The early days of the S.A.S.

I would like if I may to talk about the very early days of the SAS yes the special air service in this video which has been sponsored by my friends at the great courses plus more of that later now you've probably heard of the SAS I mean that's not surprising perhaps one of the most famous quite definitely one of most famous regiments in the entire world but maybe you know quite as much as you would like about it's very early days and these can be traced to one man left and at David Stirling who found himself lying in a hospital bed one day in Cairo paralyzed from the waist down he'd been taking parachute training and it had all gone horribly wrong he was doing commando training despite the fact that he was from a Scots Guards regiment and he'd ended up in bed in hospital the nurses they were all familiar with him already because he used to go there to get a shot of oxygen to cure him over his many hangovers his superiors didn't think much of him they thought of him as an irritating incompetent which doesn't all go terribly well does it but his beers tend to think that he was at least charming his nickname was the giant sloth he was very big and he wasn't really known for his industry he couldn't March in a straight line apparently and well let's just say he wasn't exactly a model soldier as the British Army pictured it at the time but he had lots of time to think as he recovered and he was thinking this we are fighting we Commonwealth troops were the Italians and Germans up and down this strip of land along North Africa and we know that all the time the Germans are looking and the Italians are looking to the north because they fear quite rightly that there could be a raid coming from the north at any time because after all the Royal Navy was extremely powerful and could if it really put its mind to it land or age just about anywhere along the north coast of Africa and it was well known that they had the wrong Marine Commandos these elite elite raiding units and of course the RAF could operate from carriers or from bases in places like mortar so it was possible for a raid to appear anywhere along that that strip along there the north african coast which could be quite a long way behind their own lines so they had to look north and and worry about that threat but were they looking south were they looking south of that others see the Sahara Desert which is Seal in a lot of ways is extremely easy to get lost in that that see and there very few resources on which an army can be supplied so you can't expect any army to spend any length of time in this Sahar it would go out of supply in just too quickly but what if he put together some elite raiding forces of adventurous types with a lot of initiative and he could put them in just nobody give him lots of explosives and they could blow stuff up fuel dumps and and aerodrums and so forth they could wreak havoc he thought so still on crutches I imagine he could feel his feet at this point but he was far from fully recovered he managed to crash his way into the the staff office and put into the hands of the deputy chief of staff and his plans for this new unit and on a few sheets of paper and the response he got was yeah he knows this could be just a plan we're looking for three days later he had an audience with the Big Cheese himself the commander in chief general sir Claude Auchinleck now Auchinleck was a fearful tough and it just so happens that so was David Stirling and that the these two Scottish nobleman actually knew each other through family connections so there you go being an aristocrat can sometimes be quite convenient for this sort of thing anyway he went into that meeting a left-handed he came out a captain and was given authority to raise a force of six officers and sixty men so this is not a large unit that's just what like two platoons I a small commando company if you like but it was the beginnings of the SAS he didn't actually have the men he just had the authority to raise them so whom should he recruit well he knew what he wanted he wanted adventurous men who had a lot of their own initiative perhaps they were misfits in the rest of the army and so on people a bit like him they had to be brave they had to be prepared to get up close to the enemy and possibly killed the enemy up close as well but he didn't want killers he didn't want Psychopaths that wasn't what his unit was about it was about destroying machinery and fuel and so forth he didn't want a load of a psychopathic killer this wasn't an assassination squad this was a behind the lines blowing stuff up demolition squad that's what he wanted and he ended up with what one of the officers described as the sweepings of the public schools and the prisons but he managed to get his men they were all volunteers and training was very hard they would put on heavy packs and would be matched far further than the ordinary troopers would have to train to show that they were physically fit and determined and some of them very definitely were they would they were even when their boots came off their feet they would go barefoot over the rock to prove themselves if need be and there were there were losses some people couldn't take it and had to go there were deaths and injuries and so forth so some people left the unit to by that route when he first formed viewlet they had no kit they had he managed to get hold of a few raggedy old tents and one ancient half broken-down lorry and that was about it and the first thing he said to his men are eyes right go out there and steal everything we need and so the story goes the next day they had one of the best equipped camps in the British Army with loads of rows of new tents new transports and they even had a piano and a ping-pong table so his men proved that they had initiative and were prepared to steal it's not necessarily from the enemy so he was able to put together his unit but he was anxious to get into action because this was an