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Mike Sadler, who has died aged 103, won both the military medal and the military cross as an honorary “founding member” of the wartime SAS before going on to a long career in the British secret intelligence service MI6. He was the last original member of the SAS, whose exploits were dramatised in the BBC series SAS: Rogue Heroes (2022), based on the 2016 book of the same name by Ben Macintyre.
When the second world war broke out, Sadler was working on a tobacco farm in what was then Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He joined the Rhodesian army and was promoted rapidly to sergeant, but established an early willingness to question the wisdom of his officers’ orders.
When his commanding officer threatened to strip him of his rank if he did not apologise to an officer with whom he had disagreed, he told him in no uncertain terms that he would reduce himself to the ranks.
As a result, he was highly receptive to an invitation in a Cairo bar to join the recently formed Long Range Desert Group (LRDG), which had been set up by the British in 1940 to mount behind-the-lines attacks on German and Italian forces on the Libyan-Egyptian frontier.
During the long journey from the Egyptian capital to the LRDG’s base at Kufra, in south-east Libya, Sadler became fascinated by the group’s use of stars and the position of the sun to navigate their way across more than 700 miles of largely featureless desert.
“It was a voyage of discovery because the maps, except in the very coastal regions, had nothing much on them except longitude and latitude lines and the odd dotted line marking a camel track or something,” he said. “It was entirely like being at sea.” As a result, when they arrived at Kufra, he was offered the role of unit navigator. “The idea of navigating by the stars was so fascinating I couldn’t resist.”
Sadler’s involvement with the newly formed SAS began some months later, in the immediate aftermath of its disastrous first mission. The regiment had tried to parachute into the desert in the dark during a fierce storm, and 34 of the 55 men taking part were killed or captured.
David Stirling, who had founded the SAS, needed to mount another operation quickly or see the unit disbanded, and asked the LRDG to ferry them on the next mission, in December 1941. Sadler was attached as navigator to the mission commander Blair “Paddy” Mayne, an Irish rugby international with a similar lack of respect for poor decision-making, and they got on well.
The raid, on an airfield at Wadi Tamet, on the Libyan coast west of Sirte, destroyed 24 aircraft, blew up a number of fuel dumps and killed or wounded around 30 Italian and Germans, ensuring the SAS survived.
During another raid on a German airfield at Sidi Haneish, 235 miles west of Cairo, in July 1942, Sadler, now officially transferred to the SAS, navigated 18 jeeps across the desert without headlights or maps. Storming across the airfield firing tracer bullets from their machine-guns, the men destroyed an estimated 37 aircraft.
Sadler was told to wait at the edge of the airfield and make sure everyone got out. “So I only got away from the airfield at dawn, after the raid, and found myself driving through a German column that had set out into the desert to look for us,” he recalled. “I drove through the column from the back and nobody noticed. I don’t think they expected anyone to be behind. They’d stopped to have a cup of tea on the roadside, and I drove on and out.” As a non-commissioned officer, Sadler was awarded the military medal for his bravery.
