The Yanks Called British SAS Tea-Drinking Amateurs. Then Watched Them Clear a Building in 9 Seconds. JJ

In 1962, a muscular American green beret captain named Charlie Beckwith arrived at the SAS headquarters in Heraford, England as part of a military exchange program. He was confident, experienced, and had already served in Laos during covert operations. He figured the Brits were professionals, sure, but nothing he had not seen before. Then he watched the SAS clear a [music] building. They moved through rooms with a speed and precision that made his own training looked like it was running in slow motion. The

coordination was almost telepathic. [music] And when it was over, one of them sat down and made a cup of tea like nothing had happened. Beckwith went home and spent the next 15 years trying to convince the Pentagon that America needed an SAS of its own. So, how did a small unit of British soldiers born from one man’s fever dream in a Cairo hospital become the template for every elite fighting force on the planet? If you enjoy deep dives into elite units like this, hit like and subscribe. I post new videos every week. To answer

that, we need to go back to the North African desert. The year is 1941 and a young Scots Guards officer named David Sterling is lying in a hospital bed in Alexandria, Egypt, temporarily paralyzed from the waist down after a parachute jump went wrong. Most officers would have spent their recovery reading novels and feeling sorry for themselves. Sterling spent his writing a military proposal that would change the history of warfare. [music] His idea was radical. Instead of sending hundreds of commandos to attack a single target, why

not send four or five men to hit 20 targets on the same night? Small teams, maximum chaos, disappear before the enemy knows what happened. These were small teams meant to create overwhelming disruption. The problem was getting anyone in the British high command to actually read the proposal. Sterling knew that if he went through normal channels, some middle- ranking bureaucrat would bury it in a filing cabinet. So he did something completely insane. He grabbed his crutches, hobbled to the perimeter fence of British Middle

East headquarters in Cairo and used those crutches as a ladder to climb over the fence. He dodged centuries while barely able to walk and by pure luck stumbled into the office of Lieutenant General Neil Richie, the deputy commander of all British forces in the Middle East. Richie read the proposal. 3 days later, Sterling was promoted to captain and given permission to recruit six officers and 60 men. In July 1941, the Special Air Service called SAS was born. The name itself was a lie designed to trick

the Germans into thinking the British had a full airborne brigade operating in North Africa. Sterling’s early recruits were fellow Mavericks. One was Jock Lewis, an Oxford rowing champion and brilliant sabotur. Another was Patty Maine, a former British Lions rugby player from Northern Ireland who was literally under arrest for punching his commanding officer when Sterling came calling. These were not soldiers who followed conventional rules. Their first operation was a disaster. On the night

of November 16th, 1941, 65 SAS men parachuted parachuted into the desert to destroy German aircraft on coastal airfields. A massive sandstorm blew in, scattering them across miles of featureless terrain. Only 22 men made it back alive. The rest were killed, captured, or left wandering the desert with shattered equipment. The SAS should have been shut down right there. Every bureaucrat who had opposed Sterling felt vindicated. But Sterling refused to accept the lesson his critics wanted him to learn, which was that his entire

concept was flawed. Instead, he concluded that the parachute insertion was the problem, not the raids themselves. That’s when the long range desert group offered to drive them in. The LRDG were specialists in navigating the Sahara. They drove modified Chevrolet trucks across hundreds of miles of open desert, living off the land for weeks at a time. Sterling realized that if the LRDG could get his men to the target, they could walk the last few miles, plant their bombs, and disappear into the darkness.

The results were staggering. Over the next 15 months, Sterling’s SAS destroyed over 250 access aircraft on the ground, dozens of supply depots, and hundreds of vehicles. They wrecked railway lines and severed telecommunications across North Africa. Patty Mine’s personal tally of destroyed aircraft was higher than any Royal Air Force fighter ace achieved in aerial combat. The Germans started calling Sterling the Phantom Major cuz he appeared out of nowhere. Destroyed everything and vanished before anyone

could respond. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, the British commander who was hardly known for handing out compliments, said of Sterling that he was quite mad, quite quite mad. But in a war, Montgomery added, “There is often a place for mad people.” Sterling’s biggest single raid came on the night of July 26th, 1942. His squadron rolled across the desert in 18 armed jeeps and hit the Sidihan airfield in Libya. They destroyed 37 Axis bombers and heavy transport planes in a single night, losing only two men.

Then they drove back across the Sahara, evading enemy patrols and aircraft for days until they reached the safety of their forward camp. But empires of one man’s making are fragile. In January 1943, the Germans finally caught up with Sterling in Tunisia. He managed to escape initially, but was ultimately betrayed by local Arabs and sold to German forces. Patty Maine took over command of the SAS and Sterling was shipped off to Culit’s Castle, the notorious escape proof prison in Germany, where he remained until the end

of the war. The SAS continued without him. They fought in Italy, parachuted behind German lines in France and supported resistance fighters across occupied Europe. But when the war ended in 1945, the unit was disbanded. The Army brass figured they no longer needed a band of unconventional mavericks. They were wrong. And in the years that followed, the SAS would be reborn, harder, and more ruthless than before. The modern SAS selection course was designed in 1952 by Major John Woodhouse, and it remains one of the

most brutal military assessments on Earth. It takes place in the Brecon Beacons, a mountain range in South Wales where the weather can turn lethal without warning, where fog rolls in within minutes and temperatures swing from scorching to freezing in a single day. The first major test is called the fan dance. Candidates must carry a 25 kg Bergen rucksack plus a rifle over a 24 km route that goes straight up and over Penmmy fan, the highest peak in the Breen beacons. They descend the far side down a near vertical path called Jacob’s

Ladder. Follow an old Roman road through a valley and then turn around and do the entire thing in reverse. The time limit is 4 hours and 10 minutes regardless of whether it is pouring rain, blowing a gale, or the sun is beating down hard enough to kill. And the fan dance is just the warm-up. The selection course runs for 4 weeks with marches getting progressively longer [music] and heavier. The final test is called the long drag. It is a 64 km solo navigation trek carrying a 25 kg Bergen, not including food, water, or the rifle.

