The real Paddy Mayne of SAS Rogue Heroes

Who was the real Paddy Mayne?

Paddy Mayne was a real soldier and perhaps the SAS’s most iconic fighter, but his story is so bound up in tales of violence and excess, that truth and legend have grown near inseparable.

Born in 1915 in Newtownards, County Down, to a landowning Presbyterian family, Robert Blair Mayne excelled at sport at school.

He went on to study law at Queen’s University and was capped six times for Ireland at rugby. He was also selected to play for the British Lions on their 1938 South African tour. Standing at 6’ 3” and 15.5 stone, Mayne had an intimidating reputation but was, in reality, a man of contradictions: of kindness and cruelty, sensitivity and rage, humour and solemnity.

It was not always clear which version would emerge in any given situation – though alcohol often had a major part to play.

When did Paddy Mayne join the SAS?

Paddy Mayne first attracted wartime attention as a troop commander in No. 11 (Scottish) Commando, being mentioned in dispatches after a fight against the Vichy French on the Litani River.

• On the podcast | The SAS in WW2: everything you wanted to know

He joined the Special Air Service as one of its original members in 1941, and soon made his mark within the unit by leading a triumphant raid on Tamet airfield in December of that year.

Planting bombs that put two dozen enemy aircraft out of action and won him 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.

Paddy Mayne’s reputation in the SAS: how his legend was born

Paddy Mayne went on to lead a series of successful desert raids in Africa, helping to build the SAS’s reputation as an ever-present threat to the enemy’s tail, while becoming an inspiration to the tough ex-commandos serving under him.

One sergeant spoke of feeling “immune to danger” when led by Mayne. It was said that he chose operations carefully, prioritising the welfare of his men and making them feel part of the decision-making process.

Nor was it unusual to see him nursing the wounded. He once held the hand of a dying man whose last words were, “I’m ever so sorry to be such a nuisance, sir.” The overall result of such reassuring authority was a closely bonded, meritocratic, and generally successful desert unit.

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, where Italians and Germans were drinking and relaxing.

Kicking it open, he said “Good evening” quietly to the startled occupants, before firing his pistol, while others joined in with Tommy guns.

At least two dozen men were killed in a matter of seconds; Mayne’s SAS commander, David Stirling, reacted angrily on learning of the incident. It was, Stirling said, closer to an execution than an act of war.

• On the podcast | Special forces historian Gavin Mortimer casts a critical eye over David Stirling

All the same, a version of the story was reported in British newspapers, feeding the public hunger for bloodthirsty accounts. This was how the legend of Paddy Mayne was born – soon to spread among British and Commonwealth troops in the Middle East.

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How was Paddy Mayne viewed by his men?

Mayne’s ruthlessness was not restricted to the enemy. He came to dominate 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.

Mayne once pinned a smaller officer, Johnny Wiseman, to the ground, called for a razor, and forcibly shaved off half of his beard without soap or water.

Wiseman, who never learned what he had done to annoy his commander, fully expected to be killed.

Another officer who learned to avoid Mayne’s drunken company was Bill Fraser, a courageous but troubled Scot, whom Mayne would regularly taunt for his supposed homosexuality.

More of a warrior king than a complete officer, Mayne’s influence on the SAS’s desert war was huge. It reached its high point in July 1942 when he and Stirling came together to lead a raid on Sidi Haneish airfield.

Eighteen heavily armed jeeps were driven steadily around the airfield, blasting their machine guns and destroying around forty German aircraft.

It was an audacious performance of choreographed precision. Yet, even then, Mayne found a way to stand out from the crowd, jumping from his jeep to plant a single bomb on the engine of the only undamaged aeroplane.

Paddy Mayne in Sicily and beyond: commander of the SAS

Once the desert war had ended, the main body of the SAS was rebranded as the Special Raiding Squadron (SRS) and went into action in Sicily, with Mayne as its commander – David Stirling now a prisoner of war, having been captured in Africa in 1943.

