British Generals Called Him A “Misfit” — Until He Destroyed 400 Planes With 70 Men

In the summer of 1942, something extraordinary was happening in the North African desert. Squads of modified American jeeps were hurtling across hundreds of miles of open sand, stealthily bypassing German and Italian positions to appear like specters and launch devastating strikes on enemy airfields.

The handful of soldiers aboard these vehicles claimed they destroyed more Axis aircraft than the Royal Air Force had shot down in conventional aerial combat during the same period. Yet, this unit almost never had the chance to exist. Founded in July 1941 by a 25-year-old lieutenant on crutches, the Special Air Service, SAS, began as one of the most audacious gambles in British military history.

A force of fewer than 70 men proposed to achieve results that entire brigade-sized units could not. The SAS’s North African campaign, spanning from its disastrous first operation in November 1941 to the capture of David Sterling in January 1943, allegedly destroyed between 250 and 400 enemy aircraft.

While these figures remain a matter of debate when compared to German records, it is undeniable that the unit forced Raml to divert precious frontline troops to guard rear area airfields. This force, which British military bureaucrats had actively hoped would fail, eventually became the template for all modern special forces organizations in the Western world.

The origins of this story are also tied to a vehicle, not a British one, but an American one. The Willys Jeep, designed in Toledo, Ohio, as a simple generalpurpose utility vehicle, was transformed by British ingenuity into the deadliest desert raider of the Second World War. To understand how this transformation occurred, however, we must first understand the men who facilitated it and the desperate circumstances that gave birth to the unit.

By the summer of 1941, the British position in North Africa was precarious. The desert fox, German field marshal Irwin Raml, had arrived in Libya with his Africa corps in February and immediately began driving the British back toward Egypt. The defenders of Tobuk were besieged. The RAF was struggling to maintain air superiority over the Libyan airfields from which German and Italian planes launched attacks on Allied convoys and ground troops.

The situation had to change and it required unconventional thinking. David Sterling was by most traditional standards a poor soldier. He was born on November 15th, 1915 at 15th Cambridge Square, London into a Scottish aristocratic family. He was the son of Brigadier General Archabald Sterling of Kir. Although he spent his childhood at the Kier Estate in Perth, London was his birthplace.

Educated at Ampleforth College, he was asked to leave Cambridge University after a year of drinking and gambling. Standing 6’5 in tall, he had the physique of a mountaineer. He had been training to climb Mount Everest before the war interrupted his plans. Sterling joined the supplementary reserve of the Scots Guards in 1937 and served in number eight guards commando under Colonel Robert Lok as part of layforce.

But his service record was far from distinguished. He was nearly prosecuted for malingering and his superior officers found him both exasperating and amusing. When Leforce was disbanded on August 1st, 1941 after suffering heavy casualties during the retreat from Cree, Sterling was lying in a Cairo hospital, recovering from a spinal injury sustained during an experimental parachute jump.

That jump had gone terribly wrong, leaving Sterling unable to walk for weeks in a hospital bed with nothing to do but think. It was during this forced convolescence that Sterling developed his radical insight. He had seen how conventional commandos operated, assembling large forces of 200 or more men, transporting them to a target via ship or plane, and then launching a mass attack.

These operations were complex, required immense coordination, and were easily detected. The enemy had learned to prepare for them. Due to the loss of surprise, operation after operation was cancelled at the last minute, and even when they proceeded, casualties were often catastrophic. Sterling advocated the exact opposite approach.

He argued that small teams of four or five men, if they could maintain stealth and mobility across the vast and undefended desert flanks, could destroy more aircraft and supplies than a whole coordinated commando force. The key entry point lay in the desert itself. Unlike the continuous fronts of the European theater, the North African campaign was characterized by massive gaps in the lines.

The desert was simply too vast to be fully garrisoned. Small teams could slip through these gaps, travel hundreds of miles undetected, strike their targets, and vanish back into the sea of sand before the enemy realized what had happened. Sterling drafted a memorandum detailing this concept. He proposed creating a unit of about 200 men organized into small detachments trained in demolition, desert navigation, and survival.

They would attack airfields, supply dumps, and communication lines deep behind enemy lines. These targets were so far from the front that they were in practice almost unguarded. The cumulative effect of repeated small-cale raids would be devastating to enemy morale and logistics. The problem was getting someone to read his memo.

