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On the night of the 26th of January 1943, David Stirling, the founder of the British Special Air Service, opened his eyes in a cave in Tunisia and found a German soldier with a gun pointed at his head. His 18-month campaign of terrorizing German and Italian airfields and bases across North Africa was over. Stirling spent the rest of the war as a prisoner of war, although he tried to escape at least four times. Given his extended imprisonment, a question does arise. Was Stirling really the mastermind of the SAS or were others like Jock Lewis and Paddy Mayne more responsible for its success?
This is the story of David Stirling, the Phantom Major. The man known to history as David Stirling was born on the 15th of November 1915. Although he was of Scottish ancestry and grew up in Scotland, he was born at 15 Cambridge Square in the Paddington area of London. His baptismal name was Archibald David Stirling, though he went by his middle name and is known as such today. David's father was Archibald Stirling, the younger son of Sir William Stirling Maxwell, ninth baronet. They were a family of the lower aristocracy in Scotland and Stirling came from privilege.
His grandfather and his father both sat in Parliament to represent the Perth region of central Scotland that straddles the Highlands and Lowland Scotland. Archibald was also a soldier. When David was a child, his father was appointed to a commission after the First World War to investigate what was then known euphemistically as shell shock, yet which is now diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder. Archibald married Margaret Mary Fraser in 1910. They had six children together, four boys of which David was the third eldest and two daughters.
David's eldest sibling, Bill, would play an important part in the formation and early years of the SAS, while another brother, Hugh, was killed in North Africa during the war. On his mother's side, David was descended from the royal house of Stuart that ruled over the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland between 1603 and 1714 and in Scotland back as far as 1371. David's youth was typical of a child of the Scottish nobility in that it was spent both in Scotland and England. He grew up at Keir House in Perthshire and several studies mistakenly suggest that he was born there rather than London.
After enjoying life in the thinly populated rural parts of central Scotland as a child, he was sent south of the border to attend Ampleforth College in North Yorkshire, where there was an officer training program for children of families with a military tradition. He grew up to be immensely tall at 6 and 1/2 ft and excelled at sports, but he was not a good student. After heading to Cambridge University, he was expelled for a combination of dozens of different incidents, usually concerning drinking and gambling. He then joined the Scots Guards as a reservist and developed a keen interest in mountaineering, aspiring to become the first man on record to climb Mount Everest.
His wanderlust took him across the Atlantic Ocean at the end of the 1930s, where he traveled and took up sporadic work. It was not a promising start to his life, though he had exhibited a sense of adventure and a disdain for convention, which were useful tools for the path he would set out on during the war. When the Second World War broke out at the beginning of September 1939, Stirling was in Montana working as a cattle herder on a ranch on the outskirts of the Rocky Mountains. As soon as word reached him of the outbreak of hostilities, he immediately began making his way back to the East Coast and sailed for Britain in mid-September.
Upon his arrival home, he rejoined the Scots Guards, in which unit his brothers Bill and Hugh were also serving. This was during the first uncertain stage of the war, when the Germans were completing the conquest of Poland, yet during which, beyond an abortive foray by the French against the German border, there was really very little else occurring. For the most part, the British and French were simply trying to rearm and train as many men as possible now that war was upon them. According to his biographers, many of Sterling's worst impulses were on display as he waited around for some meaningful service to materialize. For instance, he would frequently disappear from his unit to go to White's, a gentleman's club in London,
to drink, gamble, and play billiards, returning to his unit afterwards with a hangover and a clear attitude problem. He was moody and prone to depression, traits which characterized his whole adult life. There were allegedly reasons for his behavior beyond the lack of active combat. Sterling formed the view that the Scots Guards and other regiments were being drilled to fight the Germans as though they were still fighting the First World War, whereas clearly the rules of engagement would be very different over 20 years later. In other ways, his dereliction of his training responsibilities was useful.
