A cowboy, a one-eyed boxer and a parachuting priest…. meet the original SAS who struck terror into Nazi troops

THEY were some of the bravest, toughest soldiers of World War Two, trained killers who struck terror into Nazi troops in North Africa.

But they were also wildly unconventional pirates in a private army — oddballs who didn’t fit into the traditional ranks.

They included a former cowboy, a one-eyed boxer, a parachuting priest and a rugby international.

Some were natural warriors, nerveless and calm. Some were surprisingly gentle. Many were eccentric. And a few were close to being psychotic.

These were the real SAS, the men who founded Britain’s most famous fighting force, in North Africa in 1941, and went on to fight behind the lines in Italy, Nazi-occupied France and Germany.

For 75 years the secret wartime archives of the SAS have been sealed. Now the most secretive unit in the British Army has allowed its story to be told in full for the first time.

I was given unprecedented access to the archive and, with the help of the few remaining wartime members, I was able to piece together the fascinating history of these enigmatic soldiers for a new book.

The unit was the brainchild of David Stirling, a Scottish aristocrat, former mountaineer and cowboy, who came up with the idea for a crack team of undercover fighters while recovering from a parachuting accident.

Stirling’s plan was to parachute a team of saboteurs into the Libyan desert, creep up on the poorly defended German and Italian airfields at night, then blow up as many planes as possible before retreating back into the desert.

He set about recruiting men from the Commandos. They included:

Paddy Mayne, a vast Irish rugby player with an explosive temper, a serious alcohol problem and a capacity for raw violence.

He was also probably gay. Mayne destroyed more planes than any fighter pilot on either side of the war.

Jock Lewes, an Oxford-educated lieutenant with matinee idol looks who invented a new type of bomb that could be stuck on parked planes.

Reg Seekings, a foul-mouthed, one-eyed boxer from Cambridge with a gift for killing without hesitation or remorse.

Fraser McLuskey, aka the “parachute padre”, a chaplain who took part in many of the SAS’s most daring missions but never carried a gun.

With this motley line-up assembled, the first SAS operation was a disaster. Of the 56 who parachuted into the desert in the midst of a ferocious storm in November 1941, only 26 came back.

Some died on landing, while others, unable to unclip their parachutes in the gale, were scraped to death along the jagged desert floor.

Several were too badly injured to walk and were left to die of thirst.

But the regiment survived against all the odds and soon established hit-and-run guerilla tactics that left the Axis forces in a state of permanent, panicked befuddlement.

Stirling’s force fought by its own rules. Shortly before Christmas 1941, Mayne and his team crept on to Tamit airfield, on the Libyan coast, and planted timebombs on 24 planes.

As they were withdrawing, Mayne spotted a hut with a light coming from under the door and heard a party going on inside.

He and two troopers armed with tommy guns kicked open the door and opened fire. At least 30 German and Italian pilots were killed.

Even Stirling was shocked, reprimanding Mayne for what he called an “over-callous execution in cold blood”.

Life expectancy was short for the early SAS.

If they managed to survive a raid, they still faced being spotted in the desert by German planes and attacked from the air.

Lewes and his men were caught in the open by a German Stuka and dive-bombed.

A 20mm shell smashed through his thigh and severed the femoral artery. He bled to death in minutes and was buried in the sand.

His remains have never been found.

Cpl Jack Sillito was blowing up part of Libya’s Tobruk railway when his unit was attacked by a German patrol.

Separated from the rest of the men, he decided to walk back 180 miles to the desert camp.

He had a revolver, compass and a small flask of water, which ran out on the second day. He began to store and drink his own urine.

On the fourth day his feet cracked open and his tongue swelled. Then he began to hallucinate.

A week after setting off, an SAS jeep patrol spotted a “skeleton, with sore and bleeding feet”, just a few miles from the camp.

Sillito’s survival was close to miraculous. Within a fortnight, Stirling observed, he had “completely recovered”.

In another astonishing story, Sgt Bob Lilley was escaping on foot after a failed raid when he ran into a lone Italian soldier cycling across the desert.

The 20-year-old foreigner declared Lilley his prisoner. Lilley did not agree and the two men began fighting hand-to-hand, with the Brit eventually strangling his “captor”.

In Special Forces jargon, a “boblilley” is still used to describe a commando hit-and-run operation.

Some of the most dangerous enemies came from within. At the end of 1942, the SAS was losing men at a terrible rate as their convoys and patrols were repeatedly intercepted.

The reason, it can now be revealed, was a British spy, an undercover fascist named Teddy Schurch, who infiltrated groups of SAS prisoners by posing as an inmate himself and extracting vital information that led to scores of deaths.

Schurch was hanged after the war, the only British soldier to be executed for treason.

The vicious fighting in the harsh desert, then in Italy and France, took a huge mental toll.

Seekings was forced to kill a young boy, horrifically injured by a German shell. “You couldn’t just leave him,” he said.

The SAS was constantly under threat from senior officers, many of whom regarded Stirling’s raiders as an undisciplined mob, carrying out a form of warfare that should have been left to spies and saboteurs.

Many wanted the unit disbanded but Winston Churchill stepped in to save the regiment after his son, Randolph, took part in a daring raid and reported back to his father about the shadowy team.

Gen Bernard Montgomery, one of Britain’s most senior officers, also came to appreciate Stirling’s unit.

He said: “The boy Stirling is mad, quite, quite mad. However, in war there is often a place for mad people.”

Stirling was eventually captured by German forces and sent to Colditz, but the SAS survived, spearheading the invasion of Sicily, fighting behind the lines in Italy and parachuting into France immediately after D-Day.

By now Hitler had issued his “commando order” demanding that any men captured operating behind the lines must be executed without a trial.

Scores of SAS soldiers were murdered but Hitler did not wipe them out.

SAS soldiers were the first to enter the notorious Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where more than 70,000 prisoners had perished.

When the troops arrived in April 1945, the bodies of 13,000 lay scattered around the site, with thousands more dying. Then one listless SS guard began beating up a prisoner.

Seekings, the one-eyed assassin, asked for permission to “teach the guard a lesson”. A former regimental boxing champion, Seekings felled him with one blow.

When the man staggered back to his feet, Seekings knocked him down again. This time he did not get up.

Given how many SAS had been killed at the hands of the SS, some of the men wanted to exact bloody revenge.

Instead, they were ordered to round up the guards, force them to bury the dead and then arrest them. It was a notable act of civilisation in the midst of horror.

At the end of the war, the SAS was disbanded but a small team survived — unofficially — and hunted the SS men who had killed their comrades.

They spent three years gathering evidence and finding the graves of slain SAS men. The leader of the covert unit, Bill Barkworth, even used an Ouija board to try to track the killers.

The SAS was revived in 1947, becoming the most celebrated and mysterious unit in the Army — a blueprint for special forces around the world.

The form of behind-the-lines warfare they pioneered is more important than ever today — in Iraq, Syria and back in Libya, where the SAS story began.

SAS: Rogue Heroes – The Authorised Wartime History, by Ben Macintyre (Viking, £25) is out now.