who were able to resist this. But this has been the main reason why
Sterling has been able to get away for so long with this persona of a phantom major that no one's
challenged. And of course, one has to remember
that in the 1950s, we were a much more deferential society. He came from the upper class and working
class soldiers who I spoke to would tell me, oh yeah, they'd say Sterling, he was okay. And that
was it really. Whereas get them on the subject of Paddy Main or even Bill Sterling. They would wax lyrical about their qualities.
But with Sterling, it was always, he's okay.
But of course, one of the reasons for that
is that very few people really knew him
because he didn't spend much time at Cabrit with the SAS.
He spent most of his time in Cairo in his brother's flat.
You say he fell out of Montgomery.
What was Montgomery's view of him?
Oh, that he was unruly, impertinent, and someone who needed to be controlled. And in fact, that is why Sterling
began to lose control of the SAS, because Montgomery said, I'm not having this private army
running around doing what it likes in the desert.
They're going to come under the formal structure of the Eighth Army.
And Stirling really didn't like that.
And the great John Hackett was an account of his witnessing a contretemps between Montgomery and Stirling.
So impertinent is the best word to describe Montgomery's view of David Stirling.
Love it. Thank you very much. What's the book called?
The subtitle is The Phony Major, a play on, obviously, the phantom major.
I hope, Dan, if I can just say that I'm not kind towards David Sterling,
but I don't think one should be kind towards him because he has manipulated the truth to his own ends and he's got away with it for too
long. Worst of all, he has quite deliberately disparaged the reputation of Paddy Mayne and
diminished the achievements of his brother Bill. So what I hope people will take from this book
is a new and a more positive opinion of Paddy Mayne and the realisation that it was really Bill Sterling
and not David Sterling who was the brains behind the SAS.
Thank you very much indeed.
Thank you.
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