It was at White's that Sterling first heard news about a commando unit being raised by Lieutenant Colonel Robert Laycock that would undertake special military missions. Before too long, Laycock's plans for a unit which was named Layforce became clearer. It would consist of 1,500 commandos in three different regiments. Sterling volunteered and was sent to the Isle of Arran in Scotland for training. The environment here was deemed to be ideal for training soldiers to operate in rough conditions with bogs and bracken, harsh wind and rain at times, and also the capacity to train for both terrestrial and maritime conditions.
His height meant Sterling had a commanding presence and established himself early on as a natural leader amongst the commandos of Layforce. As they trained, developments in the war were dictating where they would be sent to serve. Western Europe was conquered by the Nazis between April and June 1940, after which the Battle of Britain commenced, though it was prematurely abandoned when Hitler turned eastwards in 1941 and invaded the Soviet Union that June. Italy had entered the war, too, and was anxious to acquire a vast empire in Africa, one that involved linking upon its existing colonies in Libya and in the Horn of Africa.
This meant acquiring Egypt and Sudan from the British. In tandem, the new British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was anxious to provide aid to Greece and Yugoslavia in the Balkans. This meant that once the Battle of Britain ended, the focus of the war between Britain and the growing Axis alliance headed by Germany and Italy switched to the Mediterranean and North Africa. Thus, in the first week of 1941, Sterling and Layforce departed Britain bound for the Eastern Mediterranean. Layforce's original task was to take part in the British assault on the island of Rhodes, which the Germans and Italians were utilizing as a major base
of operations in preparation for the eventual conquest of the larger island of Crete that occurred in May 1941. However, by the time Layforce had made its way through the Mediterranean gauntlet to Egypt, past Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya, which were all under the control of the Vichy French and Italians, the strategic situation had changed. When the decision was taken in Britain to send Sterling and the other men of Layforce to the Eastern Mediterranean, the British in Egypt had been forcing the hapless Italians back westwards into Libya. This hugely successful campaign had culminated in the capture of the city of Benghazi in early February 1941 after the Battle of Beda Fomm.
However, even before that happened, the Germans had realized that their Italian allies, whose military was incompetent by comparison with the German Wehrmacht, needed military assistance if they were to stop the British advance and push on eastwards to secure Cairo and the Suez Canal, a strategic imperative for the Germans. Thus, even as the British was settling into Benghazi, the German Afrika Korps under Erwin Rommel was arriving in North Africa. In the late spring, Rommel began a form of Saharan Blitzkrieg, reconquering the land in Libya the British had acquired in the winter of 1940 and early 1941, and then pressing on into Egypt. In tandem, the Germans and Italians defeated the Yugoslavians and Greeks in the late spring and early summer,
nullifying the strategic value of attacking Rhodes. Thus, with Cairo and the Suez Canal now under threat again, Layforce's original mission was obsolete by the time it reached Egypt. Given this, Layforce was immediately broken up into separate units. One was sent to shore up the defense of Cyprus, while others aided in the evacuation of British troops from Crete or took part in the raid on Bardia in Libya on the 19th of April designed to try to slow the German advance. Stirling was meanwhile stationed in Egypt without having fired his gun in real combat yet and was increasingly impatient to contribute in some meaningful way to the conflict nearly two years after the war had commenced.
His desire to get into the fighting was no doubt heightened by news that his younger brother, Hugh, had been killed in Libya in April 1941. Layforce was disbanded in August 1941 and its members were generally assigned into other units. By then, Stirling had spent several months idle in Cairo largely drinking too much and making occasional petitions to disinterested commanders about the benefits of establishing a successor unit to Layforce, though one that would be more specialized. His older brother, Peter, had an apartment in Cairo near the British Embassy which became a common haunt for heavy drinking soldiers.
This proved hazardous to Stirling after a certain point. For instance, he suffered an eye injury after falling over on one night out and tearing his eye against the rope of the tent. He also experienced a bout of dysentery which was not uncommon in the North African environment. However, Sterling was about to enter into the most important stage of his life and wartime service. Although the exact course of events and the contributions of various people involved is contentious. It all started when Sterling met Jock Lewes, an Indian-born British officer who Sterling began trading ideas with one day in the mess hall in Cairo.
