Viewers lapped up the show’s tales of real-life WWII derring-do, in which Ampleforth College-educated aristocrat Archibald David Stirling (1915-90) leads his handpicked squad of commandos to take on the Axis in north Africa. With such success, it would appear the regular (majority non-Eton, I presume) British army were sitting on their backsides most of the time while the SAS did all the hard work. 

Well, that’s the impression if one believes the hokum served up by the show, the opening credits of which state “based on a true story, the events depicted which seem most unbelievable … are mostly true.”  

Which way to the front?

Steven Knight, the writer of the show, is an unlikely toady to the toffs who dominate the proceedings since he created Peaky Blinders, Dirty Pretty Things and This Town, where the working class are generally the protagonists.

Perhaps it’s the sheer volume of work he takes on (at least four TV series and one movie since 2023, with five others in varying stages of development) which meant that he took the source material of Ben Macintyre’s 2016 book (also called SAS: Rogue Heroes) at face value without doing his own research.

This kind of instinctive cringing to the nobs is also a core part of director Guy Ritchie’s schtick, most recently witnessed in this year’s The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, (based 2014’s Churchill's Secret Warriors: The Explosive True Story of the Special Forces Desperadoes of WWII by writer Damien Lewis). In the movie, Henry Cavill’s Gus March-Phillipps is shown to be a veritable ubermensch, as he batters his way through hordes of Nazis with gay abandon, gleefully urging his team on to join the butchery.

In real life, March-Phillips was indeed successful in January 1942’s SOE Operation Postmaster (highly fictionalised in the picture), but was killed seven months later in the botched Operation Aquatint probing raid on Germany’s defences in Normandy.

The film makes no reference in the final credit scroll that Phillips perished the same year, instead implying he lived on to merrily continue bashing the Germans.

Undoubtedly the SAS has provided valuable service to Britain since its creation in 1941 by Stirling, but the man himself appears to be more of an English version of Otto Skorzeny (the Mussolini-freeing SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer) than Mallory (Gregory Peck) from The Guns of Navarone (1961).

In the same year as the first season of SAS: Rogue Heroes was broadcast, Gavin Mortimer published the biography David Stirling: The Phoney Major. In the book, Mortimer accused Stirling of possessing “colossal vanity,” being a stuck-up, “incompetent egomaniac,” and his conduct characterising “the arrogance of the entitled.” 

For you the war is over

He was also suspected of leaking classified information, most notably after being captured by the Italians in 1943 when boasting to fellow “captive,” Captain John Richards, aka Anglo-Swiss stool pigeon, Theodore Schurch. Stirling was later confined to Colditz until the end of the war.

He also pinched much of the credit for the success of the SAS from his comrade, Lieutenant Paddy Mayne (Jack O’Connell in the series), who wasn’t so much the untamed roistering Irish drunk depicted in the BBC show, but an educated, expert strategist with a talent for calculatedly applied violence — and who successfully replaced Stirling after he was captured. An Italian patrol nabbed Stirling who was reputedly kipping, having failed to post any sentries.

Mayne was also one of quite a few of Stirling’s acquaintances who soon saw through his self-serving bullshit.

Reinforcing this impression is the career Stirling pursued after the war, echoing the Skorzeny comparisons. He set up the mercenary group Watchguard International, dealt arms, recruited ex-SAS soldiers to fight in Saudi-financed operations in Yemen, set up the strike-breaking private army GB75 in Britain after Edward Heath’s fall and after organised Truemid (The Movement for True Industrial Democracy), a neofascist group dedicated to infiltrating trade unions and opposing left-wing “militants.” 

None to any success, although many in the reactionary “Mayfair Set” continued to admire Stirling, surely an inspiration for would-be paramilitary jefe Major Harry Kitchener Wellington Truscott (Geoffrey Palmer) in C4’s Fairly Secret Army (1984-86).