The origin of the British SAS is a fascinating story told well by Ben Macintyre in "Rogue Heroes." Mr. Macintyre described how David Stirling, a rogue in his own right, created the organization that wrecked havoc on the Nazis in the Middle East during WWII and which eventually became the famous British SAS.
I found the book at the local library after watching Mr. Macintyre talk about it on C-SPAN. That episode can be seen here.
In any event, for your entertainment and education, here's an excerpt from the book which is one anecdote demonstrating how cunning Stirling was. This one happened to be an interaction with Winston Churchill which pretty much sealed the deal to put the SAS on track to become what it eventually became. To wit:
On the evening of August 8, David Stirling shaved, bathed, climbed into his brother's dinner jacket, and prepared to launch a charm offensive against Winston Churchill.
The invitation to a private dinner with the prime minister at the British embassy in Cairo was almost certainly the result of Randolph Churchill's enthusiastic letters to his father, describing the exploits of L Detachment and its fearless young leader. Stirling certainly believed that "Randolph had been talking to his father in much the manner in which I had hoped." Fitzroy Maclean, now fully recovered from the car crash, also received an invitation.
The other guests included General Alexander, the newly arrived commander in chief, and Field Marshal Jan Smuts, South Africa's prime minister and a member of the Imperial war cabinet. In the space of a few days, Stirring went from blowing up planes with machine guns to dining with prime ministers in evening dress. It was a strange war.
Churchill was stopping off in Cairo on the way to Moscow for his first face-to-face meeting with Stalin, an encounter that his wife, clementine, characterized as "a visit to the ogre in his den." The prime minister was in ebullient form, wearing a bow tie and his velvet "siren suit" -- a military-style one-piece boiler suit that would not become fashionable again for another seventy years, until the invention of the "onesie." From the head of the table, Churchill held forth, "pink-faced and beaming." A great deal was eaten, and a great deal more was drunk. "It was little unreal," Stirling later recalled. "A table set with the best of silver and served with the best food, with the British prime Minister at the head of the feast, just 40 miles or so from the Allied front line." At one point, Churchill challenged Smuts to a game: who could recite more Shakespeare without stopping? After fifteen minutes the south African leader, a brilliant scholar with a prodigious memory, ran out of quotations, but Churchill continued, unstoppably. It took several minutes before Smuts realized that Churchill was not reciting genuine verse at all, but a sort of mock-shakespeare of his own extempore invention.
After dinner, cigars were lit, brandy was poured, and Stirling and Maclean were summoned over to accompany the prime minister as he strolled around the elegant embassy gardens. The two young men were the type of adventurers Churchill adored, swashbucklers, daredevils, and, above all, amateurs. He was well aware that Maclean had used his election to the House of commons as a ruse to get into the war, and he thoroughly approved.
"Here," he said, turning to Smuts, is the young man who has used the Mother of Parliaments as a public convenience."
Stirling and Maclean had been warned that they should on no account discuss the impending attack on Benghazi with Churchill. (The prime minister was regarded by some of his staff as an inveterate gossip and a major security risk with a habit of turning top secret information into amusing after-dinner entertainment.) They ignored this injunction. For the next few minutes' Churchill listened intently as the two young officers described L Detachment, its methods, successes, and plans for the future. Insisting that this was "a new form of warfare we were developing" with "awesome potential," Stirling suggested that the unit might have an important role to play behind the lines in Europe at a later stage in the war.
Churchill was "bowled over" by Stirling, intrigued by the contrast between the young man's gentle demeanour and his ferocious pursuit of the enemy." When the prime minister rejoined Smuts in the embassy drawing room, he described to him Stirling's record of destruction and quoted the famous lines from Byron's Don Juan: "He was the mildest-mannered man / That ever scuttled ship or cut a throat." The continuation of that quotation also fitted Stirling's character: "With such true breeding of a gentleman' / You never could divine his real thought."
Before leaving, Stirling asked Churchill, Smuts, and Alexander to sign a piece of paper, as a souvenir. of the evening.
The next morning Stirling was still nursing his hangover when a note arrived at Peter's flat. From Sir Leslie Rowan, Churchill's private secretary, it read: "I have been asked by by my chief to ask you, to let me have, for him, without further delay, the short note for which he called on what you would advise should be done to concentrate and coordinate the work you are doing. I have been asked to make sure that this is in my hands today. I can be got at the embassy." Leaving aside the civil service circumlocution' the import was clear: Churchill was intrigued and wanted to hear more, now.
Stirling immediately set to work on his brother's typewriter, and bashed out a two page memo, headed "Top Secret," written so fast it included several spelling mistakes and missing words: "All existing Special Service Units in the Middle East be disbanded and selected personnel absorbed, as required, by L Detachment . . . Control to rest with the officer commanding L Detachment and not with any outside body. .... The planning of operations to remain as hitherto the prerogative of L Detachment." In other words, Stirling proposed to take over all special forces, extract anyone he wanted for his own team, and then run operations exactly as he saw fit. This scheme, he said, would increase "versatility and resourcefulness [with] obvious advantages from the point of view of security." But it would also leave him free from interference, with the unstated implication that the bureaucrats at headquarters were incompetent, interfering gossips. It was a power grab, pure and simple, and it worked.
That evening, Stirling was summoned back to the embassy for further discussions. Running up the embassy staircase, he cannoned into the bulky form of the prime minister himself. "The irresistible force meets the immovable object," grunted Churchill. This is known, in philosophy, as the "sword and shield paradox," a conundrum in which two absolute forms of power are pitted against each other. But it also captured something of Churchill's wartime philosophy: immovability would bring victory ("We shall never surrender"), but it must be combined with overwhelming and dramatic force. War was nor just a matter of bombs and bullets, but of capturing imaginations. Stirling displayed just the right combination of daring and romance. Henceforth, Churchill would allude to him as the "Scarlet Pimpernel" - a reference to the hero of Baroness Orczy's novel, Sir Percy Blakeney, a wealthy, foppish Englishman on the outside, but in reality a master of the secret, undercover war. Stirling was just the sort of figure Churchill had been seeking to inject some panache into the North African war.
The encounter with Churchill would ensure the future of the SAS; it was also of immediate practical use. Stirling took the "souvenir" signed by two prime ministers and the commander in chief of the Middle East, and typed above the signatures: "Please give the bearer of this note every possible assistance." Seekings and Cooper, the unofficial SAS quartermasters, now found that supplies, vehicles, weapons, and ammunition, hitherto so tricky to secure, could be obtained simply by flourishing this note. Stirling had no qualms whatever about this blatant forgery: Churchill had become a staunch supporter of the unit and so, he insisted, "in a sense it was authentic."
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1:00 PM 9/9/2018
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