experimental unit and sometimes these things would come together and then whatever plan they had for it would fizzle and that the the moment for that unit would pass and the it would be broken up and the men will be returned to their various units and he didn't want that to happen this was his little baby now a lot of people were against what he was doing because it did seem together it seemed to a lot of people that he was putting together what amounted to a private army and that doesn't that that that that that won't do and what's more he was raiding behind enemy lines he was doing something a bit dastardly it wasn't it wasn't the stand up fight it wasn't the way a lot of the British officers decided that this was the way we ought to fight it solder against solder stand up you know you shoot a man who was looking at you you know just punch him in the back of the head when he's not looking so he was worried that his unit was going to get broken up so he was desperate to put it into action and he put it into action and one of the first ever opportunities he got this was probably a mistake it was called Operation squatter and it occurred on the 16th of November 1941 just five months after he'd had the idea for this unit in that hospital bed pretty much everything went wrong they're all going to parachute into action because that was what the unit was all about they had their motto was descend to ascend although strike and destroy was another motto which they tried out but they they abandoned that one so there they all were at night in a thirty knot wind which had been had been forecast and you're not supposed to jump out of a moving aircraft and parachute in winds faster than 15 knots but he decided no he couldn't wait any longer he had to get he had to get an operation under his belt and show his superiors the worthiness of this unity could do stuff it could get results so he went ahead with the mission in very high winds and edie everything went wrong pretty much from the start they threw out all their their equipment in various pods all their weapons and explosives and and radios and medical kits and and water supplies and so forth and then they jumped after it then themselves into the night into a gale and you can't see the ground properly when you're parachuting at night he himself hit the ground so hard he actually blacked out for a bit it took in two hours to gather his men together one of them vanished completely 55 men went on this mission so that's almost the entire unit so he was there putting a lot of eggs in one basket now the man had broken an ankle and couldn't walk another man had broken his back and couldn't even crawl and they couldn't find any of their equipment pots so they had on them some pistols and some grenades as an attacking force they were useless so it was just a matter really of just trying to limp back and he lost over half of his force only 21 men made it back from that first raid they made it back largely thanks to the long range desert group now the long range desert group which is time's confused with the SAS they worked together right from the start and the long range desert group was a group of soldiers who were extremely good at navigating in the desert they navigated like sea captain's they had the theodolite and astral and they would they would take observations or stars and so forth that very precise times of the day because that's the way they had to navigate because trying to use landmarks when the maps are all inadequate and besides it's just a sea of sand it was pretty much useless so we had to navigate like sea captain's and they got very good at it they could put you just you know the one hill you wanted to be at at a particular time with the right amount of water and munitions that you would need they had established caches all around the desert and they had learned the craft of navigating in the desert and after this first mission that had gone so appalling ly badly he of course was thinking oh my goodness this could be the end of my unit but already he was planning the next thing and he had his next idea which was don't parachute in don't parachute in just use your your escape route they long range desert group as as your your your what was the word your insertion group as well so he would use the LRD G as they were known or the often they call that the long ranged as a patrol group but somehow the P gets left out of the earth initials anyway you would use them for the game getting in and the getting out it made sense okay cut the whole aircraft and parachutes cut that all out of it entirely and you could arrive with the equipment that you actually set off with all going well so he then managed to organize a successful mission now there was a chap called paddy paddy Mayne he was a terrifying Ulsterman he became very popular within the regiment but he was quite terrifying to people outside the regiment who got in his way and this man would later personally clock up over a hundred aircraft destroyed on the ground which is more than any British fighter ace ever man managed in the air during World War two and this successful raid though started off with an event which David Stirling was not happy about they managed to get to the enemy aerodrome deep behind the lines and there were very few people around but they noticed that there was there was illumination in one Hut and quite a noise and they sneaked up to that Hut and burst in with their tommy guns these usually referred to as tommy guns submachine guns of some sort often get called tommy guns in these anecdotes and there was a party going on and everything suddenly went silent and after a bit of an awkward moment the tommy guns opened up and they gunned down pretty much everyone in the place and then destroyed a load of aircraft on the ground somebody blew up some they set fire to some they climbed into and just emptied a clip of rounds into the dashboard it is said that he just ripped the dashboard out of one of