What Rommel Wrote About The First SAS Raids — His Desert Diary Reveals Everything

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[00:00:00]47 December 1941.

[00:00:03]The Libyan desert south of the coastal road the Germans called the Via Balia.

[00:00:09]It is 3:00 in the morning. No moon fo.

[00:00:13]The airfield at Tamt lies still under a sky thick with stars. Its aircraft lined up in perfect rows wing tip to wing tip exactly as a peacetime airman might arrange them. The centuries walk their circuits without urgency. Perimeter wire catches no movement. The desert is silent in all directions for 50, 100, 200 miles. Nobody is coming from out there. Everyone knows that. Then a shape moves in the darkness. Then another foy two aircraft. That is what they find in the morning. 22 German and Italian planes reduced to twisted metal and scorched earth. Fost destroyed in a single night by a handful of men who had walked in from the desert with nothing but small explosive charges, steady hands, and extraordinary nerve. No air support, no armor, fresh, just silence, and then ruin. Field marshal Irwin Raml was not a man easily shaken. He had driven his tanks through France in six weeks for like he had humiliated British armor across the desert from Tbrook to Gazala. He understood war or believed he did f but as December turned to January and the reports kept coming. Another airfield hit, more aircraft destroyed, fuel dumps burning in the night.

[00:01:35]He reached for his diary and wrote something that no German general in North Africa had yet been forced to write. Force-like. He was worried. To understand what those raids meant to RML, you have to understand what North Africa meant to both sides in the autumn of 1941. Fi the desert war was a war of logistics. Everything, every bullet, every liter of fuel, every ration tin had to travel thousands of miles by sea from Europe or Britain. Then hundreds more along the narrow coastal strip.

[00:02:09]Whoever could disrupt that supply chain controlled the campaign. Whoever lost it lost the desert. Bromeml understood this better than almost anyone. The Africa corpse, his creation, his instrument was brilliant in the field, innovative, aggressive, adaptive, fragile. It ran on fuel it could not produce, ate food it could not grow, and flew aircraft it could not replace quickly. Fight lines from Italy across the Mediterranean were already under pressure from the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force. fields in Libya at Tamt at Agayabia at Cert were not just tactical assets. They were the lungs of the entire operation. Flew the air and the armored columns fighting on the coast road became blind and slow.

[00:02:58]Lose the fuel depot and they stopped entirely. Fight. And it was those airfields that a 26-year-old Scots Guards officer named David Sterling had decided to attack. But Sterling had arrived in North Africa with the layforce commandos in early 1941. Part of a wave of special operations enthusiasm that had seized Winston Churchill. But the big commando raids had largely failed. Forn insertions were slow, expensive, and visible. Sterling had a different idea. Filelike. He believed a small number of highly trained men inserted deep into the desert by parachute or vehicle could achieve more damage to enemy airfields than a squadron of bombers and do it at a fraction of the cost. Felt like he set out his case in a memo. Forged a pass to enter general headquarters Cairo and presented his argument directly to the deputy chief of staff, General Neil Richie, bypassing every officer between them pro. It was audacious to the point of insubordination. Richie authorized it anyway. Fight L detachment special air service brigade. The LA deliberate fiction implying a much larger force was born in July 1941 with 66 volunteers and almost no resources. What Sterling had was a principle, selection, not conscription. Every man who trained with him could leave at any time. felt like every man who stayed had chosen to be there. The training at Kabrit on the shore of the great bitter lake was brutal by design. Fire. Sterling believed that a man who survived it had already demonstrated the quality that mattered most. Not strength, not speed, but the refusal to stop. He and a Welsh officer named Jockl, 28 years old, first class degree from Oxford with a kind of methodical mind that turns patience into precision, developed what became known as the Lewis bomb for a small charge of plastic explosive and thermite that burned through aircraft fuel tanks and destroyed engines entirely. It weighed less than a pound. A man could carry dozens of them. File. The genius of the device was not its destructive power alone, but its specificity. It did not create a spectacular explosion that drew attention from miles away. It started a fire, relentless fire that consumed whatever it touched. For first operation in November 1941 was a catastrophe.

