SAS Sadler, Willis Michael (Mike)

[John Robertson]

Other Entry

[ LRDG ]

• SURNAME

Sadler ​

• FORENAME

Willis Michael (Mike) ​

• UNIT

1 SAS (HQ Squadron - Assistant Intelligence Officer) ​

• RANK

T/Captain ​

• NUMBER

282465 ​

• AWARD

Military Cross ​

• PLACE

Normandy 1944 ​

• ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

parent unit Army Air Corps​

born 22.02.1920​

former 4 Rhodesian Anti-Tank Battery (ranks)​

resided Southern Rhodesia​

Long Range Desrt Group (S Patrol) 1942 (Cpl)​

award M.M. with LRDG​

L Detachment SAS July 1942-September 1942 (CR/3514 Sgt)​

1 SAS (A Squadron) 1942-43 (2 Lt)​

Special Raiding Squadron 1943 (Lt)​

1 SAS (HQ + A Squadrons) 1944-45 (Cap) ​

died 04.01.2024 (Aged 103)​

​

The Royal Navy always used to say that navigation precedes gunnery. It was also true of the war in the north African desert, and the raison d’être of the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG). The SAS, formed ten months after the LRDG, soon discovered how true it was too. Mike Sadler, the last survivor of both the LRDG and the original SAS, was a “first navigator”, a senior post in the former. Unsurprisingly, David Stirling, the SAS’s founder, poached him for his new raiding force.

For the most part, the British Eighth Army’s desert war against, to begin with, the Italians, and then Rommel, was fought along the relatively narrow coastal strip of Libya. The great Cyrenaican sand sea to the south was, or seemed to be, as impassable to mechanised forces as the jungle was in the Far East.

However, its “impassibility” was also an opportunity for determined men on both sides to play havoc behind the others’ lines. With only 10,000 British troops in Egypt to defend the Suez Canal in September 1939 until reinforcements could be shipped from Britain and India — to be joined later by troops from Australia, New Zealand and east Africa — the 700 miles of Libyan-Egyptian frontier were an open invitation for the many thousands more Italian troops in Libya to raid Egypt if Mussolini were to enter the war.

Major Ralph Bagnold of the Royal Signals (and formerly the Royal Engineers) had spent much of the 1920s and 1930s exploring the desert and had published Libyan Sands: Travel in a Dead World (1935). He at once suggested forming a desert scouting force to avert a surprise attack. He was turned down, and again in January 1940, but when the Italians declared war in June the new commander-in-chief for the Middle East, Sir Archibald Wavell, approved the plan.

The LRDG began operations in September. Sadler would be recruited by members of Captain Gus Holliman’s S (Rhodesia) Patrol in a Cairo bar a few months later, having come there with Rhodesian forces from the Ethiopia campaign. “The idea of navigating by the stars was so fascinating I couldn’t resist,” he explained in later years.

Fascinating it may have been, but easy it was not, by day or by night. Maps were largely blank because, except for rock and the oases, the desert was featureless. Even the larger dunes came and went with the wind. Navigating was therefore about keeping meticulous records of bearings and distances — “dead reckoning”. A vehicle’s milometer gave the distance travelled, adjusted for known error in the instrument, but the bearing was a far greater problem.

A magnetic compass was no use because of the vehicle’s magnetism. Only by dismounting and walking away a hundred yards or so was the magnetic effect overcome — a time-consuming business. Bagnold had invented what he called a sun compass. It consisted of a flat disc with a vertical knitting needle which cast a narrow shadow over the standard 360-degree marking. When positioned in the centre of the stationary vehicle, the true bearing of travel could be determined with the aid of tables based on date, time and approximate latitude. When conditions allowed, the final reckoning could be checked by observation of the altitude of the sun and stars using a theodolite, and either a nautical almanac or air navigation tables.

Sadler was trained by the legendary “Lofty” Carr (obituary, April 20, 2022) in the rudiments of astral navigation and the theodolite. Carr found him a quick learner. Years later, Sadler said it was “because I was interested in it, and when you were interested in something you learn and I suppose I have a natural feel for it”.

