The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - PREVIEW： Epochs #247 ｜ SAS： Origin Story

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome back to Epochs. This week, now I've finally finished my Verdun series,

00:00:26.500 I did a little poll on Twitter, you may or may not have seen it, if you follow me on Twitter,

00:00:31.280 at HistoryBro1, if you're interested in following me on there. I did a little poll, I said,

00:00:37.360 would people rather me continue my series on the English monarchy? We'd got up to, we'd finished

00:00:43.500 Henry V, hadn't we? So we're up to Henry VI, it would be, which I absolutely will continue,

00:00:49.000 there's no doubt about that, it's just what to do next. So do you want to do that? Do you want to do

00:00:53.940 more Special Forces stories, or the Cambridge Five, spiring, which I also will do, promise you

00:01:03.740 I will do at some point. And anyway, on the Twitter poll, it came back, a few hundred votes, so it

00:01:09.800 wasn't just like 16 people, but it was a fair few hundred votes, and it came back, the winner was

00:01:14.720 Special Forces stories. So at least this week, maybe for the next few weeks, I'll do a whole bunch of

00:01:21.120 different Special Forces stories. So the question then is where to begin, or what one to do, what

00:01:26.260 one to pick out. And I decided that let's start at the beginning, sort of, kind of. I thought,

00:01:33.760 let's do the story of the founding of the SAS. Because if I do more of these stories, which I

00:01:40.880 almost certainly will do, I'll do for all over the world. I'll do like some sort of German thing,

00:01:45.100 Navy SEALs thing, all different stuff. But I thought, let's start with another SAS story,

00:01:53.360 and the beginning of the SAS, essentially. So let's just jump straight into that. The SAS

00:01:59.640 was not originally called the SAS 22 Regiment Special Air Service. It began as a couple of

00:02:07.400 different things. But we can definitely say that it began in the deserts of North Africa in World

00:02:14.120 War II, founded by one David Sterling, later to become Colonel David Sterling. At the time, he was

00:02:21.460 just Lieutenant David Sterling. So let's tell the story all about that. Before I even sort of tell

00:02:26.900 you about him, let's say a couple of words just about the North African campaign, the battles and the

00:02:32.760 war in North Africa in World War II. Because this is the theatre where it was born. So just to sort

00:02:39.720 of set the scene, let's say a few words about that. I would say one of the first things to say about

00:02:43.480 the North African campaign, or the war in all of Africa really, but particularly North and East

00:02:48.920 Africa in World War II, is that it's a real ding dong back and forth. It really did go back and forth 0.99

00:02:55.720 quite a lot. At one point early on, it's basically the British versus the Italians. For a very 0.60

00:03:02.600 brief moment, it looks shaky for the English, but then it's completely reversed and the English serve

00:03:07.480 up the Italians, a remarkable defeat, a victory for the English. It looks like the English, the British 0.99

00:03:12.520 rather, sorry, the British Empire, is going to just be all dominant in the African, North African

00:03:17.640 theatre. But then they get completely reversed. Rommel comes along, the Africa Corps, the Germans 0.93

00:03:23.240 turn up to sort of save the Italians and defeat the British. And then there's just a real back and

00:03:28.120 forth over basically about three years. Goes on for well over two years of complete back and forth,

00:03:33.960 fighting over the northern strip of land and coastal regions and ports all along North Africa,

00:03:39.800 all the way from Morocco, Casablanca, all the way, all the way through modern day,

00:03:44.680 you know, Tunisia and Libya and Egypt, all the way to Cairo and the Suez Canal. Back and forth,

00:03:50.680 back and forth. At one point, it looks like Rommel's completely defeated, and then he reverses it,

00:03:55.160 and Cairo's in trouble. And then back and forth, back and forth, and the Americans turn up.

