Rogue Heroes
The real SAS Rogue Heroes
It’s a story of extravagant lies, homemade bombs and adrenaline-pumped commandos.
The formative years of the SAS through the exploits of six extraordinary servicemen
The SAS changed the way that the Allies fought the Second World War. A group of motley misfits whose origins lay in a spy’s propaganda exercise, these bearded ruffians started as joke and yet redefined the art of covert warfare during the Africa campaign.
Formed in Cairo in 1941, the Special Air Service – to give the SAS its full appellation – was tasked with attacking enemy airfields. And it did so, after a couple of harrowing missteps, with an assiduous aplomb.
Once the war against Erwin Rommel was won, the SAS (as a taskforce called the Special Raiding Squadron – SRS) would spearhead the invasion of Sicily and the liberation of Italy from Benito Mussolini, then once again as the SAS take an active role in the invasion of France, swelling from a few dozen men to several thousand.
Don’t let that put you off. Though the show itself prefaces each episode with the words ‘This is not a history lesson’, there is a great truth running though both seasons of SAS Rogue Heroes.
They include founder members David Stirling, Jock Lewes and Paddy Mayne; season 1 stalwart Mike Sadler and season 2 newcomer John Tonkin; and one man who will never appear in the show, who was SAS before there was an SAS.
The man who was in the SAS before it existed
In 1941, a young British trooper based in Palestine was sent on an unlikely mission.
Together with a fellow soldier named Smith, Mick Gurmin was dispatched to Cairo with instructions to spread an elaborate yarn around restaurants, bars and tourist hotspots.
For the mission, Gurmin was issued with a uniform liberally sewn with parachute badges, to back up his membership of the 1st Special Air Service (SAS) Battalion parachute unit, which was completing its training in Transjordan.
It was an intriguing costume – because the 1st SAS didn’t exist.
Both battalion and uniform were inventions of Lieutenant Colonel Dudley Clarke. He had recently arrived in the region, having been summoned by his friend and supporter Sir Archibald Wavell, British commander-in-chief for the Middle East.
Clarke’s task was to deceive the enemy about British intentions – and the capture of an Italian officer had presented him with an opportunity. The officer’s diary revealed an Axis belief that British parachute troops were present in the Middle East.
In truth, there were none – but Clarke spotted the chance to exploit an existing fear. He schemed a plot to convince enemy intelligence that 500 parachutists, all specialists in vehicle sabotage, had arrived in the region.
This deception operation was codenamed ‘Abeam’, and Gurmin’s carefully staged performance was a key element.
Gurmin and Smith – also in fake uniform – were to leak ‘evidence’ of a crack parachute unit while seeming reluctant to do so. Clarke’s admonition made clear the importance of getting their mission spot-on: “Any carelessness or indiscretion on your part may well upset carefully arranged and important plans and have far-reaching consequences.”
In the event, Gurmin and Smith had a fine old time. They visited the pyramids, watched a football match, and went to a cabaret, the cinema and a dance. They walked around Cairo Zoo and travelled north to Port Said. Wherever they went, they frequented cafes and restaurants where they attracted attention with their badges, talking with disarming conviction about a job they had never done and which didn’t exist.
Operation Abeam seems to have been a success: certainly, rumours of a parachute unit began to spread. Curiously, the fake unit lent its name to the real SAS that was soon to be formed, thereby adding authenticity to Clarke’s deception.
For Gurmin, the consequences were profound. Just months earlier, before joining up with the Staffordshire Yeomanry, he had been an apprentice engineer in Wolverhampton.
Now his impressive performance resulted in another commission. He initially joined the Middle East Commando and then, in the autumn of 1942, became an officer in the genuine SAS.
He journeyed far across the Sahara desert, eventually reaching the Mareth Line, a system of fortifications in Tunisia, and later took part in the assault on Sicily. None of the celebrated servicemen whose ranks he was joining realised that Gurmin had been a member – of sorts – long before they had.
After the war, Mick Gurmin returned to Britain and worked in the steel industry. When he died in 1978, at the age of 58, it transpired that he had never told friends or family about his wartime deception work.
To this day, the SAS archive holds an uncaptioned picture of two men sitting in a Cairo restaurant, glancing knowingly towards the camera, wearing strange yet evocative uniforms: Gurmin and Smith. Before the SAS, it seems, came the SAS….