As one experienced practitioner wrote, the essentials of desert navigation were “map-reading (with the limitations of map accuracy appreciated), dead reckoning (with the limitations of heading and distance-measuring accuracy appreciated), astro (with the limits of instrument error and time measurement appreciated), and overall a shrewd judgment of human error, a meticulous regard for truth and logic, and the methodical care in the maintenance of the navigation log, the re-setting of time pieces and sun compass”.

Sadler, who would go on to be the SAS’s principal navigator, seemed instinctively to understand the human-error factor. “One of the essential things was not to let doubt creep into your mind,” he said. “You have to be confident because it was awfully easy, especially at night, to start feeling you’re going wrong and you should be further to left or right. It was rather easy to give way to that feeling if you weren’t confident. It was a challenge, navigating, but I liked the challenge. I was young and you don’t really think about pressure at 21.”

In December 1941 he took part in the first successful joint LRDG-SAS raid, on Wadi Tamet airfield, led by Lieutenant Paddy Mayne, a former Irish rugby international who would become one of Britain’s most decorated soldiers. The SAS, formed only five months earlier, were still heavily reliant on the LRDG to get them to where they wanted to go, so much so that the SAS joked that the LRDG were the Libyan desert taxi service.

The six-man team destroyed 24 aircraft and a fuel dump. Returning to base camp in the desert as the sun rose, they were attacked by Italian fighter-bombers. “I suppose it was quite alarming,” Sadler recalled phlegmatically years later, adding that it might just as easily have been the RAF, who could not be expected to know the location of every patrol, or instantly recognise their vehicles.

As reflected in the BBC’s historical drama series SAS Rogue Heroes (2022), based on the Times journalist Ben Macintyre’s book of the same name, Sadler’s navigation skills in featureless deserts bordered on the superhuman (he was portrayed by the actor Tom Glynn- Carney in the series). In the summer of 1942, Sadler guided a convoy of 18 vehicles armed with twin Vickers K machineguns across 70 miles of desert, at night, without headlights or map, to within 200ft of Sidi Haneish airfield.

They burst on to the airstrip and opened fire as they drove between the planes, destroying at least 37. Sadler, 5ft 10in and well built, stayed to pick up stragglers and photograph the devastation, and to bury one of the SAS drivers who had been shot through the head. For the Tamet and Sidi Haneish raids, he was awarded the Military Medal.

Willis Michael (Mike) Sadler was born in London in 1920, the elder of two sons of the director of a firm making Erinoid, a synthetic plastic material formed of casein and formaldehyde and used at the time to make knitting needles, white piano keys (replacing natural ivory) and electrical goods. His mother was a Scot.

Sadler was educated at Bedales in Hampshire. The choice was significant. Bedales was opened in 1893, a small and intimate school run on “progressive” lines, non-denominational and popular in Fabian circles, cosmopolitan and arty. The musical theatre lyricist Alan Jay Lerner was a contemporary.

In 1937 Sadler went to Rhodesia as a farming pupil, and in 1939, only days before the outbreak of war, he joined the Rhodesian infantry. He said later that he had not wanted to miss anything but that he found that all he was doing was guarding German internees, so got himself discharged as a “key man on the land” and then immediately re-enlisted, this time in the artillery.

Sadler’s private life was textured. Among other relationships it featured two marriages; the first, in 1947, was to Anne Hetherington, who had been a driver with the Fany (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry) at Bletchley Park, and therefore probably working for the Special Operations Executive (SOE). They had met towards the end of the war when she drove him to airfields. The marriage was short-lived, however, and Anne went on to marry Baron Hans von Blixen-Finecke, nephew of Karen, played by Meryl Streep in the film Out of Africa.

In 1958 Sadler married Patricia (Pat) Benson, the daughter of an Indian Army officer. She had been a meteorologist in the Wrens during the war, working subsequently in the Foreign Office and later as a teacher in Sussex. Pat died in 2001. Their daughter Sally, who is semi-retired, survives him.

In the panic after Rommel’s arrival on the Egyptian frontier in June 1942, there seemed to be nothing to prevent Axis troops reaching the Suez Canal. Stirling decided that his most useful contribution would be a series of tip-and-run attacks on their tenuous line of communication along the coastal road.

