Bleeding out under sniper fire & escaping Hitler’s camps… the real SAS rogue heroes who beat incredible odds to survive
WHILE German tanks from the 16th Panzer Division massed around him, SAS Captain Bill “Skin” Fraser appeared the epitome of calm.
Artillery shells were crashing into the recently captured Italian port of Termoli as the squad’s second in command played Lili Marlene over and over on a gramophone.
The tune was a favourite marching song of his German adversaries in North Africa which the SAS had adopted as their own.
It was 1943 and the British troops’ defensive lines were fraying badly as the enemy were closing in for a counter-attack — but like his boss Paddy Mayne, Fraser never looked calmer than when danger came knocking.
The SAS had already proved its worth, spearheading the invasion of Italy 18 months after their exploits in North Africa.
Renamed the Special Raiding Squadron, the elite team had captured three coastal gun batteries in Sicily that had threatened the invasion fleet.
Now they were in the vanguard once more.
Historian Damien Lewis, whose book SAS Forged In Hell tells the exploits of the SAS in the Italian campaign, said: “Mayne new his men had to be better, fitter and more disciplined than ever before.”
Fraser was just one of the men who inspired the gripping BBC war drama SAS Rogue Heroes.
Here. we recall more of the regiment’s real-life heroes.
- The new series of SAS: Rogue Heroes starts on BBC One on Wednesday.
Lieutenant-Colonel David Stirling
(played by Connor Swindells)
THE son of a Scottish laird, Stirling was just 25, and recovering in hospital after an unofficial parachute jump went wrong, when he came up with the idea of the SAS in the spring of 1941.
He had been a junior officer in the Scots Guards and volunteered for No 8 (Guards) Commando before devising his plan for small raiding groups operating deep behind enemy lines in North Africa.
He already had a reputation as a playboy and a gambler, having been thrown out of Cambridge University for betting and also narrowly escaping a court martial.
So, bypassing staff officers who disliked him, he broke into the British Army’s Middle East HQ in Cairo to put his plan directly to Sir Neil Ritchie, the Deputy Commander General.
Ritchie liked the idea, promoted Stirling to Captain and gave him the go-ahead to raise a special force of 65 officers and men.
With the hit-and-run successes of his unit, Stirling became known among German troops as the Phantom Major.
He was captured in January 1943, escaped and was subsequently recaptured by the Italians before finally being sent to Colditz Castle, Germany, where he spent the rest of the war.
Stirling was knighted in 1990 and died that year, shortly before his 75th birthday.
Captain (later Major) Bill ‘Skin’ Fraser
(played by Stuart Campbell)
WITH a boyish face, protruding ears and a tall, skinny frame, hence his nickname, Aberdonian “Skin” Fraser came from a family with a history of service with the Gordon Highlanders — but he was the first to be commissioned as an officer.
He had been injured in the doomed defence of France and then, like SAS leader Major Blair “Paddy” Mayne, joined No 11 (Scottish) Commando.
Fraser had been part of the 1941 Operation Exporter in Lebanon, fought with Mayne at the bloody battle of Litani River, and been an early recruit to David Stirling’s new SAS unit.
He had personally de- stroyed 38 enemy aircraft during a series of raids and he had earned the Military Cross, after leading his patrol for weeks through the desert after one daring raid had ended with them getting lost.
While he had felt out of place in the officers’ mess in the regular Army, the mavericks of the SAS suited him.
At their desert base he liked to attend the bar in his kilt, wearing his MC ribbon and with his dachshund Withers dressed in a Royal Navy tunic.
Wounded several times during the war — twice in Italy — Fraser earned a towering reputation for being at the forefront of battle whenever he wasn’t being patched up in hospital.
He was part of the Operation Husky seaborne assault on Capo Murro di Porco on the south-eastern tip of Sicily, leading No 1 Troop in bayonet charges and close-quarter combat in The Battle of the Pig’s Snout.
‘BEHIND ENEMY LINES’
Fraser helped seize three gun batteries, capturing more than 500 prisoners and safeguarding the invasion force.
At Bagnara Calabra, on the tip of the mainland, he and his unit took a direct hit from a mortar during a German counter-attack — but somehow Fraser was uninjured as two of his men were killed and seven others injured.
Tasked with seizing two vital bridges inland from the coastal port of Termoli as part of Operation Devon, the SAS suffered their worst casualties of the war when one of their trucks was hit by German artillery, killing 18.
Fraser was left unconscious, bleeding profusely, and was feared to be mortally wounded, though he recovered.
He would go on to fight through France and led the SAS’s A Squadron in its Operation Houndsworth missions behind enemy lines in the Battle of Normandy in June 1944.
Together, they killed or injured 220 Germans, captured 132 and identified 30 targets for RAF attacks, as well as destroying targets themselves.
He fought with Mayne’s “Paddy Force” through Germany, and in March 1945, aged 28, he was shot in the hand as he led a force to clear a German position in some woods — though he would fight on until the end of the war.