the aircraft by hand and had a he thought a thoroughly delightful time but when he got back David Stirling reprimanded him very severely no no that's not what we do we don't kill people now you could say that it's actually more efficient to kill pilots than it is to destroy aircraft because you can replace an aircraft but a dead pilot is dead forever but and you can't repair it a dead pilot but he Dana Stirling was absolutely against that we are not assassins that's not what we do don't ever do that again we're here to blow stuff up so paddy had to rein in his level of violence a bit but he remained a terrifyingly violent man that you were very happy to have on your side but very glad that the others like him were not the typical amongst the enemies so this was the early days of the SAS and it nearly didn't happen and it nearly got disbanded and it nearly didn't have its catchphrase of who dares wins they changed it to that later oh and it was called L detachment why was it called L detachment well it was called L detachment because it's a Dudley Clarke not a Colonel Dudley Clarke had as part of his deception plans created phantom units and one of these was the first special air service and he gave it gave lot of clues about it suggesting that it was something to do with parachutist and so they thought what let's make this new unit L detachment so that's what they were called at first why L detachment all because it suggests that through cave already been allotted because you're constantly trying to fool the enemy you see you want the enemy who will cost pick up on little bits of information here and there to think oh there's this another unit and it's a parachute thing and the more they think they know but they don't actually know the more your intelligence is deceiving them this was the idea you just throw in deliberate falsification just for the sake of confusing the enemy keeping him on his toes it's all part of the game well they became L detachment but later they stopped being called L faster and just became known as the SAS and the cap badge by the way yes I thought it was a flame a winged dagger as well it's often described as a winged dagger but apparently its original designer intended it to be a flaming sword Excalibur so there you go so those are the early days of the SAS now I should say something about my sponsor now it's the great courses plus and then just in case you don't know what the great courses plus I know that some of you do but just in case you don't it's an enormous website you can find online and it's it's full of lecture courses by eminently qualified professors from around the world though admittedly most of them are from America and they're fewer from Britain as well be the Anglophone nations and they cover a variety of topics including history which I imagine you're interested in because you're watching some of my videos so what you can do is you can follow this link for instance www dot the great course is plus.com stroke Lindy beige and that will take you to an offer of a free trial yes you can get a free trial so you can you can try it out for free have a look a load of the lectures you watch them stream on your on your computer at home or some other advice and if at the end of the trial you decide you don't like it never mind you you don't have you don't have to subscribe you can just say thank you very much I've seen enough unsubscribe and you will own nothing but why not give it a go and one of the courses that I think reasonably pertinent is a history of the Middle East it's by Professor Ayman Gearin in his called turning points in Middle East history and there is of course a huge amount of overlap between Middle East and history and and Western history so yes of course you you you get the expansion period of the Arabs but of course those Arabs were conquering people so it's it's part of Spanish history for instance that the Arabs conquered much much of Spain and yes you get the the the Fatimids and the Umayyads and those sort of people but in later lectures you'll see that there are things about the siege of Vienna for instance because the Ottomans and the hasta hunt are the austro-hungarians were at war for quite a long time that that's deep into Europe so it's quite definitely part of Western history as well and Napoleon of course invaded the the Middle East and went around the place being generally mendacious in a bit of a get and you can learn about that in all his interactions and and another thing which made me think of this course in the first place was that there's also a lecture about the war in the desert in World War one now it's interesting that the long range desert group wasn't to the first of its kind you may think that it's a world war two thing this idea of putting men in cars to to zoom around the desert but actually there was the the the light car patrol in World War one that used mainly Model T Fords would you believe and they were hurtling around North Africa in 1917 doing something pretty similar to the LRD G later on and the LRD G whilst traveling around would keep finding their camps they would actually end up camping in the same place and finding old World War one bully beef tins and so forth and even even car tracks that had been made all those years ago which still survived which was extremely useful because when you're in the LRD g and you're making your way in secret through the desert you are of course leaving trails in the sand behind you which could be seen from an aircraft and you might think that would make you extremely trackable but the good news is that these tracks often last a very long time and some of them are even world war one vintage so the fact that there have been cars criss crossing the desert for quite a long time was extremely useful in world war ii for the the secrecy of the LRD G but I'm getting I'm getting sidetracked sorry I wasn't gonna say any of that also talking is the great course is plus so it's taught by a man