00:03:59.960 And, you know, it spells the beginning of the end for the Germans, but they put up a plucky 1.00

00:04:04.280 resistance and against all the odds, keep winning for a bit. And then it goes on and on and on,

00:04:08.200 and it's a fantastic story. I would, should like to do maybe even a miniseries, but definitely a

00:04:13.960 whole epoch just about the North African campaign. The war in North Africa, it's a fantastic thing.

00:04:19.720 Well, I think, you know, it's one of the most sort of romantic, in the limited sense of the word,

00:04:25.880 romantic parts of World War II. Lots and lots of heroism, daring do, bloody adventure, sort of

00:04:32.200 incredible stories. Like the great, the Battle of El Aname and the taking and retaking of Tobruk,

00:04:36.840 and on and on and on. The Desert Fox, the jewel in the desert between Monty and the Desert Fox Rommel,

00:04:43.560 and even Ike Eisenhower himself is involved and is there, and Omar Bradley and some great,

00:04:49.080 great names. So, but the story I'm telling here is actually one tiny, tiny part of that story,

00:04:55.240 right? I'd like to do, in fact, I will try and do at some point an epoch talking about a grand

00:05:00.440 overview of everything that happened. I can do that. If you're interested in that, let me know. I would

00:05:05.240 like to do that. So, but this story, the story of David Sterling and the SAS, what became the SAS rather,

00:05:12.120 it's really, really just a small, tiny cog, tiny component, basically, in, in that much,

00:05:17.400 much grander story. So, in a nutshell, there's this, this, this chap, very posh, basically,

00:05:22.840 aristocratic chap, David Sterling, and he's been, he's been with, he's in the Scots Guards,

00:05:27.480 he's in North Africa, he's in the Scots Guards, and he's wounded his back. He's doing parachute

00:05:34.280 training, parachute jump, landed too heavily and cracked his back quite badly. He's sort of,

00:05:40.520 sort of basically paralysed from the waist down, temporarily. And he's in hospital,

00:05:45.400 in Cairo, I believe. And so, he's just got lots of time to just lay in bed, just loads and loads

00:05:50.600 of time to just lay there and think. It's actually a relatively similar story to when Lawrence of

00:05:55.400 Arabia, Lawrence of Arabia, T.E. Lawrence, got a fever at one point and just had to lay in a tent

00:06:00.680 for a few days on end, sweating it out. And in that time, he had nothing to do but think,

00:06:05.640 and he dreamt up a great strategy. Something, something similar-ish happened to David Sterling,

00:06:10.760 when he's in hospital with his back. He just dreamt up a whole new, basically, it's not entirely,

00:06:15.560 entirely new, but he dreamt up a basically sort of a new way of, of doing war. You know,

00:06:20.840 because there had been commandos before the North African campaign in World War II. There had been

00:06:27.640 such a thing as sort of a special troops, highly trained, specialised troops, even in the desert.

00:06:33.800 But David Sterling takes it to a whole new level, a whole new paradigm. You know, the idea that a

00:06:39.960 soldier is not just simply a cog in a giant machine and he's there to do as he's told and nothing else

00:06:47.160 ever. Sterling has the idea that each man, or even a small unit of men, sometimes just two men,

00:06:52.840 sometimes a small, often a small unit of three, four, five men, that they're sort of, that they can

00:06:57.880 act as sort of an independent body, an independently thinking small unit, and that they can make,

00:07:04.680 should be able to make decisions of their own on the fly, tactical and even strategic decisions on

00:07:10.280 the fly, and that that could work. And then, of course, there's the element of going deep behind

00:07:14.120 enemy lines. But we'll get into all of that. So David Sterling has this idea, a few different ideas,

00:07:20.040 of how to do things differently in North Africa. And at that particular point, Britain in North

00:07:26.200 Africa was a bit of a shaky ebb. We weren't at our all-time high, like we'd just beaten the Italians,

00:07:33.080 or we'd just annihilated a big chunk of Rommel's Africa Corps, anything like that. We were looking

00:07:39.400 for new ideas, anything to help, really, anything that could help. And so I've got an account here

00:07:44.760 from John Lewis, and I'll let him tell the story. Again, it's only a few pages,

00:07:49.560 and I'll just sort of fairly constantly interrupt myself to add in further details.

