What the SAS Did on Its First Desert Raid D

In November 1941, a brand new British unit went into action for the first time. It had no history, no reputation, and almost no support from the regular army officers who were supposed to be commanding it. Within a single night, it lost two-thirds of the men who took part. That unit was the Special Air Service, and its very first mission very nearly killed it before it had the chance to become one of the most famous special forces units in the world.

This is not the story most people expect when they hear about the SAS’s beginnings in the North African desert. There is no legend here, no flawless raid, no daring escape against impossible odds, not at first. The real story is messier and in some ways more remarkable because it is a story about a unit that failed catastrophically on its opening night and chose to try again anyway.

To understand what the SAS actually did on its first desert raid, you have to understand two nights five weeks apart. The first ended in disaster. The second is the reason the SAS still exists today. By the summer of 1941, a young Scots Guards officer named David Stirling had convinced himself that the British army in North Africa was fighting the war in the desert the wrong way.

Rommel’s Africa Corps depended heavily on forward airfields dotted along the Libyan coast to keep its aircraft supplied, refueled, and ready to strike at British forces further east. Those airfields were sprawling, lightly guarded on their perimeters, and packed wingtip to wingtip with parked aircraft.

Stirling’s idea was that a very small number of men, a handful per target, not a battalion, could be parachuted into the desert at night, marched to one of these airfields on foot, plant explosive charges on as many aircraft as they could reach and disappear back into the desert before dawn. It was on paper an absurdly simple idea.

It was also, in the eyes of most senior officers Sterling approached, a waste of good soldiers. Special unconventional units were viewed with deep suspicion by much of the conventional British military hierarchy in 1941, and Sterling, recovering from a parachute training injury that had temporarily paralyzed his legs, had no rank, no combat record in this theater, and no natural authority to draw on.

According to the story that has since become part of SAS legend, Sterling got past a sentry at British Middle East Headquarters in Cairo on crutches, made his way into the office of the Deputy Commander-in-Chief General Neil Ritchie, and pitched his idea directly. Whether every detail of that account is precisely accurate or has been polished by decades of retelling, the outcome is not in dispute.

Sterling received permission to raise a unit of roughly 60 men, initially named L Detachment Special Air Service, a deliberately misleading name chosen in part to suggest to German intelligence that Britain already had a far larger airborne force operating in the region than it actually did. Recruitment was fast and informal, drawing heavily on men from Layforce, a commando formation then in the process of being disbanded after heavy losses elsewhere in the Mediterranean campaign.

Training took place at a camp near Kabrit on the shores of the Great Bitter Lake in Egypt, and it was brutal even by the standards of British special forces. Men practiced live parachute jumps from aircraft with makeshift equipment, forced marches across open desert carrying full kit, and night navigation without the benefit of any of the experience that later SAS generations would draw on because there was no earlier generation to learn from.

Everything was being invented for the first time, often only days before it needed to be used in combat. By November 1941, the newly formed unit believed it was ready. It was about to discover that belief and readiness were not the same thing. The target was Operation Crusader, a major British offensive intended to relieve the besieged garrison at Tobruk and push Axis forces out of Eastern Libya.

Stirling’s unit was given a supporting role, parachuting behind enemy lines on the night before the offensive began, attack a cluster of Axis airfields around Gazala and Timimi, destroy as many parked aircraft as possible, and deprive Rommel’s forces of air support at the critical opening moment of the battle. 55 men, organized into small sticks under Stirling and his second-in-command, Blair Paddy Mayne, prepared to jump on the night of 16 November 1941.

Even before the aircraft took off, the operation had already been fighting an uphill battle. The RAF had initially been reluctant to commit transport aircraft to the mission at all, and Stirling had needed to appeal above their heads to secure them. Then the weather turned. A storm rolled in off the Mediterranean that night, by some accounts one of the worst the region had experienced in three decades, bringing high winds, driving rain, and near zero visibility.

Stirling was offered the chance to abort the mission before it began. He chose to go ahead. It was, in hindsight, the wrong call, and Stirling himself would later more or less admit as much. The parachute drop turned into chaos almost immediately. Men were scattered miles from their intended landing zones by gale force winds.

Some were dragged brutally across the desert floor by parachutes they could not release quickly enough in the wind, suffering serious injuries before they had even reached the ground. At least one stick of paratroopers is believed to have been blown out over the sea and lost entirely. Equipment containers, including the explosives meant for the airfield attacks, were scattered even further from the men than the men were from each other, and much of what was eventually recovered had been soaked through and rendered useless.