Sterling and Jock Lewes are generally credited with being the driving force behind the idea of a new special operatives unit that would parachute in behind enemy lines in North Africa to attack German and Italian positions in the Western Desert of Egypt and in Libya. The typical interpretation was that Sterling was the man who organized what would become the SAS, but this is now recognized as an oversimplification. There are reasons why Lewes's role was understated. He had a controversial background which included a period in which he had been in Germany in the 1930s and had been a supporter of the Nazis, even meeting Hitler in Germany. He turned against the
German fascists after the events of the Kristallnacht pogroms against Germany and Austria's Jewish people in November 1938. In Egypt in 1941, Lewes had acquired access to a consignment of parachutes that were accidentally delivered to Port Said after being intended for India. He and Sterling carried out an experimental parachute jump in the desert using these and a Vickers biplane, in the summer of 1941. This first test was a disaster. Sterling's parachute became snagged on the tail of the plane when he was jumping and ripped.
He then hit the ground at speed and was knocked unconscious. When he came to, he was in the Scottish Military Hospital in the city of Alexandria and had suffered spinal injuries that left him suffering from intermittent back pain and migraines for the rest of his life. The version of events which lionizes Sterling's role in what followed holds that he then spent the weeks that he was convalescing in hospital looking over maps of the Western Desert and coming up with plans for developing what became the Special Air Service, or SAS for short. Alternatively, other studies claim that Lewis already had extensive plans for this, while David's brother, Bill, also played an important part.
Regardless of who the real architect of the SAS was, Sterling or Lewis, Sterling was most likely the individual who was forceful enough to get the idea for the unit in front of Claude Auchinleck, the recently appointed British Commander in the Middle Eastern Theater. Auchinleck authorized the creation of the new unit and promoted Sterling to the rank of captain. It was initially called L Detachment and then the Special Air Service. Initial recruitment and training for the SAS began immediately with dozens of men volunteering to join the new unit.
These included Robert Paddy Mayne, a Northern Irishman who would play a central role in the SAS's operations over the next 4 years, and who had a background as a boxer and lawyer. The fledgling unit was given a limited amount of resources and sent to Kabrit on the Great Bitter Lake, about 100 mi east of Cairo towards the Suez Canal. To make up for their lack of supplies, the men robbed four lorry loads of equipment from an army camp of soldiers from New Zealand, which allegedly included a piano, an early act which established Stirling's unit's reputation for quasi-lawless behavior within the armed forces in Egypt.
Two further important developments in this early stage were that Stirling's unit adopted their famous motto, "Who dares, wins." While they also developed their own makeshift incendiary device, the Lewis bomb, an explosive made from plastic that was lightweight, meaning that SAS members could carry two dozen of them or so, unlike traditional grenades, which were metallic and heavy. The inaugural mission of the SAS was Operation Squatter, which took place in Libya on the night of the 16th of November 1941 into the morning of the 17th.
The mission was launched in advance of a more conventional offensive by Auchinleck's forces on the ground planned for the 18th of November. Five targets were selected by Stirling and the other senior commanders. Then, five Bombay planes dropped five distinct units led by Stirling, Lewis, Mayne, and two others into the Gazala-Timimi area of Libya. However, everything that possibly could have gone wrong did so. A huge desert gale force wind blew through as the mission was underway, but Sterling elected to go ahead with the mission despite one of the pilots recommending that they should abort.
The numbers are disputed, yet it seems relatively clear that over half of the 55 men who jumped that night never returned to Egypt. Some of them died in the jump. Others were stranded in the desert afterwards and never made it back to safety. The entire debacle convinced Sterling that the Special Air Service would be better served if they didn't attempt to drop in directly to enemy sites, instead moving from the nearby desert to strike clandestinely at relatively isolated German and Italian bases. After the disastrous Operation Squatter, the SAS amalgamated with elements of
what was known as the Long Range Desert Group as they sought to operate over long distances across the desert. Sterling's role in the formation of the SAS might be doubted today. However, he clearly was the crucial individual in ensuring that the unit was not shut down entirely after the initial teething problems. He was good at playing the political game of contacting the right commanders in Cairo to obtain resources. And in December 1941, the Long Range Desert Group started to meet with some success. On the night of the 14th of December 1941, they attacked multiple airfields at Sirte, Tamit, and Agedabia in Libya, destroying dozens of Italian and German planes on the ground.