For this he secured his own vehicles, no longer relying on “lifts” from the LRDG, including a batch of the newly arrived (American) Willys Jeeps, and established a forward base in the desert with sufficient stocks of ammunition and petrol for several weeks without resupply.

Precise navigation would again be key to success, so he got Sadler, by then a sergeant, transferred from the LRDG to the SAS as his chief desert navigator. No one resented Sadler’s arrival. Besides his reputation as a navigator, his modesty was endearing, and he was quickly accorded honorary “original” status. Newcomers also found him a gifted and patient instructor.

However, the SAS were not used on harassing raids as Stirling intended but instead, after being reinforced by other units, in outright attack against the port facilities in German-occupied Benghazi. Security was compromised and the raid was a disaster.

After General Sir Bernard Montgomery’s success at El Alamein in October 1942 and Rommel’s consequent withdrawal westwards, Stirling’s force returned to intelligence gathering and reconnaissance. About this time — quite irregularly, though later formalised — Stirling commissioned Sadler in the field.

In January the following year, he and Sadler, now a lieutenant, set out with a small SAS party to seek a route through the desert by which the Eighth Army might outflank the German defences of the Mareth Line in Tunisia, and to link up with the newly landed (Operation Torch) Anglo-American First Army. The patrol was ambushed in scrub near the Gabès Gap, the passage between the sea and impassable salt marshes, and Stirling was captured, spending the rest of the war in Colditz.

In the mêlée, Sadler escaped with another SAS soldier and an Arabic-speaking Frenchman. Without a compass, maps, food or water, Sadler led the trio on a five-day, 100-mile trek to reach the First Army. Abbott Liebling, the American war correspondent, saw him emerge from the desert, and wrote: “The eyes of this fellow were round and sky blue and his hair and whiskers were very fair. His beard began well under his chin, giving him the air of an emaciated and slightly dotty Paul Verlaine.”

Sadler was subsequently flown to Eighth Army headquarters and assigned to guide the New Zealand Corps round the southern flank of the line.

After the Allies’ final defeat of the Axis forces in north Africa in May 1943, the SAS, now under the command of Paddy Mayne, took part in the invasion of Sicily and mainland Italy, and Sadler took on a more combatant role. Later that year he was flown to England to form an intelligence section for the expanded SAS brigade preparing for operations during the invasion of Normandy.

On the night of August 7, 1944, Sadler, now a captain, and Mayne parachuted into the Loiret départment some 60 miles south of Paris to join the SAS squadrons already operating there, to co-ordinate the local “Maquis” (Resistance) sabotage in support of the Allied breakout from Normandy.

This almost cost him his life. Hitler had ordered that any captured SAS were to be summarily executed (the so-called Kommandobefehl). While crossing the Montargis-Orleans Road in a two-Jeep patrol, Sadler encountered a stronger German one. At first he bluffed them with a cheery wave, but after passing within a few feet of each, the Germans opened fire. Sadler ordered his second Jeep to flee while he used his twin machine guns to hold off the enemy. He was subsequently awarded the Military Cross, his recommendation for gallantry initiated by Mayne and approved by Montgomery.

When the SAS were disbanded at the end of the war, Sadler, by now a major, left the army and joined the Falkland Islands dependency’s Antarctic survey, for which he was awarded the Polar Medal. He then spent two years with the American embassy in London on “information work”, ostensibly distributing publicity films, before being recruited by the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). All he would say about his time with MI6 was that it allowed him also to indulge his love of ocean sailing, particularly in the Caribbean.

He finally retired — officially, at least — in 1984, spending his later years in a retirement home near Cambridge.

The LRDG and SAS finally came together when the LRDG Association joined the SAS Regimental Association in 2000, and in 2017 a memorial to the LRDG was installed at the SAS chapel in Hereford, with the words, “They Showed Us The Way”. By then, however, Sadler’s preternatural eyesight, which had so often shown the way, was rapidly fading, and by the end was wholly gone.

Major Michael Sadler MC MM, LRDG and SAS “original”, was born on February 22, 1920. He died on January 4, 2024, aged 103

Source : https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/major-mike-sadler-obituary