Sterling was only a young lieutenant with a reputation for poor discipline and was just recovering from injury. Senior officers at Middle East headquarters MEHQ in Cairo had more pressing matters than listening to the whims of a junior officer who couldn’t even manage a parachute jump. What followed has become legend.

It is said that Sterling on crutches slipped through a gap in the fence when guards refused him entry and bluffed his way into GHQ Cairo. Nursing his back injury, he moved as quickly as possible into the headquarters building and stumbled into the office of the deputy chief of staff, Major General Neil Richie.

Before anyone could throw him out, he handed over his memo. Historian Gavin Mortimer proposed a different version in his 2022 biography. Mortimer suggests that it was actually Sterling’s brother, Bill, who held a staff position at HQ and ensured the proposal reached the right desk. The truth likely involves both. The important part is that Richie read the memo, found its logic compelling, and recommended it highly to the new commander-in-chief Middle East, Sir Claude Aenlech.

At the time, Aenlech was under immense pressure from Prime Minister Winston Churchill to launch an offensive against Raml. He needed results and was willing to consider unconventional means that might deliver them. 3 days after receiving Sterling’s memo, Aenlech personally interviewed the young lieutenant, promoted him to captain on the spot, and authorized him to recruit six officers and 60 soldiers.

The unit was named L Detachment, Special Air Service Brigade. The name was a deliberate act of deception, the understanding of which reveals the fog of war that made the SAS possible. Brigadier Dudley Clark ran a sophisticated deception operation in Cairo called a force. One of his plans was to create a fictional special air service brigade, K Detachment, complete with fake unit badges, doctorred photographs, and intentionally leaked intelligence.

The goal was to convince the Axis that an entire 5,000man British paratrooper brigade existed in North Africa, ready to drop behind Raml’s lines. This fictional unit was so realistic that it had already caused the Germans to divert troops and planes to counter a non-existent threat. Sterling’s real unit was named L Detachment to imply that A through K detachments already existed.

That fictional part was designated K detachment, making Sterling’s small force appear to be just one component of a massive organization. This was deception upon deception, and it provided the SAS with valuable room to operate during its vulnerable early days. However, even with Aenlech authorizing the unit’s creation, mid and lower level officers at MEHQ were not convinced.

Staff officers were rigid and hostile. Bureaucrats tried to block Sterling from recruiting officers from the disbanded layforce. They refused to provide adequate equipment, supplies, or transport. Every request was delayed, denied, or simply ignored. The SAS’s first operation became theft. Sterling and his men raided a nearby camp of a New Zealand regiment, stealing tents, bedding, and even a piano to furnish their new headquarters at Cabrit, a desolate camp on the shores of the Great Bitter Lake. Staff officers at HQ were

described as actively hoping for the SAS to fail, wishing that its inevitable collapse would prove their opposition right and prevent future unconventional units from disrupting the normal military hierarchy. Sterling later described these officers in his typically blunt language as fossils. The men Sterling recruited were an extraordinary collection of misfits, adventurers, and natural warriors.

They came from disbanded commandos, the long range desert group, LRDG, or regular infantry battalions where their independent thinking had made them unwelcome. What they shared was a willingness to volunteer for missions of extreme danger and uncertain outcome. The training program awaiting them at Cabaret was not designed by Sterling, but by a man Sterling himself acknowledged as a more rightful founder of the SAS, Lieutenant John Steel Lewis, usually called Jock.

Born on December 21st, 1913 in Kolkata, India, where his father was a chartered accountant, Lewis grew up in Australia and attended Christurch, Oxford. There he was president of the University Boat Club and rode for the Oxford 8. He was an intellectual as much as an athlete and a natural leader, having served in the Welsh Guards before transferring to the Commandos.

If Sterling provided the political vision and social connections needed to survive bureaucratic obstruction, Lewis built everything else. He designed the training program, a harsh regime of desert survival, weapons handling, demolition, and celestial navigation intended to turn civilian soldiers into silent killers capable of operating behind enemy lines for weeks.

He established the principle that every SAS man must be proficient in all skills so that teams could continue to function after suffering casualties. He instilled a sense of discipline and attention to detail that meant the difference between life and death in the desert. Most importantly, Lewis invented the weapon that gave the SAS its bite.

