Paddy Mayne and David Stirling
The recent TV series could perhaps have shown a more complex man in Paddy Mayne. By Gavin Mortimer.
David Stirling resented Blair Mayne. ‘Paddy’, as the Irishman was known, was the man Stirling wanted to be; the gifted sportsman and superb guerrilla soldier, festooned in medals, respected by his men and admired by his peers.
Stirling struggled to earn either the respect or the admiration of the soldiers in the Special Air Service. He lived in the shadow of Mayne, whose exploits in the Libyan Desert in the winter and spring of 1941/2 were in stark contrast to his own incompetent attempts to destroy Axis aircraft. In two raids on Tamet airfield in December 1941, Mayne and the five men with him accounted for over fifty aircraft. Stirling achieved nothing. Two raids on the airfield at Sirte were embarrassing failures. On the first raid Stirling fell into a slit trench containing an Italian sentry and on the second he led his men into a mine field.
Mayne was becoming a legend and Stirling a liability.
Contrary to popular myth David Stirling is not the sole founder of the SAS. It was his eldest brother, Bill, who had the intellectual drive and the military understanding to grasp in the late summer of 1941 that the Axis airfields were vulnerable to a small, well-trained force of guerrillas. Bill had been one of the early recruits to the Special Operations Executive [S.O.E] in early 1940 and he realised in a short time that the British military was woefully under-prepared and ill-informed of the requirements for irregular warfare.
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