[00:05:35]Parachute insertion into an unforcast sandstorm killed or scattered most of the force before they reached any target. of 66 men dropped, only 21 returned. But Sterling did not disband.

[00:05:49]He retrained freshutes to long range vehicle insertion, partnering with the long range desert group, soldiers who knew the vast inland terrain the way a sailor knows the sea. Flynn, men who had been navigating by stars and sun compasses across thousands of miles of desert since 1940, who moved like ghosts through ground that the conventional armies on both sides had written off as impassible. For he went back to Cairo and argued for another chance. He got it, fought, and this time the targets would burn. The raids that RML would eventually write about began in mid December 1941 in the chaotic weeks following the British operation crusader offensive front was fluid.

[00:06:34]Communications were strained and the Axis airfields were doing exactly what they were designed to do. Keeping aircraft forward close to the fighting ready to react quickly for that proximity was their strength. It was also Sterling had decided their vulnerability. He split his force. On the night of the 14th of December, Sterling led a small party toward the airfield at Agabia F. A second group led by a 26-year-old Irishman from County Armar named Blair Patty Maine went for the field at Tamt. Maine was a man of contradictions. A pre-war international rugby player, a qualified solicitor, a natural fighter who had been briefly underaddressed before joining the Special Air Service for striking a senior officer. Far Sterling had personally secured his release. Not out of sentiment, but because he had seen Maine operate and understood precisely what kind of man he was recruiting.

[00:07:35]There were soldiers who performed well under pressure felt. And then there was Maine, who seemed to become more himself under it, quieter, steadier, more purposeful, as though violence had a clarifying effect on him that ordinary life could not match. 4 miles from the primer, 4 miles from the perimeter, killed their engines, and waited.

[00:07:56]Maine's team dismounted in silence and walked the rest. four miles through soft sand, carrying their charges, maintaining absolute noise discipline, approaching from the desert side that the Italians had left unwatched. The wind was in their favor. No dogs, no centuries on the far side, or the aircraft were there exactly as intelligence had reported. 24 of them lined up on the strip. What happened next took less than 20 minutes. Maine's team moved along the row of aircraft, placing Lewis's bombs on each fuel tank and engine bay. File the charges carried a 30inute fuse long enough to withdraw, short enough that the margin for error was almost nothing. They worked fast in near silence for like when one aircraft near the end of the row appeared to have no charge remaining. Maine reportedly tore the instrument panel from the cockpit with his bare hands. Whether that detail is entirely precise or has been sharpened by retelling, the intent was not in doubt. Nothing on that airfield would fly again. They walked back into the desert as the first explosion lit the sky behind them. Like Sterling's night at a gayabear was less successful. A patrol interrupted by centuries, a withdrawal before any charges were placed, frided. He returned empty-handed, but the principle had been proven. The longrange desert group could deliver them. The Louis bombs destroyed aircraft. The desert covered the withdrawal.

[00:09:27]Five days later, Maine went back to Tmet fire BBS 27 more aircraft. In less than 2 weeks, one small unit of British soldiers had destroyed more aircraft on the ground than the Royal Air Force had managed in aerial combat over the same period. fully. The numbers would not be fully confirmed until after the war, but the pattern was already visible in German and Italian operational reports.

[00:09:55]Airfields that had been considered safe that sat behind the lines that had no realistic ground threat were being hit hard with no warning and no trace. RML read the reports. He could not explain them full. And what he could not explain, he could not defend against. By Christmas 1941, he had begun requesting reinforcements for airfield security.

