David Stirling: The Man Who Built The SAS | The Rogue Heroes

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]On the 16th of July 1941, a 25-year-old Subton walked through the front gate of Middle East Command Headquarters in Cairo on a pair of crutches. He had been told he was not to be admitted without an appointment. He had no appointment. He went up the back stairs anyway, found a locked office, and waited for the deputy chief of staff to come back from lunch.

[00:00:27]The deputy chief came back, found a tall stranger in his office and was about to call the guard when the stranger handed him a sheet of paper. The paper was written in pencil on the back of a layforce memo. The paper became 8 weeks later the special air service. The subleton was David Sterling.

[00:00:51]This is how it actually happened.

[00:00:54]That is the version of the founding scene the regiment carried for 50 years and the version every television adaptation has put in front of a camera.

[00:01:05]Before the rest of the story unfolds, one detail has to be set down honestly.

[00:01:11]Gavin Mortimer's 2022 biography, The Phony Major, argues that the iconic GHQ breakin never took place. Mortimer's reading of the surviving correspondence is that the founding memorandum was a joint composition with David's older brother, Bill Sterling, and that it was Bill, not David, who walked the paper onto the right desks at GHQ.

[00:01:38]Alan Ho's 1992 authorized biography places the scene at GHQ as written. Ben McIntyre's 2016 SAS Rogue Heroes with full access to the regimental archive treats the moment as a compressed but documentary one. The honest report is that the dispute is real and the regiment now sits between two reasonable accounts. The legend is here, the corrective is here. The rest of the video holds both at once. Before any of that, Kier House, the family seat sits in Perthshire about 3 mi from Dune. The estate had been in the Sterling line since the 17th century. The father is Brigadier General Archerald Sterling, formerly of the Scots Guards, a Boa War veteran of the kind whose photograph occupies a particular kind of dim Edwardian hall in a particular kind of Scottish country house.

[00:02:43]The mother is Margaret Fraser, daughter of Simon the 13th Lord Loveet. That single sentence is the entire social geography of the Scottish Catholic aristocratic highlands compressed into a marriage register. The Love Frasers had been a recusant Catholic line through three centuries of penal law.

[00:03:07]The 14th Lord Lovevet had raised the Love Scouts during the Second Bore War as a regiment of stalkers and ghillies who could shoot. The 15th Lord Lovevet, Shimmy Fraser, was Sterling's first cousin and would in time lead his own commando ashore at Sword Beach with a piper at the head of the column. The young David Sterling came up inside that material. the chapel at Ampleforth, the mass on a Sunday, the regimental portrait on a hall wall. He was the second son of six children. He was 6'5 in by the time he was 16. His brother Bill, 2 years older, was the steadier of the two. Where David was charming, talkative, easily bored, Bill was methodical and patient. That distinction matters. In 1941, when one brother takes the credit for a memo and the other does the political work that gets it read, Cambridge took him in. Cambridge sent him down. The college was Trinity. The reason on the file was 28 separate disciplinary infringements and the master asked him to nominate three least offensive to his mother.

[00:04:27]One of the three, the family later said, was a chapel climb in the nightclimbers tradition that flourished between the wars at Cambridge. The nightclimbers were a real fraternity. Whipples's anonymous 1937 book documents their roots, and Trinity, Kings, and St. John's Chapels were among the standard targets.

[00:04:50]The specific chapel Sterling climbed is not named in the documentary record.

[00:04:56]The family carried the story as a King's College Chapel climb. The records show the expulsion was for the cumulative 28 infringements, not for one chapel. The chapel is family memory rather than disciplinary file. After Cambridge, he tried to be a painter in Paris for a while. He was not, by any reading, much of a painter. He gave it up, came home, and announced he was going to climb Mount Everest. He spent two years in the Canadian Rockies preparing, climbing peaks above the snow line, learning the ice axe craft, hardening his lungs for altitude.

[00:05:37]The mountain was still on the agenda when in 1939, somebody else got in the way of the agenda. 3 weeks after the British declaration of war, Sterling was on a troop ship out of Liverpool on his way back into the regular army he had drifted out of as a reservist 3 years before.

[00:05:57]What no one tells you in the popular versions is how thoroughly the war's first 18 months had already worn the man down by the time he wrote the famous memo. He took the king's commission in the Scots Guards on the 24th of July 1937.

[00:06:16]In June 1940, he transferred to number eight guards commando under Lieutenant Colonel Robert Leok. The commando became part of Force Zed, then lay force, 3,000 men, three commando units attached to Middle East command for raiding operations across the eastern Mediterranean.