The mission’s own after-action report described the survivors as widely dispersed with their demolition material soaked. Not a single enemy aircraft was destroyed. Of the roughly 65 men who had set out that night, only 22 made it back to friendly lines, some after more than 36 hours of exhausting movement across open desert while evading Axis patrols.

Others were killed. A number were captured and spent years as prisoners of war. Two of them would not make it home until they escaped captivity in October 1944, nearly 3 years later. By any conventional military standard, Operation Squatter was an unambiguous failure. A first mission so costly that it could easily have ended the unit’s existence before it fought a second time.

What actually happened next is the reason the story doesn’t end there. Sterling and the surviving members of L Detachment made their way back to Allied lines in the days following the disaster. Brought in partly with the help of a small British reconnaissance and navigation unit already operating deep in the desert. The Long Range Desert Group, or LRDG.

The LRDG had spent more than a year mastering something the fledgling SAS had not yet learned at all. How to actually survive, navigate, and travel across the deep Libyan desert using vehicles rather than legs or parachutes. Where the SAS had jumped blind into a storm and been scattered to the winds, LRDG patrols moved with practiced precision across hundreds of miles of open desert using sun compasses, celestial navigation, and an intimate understanding of the terrain that had taken them months of patient experience to build. Stirling recognized immediately what this meant for his own unit’s future. The problem with Operation Squatter had never really been the men, their training, or even the concept behind the mission. The problem was the method of insertion. Parachuting small teams into an unpredictable desert environment at night, at the mercy of weather no one could forecast reliably, was simply too

fragile a method to build a reliable raiding capability around. So, Stirling made a decision that would define the SAS for the rest of the war and for decades afterward. He abandoned parachute insertion for raiding missions almost entirely and instead proposed a new partnership. The LRDG would drive SAS raiding parties out to their targets by truck, wait nearby, and drive them back out again afterward, while the SAS men themselves focused entirely on the specialized work of getting onto an airfield, planting demolition charges, and getting off it again before daylight. It was, in effect, an admission that the unit had gotten half its own concept wrong on the very first attempt, and the willingness to make that admission barely a month after a catastrophic failure is arguably the most important decision in the entire early history of the SAS. There was very little time to prove the

new approach worked. Senior commanders who had already been skeptical of Stirling’s unit were watching closely, and a second failure of anywhere near the scale of Operation Squatter would almost certainly have seen L Detachment quietly disbanded and it’s surviving men redistributed to conventional units.

Sterling had at most one more chance. In early December 1941, barely 3 weeks after the survivors of Operation Squatter had staggered back into Allied lines, Sterling organized a new mission. This time built entirely around the LRDG’s vehicles rather than parachutes. The plan called for small raiding parties, each accompanied by an LRDG patrol for navigation and transport, to strike three separate Axis airfields simultaneously.

Sirte, El Agheila, and Agedabia, all clustered along the Libyan coast and by mid-December packed with German and Italian aircraft supporting Rommel’s forces during the ongoing Crusader offensive. Sterling would lead one party. Paddy Mayne would lead another aimed at the airfield at Wadi Tamet. A third, under Lieutenant Bill Fraser, would strike the airfield complex at Agedabia itself.

The journey out was nothing like the swift, decisive strike the SAS had originally imagined for itself. It took the better part of a week jolting across open desert in LRDG trucks painted in an unusual pink and green camouflage scheme designed to blend into the terrain sleeping rough dealing with the mechanical breakdowns and flat tires that were simply a routine cost of doing business hundreds of miles from the nearest supply depot.

This was, in its own quiet way, as demanding a test of endurance as the parachute operation had been. It simply wasn’t the kind of test that could be undone by a single night of bad weather. Fraser’s party reached a position roughly 16 miles from Agedabia in the early hours of 21 December, then moved the rest of the way on foot under cover of darkness, exactly as Operation Squatter had originally envisioned.

Except this time, the men arriving at the perimeter fence were rested, equipped with dry explosives, and had not just spent the previous several hours being dragged across open ground by a runaway parachute. What happened next at more than one airfield along that stretch of coast on the same set of nights in mid to late December 1941 became the real founding legend of the Special Air Service.

At Wadi Tamet, Paddy Mayne led a small party of roughly seven men onto the airfield perimeter and began working methodically down the parked rows of aircraft, attaching small time-delayed explosive charges, known as Lewis bombs, developed by one of L Detachment’s own founding officers, Jock Lewis, to as many aircraft as his party could reach before their limited supply ran out.