Existing demolition charges were ills suited for destroying aircraft. Standard explosives blew holes in fuselages, but the planes often remained repairable. Incendiary devices might start a fire, but not necessarily destroy the target. The SAS needed a device that would both explode and burn to ensure every attacked aircraft was a total write-off.

After weeks of experimentation, Lewis developed his solution. The Lewis bomb consisted of about a pound of Nobel 808 plastic explosive mixed with roughly a quarter pound of thermite and diesel oil. Added components included steel shavings and a 2 oz dry gun cotton primer with a 30-second delay fuse. The whole device weighed about a pound, small enough for one man to carry a dozen.

Upon detonation, the explosive would blast open the fuel tanks while the thermite ignited the aviation fuel, ensuring a total burn. It was ingenious, portable, and devastatingly effective. Every plane destroyed by the SAS in foot raids was destroyed by a Lewis bomb. The third core member of the SAS’s wartime leadership was a sharp contrast to the aristocratic Sterling and the intellectual Lewis.

Robert Blair Maine was born on January 11th, 1915 in New Town Ards, County Down in what was then Ireland. The son of a wealthy family, he had qualified as a solicitor. But his true vocation was violence. Controlled violence on the sports field and uncontrolled violence on the battlefield. Maine was the Irish University’s heavyweight boxing champion.

Between February 1937 and March 1939, he earned six international rugby caps for Ireland as a second row forward. In 1938, he toured South Africa with the British and Irish Lions and played in all three test matches. Standing 6′ 3 in tall and weighing 217 lbs, most of it muscle, he was called Patty by his comrades, who viewed him with a mix of adoration and terror.

Maine had a volatile temper that once triggered was catastrophic. He was allegedly recruited into the SAS from a jail cell where he was awaiting court marshal for striking a superior officer. While specific accounts of that incident vary, the core fact remains that Maine was facing the end of his military career when Sterling appeared with a chance for redemption.

Maine would become the SAS’s greatest warrior. But in those early days at Cabaret, he was just another recruit learning how to set Lewis bombs and navigate by the stars. The SAS’s first combat operation was launched on the night of November 16th in the 17, 1941 in support of Operation Crusader, the major British offensive aimed at relieving the besieged troops into Brooke.

Cenamed Operation Squatter, the plan called for 55 men in five groups to be dropped by Bristol Bombay transport planes near five Axis airfields near Gazala and Tamimi. They would plant Lewis bombs on parked aircraft and then trek 50 mi south across the desert to rendevous with the LRDG, which would transport them back to friendly lines.

The weather forecast was atrocious. Meteorologists predicted winds of 30 knots, double the limit for a safe jump. Sterling faced an impossible choice. If he canled, HQ would use the failure to disband the unit before it had achieved anything. If he proceeded, his men might be scattered across the desert, unable to reach their targets or the extraction point.

Sterling chose to proceed. The five jump group leaders were Sterling himself, Patty Maine, Jock Lewis, Lieutenant Ao McGonagal, and Lieutenant Charles Bonington. They boarded the planes on the night of November 16th and flew deep into the desert toward the enemy airfields. What followed was a disaster. The winds reached Gale Force 7 or 8, whipping up a massive sandstorm that reduced visibility to near zero.

The pilots were flying blind, unable to see the ground or find the drop zones. One plane carrying Lieutenant Bonington and his men was shot down by a German Messmitt night fighter. The other planes dropped the paratroopers as best they could, but the wind scattered men and equipment over miles of desert. Equipment containers holding the precious Lewis bombs were ripped from their parachutes and lost.

Those bombs that were recovered were soaked by the rain that preceded the sandstorm. Men landed miles from their intended drop zones with damaged or missing navigation equipment. The small groups that managed to assemble found themselves completely lost and unable to reach their targets before dawn exposed their positions.

That night, not a single shot was fired at the enemy and not a single Lewis bomb exploded on an axis plane. Of the 55 men who jumped, only 21 or 22 struggled back to the LRDG rendevous over the following days. Lieutenant McGonagal died of severe injuries sustained during the landing.

The rest were killed, captured, or lost in the desert. Operation Squatter was a total devastating failure. Any rational assessment would have concluded that the SAS experiment was over. Sterling’s theory had collided with reality and reality had won. The logical course of action was to return the survivors to their original units and forget L detachment ever existed.