Mayne's success at Tamit was especially noteworthy. He announced his arrival by kicking open the door of an officer's mess hall at the airfield and opening fire with his machine gun. His men placed bombs on and destroyed two dozen planes and absconded without any casualties. Stirling was less successful. He stumbled over a sleeping guard at Sirte, and the attack was largely abandoned. This began a pattern whereby Stirling, Mayne, and their men attacked various airbases across Libya every five or six days throughout late December and into January 1942.
Soon, they had destroyed over a hundred planes in these attacks, though Jock Lewes was killed on the 30th of December 1941 after his unit of vehicles came under attack in the desert from Axis aircraft as they were attempting to head back to their desert base. The first seven months of 1942 were the period when the reputation of the SAS was established as Stirling and his men struck repeatedly at targets across Libya. Many of these were airfields, such as the raids on Benghazi airfield in mid-March, but others were against port facilities and communications installations.
An attack on the harbor of Burat in January, for example, didn't go according to plan as a portable canoe which Stirling and his men had brought along, became trapped in the soft sand, forcing them to improvise. In the end, they destroyed a large consignment of fuel and a wireless station. Then, in June, the SAS, with Sterling now a major and the unit having been expanded, was deployed to attack multiple sites around the Mediterranean simultaneously. These attacks included locations in Libya and Crete, the goal being to reduce the scale of the maritime attacks on convoys trying to relieve the British forces in Malta, a key British base surrounded by Axis forces in the center
of the Mediterranean, which was the key link between the Allied positions in Gibraltar and Egypt. Fresh from this success, the SAS began operating as an even faster-moving armored division after Sterling acquired the use of three dozen jeeps and armored vehicles. These were then fitted with Vickers machine guns that could fire on aircraft attacking them if needed. With this increased firepower, Sterling and the SAS attacked the Sidi Haneish Airfield in northwestern Egypt on the night of the 26th of July, 1942. In what was arguably their most famous raid of the North Africa campaign, 18 jeeps blasted through the Axis base, firing off three or four Vickers guns from each vehicle as they drove in an arrow head formation.
Nearly 40 enemy aircraft were destroyed before Sterling and his men made off as swiftly as they had driven into the airfield. The ethos and workings of the SAS under Sterling have become infamous, with the group portrayed as a rough and semi-lawless group of misfits living out in the desert barely under the control of the general headquarters in Cairo. There's an element of truth to this, but it is also a myth to some extent. Sterling was anxious to bring on board men who were capable of thinking independently and who questioned authority, as they would be best suited to reacting quickly to changing
circumstances deep behind enemy lines. Conversely, he expressly stated that he was looking for people who were intelligent, not psychopaths who were likely not only to get themselves killed, but to also endanger the wider mission. SAS members later noted that Sterling's own leadership style was not brash. He was actually a relatively reserved man and didn't bark out orders. Not everyone agreed with this assessment, though. There are reports from members of the SAS who, after the war, criticized his leadership as being amateurish. As with everything to do with Sterling, there are conflicting accounts.
One thing that is crystal clear is that the individuals whom he brought into the SAS were tough. They had to be, as they did indeed live for weeks at a time in an isolated rendezvous location in the Sahara Desert, including 3 weeks at the height of the summer heat in 1942. The Long Range Desert Group was also joined in 1942 by a division of 50 free French fighters. Despite Sterling's repeated requests, the senior commanders in Cairo consistently refused his request for the size of the overall SAS to be increased to 500 well-supplied men, and their numbers generally ranged between 100 and 200 with a high attrition rate.