00:07:54.360 Okay, so he says this, quote,

00:07:55.960 Most of the North African campaign of 1940 to 1943 was fought out in the narrow coastal strip,

00:08:02.200 which runs the long arc from Tunis to Cairo. South of the coastal strip lies the Sahara,

00:08:08.440 an immense secret place of shifting sands and cauldron-like heat. Few paid much attention to

00:08:14.760 this wilderness, but in its unguarded vastness, a young British second lieutenant saw the possibility

00:08:21.160 of a new type of unit to operate, a unit which would strike swift and hard, and then disappear

00:08:26.840 like a phantom into the desert from which it had emerged." So, end quote. So that's sort of the broadest

00:08:32.760 possible concept. And it is quite, relatively speaking, a narrow strip of land across the

00:08:38.840 shores, all across the top of North Africa. Obviously, north of that is the sea. And then

00:08:44.120 south of that, quite quickly, we'll show maps, turns into just the Sahara. And no one expected

00:08:50.120 to be raided from the south, right? The Sahara is just a pitiless, empty, just completely lifeless

00:08:56.440 desert. And there's no way that the enemy will just come out of the south, out of the Sahara,

00:09:01.480 and attack you from that area, and then disappear back into it. So you don't defend yourself from

00:09:06.440 that position. You're going to be attacked from the east or from the west, but not from the south.

00:09:11.400 So, you know, if we can take advantage of that as a concept. I mean, again, there are parallels with

00:09:17.880 Lawrence of Arabia again, where in the deserts of Arabia, the deserts of the Hejaz and Mesopotamia,

00:09:26.200 and even Syria, modern-day Syria and Lebanon and stuff. The idea that people wouldn't expect to be

00:09:31.560 attacked from the desert side, wherever that is in their location. They're flanked by a desert,

00:09:38.040 and suddenly the enemy comes roaring out of that area. It's not expected. OK, Lewis continues saying

00:09:45.080 this. The Special Air Service was conceived in a hospital bed in Egypt. Injured during some

00:09:51.400 unofficial parachute training, David Sterling, a subaltern with No. 8 Guards Commando, this is

00:09:57.800 the Scots Guards, decided to use his enforced stay in the Alexandria Scottish Military Hospital

00:10:03.400 to develop a scheme for special operations in the desert. I can only imagine he had read Seven

00:10:09.160 Pillars of Wisdom, T.E. Lawrence's memoir. I don't actually know. I have seen David Sterling himself

00:10:15.400 in interview a few times. I've never seen anyone ask him that, and I've never seen him talk about

00:10:20.200 it himself. And I've read around this quite a lot over the years. I've never seen David Sterling

00:10:25.880 actually just explicitly say, I lifted a fair few of my ideas from T.E. Lawrence. But I would have

00:10:32.680 thought he did. Lawrence of Arabia was extremely famous in the interwar years. A household name famous.

00:10:40.280 So, there you go. Alright. Lewis continues. On his release from hospital in July 1941,

00:10:45.800 Sterling determined to bring his plan to the attention of the Commander-in-Chief. As Commander-in-Chiefs are

00:10:51.320 not, by and large, in the habit of granting interviews to junior officers, Sterling decided

00:10:56.920 to ignore the usual channels. Classic thing he did all the time. Sort of his special move is ignoring

00:11:02.680 official channels. Sort of the main thing he did, really. Instead, he hobbled on his crutches to the

00:11:08.120 British Army Middle East HQ and tricked his way past the sentry. Inside, Sterling found his way into

00:11:14.440 the office of Deputy Commander Middle East, one General, Neil Ritchie, who's basically the second