The staff officers at MEHQ certainly anticipated this outcome and had already begun processing the disbandment paperwork. But during the long, slow extraction from the disaster site in the LRDG’s Chevrolet trucks, Sterling was not thinking about failure. He was thinking about the trucks themselves.

If the LRDG could pick up his men from the deep desert, why couldn’t they drop them off? The parachute jump had failed because of uncontrollable weather, but vehicle infiltration would eliminate that variable entirely. Sterling approached the commander of the LRDG patrol that rescued them, Lieutenant David Lloyd Owen, with a proposal.

The LRDG had been operating deep in enemy territory since 1940, conducting reconnaissance and occasionally striking targets of opportunity. They knew the desert better than anyone. What if they transported SAS raiding parties to within striking distance of enemy airfields, dropped them off, and returned to pick them up after the attack? Lloyd Owen agreed to pass the idea to his commanders and the LRDG leadership agreed to a trial.

Just one month after the debacle of Operation Squatter on December 14th, 1941, the SAS launched its first successful operation. Three raiding parties were transported by LRDG vehicles near enemy airfields and then proceeded to their targets on foot. The results exceeded everyone’s expectations, perhaps except Sterling’s.

Patty Maine led his party to the Tamimi airfield where they approached the perimeter on foot in the darkness. What followed demonstrated why Maine would become the most feared commando of the North African campaign. Finding the officer’s mess still brightly lit and occupied, Maine kicked in the door, startling about 30 Axis air crew having dinner.

He opened fire with his pistol, then withdrew and began systematically moving through the parked aircraft, planting Lewis bombs on each. The SAS claimed 24 aircraft destroyed at Tamimi that night for zero British casualties. It was reported that when Maine found more targets than he had bombs for, he climbed into the cockpit of a surviving plane and ripped out the instrument panel with his bare hands to ensure it would never fly again.

On December 21st, 22, a five-man team led by Lieutenant Bill Fraser attacked the Agila airfield located even deeper in Axis territory. The SAS claimed to have destroyed as many as 37 aircraft, though postwar verification of German records suggests the number was closer to 25. The discrepancy between SAS reports and access records would become a recurring theme, but even the lower figure was a remarkable achievement for five men acting without any support.

In several raids that December, the SAS claimed about 60 enemy aircraft destroyed without losing a single man. The concept that staff officers had dismissed as impossible had been proven. General Aenlech promoted Sterling to major and authorized the expansion of the unit, but success came at a price. On December 31st, 1941, Jock Lewis was returning from a raid on Nefilia airfield in an LRDG truck when the convoy was spotted by a German aircraft.

A Messormid 110 repeatedly strafed the exposed vehicles. A 20 mil cannon shell struck Lewis in the leg, severing his femoral artery. He bled to death in 4 minutes while those around him were unable to stem the flow. He was only 28 years old. Lewis’s death was a heavy blow. He was the intellectual architect of everything that made the SAS function, and his loss was deeply felt by everyone who had trained under him.

But the machine he had built continued to run. His training methods, tactical doctrine, and the Lewis bomb remained, passed down to the men who would continue the missions he had designed. Over the following months, the SAS conducted raid after raid against enemy airfields and installations. They became completely dependent on the LRDG for transport, a dependency that was both a strength and a limitation.

The LRDG’s Chevrolet 30C30 trucks, nicknamed Libyan Desert Taxi Service by those they carried, were reliable and capable of crossing immense distances. But the LRDG also had its own critical missions, particularly road watch, the constant surveillance of the Via Balbaya coastal road to track Axis troop and supply movements.

Scheduling conflicts became increasingly severe. Due to the different nature of their tasks, LRDG commanders sometimes refused to transport SAS raiders to targets they deemed too dangerous or too far from their areas of operation. Moreover, this lack of operational independence graded on Sterling, who felt the SAS should control its own destiny.

The solution emerged gradually. Before acquiring Jeeps, Sterling recovered a rolled over Ford station wagon from a Cairo scrap heap. The vehicle had been written off in an accident, but Sterling’s men stripped away its damaged roof, mounted Vickers K machine guns on improvised mounts, and painted it in desert camouflage.