Details of Sterling's work and the actions of the SAS had reached all the way to the top of the British government by this time, and in August 1942, he had the opportunity to converse in person with the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. Churchill had planned to stop by Cairo on his flight into Russia by a circuitous route to avoid German-controlled airspace. He passed through again on the return trip, and on this second stopover in the Egyptian capital, Sterling was asked to attend a dinner party with the Prime Minister. Though he had been specifically instructed by his superiors beforehand
not to mention anything to Churchill about a potential raid on Benghazi, Sterling disobeyed the command and broached the subject with Churchill after dinner. Churchill was impressed by the audacity and later stated his surprise at the contrast in Sterling's mild manner and his reputation for ferocity in running the SAS. He arranged for Sterling to attend as a dinner guest again the following evening, and the mission was discussed further.
Sterling confided during the course of their conversation that he was in constant fear that the SAS would be disbanded. Evidently, he made a substantial impression. In the days that followed after Churchill left Egypt, Sterling learned that the SAS would have the resources it needed and the proposed mission to Benghazi was greenlit. The SAS attempted to attack Axis positions at Benghazi on multiple occasions in 1942, but the raid which has garnered the most attention is Operation Snowdrop. An SAS mission that took place over the late night of the 13th of September and into the following day.
The original plan was for a small band of the SAS to block the harbor of Benghazi and thus prevent Axis resupply of the city as the allies stepped up plans for Operation Torch. The Western Allied invasion of Morocco and Algeria in November 1942. Gradually, the plan became more complicated to include over 200 men, nearly 100 vehicles, and simultaneous attacks on other sites in Libya. It did not go as planned. The convoy was delayed and the element of surprise was lost. Then, the Axis forces responded and attacked the SAS.
Nearly three quarters of the vehicles were destroyed while things went even worse at the corresponding raid onto Brooke. Over a quarter of Sterling's men were lost and the mission was a complete debacle. The reasons for the failure were complex. In 1967, the journalist and novelist Len Deighton wrote a piece for The Sunday Times magazine in which he claimed that Sterling was substantially responsible as he had been indiscreet in Egypt before the mission and Axis spies had acquired information about the mission before it was ever launched.
Stirling sued for libel in 1968 and won a substantial settlement. The debacle of Operation Snowdrop in September 1942 was only one controversy surrounding Stirling. One of the other big issues that have surfaced in recent assessments of his career and the operations of the SAS is that Paddy Mayne was actually the most capable commander that the unit had after the death of Jock Lewis. The orthodox view of Stirling for decades was that he came up with the idea for the SAS and it would not have succeeded in 1942 had it not been for his leadership and constant lobbying in Cairo.
However, over the last 10 years a more nuanced view has developed, one which notes firstly that Lewis was one of the main architects of it in 1941 as was Bill Stirling, David's brother, and then that Mayne became as significant a commander as David in 1942, eventually leading the SAS after Stirling was captured by the Axis forces. For instance, members of the SAS noted years later that Mayne had a better instinct for day-to-day command affairs. He would reiterate things to his men like proper gun maintenance in between missions which Stirling simply had no aptitude for.
It was also night and day when it came to Stirling and Mayne's combat record. Nobody destroyed more Axis planes personally in North Africa than Mayne did, but he was not a political soldier, unlike Stirling. Therefore, the British High Command was more inclined to cultivate the idea that Stirling was the Phantom Major, leading his men on missions in Egypt and Libya and then disappearing into the desert as rapidly as they had appeared when in reality, Mayne was the effective field commander. One modern study has even gone so far as to claim that Stirling's reputation as head of the SAS was nothing more than a byproduct of his egomania and capacity for self-promotion.
The reality probably lies somewhere in the middle. Stirling was a key figure alongside his brother and Jock Lewis in creating the SAS, and himself and Mayne then complemented each other well in 1942. Mayne was unquestionably the more effective field commander, but Stirling was the pivotal man when it came to drumming up support for the unit amongst the commanders in Cairo. Mayne was the soldier, Stirling was the politician. Though Mayne was arguably the more critical commander when it came to the day-to-day running of the SAS, the Axis evidently were more concerned with Stirling.
