The Phantom Major: The Story of David Stirling and the SAS Regiment

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David was also in Egypt in the summer of 1941. For the last year Bill had looked out for his wee brother. He had brought him to Lochailort to work as his assistant and then arranged for him to join a commando unit in November 1940. David had sailed to North Africa but by June 1941 he was bored and in search of adventure. In August 1974, before Stirling was ready to go public with GB75, the pacifist magazine Peace News obtained and published his plans. [25] His biographer Alan Hoe disputed the newspaper's disparaging portrayal of Stirling as a right-wing ' Colonel Blimp'. [26] Undermining trades unionism [ edit ]

There were numerous examples in the 1940s and the years immediately after when Bill and David were referred to as the co-founders of the SAS.

Mostly we didn’t remember killing people because, in our case at any rate in the SAS, we were mostly shooting in the dark at things, or putting bombs on targets and hoping not to disturb the people who were going to be the recipients of them. The Stirlings were friends of the royal family. He was a very powerful figure and no one was wishing through his lifetime to challenge his version of events.” ‘Mystique’ of the SAS There was of course Bill Stirling. But because he recognised David’s flaws and how lost he was after the war, he was quite happy to let David take the plaudits. The Regiment refers to three regiments known as the 21st SAS Regiment, 22nd SAS Regiment, and 23rd SAS Regiment. The 22nd SAS Regiment is a part of the Regular Army, while the 22nd and 23 regiments are a part of the reserve Territorial Army.

The hair-raising adventures of David Stirling, the madman behind the SAS". The Daily Telegraph. 31 October 2022 . Retrieved 14 November 2022. In the space of 15 months, the Luftwaffe and the Italian Regia Aeronautica suffered the loss of more than 250 aircraft and dozens of supply dumps. in 1984 the new base of the SAS was renamed Stirling Lines (from Bradbury Lines) in his honour. [30] It was Johnny who suggested he write a history of the wartime SAS from the perspective of the men rather than the officers. Gavin claims that what allowed Stirling to “pull off this deceit” was the death of Paddy Mayne in a car crash in 1955.In the biography, Mortimer analyses Stirling’s complex character: the childhood speech impediment, the pressure from his overbearing mother, his fraught relationship with his brother, Bill, and the “jealousy and inferiority” he felt in the presence of his SAS second-in-command, Paddy Mayne.

But while Stirling spent the rest of the war in Colditz, Mike managed to escape with another SAS soldier and an Arabic-speaking Frenchman. They make for very good stories, no denying, and they were very exciting at the time in some cases – exciting and frightening at the same time.Mike Sadler had been captured along with Stirling in 1943 while trying to cross the Tunisian desert to meet the British-American 1st Army.