[00:10:19]The requests would grow more urgent in the weeks that followed. False. The Axis air forces were now committing men and resources to guard installations that had never needed guarding before because the desert had always been protection enough. That assumption was no longer valid. Fines. something had changed and nobody in German or Italian intelligence had yet been able to tell him precisely what that uncertainty was in many ways the special air services greatest weapon fork just a quick moment thank you for spending your time with this story if you're finding it worthwhile a like or a subscription means more than you might think right then back to the desert five like January and February of 1942 brought the raids s deeper, harder, and more frequent. Sterling was operating now with a rhythm. Infiltrate by vehicle. Strike fast. Withdraw into the desert. Disappear. Fire. The long range desert group provided navigation and transport. The Special Air Service provided the violence. It was a partnership of unusual precision. Two very different units whose skills fitted together almost perfectly. The raids on Certe and the surrounding fields in January destroyed dozens more aircraft far at Burka near Benghazi. A strike in March 1942 hit a major transport hub, destroying aircraft and causing disruption to Raml's supply schedule that he felt directly in the planning meetings that followed. Fight. The losses were not catastrophic in raw numbers. Germany and Italy were still producing aircraft, but they accumulated in the wear of cumulative attrition.

[00:12:05]Hours of maintenance lost, experienced ground crews replaced, flights routed, and above all in the confidence of men who had believed the rear was untouchable. It was in this period that RML wrote the words that would become the most quoted tribute to the special air service in its entire history.

[00:12:24]Frabbed. The operations of the SAS caused us more damage than any other British unit of equal strength. The sentence is measured characteristic of the man. Brol did not exaggerate. He had no reason to inflate the capabilities of an enemy in his private diary. He was a professional soldier accounting for what had happened to his command and what had happened to his command. And what had happened in the plainest possible terms was this. A few dozen men had achieved what conventional forces could not at a cost that was a fraction of what a bomber campaign would have required.

[00:13:01]Crushed. But the diary reveals more than admiration. It reveals frustration. RML had been unable despite repeated orders and reinforced guard details to stop the raids for like the problem was structural. The Axis airfield stretched across hundreds of miles of coastline prior to guard everyone against a desert infiltration required more men than could be spared from the front. The Special Air Service did not strike the same place twice in quick succession.

[00:13:32]They moved unpredictably, hit at different points along the coast and vanished into terrain that even experienced desert troops found hostile and disorienting. The Sahara did not discriminate. It was as dangerous to the pursuers as to the pursued, more so, in fact, because the raiders chose when and where they entered it. For Rummel, who had built his entire tactical philosophy on speed, surprise, and the exploitation of uncertainty. This was a mirror.

[00:14:03]Someone was doing to his rear what he did to the British front, fall like, and it was working. The irony was not lost on him. German responses came. The Brandenburgger units, Germany's own special forces, were tasked with counter operations and infiltration crowds.

[00:14:20]Additional Italian garrison troops moved to airfield security. Five like intelligence assets were redirected toward identifying the deep desert routes the British longrange vehicles used to travel undetected across hundreds of miles of open ground. Boris air forces began flying more regular patrols over the desert interior, searching for the vehicle tracks that betrayed the raiders lines of approach.

[00:14:46]None of it stopped the raids. Force the desert was simply too vast and the British raiding parties too skilled at concealment to be interdicted by patrol alone. You could not guard an infinity of sand freed March 1942.

[00:15:02]Jock Lu was killed, his vehicle strafed by a German aircraft while returning from an operation, caught in the open desert with nowhere to shelter. He was 28 years old. Fee had designed the bomb that bore his name, developed the unit's training doctrine, and carried in himself the intellectual foundation of what Sterling was building. The idea of the Louiswis bomb that destruction could be lightweight, that a single man could render a machine worth tens of thousands of pounds permanently useless, was his gift to the unit and ultimately to the entire tradition of special operations that followed fires. His death was not widely reported. In the scale of the desert war with its vast armored battles and enormous casualty lists, one officer in a burnedout vehicle was not news.

[00:15:54]Fredish, but within the unit it was felt as something close to irreplaceable.