By the second half of 1942, he had become known as the Phantom Major in German and Italian radio communications in North Africa, while the British newspapers were also running with this depiction of Stirling as they looked for propaganda victories back home. As the Germans and Italians increased the resources deployed to try to counteract the SAS and as the Western allies began striking deeper into Axis-held territory in Libya, Tunisia, and Algeria after the landings in Morocco and Algeria in November 1942, Stirling was finally captured on the night of the 26th of January 1943 in a mission near El Hamma in Tunisia. A special Luftwaffe paratrooper unit was deployed to prevent Stirling and his men from capturing a wadi here that was
strategically important in the Allied attempts to establish a land connection between their presences in Libya and Algeria. Stirling was one of a small bunch of SAS men captured here while sleeping. After being questioned by an Italian commander in Tunisia, he was flown north to Sicily. There then ensued months in which Stirling was transferred to a series of ever more northerly prisons in Italy and then in Germany, eventually being sent to the notorious German prison at Colditz Castle in 1944.
He spent the remainder of the Second World War detained here. In all, he made at least half a dozen escape attempts during the time that he was imprisoned by the Axis powers. Stirling's capture and position as a prisoner of war for nearly 2 and 1/2 years meant the command of the SAS devolved in all practical ways to Paddy Mayne, albeit with some fragmentation and with a new name, the Special Raiding Squadron. The Free French that had been operational under Stirling headed off to form their own unit now that French Algeria was turning into a new base of operations for them.
David's brother, Bill, became the commander of the 2nd SAS Regiment and was more involved in planning air drops of SAS parachutists in Italy. The Allied conquest of North Africa was wrapped up in May 1943 and the invasion of Sicily began in early July. Mayne and his men went on to play a part in the fighting as an advanced unit of special operatives in Sicily, mainland Italy, France, and then Germany. As they campaigned on these fronts, Mayne's men were moving ever closer to where Stirling was detained at Colditz.
The castle prison was liberated on the 16th of April 1945, 3 weeks before the end of the war in Europe. He didn't dither or try to collect himself too much after the experience of 2 and 1/2 years as a prisoner of war. Instead, he was soon in contact with the War Office and was asked to begin preparing a special operatives task force for deployment to the Far East. This never materialized though as the dropping of the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the 6th and 9th of August 1945 led to Japan surrendering before any campaign against the Japanese Home Islands was entered into.
Despite its eminent success as a unit, the SAS was disbanded immediately after the end of the Second World War. It was reformed in 1947 as 21 SAS regiment, and the idea of it spread internationally. By the end of the 1950s, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia all had Special Air Service companies. The SAS's most well-known post-war moment came in 1980 when they were central to the siege of the Iranian Embassy in London after it was taken over in the context of the wider hostage crisis of American Embassy staff in Tehran following the Iranian Revolution. Stirling was not the driving force behind its recomposition in Britain after the war, though, and Brian Franks,
a member who had risen to prominence within the unit towards the end of the war when they were operational in France after D-Day, was the main figure post-war. Instead, Stirling had decided to leave Britain immediately after the war ended, seeking out a new adventure in Southern Africa. He did not even wait to be demobilized, and instead went to Southern Rhodesia, the vast British colony corresponding with modern-day Zimbabwe, to seek his fortune.
He was there when he received notice that he was to be awarded an OBE, an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. In 1949, he formed the Capricorn Africa Society in Southern Rhodesia, the goal of which was to continue Britain's role in Africa as calls for decolonization grew in the post-war era. The society's manifesto stated that it aimed to develop the economy of the vast region running from Kenya and Uganda south to South Africa, and to promote greater racial integration. This should not be viewed as a model of liberal colonial harmony. The Capricorn Society stipulated that the right to vote, for instance, should only be extended in the colonies gradually as the native people adopted markers of British civility.
After the Suez Crisis of 1956 and the shattering of the image of British power in the world, decolonization accelerated across Africa at the end of the 1950s. Realizing the mission had failed, Stirling resigned as head of the Capricorn Society in 1959 and returned home. Southern Rhodesia descended into the Bush War in 1964 between the white settler community and the native people. Back home, Stirling became involved in media and set up multiple television stations in both Britain and developing countries abroad.