They named it the Blitz Buggy. And though it was prone to breakdowns and unreliable, it gave the SAS its first taste of independent vehicle operations. The real turning point came in June 1942 when the SAS received its first shipment of American Willys jeeps. These vehicles arriving in North Africa in large numbers as part of lend lease were proving their remarkable capabilities in desert conditions.

By July, at the urging of Patty Maine, Sterling returned to Cairo to secure a larger supply. Through a combination of official requisitioning and the kind of informal acquisition for which the SAS was famous, the unit soon possessed about 16 jeeps and 20 Bedford 3-tonon supply trucks, achieving total independence from LRDG transport.

However, the standard Willys jeep was not a weapon of war. It was a utility vehicle designed for transporting personnel and light cargo. The modifications required to turn it into a desert rating platform would have astonished the engineers who designed it in Toledo. The SAS borrowed heavily from techniques pioneered by Major Ralph Bagnold, the founder of the LRDG and one of the world’s preeminent desert exploration experts.

Bagnold had traveled the Sahara for years before the war, understood its secrets, and developed the equipment needed to survive and operate in its harsh environment. The first step was weight reduction. The canvas roofs, windshields, doors, and any non-essential sheet metal were stripped from every Jeep. Every pound shed meant one less pound to burden the tires in the sand, increasing range and improving performance on soft terrain.

Bagnold condensers were installed on the cooling systems. These ingenious devices collected steam from the radiator, condensed it in an external can, and then used vacuum pressure to draw the water back into the system. In the desert heat, a standard vehicle would lose gallons of coolant to evaporation. The Bagnold condenser solved this, allowing vehicles to travel hundreds of miles without needing water.

Steel sand channels, another Bagnold invention, were strapped to the sides of every Jeep. When a vehicle became bogged in soft sand, these perforated metal tracks could be placed under the wheels to provide traction for self-reovery. Navigation required specialized equipment. Standard magnetic compasses were unreliable near the metal fittings of the vehicles and were prone to massive errors in the featureless desert with no landmark references.

The Baguild Sun compass consisted of a calibrated projector disc and a vertical needle providing accurate directional readings regardless of magnetic interference. Navigators set the disc according to the time of day and the sun’s position, then maintained course by keeping the shadow of the projector needle on the correct bearing.

At night, navigation turned to the stars using techniques Jock Lewis had incorporated into SAS training. The most critical modification addressed the Jeep’s limited range. The standard fuel tank held 15 gall, which provided less than 120 m in the fuel hungry desert sand. This was entirely inadequate for infiltration raids that might travel 400 m or more behind enemy lines.

Jerry racks were welded to the rear fenders and the hood, creating space to carry 8 to 12 additional 5gallon fuel cans. This expanded total fuel capacity to over 60 gall, stretching the range to over 400 m. Similar racks were used to carry water cans and spare parts. By the time all modifications were complete, each Jeep looked more like a mechanical mule than a military vehicle.

But it was the armament that made the SAS Jeep truly lethal. The centerpiece of its weapons was the Vicer’s K machine gun, also known as the Vicer’s gas operated VGO. This weapon was originally designed for observers in RAF bombers, intended for rear gunners to fend off attacking enemy fighters. When beltfed Brownings replaced the Vicer’s K on aircraft, large quantities of these weapons became available as surplus.

The characteristics of the Vicer’s K made it nearly ideal for hit-and-run ground warfare. It fired the standard British 303 rifle caliber at an adjustable rate of 950 to 1,200 rounds per minute, significantly higher than standard German infantry machine guns. It was fed by a 100 round flat pan drum magazine that could be swapped quickly.

The entire gun weighed only 29.5 lb, light enough to be operated by a single man. Most importantly for desert warfare, the Vicer’s K’s low friction locking mechanism proved remarkably resistant to the fine sand that infiltrated every crevice of the desert environment. Even when coated in fine dust, the Vickers K would fire reliably.

The standard SAS Jeep configuration was a twin mount Vicer’s K on the passenger side and another twin mount Vicer’s K on a swivel post in the rear. This gave a single vehicle four rapidfiring weapons capable of producing a torrential volume of fire. Some Jeeps also carried a single 50 caliber Browning heavy machine gun in the rear for use against armored targets or defensive positions.

When loaded with a mix of tracer, incendiary, and armor-piercing rounds, these weapons could shred a parked aircraft in seconds. The tracers allowed the gunner to correct their aim in the dark. The incendiaries ignited aviation fuel on contact. The combination was devastating. The first test of vehicle-born tactics came on the night of July 7th to 8th, 1942 against Befield.