Fraser was awarded a bar to his Military Cross and the Croix de Guerre with Palm.
He returned to the Gordon Highlanders after the war but was almost immediately demoted for being drunk on duty and left the Army soon after.
He was later charged with 30 burglaries but found work as a baker and later a costings clerk.
Fraser died in 1975, at the age of 58.
Lieutenant-Colonel Bill Stirling
(played by Gwylim Lee)
WHEN the SAS War Diary was published in 1946, the unsung older brother of SAS founder David Stirling was described as “a man from the shadows”.
By 1943, Bill was in charge of 62 Commando and saw the opportunity for a second SAS crew.
In September 1943, 2SAS landed at Taranto, at the heel of Italy aiming to rescue Allied soldiers who had been in PoW camps when the Italians surrendered.
Under the command of Major Oswald Cary-Elwes, the unit seized Chiatona railway station, 12 miles west of Taranto, assembled a train and headed for a concentration camp at Pisticci, where they burst out, surprising the guards, and rescued 180 prisoners.
Bill was sacked two days before D-Day when he objected to a plan to drop the SAS just inland from the beachhead.
He knew they would be wiped out as they would be too lightly equipped.
Top brass realised he was right and instead dropped 2SAS hundreds of miles inland — but did not give Stirling his job back.
Stirling later turned his back on the military.
He died in 1983, aged 71.
Corporal (later Sergeant) James ‘ Jock’ McDiarmid
(played by Mark Rowley)
One of the SAS originals, Jock McDiarmid was shot in the ankle by a sniper at Bagnara Calabra in southern Italy but continued to lead his section up a steep exposed slope until he collapsed from blood loss.
His actions earned him the military medal and he was back in action in the defence of Termoli.
Assigned to help carry the wounded because of his own injury, he was with the stretcher party when an enemy soldier leaned out of a building ready to turn his machine gun on them.
A burst from the SAS Bren guns sent the man scuttling back inside, then McDiarmid ran in after him. He emerged moments later, announcing: “He’ll fire that Beretta no more.
“I wrapped it around his f***ing head.”
He later earned the Croix de Guerre for silencing a German machine gun nest in France.
McDiarmid was renowned for doing his “puddle dance” which ended with him and anyone close by soaked to the skin.
He emigrated to Australia after the war and became a cadet instructor at the Armidale School, New South Wales.
He died in 2009, aged 90.
Lieutenant John Elliot Tonkin
(played by Jack Barton)
Outnumbered, outgunned, out of ammunition and cut off from the rest of No 3 Troop, Lieutenant Tonkin was out of options.
The seemingly deserted farmhouse they had stumbled upon on the edge of Termoli had been crawling with German troops — and as the SAS men withdrew under heavy fire, they had come under attack from a second enemy patrol.
Things looked desperate.
Formerly a member of the Long Range Desert Group which the SAS has used as their “desert taxi service” in North Africa, Tonkin had joined the mavericks in time for their role spearheading Operation Husky.
Born in Singapore and having grown up on the Isle of Man, he was blessed with a wildly offbeat sense of humour.
He was also a fierce fighter, as he had shown when leading a bayonet charge on enemy positions in Bagnara Calabra — charging down the enemy guns and overrunning the German positions.
They had killed ten and taken dozens of prisoners.
Now in Termoli, trapped by a German pincer movement, he gave the only order he could: “Every man for himself!”
As one of his team was killed and three badly wounded, a few managed to escape, but Tonkin and 22 others were taken prisoner.
He found his captor, a German general, was himself a parachutist with respect for the men of the SAS and, over a comfortable dinner, it was hinted that Tonkin should try to escape because, under Hitler’s commando order, the general was obliged to hand him and his men over to the Gestapo for execution.
Transported by lorry the next day, Tonkin waited for one of the stops along the way when the German guards took a cigarette break and slipped out of the vehicle to make his escape.
The following year, still just 23, Tonkin was parachuted into France the day before D-Day to prepare for his 55-strong B Squadron to launch Operation Bulbasket — complementing A Squadron’s Operation Houndsworth — to sabotage German attempts to get Panzer reinforcements to Normandy.
‘BETRAYED AND AMBUSHED’
Among other successes, they identified a train carrying a massive amount of fuel for the Panzer divisions and called in an RAF attack which then destroyed it.
But their camp in the forests was betrayed and ambushed.
After telling his men to scatter, Tonkin remained to destroy the unit’s code books before hiding, but 33 of his commandos and an American pilot were captured, executed by the SS and buried in a mass grave in the forest of St Sauvent.
Three who had been injured in the fighting were given lethal injections in their hospital beds.
Tonkin, having escaped again, carried on his sabotage mission for another month before he flew home with the last five members of his squadron.
When the SAS was disbanded he applied for a job in Antarctica — Operation Tabarin — cementing British territorial claims in the region.