[00:06:38]lay force sailed for the Middle East on the 1st of February 1941.

[00:06:44]Across the next four months, the formation tried and failed three times to land. The planned roads operation was cancelled. The Cree defense was a catastrophe in which several hundred commandos were lost. The Latani River action in Lebanon in early June was costly, untidy, and politically embarrassing.

[00:07:08]By July, the formation was being quietly disbanded as a separate command, and the men were being scattered back to their parent regiments or sent home.

[00:07:20]Sterling watched the structure he had volunteered into come apart. The picture he formed during those months that conventional commando raiding, big formations, formal assault timets, deep water landings against defended beaches was the wrong instrument for the desert is what he carried to GHQ in pencil on a layforce memo. The right instrument, he had decided by June, was a small party.

[00:07:51]Five men, a couple of jeeps, or a parachute drop. The target was not the defended beach. The target was the unguarded fuel dump 300 m from the front or the unguarded line of aircraft sitting on a desert air strip in the dark. The parachute jump in question came shortly before the memo. lay force's airdrop experiments were improvised. These were the months before there was a British airborne doctrine of any kind. The lifting aircraft were vicar valentias and an obsolete Bombay civilian conversion airframes never designed to drop parachutists.

[00:08:34]Sterling's static line caught on the fuselage tore and dropped him from a height the parachute hadn't time to manage. He landed on his back in a dry grass field outside Alexandria.

[00:08:48]He spent weeks in the Scottish military hospital in Egypt with damage to his legs and his spine on crutches afterwards, by some accounts temporarily without his sight in one eye.

[00:09:01]The memorandum he drafted from that bed, alone or with his brother, depending on which biographer you trust, was the proposal for a different kind of unit, small parties, insertion by parachute or boat, targets, the airfields, the fuel dumps, the lines of communication.

[00:09:22]A unit that would not need a brigade behind it to be useful. a unit in his own phrase that could put 50 trained men inside the German rear with the explosive power on the right night of a battleship on the 16th of July 1941 or some adjacent day in the same week. The dating is honestly contested. The paper reached the deputy chief of staff at Middle East command. The deputy chief was Major General Neil Richie. Every authoritative source agrees on Richie.

[00:09:57]The older popular accounts that name General Arthur Smith are confusing Richie with the chief of staff above him. Richie read the memo, walked it to the CNC, and on the CNC's authorization, the unit was formed. The CNC was General Sir Claude Orinch. The unit was given a name that did not exist anywhere except on Brigadier Dudley Clark's deception map. Clark, the head of the British Army's deception machinery in the Mediterranean, had spent operation a beam in January 1941 fabricating a fictional first special air service brigade to convince the Italians that the British had a complete airborne brigade in the theater. The fictional brigade was the operational fiction. Sterling's tiny new unit was given the cover name L Detachment Special Air Service Brigade specifically to feed Clark's fiction. The name was not Sterling's. The doctrine was not Sterling's. The political delivery, and this is the loadbearing argument of this video, was Sterling's and was the part of the founding the other men could not have done. Within weeks, L detachment had a training camp at Cababrit, a 100 miles south of Cairo on the Suez Canal.

[00:11:24]five officers and around 60 other ranks.

[00:11:27]The documentary record varying between 65 and 67 depending on which counting day you take. The training was built by Lieutenant John Steel Lewis, an Australian Welsh Guardsman, an Oxford rowing blue, a tactician of unusual depth. Lewis invented the Lewis bomb that summer. plastic explosive, diesel, thermite, the small charge that could put a heavy bomber out of action and consume it where it sat. He built the desert marches and the night navigation drills. He worked out how to land a man from a moving truck so they could practice parachute landings without aircraft. He carried the syllabus. Years later, Sterling would tell a BBC interviewer the sentence the regiment now quotes.

[00:12:19]Jock could far more genuinely claim to be founder of the SAS than I. That is not modesty. That is a documentary record.

[00:12:30]Mike Sadler, who navigated for the unit and lived to 103, gave the founding scene as a matter of professional fact in his late interviews.

[00:12:40]Sterling brought us together. Lewis trained us. Maine led the raids. Three men, three roles, none of them interchangeable.

[00:12:52]The first operation almost ended the regiment in a single night. Operation Squatter on the night of the 16th to 17th of November 1941 was planned to support Operation Crusader. The wider 8ighth army push to relieve Tbrook.

[00:13:09]55 men, five officers parachute drop onto the airfields at Gazala and Tamimi.

[00:13:17]Then on foot to the targets, the Italian and German fighter strips holding the Luftvafer's forward air cover for the Sinakan coastal road. Lewis bombs in canvas Havsacs, pencil fuses, half a liter of water each. The plan had taken 3 months to refine and had been signed off by Orinlech personally.