Maine’s party had infiltrated the airfield on foot as usual and began planting Lewis bombs on aircraft. They had placed about 40 charges when they realized a problem. About half of the bomb primers had become damp from the desert night condensation and failed to ignite. Only 22 aircraft were destroyed. Frustrated by this partial success, Sterling improvised what became a signature SAS tactic, he led the Blitz buggy and two newly acquired jeeps directly onto the airfield, driving between the rows of aircraft with all

machine guns firing at full tilt. The tracers and incendiaries from the Vicer’s Ks ripped through wings, fuselages, and fuel tanks. Planes that had survived the bomb failure were systematically destroyed by machine gun fire. The SAS claimed another 15 aircraft destroyed in this charge, bringing the baggage total to about 37.

This was the first vehicle-born airfield raid in history, and it proved that heavily armed jeeps were even more effective than foot raiders. Bomb planting took time and relied on fuses that could fail, whereas machine guns provided instant and reliable destruction. This tactic reached its perfection 3 weeks later in the most famous SAS raid of the Desert War.

On the night of July 26,27, 1942, 18 armed jeeps carrying about 60 British and free French commandos assembled for an attack on city hanesh airfield. The force was led by Sterling himself with Patty Mine commanding one of the jeep columns. They left their hiding place at Beer El Cusier in the late afternoon and crossed 50 mi of open desert, navigating initially by Sunmpass and then by the stars after dark.

The navigator was Mike Sadler, an LRDG veteran who had transferred to the SAS and was later recognized as the finest desert navigator of the war. As the columns approached the airfield perimeter at around 10 knots, something unexpected happened. The runway lights suddenly switched on, illuminating the rows of aircraft.

For a moment, the commandos feared they had been detected. Then they realized the truth. A Luftwaffa bomber was coming in to land, and the ground crew had lit the airfield to guide it down. The SAS had arrived at the perfect moment. At approximately 10:15 p.m., Sterling fired a green, very signal flare, the signal to attack.

The 18 jeeps in a V formation roared onto the airfield, nine vehicles in each column with gunners on both sides firing outward at the parked aircraft. The noise was deafening. Tracers carved bright lines through the darkness. Planes exploded one after another as incendiary rounds struck fuel tanks. German and Italian ground crews fled in every direction, some running toward defensive positions, most simply running for their lives in the chaos.

The attack lasted about 15 minutes. The SAS claimed 37 to 40 German aircraft destroyed, including Junker’s 87, Stuka dive bombers, Junker’s 52 transports, and Messmmet 109 fighters. However, German records consulted after the war suggest the actual number of destroyed or severely damaged planes was closer to 20.

Even this lower figure represented a staggering achievement. The SAS lost one man in the attack itself. Corporal John Robson, 21, was killed by a bullet to the head while operating his machine gun. He was the only Allied fatality of the charge. The withdrawal was not easy. As dawn approached, the French SAS teams assigned to secondary targets found themselves behind schedule.

Tire punctures on the rugged desert floor slowed progress and they were spotted in the open by four German stucokas as the sun rose. The planes repeatedly strafed the exposed jeeps. Two vehicles were destroyed. Warrant officer Andre Zernheld, a French paratrooper and philosopher who had written poems about war and faith, was struck in the shoulder and abdomen.

He died about 13 hours later in the company of his comrades. A prayer was found in his notebook after his death beginning with give me O Lord the souls of those soldiers who are about to die. This later became the official prayer of the French airborne forces. Multiple simultaneous or near simultaneous raids that July compounded the damage to the axis.

On the same night as the baguch raid, French SAS groups struck Fuka airfield while Maine hit Daba. A second raid on Fuka in late July destroyed more enemy bombers. In the single month of July 1942, SAS jeep raids may have claimed between 75 and 85 Axis aircraft, though confirmed kills were lower.

By this stage, Sterling could report to MEHQ that the SAS had destroyed at least 143 Axis aircraft in just 6 months of operations. Even accounting for the tendency of raiding forces to overreport kills, the impact was undeniable. The unit that HQ had tried to strangle in its infancy was now producing results that could not be ignored.

