Art of deception
Michael Vestey
It is reassuring to know that the SAS and SBS are operating somewhere in Afghanistan. At the time of writing they have yet to locate Osama bin Laden's cave, though if anyone is going to find him one hopes it's them, The SAS was founded 60 years ago by David Stirling but as a Radio Four documentary last week, Of One Company: the Beginning of the SAS (Thursday), made clear others were involved at the start.
In this independent production Julian Putkowski traced the SAS's origins back to Colonel Dudley Clarke, a protege of General WaveII in the desert war against the Germans and Italians. Clarke worked in great secrecy at the General Headquarters in Cairo and his job was to fool the enemy. In his Notes on Strategic Deception he wrote what he called The Scenario'. 'The Scenario is a detailed fictional account of the reading we should like the enemy to put on our existing military situation. It must be designed to provide a false, though reasonable, explanation of all movements.'
Clarke had seen a diary taken from a captured Italian officer. In it were Italian fears about British parachutists, so it was decided to unnerve them by using dummy parachutists. Two soldiers were instructed to sit prominently in a Cairo café wearing parachute badges. It wasn't made clear if this worked or not but Clarke had established airborne forces in Britain and might well have been doing the same in Cairo. He called his fictional regiment the Special Air Service.
Some time later it evolved into the real SAS under the impetus of its co-founders, David Stirling of the Scots Guards and a fellow commando, Jock Lewis. both in Cairo. Lewis had an idea for raiders to go in by parachute and come out on foot. During the trial drops Stirling injured himself and while in hospital wrote a memo setting out how land and seaborne parachutists should conduct operations. Clarke liked the idea; having a real detachment would make the original deception all the more believable. The natural place to train would be a former commando school by the Suez Canal.
Putkowski said the Stirling memo was thought to have been lost, though several historians had tried to reconstruct it. However, it was found by David List who has researched the SAS. Checking the files at the Public Record Office he finally came across it. Stirling, having persuaded the army to accept his recommendations, began training. But the first operation to destroy Rommel's fighter aircraft at five bases way behind enemy lines was a disaster. After a storm forced them to abandon the attempt one of their aircraft was shot down. Of the 55 men who went only 21 returned; 28 were captured and six were killed.
But they tried again, this time reinforced by Free French parachutists, and were more successful. Lewis was killed. Stirling was eventually captured and sent to Colditz. Putkowski said of the SAS: 'The secrecy comes out of its birth as a deception, the professionalism from Jock Lewis, but someone had to make it work: David Stirling. The British army had returned to the art of war.' Stirling had been described in a letter from Lewis, read out by his nephew John: 'I could have told that he is 6ft bin, dark-haired and pale-faced with a thin black moustache, but I could not have told that his brown eyes, so dark that the pupils are invisible and which look like one who has just taken off his spectacles, and then as an invalid keeping to his cabin, wearing dark glasses, unable to eat or drink more solidly than water, appearing very occasionally among our brown bodies.'
Sir Carol Mather, one of the early SAS men and later a Tory MP, said of Stirling, He was certainly a very idle officer, a lazy fellow. A bit of a gambler, a bit of a drinker . . a very amusing companion but we never saw him really in the role of a great leader, which he turned out to be. The reason for his leadership powers was the utter daringness of his plans . . . There was a large element of the practical joke in the whole thing; he liked to play practical jokes on the Germans and Italians.' One wonders today what little jokes the SAS might be planning for Osama and his mad mullahs: blow-ups of 70 virgins to be dropped on his caves, perhaps? Stirling might have liked that.
I suppose it's a tribute to Melvyn Bragg that I still think of him as the presenter of Radio Four's Start the Week, as I mistakenly referred to him last week. It was, of course, Jeremy Paxman who took over from him when he decamped to In Our Time on Thursday mornings. Or it might have been the wretched flu that has laid me low playing tricks with my memory,
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