[00:15:59]Sterling did not stop. He recruited more men. He extended operational range. He began raiding into Benghazi itself, fought for Raml's entire campaign, walking through its streets, wearing German and Italian uniforms, fing charges toward ships and fuel depots with a degree of personal recklessness that alarmed even his own veterans fright. He was eventually captured in January 1943.

[00:16:26]His position betrayed, some believed by informants in the local population. He was by then the most wanted man in North Africa through the Germans called him the phantom major. By the time Sterling was captured, elder detachment had grown into a regiment, first SAS regiment with operations extending into Europe and the Mediterranean, but the North African accounting remained and remains remarkable. fierous estimates, the unit and its successors destroyed somewhere between 300 and 400 aircraft in North Africa alongside fuel depots, vehicles, supply dumps, and communications infrastructure. Vot the Royal Air Force in the same period destroyed fewer aircraft in aerial combat over the theater than the special air service destroyed on the ground.

[00:17:17]Those numbers mattered to Raml 4. They appear in German operational records, in the unanswered supply requests, in the maintenance schedules that slipped.

[00:17:27]Every aircraft destroyed on an airfield was one that did not need to be shot down because it never flew again. Quote, the pilots were usually unharmed. The ground crews were rarely touched, but the machines that the entire supply chain was straining to keep in the field were gone at a cost that the Italian route across the Mediterranean was already struggling to cover. like. And beyond the hardware, there was the psychological toll. The growing unease among Axis personnel serving at airfields, men who understood that the darkness around them was no longer necessarily empty. Maine survived the war. Four. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Order four times, a distinction without precedent for a soldier of his rank. He returned to County Armar in 1945 as one of the most decorated soldiers in the British Army.

[00:18:17]Foot. He was 30 years old. He struggled as many veterans of elite units do with the transition from a world that had demanded everything to one that asked very little for like he died in a car accident in 1955 at the age of 40. His memorial stands in New Townids, Northern Ireland. It lists his decorations. It does not attempt to explain the man. Fred Sterling spent years as a prisoner at Culitz Castle, escaping four times before the war ended. He returned to civilian life, went into business, and never entirely withdrew from the world of special operations. Four, in his later years, he rarely spoke about his own contributions. Four, he spoke instead about the quality of the men he had recruited and about the principle that had made the unit possible. that if you selected for the right qualities, you did not need to command people in the traditional sense. Far like you simply had to trust them. Froml's diary entry is remembered today most often as a compliment. The great German commander acknowledging the quality of his adversaries. That is a fair reading. F.

[00:19:31]But there is another way to understand it. The raids worked because they were built on a simple uncomfortable insight.

[00:19:38]The conventional military mind defends what it can see and what it expects, fortifies the front, watches the flanks, and trusts the deep rear to its own isolation. Sterling understood that the rear is only safe as long as your enemy believes it is. The moment you place even a small credible threat into that space, the entire defensive architecture of a campaign has to shift to accommodate it. And that shift costs men and resources that were needed somewhere else. Bromeml understood war. He understood speed and initiative and the disruptive power of the unexpected. For no one in the German high command had anticipated was that the British would apply those same principles against the one thing they had assumed was beyond reach. The desert had been a guarantee.

[00:20:27]It became a liability. Fire. That inversion of a strength becoming a weakness the moment someone refuses to accept its premise is perhaps the deepest lesson the raids left behind.

[00:20:39]Five. The young men who walked across those airfields in the dark. Most of them in their 20s, many of them dead before the campaign ended, were not fighting for territory. They were fighting for time. Fresh they destroyed was a mission that did not fly. A bomb that did not fall. a reconnaissance run that never happened. For in the long mathematics of attrition that decides campaigns fought over years, those small ledger entries accumulated into something that changed the course of the North African war. They carried bombs they could hold in one hand. They walked where no army was supposed to walk. And a German field marshal reading the damage reports by lamplight somewhere in the Libyan desert wrote in his private diary that they had hurt him more than anything else he had faced. Fat that is not a small thing. It never was.