The cumulative effect of SAS raids triggered an increasingly desperate Axis response. Field Marshall Raml reportedly stated that Sterling and his men had caused him more harm and damage than any other Allied force of equivalent size. Sterling earned the nickname the Phantom Major, though sources dispute whether the term was coined by German intelligence or the British press.

The Germans implemented upgraded countermeasures. Airfield security was vastly increased. Sentry posts were established around aircraft dispersal areas and patrols were conducted 24 hours a day. The problem was that these security measures required manpower and soldiers sent to guard rear area airfields could not be sent to the front.

This was exactly the force multiplier effect Sterling had predicted in his original memo. A few dozen SAS raiders were pinning down hundreds of Axis soldiers. Maine grimly noted after one raid that the enemy had placed a sentry next to almost every plane. Even that was not enough. Maine simply dispatched the sentries with a knife before planting his bombs.

Axis intelligence also attempted more sophisticated countermeasures. They deployed a spy, the pro-fascist Anglo-Swiss Theodore Church, who entered prisoner of war camps disguised as a captured British officer to extract information from captured SAS men. A former French foreign legionnaire, Herbert Brookner, joined the SAS under false pretenses and leaked plans for an upcoming raid to the Germans.

As a result, operations against the airfields at Derna and Martuba failed because the targets had been evacuated before the raiders arrived. The most significant response came from the highest levels of the Nazi regime. On October 18th, 1942, Adolf Hitler personally issued the Commando Order, known in German as the Commando Befail.

The order was distributed in only 12 copies and was classified as top secret. It stipulated that all commandos fighting against German forces were to be annihilated even if they were wearing formal uniforms or attempted to surrender. This order was largely spurred by the actions of the SAS as well as other commando operations like the DEP raid and operation bassalt in the Channel Islands.

It was a war crime, violating the laws of armed conflict that had protected prisoners of war since the 19th century. General Alfred Yodel was later partially convicted at the Nuremberg trials after the war for his role in distributing and implementing the order. In June 1942 alone, the SAS claimed to have destroyed approximately 8% of the total German aircraft in North Africa, a staggering proportion for a unit of fewer than 200 men.

Even if this data was exaggerated, and even if the actual percentage was hald, the strategic impact was immense. Estimating the total number of aircraft destroyed by the SAS during the North African campaign requires handling significant discrepancies between sources. The most rigorous academic data comes from Alan Vic’s study for the Rand Corporation, snakes in the Eagle’s Nest, which recorded a total of 367 aircraft destroyed by all British special forces in the theater.

This includes not only the SAS, but also the Special Boat Squadron, the LRDG, and Special Operations Executive, SOE agents. Other historians estimate higher. Author Damian Lewis, in an interview with the Imperial War Museum, cited operational records suggesting that specific SAS kills were 380 confirmed and approximately 450 suspected.

Conservative estimates start at 250 while the highest claims exceed 400. Over reporting by the SAS was common and understandable. At Aguila, the unit claimed 37 while Axis records show about 25. At city Hanes, the SAS claimed 37 to 40, while German records suggest closer to 20.

Soldiers attacking airfields in the dark of night amidst bombs, bullets, and towering fires would naturally overestimate the damage caused. Some aircraft that were already uncserviceable might not be counted as losses in access records, even if physically destroyed. Both sides had reasons to distort the data. What is indisputable is that a unit that never exceeded a few hundred men caused the equivalent destruction of a conventional airwing at a negligible cost in manpower and material.

The claim that the SAS destroyed more enemy aircraft than the RAF shot down in air combat during the same period is widely accepted by the Imperial War Museum and several historians, though it may more accurately apply to specific months in 1942 rather than the entire campaign. Bob Seekings represented the other side of the SAS, the workingclass backbone that balanced aristocratic officers and famous warriors.

He was born on March 19th, 1920 near Elely in Cambridge. The son of a farm laborer seekings enlisted despite being almost completely blind in one eye. By regulation, he should have been rejected for service entirely, but he memorized the eye chart to bluff his way through the medical exam. An original member of L detachment seeking survived operation squatter and participated in 10 major raids during the North African campaign.

He personally claimed over 15 aircraft destroyed and rose from private to squadron sergeant major through merit and survival. He was awarded the distinguished conduct medal and the military medal, honors typically given for acts of extreme bravery. Historians later described him as the great unsung hero of the wartime SAS, the stabilizing force behind the leadership of Sterling and Maine.

