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

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Business was chiefly with the Gulf States. He was linked, along with Denys Rowley, to a failed attempt to overthrow the Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi in 1970 or 1971. Stirling was the founder of “ private military company” KAS International, also known as KAS Enterprises. [23] During the course of his research, however, he read a book he regards as the best memoir of the SAS ever written, Born of the Desert by Malcolm James, who was the SAS wartime medical officer.

Having been dubbed ‘The Phantom Major’ by his German adversaries, they found great delight in capturing Stirling during a mission in Tunisia 1943. He escaped and was recaptured by the Italians. With an interest in rugby, Gavin Mortimer first got interested in the wartime SAS more than 20 years ago through research he was doing into his hero Paddy Mayne. Gavin claims that what allowed Stirling to “pull off this deceit” was the death of Paddy Mayne in a car crash in 1955. One can feel a degree of sympathy for Stirling because he was an ideas man and he was someone who found himself in a situation ie commanding officer of the SAS, who clearly wasn’t cut out for this role. But in an era when pulling down statues is all the rage, is it time to erect a new one? Of Bill Stirling, the real hero of the SAS.The unit was disbanded after the war ended, but in 1947 it was re-formed as part of the Territorial Army, becoming a regular Army unit again in 1952. BOOK REVIEW / A place for mad people: 'David Stirling' – Alan Hoe". Independent.co.uk. 12 September 1992.

David Stirling, founder of the SAS on patrol during WWII - he was dubbed the “Phantom Major” by German Field Marshal Rommel, and was rumoured to have personally strangled 41 men During the mid to late 1970s, Stirling created a secret organisation designed to undermine trades unionism from within. He recruited like-minded individuals from within the trade union movement, with the express intention that they should cause as much trouble during conferences as permissible. One such member was Kate Losinska, who was Head of the Civil and Public Services Association. Funding for this "operation" came primarily from his friend Sir James Goldsmith. [21] Honours [ edit ] Statue of David Stirling by Angela Conner near Doune, ScotlandIn 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. Q Would you regard what you did as more dangerous than what other members of the military were doing? But while Stirling spent the rest of the war in Colditz, Mike managed to escape with another SAS soldier and an Arabic-speaking Frenchman.

It was like being on the sea in a way. You could go in any direction. There was a great sort of freedom attached to being in the desert. There was so much variety – beautiful smooth surfaces, sand, and impassable great sand dunes hundreds of feet high –slowly moving across the desert with the prevailing wind, the sand dunes moving very, very slowly, perhaps a foot every year, but altering their arrangements quite considerably. Mostly we didn’t remember killing people because, in our case at any rate in the SAS, we were mostly shooting in the dark at things, or putting bombs on targets and hoping not to disturb the people who were going to be the recipients of them.

‘Lounge lizard’

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. Lieutenant-Colonel David Stirling was “quite, quite mad”. At least, that was the assessment of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. Indeed, while bored in Cairo during the Second World War, Stirling had jumped out of an aeroplane without proper training (or a helmet), tore his parachute on the tail, and hit the ground at such speed he was temporarily blinded and paralysed. Soon after, still on crutches, he sneaked into British Middle East HQ (“I had to use my crutches as a kind of ladder to get over the wire when the guards weren't looking,” Stirling recalled). This one-man mission was carried out for good reason: to evade not only the guards, but also the British army’s bloated administration, and put a proposal directly into the hands of the generals – the proposal that ultimately founded the SAS. But was the Perthshire-born officer really a military genius, or was he in fact a shameless self-publicist who manipulated people, and the truth, for his own ends? Analysis of character

Cautious when speaking to the Italians, he was “vain and voluble” in conversation with a fellow “captive”, Captain John Richards. Unbeknown to Stirling, Richards was an Anglo-Swiss stool pigeon, Theodore Schurch, who had deserted from the British army and was working for fascist intelligence. Oh yes. They said what a good chap he was, and how sad. People on the whole didn’t think about being killed. We all thought someone else would be killed, but not us. I don’t know why it was. I suspect it was self-protection really.

Death of Paddy Mayne

There was of course Bill Stirling. But because he recognised David’s flaws and how lost he was after the war, he was quite happy to let David take the plaudits. David Stirling, by contrast, was the “frontman”. He was “quite charismatic and quite forceful and a very good salesman”. Mortimer, Gavin (20 April 2015). Stirling's Desert Triumph: The SAS Egyptian Airfield Raids 1942. Bloomsbury. p.37. ISBN 978-1-4728-0764-9. Stirling was educated in England at the Catholic boarding school Ampleforth College. He was part of the Ampleforth Officer Training Corps. He attended Trinity College, Cambridge for a year before going to Paris to become an artist. [2] Second World War and the founding of the SAS [ edit ] Lieutenant Colonel Stirling with Lieutenant Edward McDonald and other SAS soldiers in North Africa, 1943 Mike Sadler had been captured along with Stirling in 1943 while trying to cross the Tunisian desert to meet the British-American 1st Army.