Fantasy in Sand

David Stirling: The Phoney Major: The Life, Times and Truth about the Founder of the SAS by Gavin Mortimer

This book is a remarkable one. I had never read so thorough and complete a demolition of a widely-accepted legend — from an author whose sympathies ought to have been in the subject’s favour.

David Stirling may have been a dissolute aristocrat before the war — awkward company, lazy, tormented — but by war’s end he was a lieutenant colonel, a DSO, and subject of an admiring tabloid nickname: the ‘Phantom Major’: a man who slit German throats in the desert by night, casually operated hundreds of miles behind Rommel’s lines, blew up untold numbers of aircraft, and had created the Special Air Service — a force as feared as it was mysterious. Friend to Churchill, innovator par excellence, Stirling was only denied higher reward because the record of his deeds could not be verified — or believed. A hero — fearless, eccentric, modest: the eventual biographers ate it up.

And as Gavin Mortimer notes in his epilogue, he had previous written a book on the wartime SAS, Stirling’s Men, in which he had played into Stirling’s fluff and into his pomp. He had interviewed hundreds of SAS men, and they were, generally, either polite about Stirling or enraptured. Mortimer had every reason to go ahead when it came to write this biography, and to reaffirm the legend.

But something different happened instead.

As Mortimer began to investigate Stirling, he realised that the man made claims which could not be backed up, and had no basis in fact.

Stirling claimed that he had invented the SAS idea, for instance. No he did not; instead, the originator was his brother, Bill. Stirling’s admirers and biographers said that he had created the idea of mounting raids out of the desert using machine-guns mounted to jeeps. No he did not; the Long Range Desert Group (which was later deputised to transport the SAS to their targets in North Africa) did so before the SAS. And before the SAS had decided to ditch Stirling’s first idea: parachuting. Parachuting which had resulted in numerous injuries due to faulty training methods; Stirling’s own incapacitation; and a failed first airborne operation which was a total loss — costing lives, materiel, and time that L Detachment, as it was then known, did not have.

Under Mortimer’s gaze, Stirling’s biography begins to disintegrate. The two successive evenings with Churchill, in which Stirling pleaded for the survival of his unit and at the same time gave Churchill the inspiration to call Italy ‘Europe’s soft underbelly’? They didn’t happen. The story of Stirling, still hobbling for a parachuting accident, shinning over a fence to see either Claude Auchinleck or Neil Ritchie? A fabrication, a complete fantasy.

That meeting with Orde Wingate of Chindits fame? Impossible, as Wingate had recently attempted suicide and was in no condition to talk tactics with Scottish aristocrats.

His very command of the SAS — slitting throats and bombing aircraft — an exaggeration. Sub-commanders of Stirling’s — Paddy Mayne most notably — outshone Stirling in activity and achieved more success.

And Stirling’s leadership of the SAS? Based on trying to turn a special forces unit into an aristocratic social club — bringing Randolph Churchill, unfit and alcoholic, on dangerous missions for no reason.

And somewhat undermined by the amount of time Stirling spent in Italian and German captivity in the last half of the war, accidentally talking to planted spy-prisoners about key operational details which then found their way to German high command. After which his regiment, now commanded by others, wanted almost nothing to do with him.

You might consider these things lapses in memory, but Mortimer does not. He notes that in later life, Stirling’s desire to re-emphasise his life and role went on. The lies became more elaborate.

Stirling claimed to have been an art student in Paris for fifteen months during dates which do not fit. He claims to have had a serious interest, pre-war, in conquering Everest. A fabrication; his interest in mountaineering was minor, and the summits he claims to have reached in preparation were inaccessible to amateurs — especially people provably in other places on the dates Stirling mentioned, or alluded to.

This presents something of a challenge to the biographer, which Mortimer mostly surmounts. He focuses on Stirling, the man in full, and spends effort and pages documenting his deceits and libel threats. This is never dull. But the book most comes alive when on the topic of its two substitute-subjects: Paddy Mayne, the supreme special forces man, and Bill Stirling, David’s brother — in Mortimer’s view the true, unheralded founder of the SAS.

Mayne has a place in accepted wisdom, but often as a sub-literate brute: a killer rather than a special forces man, a hot-blooded Irishman whose past — as an accomplished rugby international — gave some basis for calling him a battlefield thug. But Mortimer loves Mayne and it seems, from his interviews with Mayne’s men, that they loved him too. Astute tactically and preternaturally calm in battle, Mortimer says, Mayne was the ideal commander of special forces. Towering in height and as fit as anyone (David Stirling, by contrast, did not attend to his physical conditioning and spent much of his time in Cairo clubs, gossiping loudly about secret information), Mayne’s men told Mortimer that their leader would never think of asking someone to do something he thought could not work — and always fought first, alongside them.

David Stirling, by contrast, led his forces into ambushes, alerted sentries, and flipped a car while driving recklessly, killing one man and wounding everyone else in the vehicle.

Mortimer seeks to rescue Mayne’s reputation from decades of behind-the-hands rumour-mongering. Mayne’s alleged homosexuality, for example: apparently this is groundless, and can in fact be traced back to Stirling’s own gay self-disgust.

But even greater is the good Mortimer does for Bill Stirling. Bill is still so unknown that he does not have a page on Wikipedia. A retiring landowner, he does not seem the type to have pioneered British special forces. And yet he did. It was Bill Stirling who established the special operations and commando training school at Lochailort, and who joined one of the early special forces missions: Operation Knife, an aborted effort to insert British irregulars into Norway in 1940. And it was Bill who lived with David in Cairo and gave him much of the impetus to formulate plans for a special unit, plans that were only headed with David’s name.

After his brother David was captured in 1943, Bill took over the running of the SAS. He did not go on operations, but he was a strategic talent, a man respected by those under him — an unheralded pioneer. All many know of Bill is that he was David’s elder brother, and perhaps some tales of his problem gambling. There is one story of a fabulously exorbitant IOU written by Bill long after the war after a night at the table, but it was quickly made good. As Mortimer says, Bill was a rich man in business the world over. He always paid his debts.

Mortimer feels no doubt, after earlier more hagiographic efforts, that he has debts to history and to the truth; to the memory of Bill Stirling and Paddy Mayne, long overshadowed — Mayne by his early death, Bill by his retiring nature — which allowed David Stirling to recruit biographers and memoirists to burnish his image: one of the wartime terror of Rommel rather than the serial liar and failed escape artist in Italian captivity.

This book, in quite some style, pays them up.