00:11:19.960 most powerful man in the Army, and who has, of course, got the ear of the overall commander,

00:11:25.720 Auchinleck. So, it's the next best thing, Neil Ritchie. Sterling apologized to the somewhat surprised

00:11:31.960 Ritchie for the unconventional call, but instead said that he had something, quote,

00:11:37.080 of great operational importance, quote, to tell him. And as I said earlier, they're looking for

00:11:42.200 anything that might help, any tiny little advantage, any little detail, anything, really. I mean,

00:11:47.320 it's almost desperate. It's to the point where some random Lieutenant has got in to see Neil Ritchie,

00:11:54.120 and he's like, yeah, go on then, go on then, what have you got? It just might work. It's just so

00:11:58.360 crazy it might work. You know, because in the normal course of events, it'd be like, how dare you

00:12:02.360 just enter into my presence? Get lost. I haven't given you a formal interview. I haven't ordered

00:12:08.040 you to come and see me, so get lost. Get lost. Be gone. But no, at this point, Neil Ritchie's like,

00:12:13.800 all right, I'm listening. Whatever it is you've got to say is almost probably worth a shot.

00:12:18.840 Ritchie offered him a seat, and Sterling pulled out the penciled memo on a desert raiding force he had

00:12:25.000 prepared in hospital. Yeah, apparently, uh, David Sterling just had a, a few scraps of paper,

00:12:29.560 basically, that he just, with a pencil, just scribbled out a few notes. Yeah, it's very,

00:12:34.040 very sort of slapdash, isn't it? It's very sort of informal and fly-by-wire. It's all sort of held

00:12:39.800 together with baling wire and Scotch tape. It's all a bit cobbled together. Okay, Lewis goes on here

00:12:46.040 saying, Ritchie spent several minutes reading it. It was then Sterling's turn to be surprised.

00:12:51.400 Ritchie looked up and said briskly, I think this may be the sort of plan we're looking for.

00:12:55.960 I will discuss it with the Commander-in-Chief and let you know our decision in the next day

00:13:00.120 or so. Probably said it in a lot posher accent than that. I think this may be the sort of plan

00:13:04.920 we're looking for. I will discuss it with the Commander-in-Chief and let you know our decision

00:13:08.920 in the next day or so. The Commander-in-Chief was General Auchinleck, new to his command and under

00:13:14.600 pressure from Churchill to mount an offensive. Yeah, as I say, by this point in the war, Rommel and the

00:13:19.960 Africa Corps has arrived and started pushing the British back and he's besieging Tobruk.

00:13:25.960 And we're just on the back foot. In a number of ways, we're on the back foot. And Churchill,

00:13:29.960 not that long before, six months before or a year or so before, thought we'd had it all sewn up in

00:13:35.000 Africa. He's seen the first great victories of the war, i.e. when we smashed the Italians.

00:13:40.920 We've seen that first great victory disappear almost. And, you know, it's not inconceivable that the

00:13:46.920 Germans and Rommel might even take Egypt and Cairo and the Suez Canal and boot the British out of 0.74

00:13:55.240 Africa and Egypt entirely. So Churchill is putting all sorts of pressure on Auchinleck and the armies

00:14:02.280 in North Africa to push forward, to be aggressive, to, you know, do what you can. Don't just sit there

00:14:06.920 and peter out and die, you know, get things going, light a fire under it. So that's what they're

00:14:12.040 looking for. So someone like David Sterling, basically a crazy SOB, so crazy that most commandos 0.93

00:14:18.840 think it's a bit mental. They're looking for something like that, like a game changer, something 0.91

00:14:23.720 out of something out of the ordinary, you know, out of the box thinking, however you want to say it.