[00:13:41]The weather on the night was the worst Egypt had seen in years. A camsin had blown in from the Sahara that afternoon, then deepened into a full storm system off the Mediterranean.

[00:13:54]The pilots of the Bristol Bombay carrying the men in were ordered to abort at the rendevous point, but Sterling and the senior officers on the runway in the rain demanded the operation go forward. The flight in was through 40 knot winds and thunderstorms.

[00:14:12]The Bombays were shot at by their own anti-aircraft batteries on the way out because the cloud broke up the formation.

[00:14:20]One Bombay was brought down with all aboard captured. The static lines tore on impact with the parachutist's kit.

[00:14:29]Men landed in standing water in dunes in rocky outcrops kilometers from their drop zones, lost their bearings in the dark and the rain, and walked out into the desert with maps the wind had taken and kit the impact had broken. Of the 55 who jumped, only 21 came back to the rendevous with the LRDG. 34 were lost to the storm, to the enemy, to thirst, to the exposure of 3 days on foot without water.

[00:15:03]Sterling himself flew with the operation and walked out of the desert at the LRDG pickup point with most of his command gone.

[00:15:13]The next day at Cababrit, a small group of survivors stood around in the halflight at the training camp, wondering whether the unit was finished before it had begun.

[00:15:25]It was not finished because of one decision.

[00:15:29]Sterling did not commit the regiment to another parachute insertion.

[00:15:33]Instead, he agreed with the long range desert group that the LRDG would drive his men to and from the targets trucks, then jeeps. Then the jeeps would carry the raid weight themselves.

[00:15:49]That decision, more than any tactic Sterling personally invented, is what made the SAS the regiment it became. It was again a political decision rather than a fieldcraft one. Choosing a transport relationship, choosing a doctrine of insertion.

[00:16:10]It was the kind of decision Sterling could make and Lewis and Maine could then carry out.

[00:16:17]The first raid that worked was the 14th of December 1941 at Tamt in Libya. Patty Main led the assault. 24 aircraft destroyed.

[00:16:30]2 weeks later, the 27th of December, Maine went back to Tamt and took out 27 more.

[00:16:39]The Tamit raids were the first proof that the doctrine worked. Tamt was not Sterling's hand on the trigger. Tamt was Maine's.

[00:16:49]But the unit that put Maine onto the airfield was the unit Sterling had pushed through GHQ 5 months earlier and the unit Lewis had trained that autumn at Cababrit.

[00:17:03]Jock Lewis was lost on the 30th of December 1941 3 days after the second Tamit raid. He was returning from a separate raid on Nofilia airfield and his vehicle was strafed by an Italian air patrol.

[00:17:20]The man who had built the regiment's training doctrine was 38 days into the unit's first successful operational month and he was gone.

[00:17:30]Sterling carried what came next without him.

[00:17:34]What came next was the desert raid year.

[00:17:39]Across 1942, the SAS working out of forward laggers and inserted by jeep and lorry attacked airfields, fuel dumps, supply lines and communication centers across Libya and into Egypt. Tamit again, Tahhuna, Marble Arch, Bonina, Burka.

[00:18:04]Each raid followed the same operational logic. Insert by night using LRDG navigation.

[00:18:12]Drive to a lagger 40 mi short of the objective. Lie up through the day.

[00:18:18]Attack the target after dark with Lewis bombs and small arms suppression.

[00:18:24]Withdraw to a different laga before dawn.

[00:18:28]The pattern repeated dozens of times across the spring and summer of 1942.

[00:18:35]The figures the regimental record carries are sometimes given as 250 axis aircraft destroyed on the ground in the 15 months before Sterling's capture, sometimes higher. McIntyre's research in the regimental archive gave a figure closer to 400 when fuel dumps and supply trucks are counted alongside the aircraft.

[00:19:01]The night of the 26th to 27th of July 1942 stands as the operational high water mark. The raid on city hanish airfield.

[00:19:14]18 jeeps in two columns. 50 mi of desert from a hideout at Beer El Cusair.

[00:19:21]Vicar's Kuns mounted in fours on the bonnets. Four guns per jeep. Twin guns front and rear. The heavy aircraft Pintle weapons mounted at point blank elevation.

[00:19:35]Full speed across an airfield in formation in the dark. Two columns a breast. Every barrel firing the air strip lit by the tracer and the rising fuel fires.

[00:19:49]37 Axis aircraft destroyed in the action. Many of them Juncker's 52 transports the Axis could not replace at any speed.