He was very far from successful in this endeavor and later quipped that he owned the largest collection of bankrupt television stations in the world. He never married and his relationships were always challenging owing to his innate shyness, something which clashed with his enormous presence towering above almost everyone that he met. His accounts of his relationships in later years always seemed to have a subtext of a man who feared being entrapped or confined by the prospect of marriage, and he referred to some of his romantic encounters as close escapes.
This contrasts with some of the semi-fictional modern portrayals of Stirling which represent him as a womanizer. There has even been speculation that Stirling was gay, but there really isn't any evidence to support this other than the fact that he didn't marry or start a family. The likelihood is that he merely wanted to keep his options open in life. Those options included becoming involved in privatized security in the 1960s and 1970s. For instance, he became a contractor with Watchguard International Limited, which was helping to train military units in the Middle East and Africa.
This included a role in an aborted plan hatched around 1970 and 1971 to try to overthrow the regime of Muammar Gaddafi, a military commander who had seized control of Libya in a military revolution in 1969. Stirling became involved in British politics in a clandestine way in the mid-1970s. In 1974, strikes occurred across the United Kingdom in response to the three-day week imposition by the government to limit electricity consumption in the middle of the fourfold increase in oil prices after the oil shock of 1973. Stirling was dismayed by the social and political unrest and formed Great Britain 75, an association of former military men and others who formulated plans to keep
the country running in the event of a wider general strike throughout the nation. This had inherently paramilitary overtones and was quashed once plans for it leaked late in 1974. His conservative and anti-left politics was also on display in the role he played in Truemid, the Movement for the True Industrial Democracy that aimed to form a right-leaning alternative to the trade unions. Lewes' connections with the SAS continued through his later years as well. For instance, in 1984, Stirling delivered an address at the opening of an SAS base in Hereford.
During a similar speaking event 1989, he delivered his views on what the SAS actually represented, stating that the essence of the regimental ethos was that the Special Air Service constitutes the smallest core in the British Defense Forces, but with a special strategic role, which is probably unique among all the armies of the world. The following year, Stirling was granted a knighthood. He did not enjoy the Sir designation for very long. He died not long afterwards in London on the 4th of November, 1990, a week and a half before what would have been his 75th birthday.
He was buried at Moray in Scotland. In 2002, a statue of him was unveiled at Keir, where he grew up. Owing to the appearance of several books and a successful television series, David Stirling has never been more well known. Yet, increased attention has also brought increased scrutiny. The earliest studies of the Long Range Desert Group and the formation of the SAS in Egypt and Libya in 1941 and 1942 tend to unequivocally accept the idea that Stirling was responsible for the creation of the unit and led it until he was captured and ended up in Colditz. That version of events brought Stirling fame in his own day.
Now, there is a more nuanced interpretation. This notes that Stirling had very little military experience at all when he arrived in Egypt in 1941 and that when he got there, he spent a protracted stint largely drinking in Cairo before he got round to petitioning for a special operatives unit to be formed. He was one of three men who were then responsible for the formation of the SAS. His brother, Bill, and Jock Lewes should get a lot of the credit, too. Once the unit was formed, there's no real denying that Paddy Mayne was the more gifted military commander on the ground or in the desert, as the case may be.
This aside, it probably goes too far to dismiss Stirling as a poor leader who orchestrated disasters like Operation Snowdrop before being captured, spending the war in prison, and having a so-so post-war career in Africa and elsewhere. The more accurate interpretation lies somewhere in the middle. Stirling was not quite the brilliant visionary who was solely responsible for creating the SAS, but at the same time, he provided the political guile that ensured that the unit was set up and continued. It was Stirling who knew how to convince the commanders in Cairo to keep the guns, jeeps, and money being allocated to the SAS in its earliest days. That was just as indispensable a talent as Mayne's capacity for attacking
Italian and German airfields. The two men complemented each other and the SAS flourished as a result. What do you think of David Stirling? Was he really a visionary who drove the creation of the SAS and played a leading role in the Allied victory in North Africa? Or was he an opportunist charlatan who stole the credit for the work of Jock Lewes and Paddy Mayne? Please, let us know in the comments section. And in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
