The Phantom Major: The Story of David Stirling and the SAS Regiment

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Well, he doesn’t come cheap, but what are you getting for all those points? First off, a Veteran Major is nothing to sniff at in the leadership department, and given how small SAS armies tend to be, there’s a good chance he can activate most of yours in one go with his You Men Snap To!He’s also a powerful force in his own right, with three mates (one of whom is also a Medic), providing a capable little fireteam. As his Mad, Quite Madspecial rule makes him very very difficult to Pin out of usefulness, he can be used very aggressively without too much fear of being bogged down. The Phantom Majoris a fun little rule that can remove models from enemy infantry units beforethe game begins – while one Inexperienced chap isn’t likely to change the outcome of a game, having an expensive Veteran with plenty of kit not take part can be very inconvenient indeed for your opponent, particularly if you can roll well and get a few of them off on guard duty! SAS: Rogue Heroes a b c Adam Curtis, The Mayfair Set "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 25 March 2014 . Retrieved 12 June 2014. {{ cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title ( link) David Stirling, by contrast, was the “frontman”. He was “quite charismatic and quite forceful and a very good salesman”. The other key player in the early SAS, who was never given the credit he deserved, says Mortimer, was Paddy Mayne. Why? Because Stirling feared and envied the talented Ulsterman in “equal measure”. Mayne was one of the few men who had seen through Stirling and recognised him for what he was: an incompetent egomaniac. After his capture, Stirling’s war was over, despite a number of abortive escape attempts, which eventually led him to Colditz. The SAS thrived under Mayne for the rest of the war. Following Mayne’s untimely death in a car crash in 1955, Stirling once again used his powers of self-promotion to create his own myth, appropriating many of Mayne’s qualities and successes along the way.

There were numerous examples in the 1940s and the years immediately after when Bill and David were referred to as the co-founders of the SAS. In the biography, Mortimer analyses Stirling’s complex character: the childhood speech impediment, 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, Paddy Mayne. The BBC is set to explore the beginnings of the elite British military force, The Special Air Service (SAS) in SAS Rogue Heroes. According to regimental tradition, Mayne was recruited into the SAS from a prison cell, where he was awaiting court martial for striking his commanding officer. Whatever the truth of this story, Mayne proved to be a great asset to his new unit.This article is an edited transcript of SAS: Rogue Heroes with Ben Macintyre on Dan Snow’s History Hit podcast. Bill and his mother arranged a job for David with a firm of Edinburgh architects but he didn’t last long. A pattern was emerging of David quitting when the going got tough. Mrs Stirling decided drastic measures were needed. She despatched David to America in the autumn of 1938 to work on the ranch of a family friend, Charlie Urmston. He had emigrated from Dunblane to the States and he had become a successful rancher in El Paso.

In the space of 15 months, the Luftwaffe and the Italian Regia Aeronautica suffered the loss of more than 250 aircraft and dozens of supply dumps. The six-part drama, which begins on Sunday, October 30 at 9pm, will take a deep dive into the creation of the famed Special Forces unit- focusing particularly on Scottish aristocrat David Stirling, founder of the force. The adventures took their toll. Stirling was in rough physical shape – plagued by migraines and painful desert sores. He conceived a foolhardy plan in January 1943: to journey across the desert, passing right through the Germany army as it retreated into Tunisia, and be the first unit from the Eighth Army to link with the advancing First Army. He was captured on his way, however, by Luftwaffe paratrooper force. He escaped, scarpering after asking for a pee break, but was recaptured the next day. Held in Rome, he spilled sensitive SAS details to a fellow prisoner, the notorious traitor Theodore Schurch, who was working for the fascists. Stirling lied about his indiscretion, claiming he’d fed Schurch duff intel to deliberately deceive. But while Stirling spent the rest of the war in Colditz, Mike managed to escape with another SAS soldier and an Arabic-speaking Frenchman.Following its disastrous opening operation in North Africa in November 1941, it was Mayne who first brought badly needed success to the SAS.

He was a first-class man, highly intelligent, highly motivated, and in many ways the founder of the SAS. Mike was the navigator for the first SAS unit – then known as L-Detachment – guiding raiding columns for hundreds of miles behind enemy lines in North Africa. The whole SAS started out its success by being terrifically secret. David didn’t want any publicity at all, and we never had any to start with, not until the raid of the SAS on the Iranian embassy, which took place in the presence of the television cameras. MORE : Connor Swindells describes ‘intense’ bootcamp in Moroccan desert in preparation for SAS: Rogue Heroes role

Training and leadership

a b c d e f Macintyre, Ben (2016). Rogue Warriors. New York: Crown Publishing Group. pp.48–49, 143–146, 149–154. ISBN 978-1-101-90416-9.