airman Gilman know a man gear and there you go I got in the end and I know what you're wondering is he really the man for you does he wear beige what's his scholars cradle like what I thought I happened to check on this because you know this is important and so I looked at but obviously you would start with the beginning of lecture one wouldn't you and okay let's see how he presents himself okay and start the clock stop the clock stop the clock what was that one second one point one point six three seconds and he hit us with a scholars cradle without looking just I have to look I'm not really good there we go and just straight off the bat and he's wearing a beige suit so there you go he's our man so you know you can rely on him as a lecturer of course they wouldn't have picked him if they were he one went a thoroughly reliable lecturer in his course so there's a course on Middle Eastern history on the great courses plus and you don't have to look at that one you can look at any of the courses in the great block cause it's plus for free and give it a go so you can use this use this address here so that's on the screen or you can go into the link and just click on that in the description that's quicker anyway so why not do that so there you go the great courses bus now back to the SAS and in the second part of this video I'm going to be talking about this book Eastern approaches by Fitzroy MacLean and this is my brother bought me this is a present and thank you brother what a great present because this this man looked like this that the dashing aristocratic British officer is even though that you think he's even got the moustache it's a book of three parts and each one is enough to justify a book is enough to make you think oh wow this guy had an interesting warden II and you would read we read that but this guy had three interesting Wars the first section of the book is about his time in Russia and he spoke fluent Russian and he worked for the British diplomatic service and had been trained up in his job for about six years and he was quite a valued member of the team and whenever he got some leave he liked to zip around the there's the the Soviet Union and have a look at various bits of it just for his own tourism curiosity he wanted to go to place like cash and summer can do you know places on the the old Silk Road and that the spice trails and so forth and to do this he had to give various Soviet agents to slip because he wasn't meant to be going to these places didn't have permission really and so he he the lots of adventures of long train journeys and and trying to give agents in pursuit of him trying to prevent him from doing whatever it is that he's trying to do and so that's all quite amusing but a historical note he is possibly the only Russian speaking non Russian who witnessed Stalin's show trials and that's the amazing episode and just to summarize it he ended up concluding though he makes it quite clear in his book is not completely sure because he found it all just completely bizarre but he ended up concluding that these various communists who were being accused of all sorts of things on flagrantly trumped-up charges and they went meekly to their face despite knowing what serious trouble they personally were in he thinks out of just love and respect for the Communist project they they were so indoctrinated with with communism as being a great thing that they they took a hit for the team if you like they thought oh well if this is going to do the communist party good in the long run fair enough I'll I'll let them say that I'm guilty even though I know I'm flipping well not and they they accepted their fates like like meek lambs right that's how he concludes it anyway that's that's the first third of the book and he needs to get out of the Diplomatic Service because he day he wants to fight the war the war starts he wants to do his bit and they say no no you can't leave the Diplomatic Service you're far too valuable here you've spent years being trained up we've got you trained now and you speak fluent Russian you know exactly what's going on here we need you here you're far too valuable and yeah you could see their point but the trouble is things what they do is bit you wanted wanted to fight and he wasn't going to do any fighting working for the Diplomatic Service in Moscow so he went back to them and said ah I'm thinking of going into politics and standing for election and they said ah yeah okay well in that case oh yeah well you can't be diplomats because you know you can't be a member of a a political party and in the diplomatic service because there's those they have a conflict of interests there that's no good there's nobody at all go on off you go oh great so he left and join the army got trained up in a Scottish regiment and then suddenly one day he joined as a private then got promoted to corporal which it was quite a big step up and lots more responsibilities in power and then suddenly he was told oh you're a platoon officer how did that happen it's not explained in the book just it seems to be a surprise to him at the time as well so he becomes an officer and then is sent out to North Africa and shortly after stepping off the plane he runs into David Stirling David Stirling the man who set up the SAS and of course he's an old friend isn't he because you know the holy Scottish aristocrat they all know each other and the Davis sterling says oh I'm putting together this this this new unit it's called it's called L detachment and yes we've just had our first mission and it was a bit of a disaster but you know we need types like you what do you say and he says ok and it's it tells you something about the times doesn't it but he was able to just leave his regiment and join the SAS because he could pull strings because he had mates in the right places oh by the way I missed him a bit of politics after a while the army said so the Diplomatic Service said then aren't you supposed to be standing for