When the demolition charges were exhausted, accounts of the raid described Mayne resorting to raw physical destruction, tearing instrument panels and control surfaces out of remaining aircraft by hand rather than leave them intact. By the time his party withdrew, roughly two dozen enemy aircraft, along with fuel stores and other equipment at the airfield, had been destroyed without a single casualty among his own men.

At Agedabia, Bill Fraser’s smaller party of four men, Geoff Du Vivier, Jock Byan, Arthur Phillips, and Bob Tait, two of whom had survived the disaster of Operation Squatter only weeks earlier, worked through the parked ranks of German and Italian aircraft on the airfield in a similar fashion. Sources on the exact tally differ, with figures ranging from roughly three dozen aircraft destroyed at Agedabia specifically, contributing to a combined total across the December raids that some accounts place at around 60 Axis aircraft destroyed or badly damaged in a single coordinated series of strikes. For the loss, remarkably, of no SAS personnel at any of the three targeted airfields. A third party operating near Sirte added further destruction to the tally, though it achieved less than the other two groups on this particular night. Taken together, the December raid stood in almost total contrast to Operation

Squatter in every respect that mattered. Where the parachute assault had produced no destroyed aircraft and heavy losses among the raiding force, the vehicle-borne raids produced dozens of destroyed aircraft and returned their men home safely, guided back across the desert by the same LRDG patrols that had driven them out in the first place.

For a unit whose continued existence had been genuinely uncertain just weeks earlier, this was close to the best possible outcome. It gave Sterling something Operation Squatter had conspicuously failed to provide. Proof, in a form senior commanders could not easily dismiss, that his concept worked when executed with the right method of insertion.

It is worth pausing on exactly what changed between these two operations, because the difference was not courage or training or the fundamental soundness of Sterling’s original idea. All three of those things had already been present on the night of Operation Squatter. What changed was the single most vulnerable link in the entire plan, how the men actually got to and from the target.

A parachute drop into open desert at night depended on weather conditions the unit had no ability to control or reliably predict, delivered men to unpredictable locations relative to one another, and offered no reliable means of extraction beyond an exhausting overland march through territory patrolled by the enemy.

A vehicle-borne approach, supported by the LRDG’s existing mastery of desert navigation removed almost all of that uncertainty. It delivered raiding parties close to their targets with their equipment intact and dry, and it offered a defined reliable way to get them out again once the job was done. This lesson shaped virtually everything the SAS did for the remainder of the North African campaign.

Vehicles, first LRDG trucks, later the SAS’s own armed jeeps fitted with twin Vickers machine guns for close support fire during raids, became a central to the unit’s identity as the raiding tactics themselves. Over the following months, SAS parties working in this new fashion struck airfields across Libya repeatedly, and by the time the North African campaign had run its course, the unit is credited with having destroyed several hundred Axis aircraft on the ground.

By some estimates, more aircraft than the entire Allied Desert Air Force managed to shoot down in aerial combat over the same period. None of that record would have been possible without the uncomfortable, costly lesson of the very first attempt. The SAS’s actual founding achievement was not a flawless raid.

It was the willingness, in the space of a single month, to look honestly at a catastrophic failure, identify precisely what had gone wrong, and rebuild the entire operating method around a lesson paid for in the lives and captivity of a third of the unit’s original strength. History remembers the Special Air Service today for what it became, one of the most imitated, studied, and respected special forces units in the world, a template that inspired similar formations across dozens of Allied and later independent nations. It is tempting, looking back from that vantage point, to assume its beginnings must have matched its later reputation for precision and success. They did not. The SAS’s first true action, Operation Squatter, was by almost every measure a disaster, costly in men, entirely unsuccessful in its immediate objective, and close to being the last mission the unit ever conducted. What actually secured the

unit’s future was not that first raid, but the second one, executed barely a month later by men who had learned, at considerable cost, exactly which part of their original plan needed to change. The story of the SAS’s first desert raid, properly told, is really the story of two nights, one that nearly ended the regiment before it began, and one that proved, with burning aircraft scattered across three separate Libyan airfields, that the underlying idea had been sound all along.

What separated success from disaster wasn’t luck, or bravado, or even, in the end, extraordinary courage. Every man involved in both operations showed plenty of that. It was the discipline to recognize failure honestly, and the speed with which a fledgling unit rebuilt itself around a hard lesson before anyone in command lost patience and shut the whole experiment down.

That willingness to fail badly, admit exactly why, and come back within weeks having fixed the actual problem rather than simply trying harder at the same broken method, is arguably the truest founding principle of the Special Air Service, and one considerably less comfortable to admit than the legend usually allows.