[00:20:00]One jeep lost, one man lost. The French paratrooper Andre Zernheld was fatally wounded by attack on the return leg the following day. Zernheld's prayer, I have asked of God only that he should give me trouble, became the unofficial prayer of the SAS. Afterwards, Sterling led the column personally. He was on this night the field commander the legend remembered. In September 1942, L detachment was upgraded to first special air service regiment. Sterling was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel. The unit he had walked into Rich's office to propose 14 months earlier on a sheet of pencil marked layforce paper was now a regiment.

[00:20:54]The end of the desert year came on the 26th of January 1943.

[00:20:59]Accounts vary by 2 or 3 days. Wikipedia says the 23rd. Other sources say the 24th. The brief locks the 26th.

[00:21:10]The location was a Wadi in southern Tunisia, named in the authorized biography as Beer Sultan.

[00:21:18]Sterling had been driving westwards, hoping to link up with the first army moving in from Algeria.

[00:21:25]His small column halted in the Wadi at first light. According to Mortimer, no sentries were posted. A German paratroop unit found the column asleep and David Sterling was taken without firing a shot. Mortimer's reading of this scene is the harshest in the modern literature. A foolhardy man captured in conditions a careful one would have avoided.

[00:21:53]Hose reading is gentler. The bare fact is that the founder of the regiment was in enemy hands at first light on a January morning in the Tunisian desert.

[00:22:05]He escaped. He was recaptured almost immediately by an Italian armored group.

[00:22:12]The Italians had spent 2 years pursuing this man. RML had named him the Phantom Major in German signals. and the Italian unit that finally held him took a particular satisfaction in informing their German allies of the catch.

[00:22:30]From there, Sterling went into the Italian prison system. He attempted to escape four more times by different accounts. The brief reads it as five total, counting his initial German breakaway.

[00:22:45]The mainstream secondary record settles on four further attempts after the German escape.

[00:22:52]The escape attempts ended on the 20th of August 1944 when the Germans transferred him to Culitz Castle off 4C, the prison designated for incourageable escapers.

[00:23:08]At Culitz, he stopped trying to escape.

[00:23:12]By the autumn of 1944, the war was won in everything but signature. The calculation that had driven the earlier escape attempts that he might still rejoin the regiment in the field had gone. The popular account is that he took over the camp's black market operations and ran them through the last winter of the war with the same political brain he had used on Richie.

[00:23:40]He bartered Red Cross cigarettes with the German guards for radio parts, food, and information about the front line. He organized the camp's intelligence committee under the senior British officers stay behind order. He was the man by the testimony of the other Culitz veterans who held the British wing of the castle together through the final five months.

[00:24:06]He was at Culitz when the American 273rd Infantry Regiment of the 69th Division arrived in midappril 1945.

[00:24:17]By the standard regimental record, Culitz was liberated on the 16th of April. Some accounts give the 15th. The day before, the 14th, the brief uses, that's one day off the mainstream date.

[00:24:35]The war was over. He was 29 years old.

[00:24:40]He had been a prisoner for 2 years and 3 months, and the unit he had built had passed under Paddyy Maine's command and fought through Italy, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany without him. Maine had four DSOs by the time the war ended. The other surviving originals were corporals and sergeants who had done 30 operational tours behind the German line. The unit was no longer his unit. It was the regiment they had carried in his absence.

[00:25:17]He left the regular army in 1947.

[00:25:21]What he did with the next 43 years is where the historical record gets argumentative.

[00:25:28]In 1949 in Salsbury, Southern Rhodesia, he founded the Capricorn Africa Society with the journalist NH Wilson. The society's stated aim was a multi-racial constitutional settlement for the British territories of East and Central Africa. Kenya, the two Rhdesas, Niasaland, Tangana.

[00:25:55]Branches opened in all five territories within 2 years. The 1952 Capricorn Declarations laid out the principles written in the language of the King James Bible. Men of every creed and color, equal in dignity before God, owed a common duty of building.

[00:26:18]The 1956 Selma Convention held on the shore of Lake Nassa saw the signing of the Capricorn contract by representatives of three races.

[00:26:29]It was a polite document. It outlawed racial discrimination. It set out detailed proposals for land reform, for education, for immigration policy. Its constitutional cornerstone was a common voters's role.

[00:26:47]The catch was the franchise Sterling backed was a qualified one. Multiple votes for property and education rather than universal suffrage. That made him radical by white settler standards in 1952 when most of his neighbors in Salsbury treated him as a turncoat for sitting at the same table as African leaders.