00:14:28.360 So Churchill and Auchinleck are looking for something like this. Lewis goes on,

00:14:32.760 Stirling's plan was indeed what Auchinleck was looking for. It required few resources and it was

00:14:38.040 original. The unit Stirling proposed was to operate behind enemy lines in order to attack vulnerable

00:14:43.880 targets like extended supply lines and airfields. What is more, the raids were to be carried out

00:14:49.880 by very small groups of men between five and ten, rather than the standard commando force of hundreds.

00:14:55.480 So that's the other thing. Not only do they need some sort of game changer, but they need to do it

00:14:59.400 on a shoe street, right? That's the other thing. Because to move around and conduct operations in

00:15:05.640 the desert is extremely difficult. Every single man needs loads and loads of water, right? Every

00:15:12.520 single day, obviously, without fail, otherwise you die quickly. And food, and the logistics. Any vehicle

00:15:17.880 needs loads and loads of petrol, of course, and it needs loads and loads of maintenance. In other words,

00:15:23.320 there are more or less difficult theatres of war, right? Just a normal temperate zone is basically

00:15:30.120 the easiest. But anything like really high mountains, deserts, jungles, it's very, very difficult. And

00:15:36.840 the deserts of North Africa were very, very difficult for a number of different reasons. And so,

00:15:41.800 if Stirling's coming to him and saying, look, we don't need to be able to, my plan, my idea,

00:15:47.320 the concept is that we don't need battalions worth of men. We don't need hundreds and hundreds of

00:15:53.320 vehicles and millions of gallons of petrol, right? So let me do stuff with little gangs,

00:15:59.880 little teams of five or ten men, sometimes just two men, with one Jeep, right? Give me four guys

00:16:05.720 and one Jeep. Let me see what I can do. And they're like, we like that. You know, the senior brass, like,

00:16:10.520 we could stretch to four guys and a Jeep. We could cover that, actually. Yeah, okay. Give it a whirl.

00:16:16.600 That's sort of how it, you know, sort of how it works out. Lewis continues, quote,

00:16:20.440 Meanwhile, Richie looked into Stirling's background. He was pleased with what he found. David Stirling,

00:16:26.360 born in 1915, was the youngest son of the aristocratic Brigadier Archibald Stirling of Keir.

00:16:32.600 After three years at Cambridge, David Stirling had joined the Scots Guards for transferring to Number

00:16:38.200 8 Commando as part of the Layforce Brigade Number 8 and been dispatched to North Africa,

00:16:44.440 where its seaborne raids had all proved to be washouts. The unit, along with the rest of Layforce,

00:16:50.600 had been marked for disbandment. Stirling, however, had remained so keen on the Commando idea that he

00:16:56.600 had jumped, literally, at the chance of doing some parachuting with shoots that another officer in

00:17:02.440 Number 8, Jock Lewis had scrounged. Incidentally, Jock Lewis goes on to be in the SAS, right? Once

00:17:08.840 David Stirling is given the green light to start his, well, it's not called the SAS to begin with,

00:17:12.680 it's called L Detachment. Once he does get the green light to sort of form L Detachment,

00:17:17.160 it's Jock Lewis is one of the first he goes to and says, do you want to be in this? They've let me,

00:17:21.080 they've let me have my own detachment. You're in, right? And Jock Lewis was like, yeah, sure,

00:17:24.440 definitely. In fact, there's the Lewis bomb. You may well have heard of the Lewis bomb.

00:17:28.680 Well, that's named after this Jock Lewis. He was like a demolitions expert. He was an explosives 0.74

00:17:33.400 expert. Okay. The jumping trials had taken place near Mercer Matra. The aircraft used a lumbering

00:17:40.040 Valentia biplane, was not equipped for parachuting, and the men had secured the static lines which

00:17:45.800 opened the parachutes to seat legs. Stirling's parachute had caught on the door and snagged.