Sterling’s personal war came to an end on January 24th, 1943 in southern Tunisia. The SAS commander was leading a raiding party deep into enemy territory in an attempt to become the first unit of the eighth army to link up with the first army advancing from the west. Even Brigadier George Davyy had warned him against getting too close to the enemy and taking too many risks with minimal intelligence.

The warning proved preient. Sterling’s group was spotted by a German patrol and forced to scatter. Sterling himself evaded the initial contact and sought refuge among local Arab tribesmen. According to SAS tradition, these Arabs subsequently betrayed his position to the Germans for goods or money. He escaped his German captives once, but was recaptured by Italian troops and flown to Rome for interrogation.

Sterling proved as resistant to captivity as he had been to authority. He attempted to escape from various P camps at least four times, once making it within a few miles of Switzerland before being recaptured. Eventually, the Germans transferred him to Culitz Castle in Saxony, a fortress classified as Escape proof, where the most persistent Allied escapers were concentrated.

Sterling spent the remainder of the war there, serving as chairman of the escape committee, planning breakouts for other soldiers. Sterling’s capture initially triggered fears that the SAS would be disbanded. The unit was so closely tied to its founder that many believed it could not survive without him.

However, Patty Maine took command on January 27th, 1943 and led the unit through the remainder of the North African campaign. Under Maine’s leadership, the SAS participated in the Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943, serving as the assault vanguard at Capo Muro Deorco. David’s brother, Bill Sterling, formed the second SAS regiment in Algeria in May 1943, doubling the unit’s strength.

By September 1942, even before Sterling’s capture, General Aenlech had granted the SAS full regimental status, a final validation of a concept that military bureaucrats had once tried to kill. Patty Maine himself survived the war but died in a car accident in 1955 while driving home late at night in Northern Ireland. His wartime decorations included the distinguished service order with three bars, making him one of the most decorated British soldiers of that conflict.

Even King George V 6th once asked why the Victoria Cross had curiously eluded him. The answer likely lay in Maine’s difficult personality and his history of clashes with superior officers. Bravery alone was never quite enough for the British military’s highest honor. Field Marshall Montgomery reportedly remarked, “The boy Sterling is mad.

Quite mad. However, in war there is usually a place for madmen.” Whether Montgomery actually said this has never been definitively confirmed, but the sentiment captured the genuine view of high-ranking military figures toward the SAS and its founder. The commander of the US Delta Force, an American special operations unit that directly traces its methods and traditions to the SAS, later wrote to Sterling with respect.

The common bond between the special forces of the Western world is that we can all trace our roots back to you. The SAS’s North African campaign represents one of the most striking cases in military history of asymmetric warfare before the term existed. A unit conceived by a lieutenant whom high command viewed as an undisiplined gambler opposed by the headquarters that should have supported it and nearly destroyed in its first operation caused strategic level destruction with tactical level resources. The core irony is

inescapable. The vehicle that made British special forces lethal in the desert was not Britishade at all. The Willys Jeep was designed in America, manufactured in Toledo, Ohio, and crossed the Atlantic as part of Lend Lease. It was intended only as a simple utility vehicle for transporting men and cargo around military installations.

No one at Willys Overland or in the US Army ever imagined it bristling with machine guns and hurtling across enemy airfields in the dead of night. The marriage of this humble American vehicle with surplus British aircraft machine guns created a weapon system that no military planner had foreseen. British ingenuity, American manufacturing power, and the vast empty space of the North African desert combined to produce something unprecedented.

The armed jeep became not just a rating platform, but a symbol of unconventional thinking, of the spirit to improvise, adapt, and overcome that defined the SAS at its inception. The group that began with 66 men and a stolen piano in a desolate camp at Cabrit became the blueprint for every special operations force that followed.

The descendants of L detachment now serve in every western nation and many others. They carry different weapons and drive different vehicles, but their operational principles are those developed by David Sterling, Jock Lewis, and Patty Maine in the Egyptian desert over 80 years ago. The Willys Jeep is long gone, replaced by special operations vehicles equipped with armor, night vision, and satellite navigation.

But every modern vehicle owes a debt to the desert raiders of that July night in 1942 at Sidi Han, who with machine guns blazing proved that a few determined men with the right equipment and the right mindset could change the course of a war.