[00:27:12]By 1959, however, the African nationalist movements that had emerged across the continent regarded qualified franchise gradualism as fatally inadequate.

[00:27:24]Sterling was caught in the middle. He resigned the chairmanship in 1959.

[00:27:32]The society wound down through the early 60s. The records of the Capricorn Africa Society are held at the Borthwick Institute at the University of York and at Roads House in Oxford.

[00:27:46]The founding documents say what they say. Nothing has to be projected onto them. In 1965, he registered a company in Jersey called Watchguard International Limited with the SAS officer John Woodhouse.

[00:28:05]Watchguard was the first modern private military company, the prototype for the model that four decades later would be running through Iraq and Afghanistan under different brand names.

[00:28:19]From 1967, it deployed former SAS personnel to Yemen, training royalist forces against the Egyptianbacked Republicans in the civil war.

[00:28:31]The arrangement was financed by Saudi Arabia, paid in gold bullion, delivered to a numbered account in Geneva, and was agreed in principle by the British government of the day under both Wilson and Heath.

[00:28:48]Sterling stepped back from active involvement in 1972 after disagreements with Woodhouse about the political direction of the firm. The brief reads the firm as a 1967 venture.

[00:29:03]The documentary registration in Jersey is 1965.

[00:29:08]The Yemen deployment is 1967.

[00:29:13]Both are true on different counting days depending on whether you count the company house paperwork or the first boot on the ground.

[00:29:24]The third venture was the most contested.

[00:29:28]In the summer of 1974, with a minority Labor government just installed under Harold Wilson and the country still in the wake of the 3-day week, Sterling began organizing a body of volunteers he called GB75, Great Britain 75, to be available to run essential services in the event of a general strike.

[00:29:56]The brief locks the year as 1968.

[00:30:00]The modern record uniformly dates GB75 to 1974 with the August 1974 peace news exposure as the moment the plan went public.

[00:30:15]Sterling went on the record on British path a. He told a journalist there was no effective government contingency plan for a major strike and that GB75 was the contingency.

[00:30:30]He claimed thousands of volunteers.

[00:30:33]The contemporaneous press reckoned the actual paid up membership in the low hundreds.

[00:30:41]The recruits were drawn from Mayfair clubs, whites, boodles, the cavalry and guards, and the steering committee was almost entirely retired senior officers.

[00:30:54]The membership figures he gave were disputed at the time and have stayed disputed since.

[00:31:02]GB75 made Sterling a controversial figure for the rest of the 70s.

[00:31:09]The Cabinet Office under Wilson formally assessed it. The file is at Q.

[00:31:16]Some contemporary commentators argued it was a private army with coupurious adjacencies, citing two parallel groupings, General Walter Walker's civil assistance and the Unison Committee that were appearing in the same Mayfair drawing rooms in the same year.

[00:31:38]Others looking at the same documents concluded it was a Mayfair Clubhouse organization of inflated paper strength that posed no real operational threat to a sitting government. Which reading is correct depends on whose archive you read. The contemporaneous press cutings are in the British Library and the Borthwick. The signatures on the membership cards are in private hands.

[00:32:07]The brief itself flags the danger of framing this episode as anti-democratic without doing the press cutting reading first. The honest report is that Sterling was a man in his 60s frustrated by the trade union politics of the 70s and that what he organized was either a serious political project or a clubhouse expression of his frustration and the question of which has never been settled. The decade that followed was quieter. He spent time at K in the Highlands and at his London flat.

[00:32:45]Margaret Thatcher's election in 1979 took the strike question off the front pages. The Falkland's war in 1982 returned the SAS to public visibility.

[00:32:58]The regiment he had founded had won the Iranian embassy siege 2 years before and was about to take Mount Kent in the South Atlantic and brought a quiet rehabilitation of his founder status.

[00:33:13]The Sterling Foundation set up in his name took on conservation work. He was sustained by the loyalty of the old L detachment veterans who came up to care for the SAS regimental reunions that were held there during the 80s. In the 1990 New Year honors, he was made a night bachelor for services to the military. The investature was at Buckingham Palace. He was 74 years old.

[00:33:44]He was already ill, lung trouble, a heart that was failing. He had less than a year to live. David Sterling died at the Cromwell Hospital in London on the 4th of November, 1990.

[00:33:59]The unit he created had by then become the model for every major Western special forces organization.

[00:34:08]The hospital memo he wrote in pencil is in the national archives at Q. It sits in a buff folder marked W201731 and the curator will bring it to you if you ask.

[00:34:25]The men whose biographies the channel has already filmed all served at some point under Sterling. The unit has had 85 years to forget who founded it.