election and you oh yeah right so he got himself selected as a candidate then won his seat and then in some way that you could presumably do in those days but I doubt you could get away with now he in order to go to North Africa he just handed his seat over to a mate of his who could run it for him different times different times anyway so he joins the SAS and he goes on his first big mission which is a raid to Benghazi now he spoke fluent Italian although he hadn't spoken it for about three years he was a bit worried about how convincing his accent would be but it turns out fairly convincing at least in the heat of the moment so they set off with the long range desert group and they make contact with various people along the way and some suspicious things happen they contact a load of friendly natives who had been fighting the Italians for generations so any enemy of the Italians there was a friend to them my enemy's enemy is my friend but one of them was some dodgy character in in modern Europeans clothing and he spoke Italian and he seemed a bit different and they were just discussing about whether they possibly they should put him into protective custody if you know what I mean when they noticed that he'd gone which also was rather suspicious they also met to foreigners in in a vehicle that was traveling along and they thought oh if they've seen us the game's up we better we've been to chase them down they had a faster vehicle they chased them down in the desert and said right you two who are you what are you up to and they said that they were members of the SAS uh-huh well they had them there didn't they Helen oh you're not members of the SAS we're the flippin SAS and these chaps were the strange foreign accent said no no no the the South African surveyors you're one of the South F it's your difficult surveyors well how come I don't know you yeah okay right no weird we're different a sitting fair enough we didn't know your that you had the same initials right well you're a long way behind enemy lines you know you're badly lost so to look off yourself be careful and off you go be careful but fur so they check them out and then a while later they thought to themselves you know maybe we should have checked their credentials a bit more thoroughly than that so they were worried then that had they had me been given away to the enemy even before they got to Benghazi they were told on evidence based largely on aerial constants that there were no checkpoints on the road that they were taking into Benghazi but there was a checkpoint there and they came to a halt there was a red light there was a man with a submachine gun pointing it quite definitely at them as though he was really suspicious they were traveling in a vehicle that had been painted to look like a German staff car can complete with German air recognition symbols but they themselves were all wearing British uniforms they were not assassins they were not spies they were still soldiers and if you're wearing your own uniform you can't at least in theory be shot as a spy so there they will are in British uniforms and he they're accosted by the century and he says Oh weird German staff officers and we're in something of a hurry he says in Italian and there's a nasty moment he he has a spanner in his hand hoping that he'd get the guy to come up coast enough to look at the map when the pieces of paper that he got them they just conk him over the back of the head but then he heard clicks of safety catches going off a couple of more tommy guns in the night and then he heard more safety catches going off the tommy guns behind him and you thought ah it's all going to get ever so bullet II very very soon but fortunately they were waved through whoo okay and on their way into Benghazi a car got on their tail and if there's they've sped up it sped up when they slowed down it slowed down and then after while they thought this something's wrong here and so they they took off and entered Benghazi at according to his account 80 miles an hour and right turn the quick corner and wound people they were trying to lose shot by who so those significant surveyors were they actually South African surveyors that that Italian speaking Arabic he given them away who were those guys in the car why did the century let us in so easily and you thought that the game was up there so they thought right it's looking it's looking pretty bad and then various alarms went off and flares are being launched into the sky and they thought okay right clearly this isn't going to work so they rigged the explosives in the car to explode this put the detonator pencil in and set it going it would go off in 30 minutes and they'd gone out there and try to hide in the town and as they were walking around they suddenly came face-to-face with an Italian infantryman and our man Fitzroy he takes the initiative because if you don't say anything you should draw attention to yourself you it would cost it someone and oh it's going to expect you to say something if you don't say anything that's suspicious and then when you do say something so we decide to don't let that happen take the initiative and speak and he started asking him about the what's all this fuss about where all these flares and so forth and that's no it's just the RAF they're always raiding it'll be another area right oh really you don't think it's it's ground troops possibly having infiltrated alarm that that sort of thing oh no don't worry about that with miles behind enemy lines no no that won't be it all right okay then I had a quick meeting because it seemed then that maybe the enemy didn't know about them and that all their suspicions were just we just flights of fancy the trouble is that they just rigged the car with all their stuff in it to explode and of course it was also their getaway car so they'd be stuck but they looked at their watches 25 minutes have passed they had a quick decision to make they hurried back to the car took out the