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Some 287 SRS men landed at Capo Murro di Porco on the south-east coast of Sicily. The success of the Allied invasion force depended to a large degree on the ability of these men to knock out artillery defences. Fortunately, Mayne’s squadron was able to do the job.

During the following year’s invasion of France, SAS members were dropped by parachute behind enemy lines where they worked alongside French resistance fighters to carry out sabotage and prevent German forces from reaching the front line.

This was a bloody time for the organisation now that Adolf Hitler had issued his personal edict that all British or Allied Commandos found behind the lines, armed or unarmed, must be “slaughtered to the last man”.

Travelling with SAS navigator, Mike Sadler, Mayne was one of the first British soldiers to reach Paris after its liberation.

Sitting with a group of local people near the Champs-Elysees, Sadler recalled Mayne suddenly producing a hand grenade from his pocket, pulling out the pin and placing it in the centre of the table.

As the grenade started to smoke, some of the locals dived under the table while others shrank back. Sadler made a snap decision to stay where he was.

“I knew Paddy well enough to think it was only a joke,” he recalled years later. “I certainly hoped he was joking.”

Mayne, it turned out, had previously cut the detonator from the fuse. It was, as Sadler had suspected, a more-than-usually dark joke. Although, as he understood, anybody seemed capable of anything in those strange days. Particularly Paddy Mayne.

Why was Paddy Mayne denied the Victoria Cross?

In April 1945, during Operation Howard in north-western Germany, Mayne went against orders to carry out a near-suicidal mission to wipe out enemy gunners and rescue wounded comrades.

He first fired his Bren gun on foot in full view of the enemy, before climbing into a jeep and giving fire orders to a gunner, then finally lifting the wounded onto the jeep and driving them to safety.

• Read more | Desert raiders: the Long Range Desert Group in the Second World War

His Victoria Cross recommendation was anonymously rejected – most likely due to his high-profile reputation for drunkenness and ill-discipline. He received a fourth Distinguished Service Order instead but in David Stirling’s eyes, Mayne had been the victim of a ‘monstrous injustice’.

Did Paddy Mayne think of himself as a poet?

SAS Rogue Heroes certainly paints Paddy Mayne as a character deeper than a whirling dervish of chaos – instead a warrior with a poet’s soul, and that is certainly true to life.

One night in 1942, Paddy Mayne sat drinking in a desert tent with David Stirling, who was revealing something of his past.

Before the war, Stirling said, he had lived in Paris and tried to make a living as an artist but had become increasingly frustrated by his shortcomings. This remained the greatest disappointment of his life. Mayne, in return, admitted his own frustrated ambition.

All he had ever wanted to do, he said, was 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.

It is little wonder that Mayne was frequently spotted lying in the desert with a novel or a book of verse, or that his idea of undistilled pleasure was to recite poetry in the mess, the more mournful, the better.

What happened to Paddy Mayne after the war?

One of the war’s more unlikely survivors, Mayne delayed his return to a normal civilian life by travelling to the Antarctic with the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey.

Living a wild and dangerous existence, he and his colleagues caught seals, drove teams of dogs and camped out in brutal conditions. He was forced to return home after several months, troubled by a back injury sustained during his time in the SAS.

Back in County Down, he returned to legal practice and became secretary of the the Law Society of Northern Ireland. But in chronic pain and without the exhilaration and camaraderie of the war to sustain him, he found it difficult to settle back into a peacetime life.

How did Paddy Mayne die?

Though Paddy Mayne survived the war, he died not long after it – in a car accident in December 1955, aged 40. He drunkenly drove his sports car into a stationary lorry.

His funeral was attended by large numbers of mourners. Those who knew him well were shocked by his death. But not surprised.

A statue of Mayne now stands in his hometown of Newtownards.

SAS Rogues Heroes season 2 is available on BBC iPlayer now. For more content like this, explore the best historical movies of all time, check out our best historical TV series and films streaming now, and our picks of the new history TV and radio released in the UK this week