Mobs for Jobs

By the winter of 1942-43 British Special Forces had proven their worth but they were yet to face their greatest challenges

- Robin Ashcroft

ON 14 FEBRUARY 1943 David Stirling was reported missing during a personal reconnaissance of the Gabès Gap. The Special Air Service’s (SAS) War Diary noted that he was a ‘believed prisoner of war’. Stirling’s rise had been meteoric.

In early 1941 he had been a lacklustre Scots Guards subaltern attached to 8 Commando, with the nickname ‘Giant Sloth’. However, the unit he founded later that year – L Detachment, SAS – had, by the end of 1942, destroyed more enemy aircraft in theatre than the Royal Air Force, been raised to regimental status and he’d been promoted to Lieutenant Colonel. Cometh the hour, cometh the man? Perhaps.

While it’s a step too far to credit Stirling with inventing a new form of warfare, his strategic vision, aided greatly by the skills of the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) and the efforts of those under his command, had undoubtedly shown huge potential. The LRDG were not beyond, to quote its founder Major Ralph Bagnold, a bit of ‘piracy on the high desert’ but their principal role was in gathering intelligence and monitoring the enemy’s movements, and their skills lay in navigation and desert travel. After the SAS’s calamitous first operation, which saw half the force lost, it was able to access the LRDG’s talents and align it with its own propensity for destruction. And so a winning formula evolved.

Stirling’s capture could have been a disastrous moment for Britain’s emerging Special Forces, for it wasn’t a given that the SAS would emerge from among the plethora of ‘private armies’ and ‘private navies’ to become the renowned force it is today.