detonator pencil and they're not very sophisticated things it's just acid slowly eating through a wire so it's meant to take 30 minutes to do but if I don't but I know on a hot night maybe they'll do it a little faster they took it off thriller over a wall and ministers who later it went bang so yeah it was fairly accurately in half an hour but even so took him to a risk there and I thought right let's hide this car the hiding of the car was given to a man called Randolph Churchill yes Randolph Churchill the son of yeah that church of the prime minister so something of a responsibility to have this man on the team Randolph Churchill had heard that this mission was happening had been sniffing around and it just a blanket a place on it he wasn't supposed to be there at all but he seemed to be having the time of his life anyway they gave the job of hiding the car to him and one other guy whilst and they went down to carry out their main mission in Benghazi what they were the scouting mission was one of their objectives but also to blow up ships in the harbor they had rehearsed this that Suez they had taken some inflatable boats and put limpet mines on tankers floating in Suez and the the following day they'd run up the port authorities to ask for their limpet mines back it seemed the port authorities weren't terribly amused by that officer there were no explosives in those sleeping mines that was just a rehearsal but they convinced themselves you know this could actually work you can't just paddle out and put limpet mines on on things and if you are accosted by a guard which happened on the rehearsal in that case they just told the guy to mind his own effing business and the guy that all right I was only asking and walked off when they thought our Italian and German guards going to be quite so obliging well they down to the water with an inflatable boat that was the idea you inflate the boat paddle out and they had two of these and they were black Royal Engineers surveying boats they tried to use a rubber dinghies from the RAF but those were inflated by incredibly noisy canister which just would alert everyone and they were bright yellow for being recognizable from the air so they were no good but they've got these these stealthier both that were only big enough for two men but that'll do the job it wouldn't inflate it wouldn't inflate they'd sneaked through the wire got it all the way down to the river that have taken them quite some while and he just wouldn't inflate there was a pun tree it somewhere but it was dark and they couldn't find it never mind I had to so they had to sneak it back through the wire back to the car swap it for the other one bring it all the way through and they got accosted by a century again these fines there's got a bandit in his belly and he felt as he put it at something of a disadvantage but again he takes the vocal initiative and says what about going on here who the hell are you doing a costume you like this I'm trying to do my business and the man said and no parlo Italiano he was some African native you don't speak Italian he said in fluent Italian and berated him in and you a corporal to it you should speak some Italian roll over and he gave him such a flee in the air that his dignity slighted the man just sort of slinked off into the night on my own so he dealt with the century who second boat wouldn't inflate so now I thought okay the prime mission is over we can't blow up any ships but never mind we can look upon this as just a reconnaissance it'll be fine it's just a reconnaissance and they'd find some torpedo boats and they were going to try to blow those up but that didn't happen either so never mind but there's a problem they can't leave any of their stuff because if it's obvious that that the the town had been infiltrated and then they guards will be doubled and they're the any further mission acting on their reconnaissance would be near doomed to failure which meant they had to get rid of this flippin boat they only had about half an hour of darkness left so they thought what we're just gonna have to carry it back so four men pick up the boat and start walking along with it in British uniform but wait a minute there six of us two Italian guards had fallen in behind them as they marched out the harbor now they are going to sneak through the wire and off into the darkness but they can't sneak through the wire with two centuries following them so they realized we're just gonna have to brass it out so they puff themselves up which was you know some some achievement given that they'd been they'd been coming for ten days through the desert and all look quite raggy nor her ten days growth of beard and and with somewhat disheveled but their officers died and they marched up to the main guard post the main entrance to the harbor with these two Italians in tow and again he took the the vocal initiative and demanded of the guard immediately where where is the the captain of the guard here and some sleepy sergeant pulling up his trousers hold interview and they gave him a tremendous support our man Fitzroy in his fluent Italian which was apparently good enough to fool Italians gave a tremendous dressing down about how ridiculous it was look we were able to just walk around this Harbor completely unmolested we could be saboteurs for all you knew and the guy just Titov all the ridiculous thing and and for goodness sake get a haircut and look at the state of your men and he marched out of a two centuries who are with them just all walk there's trouble they they disappeared into the night and the guard that they originally accosted daven such a spectacular present arms that he almost toppled over backwards and they walked out into the night but unfortunately didn't have time now to make it escapes they had to spend a day in Benghazi and at one point that they've just found some an empty bombed out house to to hide in for a bit at one point her as an Italian sailor was coming up the