Paddy Mayne
The warrior poet
Serving under Stirling was Robert Blair ‘Paddy’ Mayne, the SAS’s greatest operational leader and most perplexing personality
Once the SAS’s first disastrous raid, Operation Squatter, had foundered, the organisation was desperate for success. David Stirling’s political judgment notwithstanding, any more failures might have spelled its end. In the event, two raids were ordered. One, carried out by Stirling, failed yet again. Fortunately, another led by Paddy Mayne, a 6’3’’ rugby international from County Down in Ireland, achieved great results.
Mayne led his men to Tamet airfield, where he destroyed or damaged two-dozen aircraft and won the first of his four Distinguished Service Orders. At one point, he climbed onto the wing of an Italian fighter plane and tore its instrument panel away with his bare hands. In the days that followed both men’s raids were repeated on the same targets.
As before Stirling’s party failed to destroy any aircraft while, this time, Mayne’s destroyed 27. The SAS had clearly found an operational leader whose conduct and example could inspire his men to far greater things.

At a professional level, David Stirling was delighted at Mayne’s success. At a personal level, though, it aggravated him. So began a rivalry that drove the SAS to increased success.
Mayne went on to lead a series of successful desert raids. One sergeant spoke of feeling “immune to danger” when led by him. But it was also not unusual to see him nursing the wounded.
Yet such recollections only reveal part of Mayne’s character. At the start of the Tamet raid, Mayne led his men to the door of the pilots’ mess, before opening fire; others with him joined in. At least two-dozen men were killed, an act Stirling characterised as something closer to an execution.
Off the battlefield, Mayne’s exerted a power over his fellow SAS officers to such an extent that they rarely refused when summoned to drinking sessions in the early hours of the morning – which often turned violent.
There was one occasion, however, when Mayne and Stirling truly came together. In a desert tent in 1942, Stirling revealed to Mayne that he was a failed artist; Mayne, in return, admitted his own frustrated ambition. He had wanted to be a writer. It dawned on Stirling that Mayne was a deeply sensitive person sitting on a well of unfulfilled creative energy, driven to all manner of behaviours by an inability to fully express himself.
Mayne, Stirling realised was driven to behave in the way he did through an inability to express his buried frustrations. Little wonder that Mayne was often seen lying in the desert with a book, or that he would recite poetry in the mess.
Though Paddy Mayne survived the war, he died not long after it – in a car accident in December 1955, aged 40.