00:17:50.920 He had descended far too rapidly and damaged his back badly on landing, which is how he had come

00:17:56.440 to be in the Alexandria hospital. Three days after his meeting with Ritchie, Stirling was back in

00:18:01.880 Middle East HQ, this time with a pass, you know, formally allowed to be there. Auchinleck saw him

00:18:07.240 in person. Again, remarkable. Auchinleck's the overall commander, right? He reports directly to the,

00:18:12.600 to the war office and Churchill, right? He'd go on to be ennobled and stuff. The fact that Stirling,

00:18:18.040 just a lieutenant, second lieutenant, a failed commando, kind of a nobody, basically a nobody,

00:18:24.360 really, at this stage. But he even gets to, to see and speak to Auchinleck is quite something.

00:18:29.480 That's the thing they say about Stirling, they always said about David Stirling,

00:18:32.840 that he was quite likeable. He was charismatic. He was interesting. He had, he had something about

00:18:39.240 him, you know, that you shouldn't say quite. He had, he had a light about him. And, you know,

00:18:43.400 sometimes that can go a very, very long way. Just a little bit of that can sometimes take you very,

00:18:47.640 very far in life. And that he had the gift of the gab. And, you know, you could talk your way into and out

00:18:52.840 of things. Yeah. There you go. Stirling was given permission to recruit a force of six other

00:18:58.280 officers and 60 men. Again, just blagged his way into it. Just was good enough and polite enough to

00:19:04.040 ask and charismatic enough to get it. That's that special something. David Stirling had it. The unit

00:19:09.960 was to be called, quote, L Detachment SAS Brigade. The SAS stood for Special Air Service, which did not

00:19:16.200 exist. The name was dreamt up by Brigadier Dudley Clarke, a staff intelligence officer, as a means of

00:19:22.520 convincing the enemy that the British possessed a large airborne force in North Africa, which they

00:19:27.960 didn't. Right. It was just an intelligence trick. To mark his new appointment, Stirling was promoted to

00:19:34.200 captain. Again, gives you the measure of it. You get, you get a few minutes with, with the top brass and

00:19:40.920 they give you a whole new detachment, 60 men, you know, a budget, not a very big budget, but a budget and a

00:19:47.240 promotion. All because, well, a couple of plate, a couple of promotions. He was a second lieutenant

00:19:51.800 and now he's captain. Just because you're quite likable and charismatic and got the gift of the

00:19:56.760 gab. I mean, well, that's world time for you. Something like that just certainly wouldn't have

00:20:00.120 happened in peacetime, would it? But when needs must, Lewis continues, the recruiting took less than a week

00:20:05.560 because Stirling already had in mind the men and the type of men he wanted and he knew them. Right.

00:20:11.160 He's already been in commando brigade. He knows the, he knows these men often. Right. Personal

00:20:17.080 acquaintances, mostly. Or people he'd already worked with. There were two particular officers

00:20:21.480 Stirling wanted. The first was Jock Lewis, who was in Tobruk, where he had been carrying out small

00:20:26.920 raids against enemy outposts. Now, old Jock's already basically doing special forces stuff, SAS style

00:20:33.720 stuff. He's just doing it on his own. That's the sort of man you would want though, right? Like,

00:20:37.000 self-selected, a self-selected type. We don't have to train you and tell you what to do. You're already

00:20:43.640 just doing it naturally. It's already what your natural inclination is. It's to go and take it to

00:20:48.600 the enemy behind anyone. Just do enemy, do raids on, on the enemy without even really being ordered to.

00:20:56.200 We hope you enjoyed that video and if you did, please head over to lotusseaters.com

00:21:00.360 for the full unabridged video.

00:21:07.000 We hope you enjoyed that video and we'll see you next time.

00:21:13.640 Bye.

00:21:15.640 Bye.

00:21:17.640 Bye.

00:21:19.640 Bye.

00:21:21.640 Bye.

00:21:25.640 Bye.

00:21:27.640 Bye.

00:21:29.640 Bye.

00:21:31.640 Bye.

00:21:33.640 Bye.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - January 25, 2026

PREVIEW： Epochs #247 ｜ SAS： Origin Story

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