stairs and Randolph Churchill accosted him with a tommy gun and saw him off but then they knew they'd been seen so they had to wait around with their guns and grenades at the ready to give a warm reception for anyone following up but no such men came so it was reasonable to assume that perhaps this was a sailor looking for loot and he saw a bombed out house and thought there might have been something to Nick there and when someone told him to clear off with a tommy gun he just did that and never thought to report it to his superiors anyway so that was Fitzroy's first mission which I think you'll agree it's full of incident and just to talk now about another mission later on I went it goes wrong I won't give you all the details because it would take too long and this video is getting long enough as it is frankly but as they were building up to their mission they had all sorts of alarm bells going off in their heads because people seem to know too much bartenders who were suspected of being spies for the opposition seem to know too much about certain dates and units and there are people in the port who had been reported as saying talking too much about this mission which was especially secret this was a much bigger mission being carried out by quite a few units and quite a few places simultaneous raids and when they met up with one of their agents in the field on the way to the mission again this man reported oh no no no you you can't go there they've evacuated all the civilians and brought in a new unit of Germans there and they've been putting in more thermus bombs it's like a mine it looks a bit like a thermos flask into a vacuum flask and though they were digging in with machine guns and wire and all the rest of it no no you can't go there I thought okay well we've got to believe this guy so they radioed GHQ m-e middle east and got the reply oh don't believe in bizarre tittle-tattle oh no no you stick to the plan you go ahead with the mission and cut a long story short everywhere they went they had a very warm reception waiting for them the Germans and Italians were absolutely apparently ready for them everywhere they went with dug-in machine-gun nests the whole bit they weren't just being unlucky and then by just running into a patrol and then they had to make a very long and grueling journey which he writes a couple of chapters on through the desert and all the time they're being strafed by the Luftwaffe they're suffering losses they lose most of their lorries they lose most of their fuel at one point they lose all of their water they've drunk the last drop for a while they're down to a teaspoonful of food a day they are absolutely desperate and I just want to read I just want to read one one bit in here which I find quite remarkable so it says the SDF they just to come up with the the particular force called the SDF the Sudan Defense Force had received over their Wireless a signal from GHQ M II of which the first paragraphs ordered them to abandon the idea of making a further assault on j.lo and to return to base forthwith this in itself was disappointing I find that amazing isn't it they they they've just come through so much suffered so many losses and physically there must be near wrecks at this point yet they're all still keen for action they were disappointed not to be given the go-ahead to make this extra attack which there's an opportunity which they'd come across the reason for the decision however which was contained in the second paragraph delighted no less than it surprised us strategically we were told our respective operations which to us had seemed from a tactical point of view such dismal failures had already achieved their main object for they had caused the enemy to divert from the front disproportionately large numbers of aircraft and troops which would otherwise have been used to counter certain operations now being undertaken by the Eighth Army these as we as we learned later with the preliminary moves which were to culminate soon after in the grand assault on Rommels lines at el-alamein thus seen as part of a larger canvas the decision of GHQ to stick to the original timetable come what might at last became comprehensible I was reminded of my sergeant instructors admonition in the early days at Inverness he has said we were nothing but in cogs in a gigantic being organization on our eventual return to civilization we were gratified to find ourselves and our operation described in the popular press in such glowing terms as to be scarcely recognizable that's pretty much all he says on it I find it extraordinary that after all that there's not the tiniest hint of bitterness in a modern film someone who'd been sent on an operation like that sacrificed sent into the jaws of near certain death in order just to be a distraction from some greater plan he would have had there's been a character motivation wouldn't it further vengeance against his commanding officer for the rest of the plot but no these men all understood oh yeah we're fighting a war GHQ is going to make decisions like that oh well and just got on with it just picked on what the pigs picked themselves up dust themselves off and started all over again which says a lot about the the quality of the people at that time and the culture which was so steeped in these people that they didn't even question it he doesn't he doesn't discuss it at all that's it and there's no there's no hint of bitterness or recrimination which I find quite remarkable [Music] you

Channel: Lindybeige

Views: 486,013

Rating: 4.9520292 out of 5

Keywords: sas, special, air, service, l detachment, stirling, david, paddy, auchinleck, desert, ww2, wwii, world war two, africa, libya, cairo, suez, benghazi, parachute, paratroops, early, history, british, eigth army, sahara, LRDG

Id: RLtfJ0ekqVE

Length: 41min 4sec (2464 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 31 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Musomino]

This was a great video!