User Guide

Stirling still had a formidable obstacle to overcome: the rigid protocol and

chain of command of the Royal Army made it unlikely that his memo would ever

get as far as Gen. Auchinlek. Characteristically, he left the hospital on crutches,

slipped through a perimeter fence and into General HQ, and took refuge in the

first office he saw. Luckily, it was the office of the Deputy Commander Middle

East, Gen. Ritchie—who was captivated by the idea and carried it to Gen.

Auchinlek.

It also didn’t hurt that the Royal Army in general—and its Middle Eastern and

North African units in particular—had a soft spot for small, individualistic units

under the command of colorful, charismatic officers. The year before, an officer

experienced in desert travel and navigation, Major Ralph Bagnold, had formed

the Jeep-borne Long Range Desert Group (LRDG); another Major, Russian émigré

Vladimir Peniakoff, had spent years among the desert Arabs between the wars

and was currently spying in Libya with a handful of picked men. (He would go on

to form a highly effective intelligence and sabotage group with one of World War

II’s most unlikely official names: “Popski’s Private Army.”) And, of course, every

such commander lived in the long shadow of a similar officer who’d served only

a few hundred miles east, and less than 25 years earlier: the almost mythical T.

E. Lawrence, “Lawrence of Arabia.”

With Auchinlek in favor of the idea, Stirling was promoted to the rank of

Captain and allowed to raise a unit of 60 men and six officers (most of the latter

fellow Layforce veterans). It had long been suspected that Allied communications

in North Africa were compromised, so the new small unit was dubbed “L

Detachment of the Special Air Service Brigade” in the hope that the Germans

would think it an airborne unit of sigificant size (considering, at the very least, the

mythical detachments A through K). A training facility was set up in the Suez

Canal Zone, while much of the necessary weaponry and equipment were “liber-

ated” from the nearby supply depot of a New Zealand division that was current-

ly occupied elsewhere (at Tobruk). The men were trained in parachuting, desert

navigation, weapons handling, and demolition techniques.

The Detachment’s initial deployment was hardly an unqualified success. The

Allied situation was far from good, with Malta under siege and the Desert Fox

pushing toward Egypt from the west. With his unit trained to a high degree of

readiness, and under pressure both to gather intelligence and to harass the

Germans in anticipation of a later large Allied operation, Stirling and his men

parachuted behind enemy lines in mid-November of 1941 to begin Operation

Crusader despite highly unfavorable weather conditions. Some of his transports

were shot down; others were forced to land at German-held airfields. Those units

that managed to parachute into the African night were separated by high winds

from their parachute containers with most of their weapons and equipment.

Ultimately, only 22 of them managed to reach the rendezvous points where jeeps

from the LRDG were waiting to extract them.

INTRODUCTION TO THE SAS