[music] Candidates must complete it in under 20 hours, moving from checkpoint to checkpoint entirely alone without using any paths or trails, day and night, regardless of conditions. Andy McNab, the former SAAS sergeant who would later become famous for his Gulf War memoir, described watching his selection group shrink from 220 candidates down to just 24 [music] by the end of the hills phase. Typically, less than 10% of volunteers make it through. [music] The mountains have taken lives. Since 1984, 20 soldiers

have died in the Breham Beacons during special forces training and selection. In 2013, three Army reserveists collapsed [music] and died during selection when temperatures soared past 30 degrees C while they were hauling heavy equipment at maximum effort. The mountains do not care about your fitness level or your military record. They will kill you if you make a mistake. And the Hills phase is only the beginning. Those who survive go on to 14 more weeks of specialized training in tactics, weapons, demolitions, and combat

medicine. Then comes jungle training, resistance to interrogation exercises, and parachute qualification. The entire process is designed to do one thing. Find the kind of person who will keep going when every rational part of their brain is screaming at them to quit. Which brings us to the evening of April 30th, 1980, and the moment the SAS went from being Britain’s bestkept secret to the most famous special forces unit on the planet. At 11 that morning, six armed men stormed the Iranian embassy at

16 Prince’s gate in South Kensington, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in London. The gunmen were Iranian Arabs fighting for the independence of Kuzaston Province. And [music] they took 26 people hostage, including embassy staff, visitors, and a metropolitan police officer named Trevor Lockach, who had been guarding the front door. Their demands were straightforward. They demanded the release of 91 Arab prisoners held in Iran and safe passage out of the United Kingdom. If the demands were not met, they said they

would begin killing hostages and would blow up the building. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher convened the government’s emergency committee known as Cobra. [music] Within hours, Brigadier Peter Deabilier, the director of the SAS, was in the room. The government’s position was clear. Patient negotiation first, but absolutely no safe passage for the terrorists. If hostages were harmed, the military would go in. Within hours, B squadron of 22 SAS was speeding down the motorway from their base and Heraford to

London. They set up in a building next to the embassy and immediately began planning an assault. SAS planners studied blueprints of the sixf flooror 56 room building and consulted with the embassy caretaker to understand every door, window, and staircase inside. At night, small teams of SAS soldiers crept onto the embassy roof to check potential entry points while MI5 surveillance specialists lowered microphones down the chimneys to listen to what was happening inside. For six days, police negotiators talked with the

terrorist leader, a 27year-old named Awan Ali Muhammad, cenamed Salem. Several hostages were released during negotiations, mostly women, and a BBC employee who faked stomach cramps to get out. But by Monday, Salam’s patience was crumbling. He threatened to start shooting. Then on May 5th, the sixth day of the siege, three gunshots echoed from inside the embassy. The terrorists had executed Abbas Laasani, an Iranian press officer, and dumped his body out the front door. They had crossed the line.

Cobra authorized the use of force, and operational control passed from the Metropolitan Police to the Ministry of Defense. The SAS were ordered to go in. While negotiators kept Saly on the phone, buying time and stalling, the assault teams moved into position. The operation was cenamed Nimrod and it called for the embassy to be stormed from all sides simultaneously with multiple teams entering on every floor at the same time. At 23 minutes past 7 in the evening, red team began descending from the roof on Absel ropes

and immediately the plan started falling apart. One trooper got tangled in his rope 4 and 1/2 m above the first floor balcony. He was dangling in full view of the windows, completely exposed, unable to move up or down. At the same time, another team member’s boot cracked the window as he descended, alerting the terrorists inside that something was happening. The commanding officer had a fraction of a second to make a decision. He gave the order for the remaining teams to go regardless of whether red

team was in position or not. Explosive charges blew out windows on multiple floors. Stun grenades went in. CS gas canisters followed. The SAS poured into the building from every direction at once. Inside, the embassy was filling with smoke and flames. The tangled trooper was hanging above a fire that had erupted on the first floor when curtains caught the blast from frame charges. His teammates were trying to cut him free while bullets tore through walls around them. Rusty Ferman, the blue team leader, led his six-man squad

through the rear of the building and into the library. They moved room by room, floor by floor, with the kind of speed and violence that only comes from years of training in the killing house at Heraford, where live ammunition is the standard, and mistakes and careers were [music] lives. The entire assault lasted 17 minutes. When it was over, five of the six terrorists were dead. 19 hostages were freed. One hostage had been killed by the terrorists before the SAS could could reach him. The sixth

terrorists, a man named Fousy Najad, survived by hiding among the hostages and was later convicted and sentenced to life in prison. He was released in 2008 after serving his full sentence. But the lasting impact of Operation Nimrod wasn’t just the rescue itself. It was the fact that the entire world watched it happen. Television cameras had been positioned outside the embassy for 6 days covering the negotiations. When the assault began, they caught SAS soldiers in their black tactical uniforms and gas

mass abs sailing down the front of the building in broad evening light. Those images were broadcast live across Britain and then replayed around the world. The pictures of masked soldiers crashing through windows became the defining image of counterterrorism for a generation. If you’re finding this helpful, hit subscribe. We cover military history and special forces stories every week. Now, the SAS going from secretive to world famous overnight might seem like a purely positive thing, but it created a problem the regiment

had never faced before. Suddenly, everyone wanted to know about them. Everyone wanted to join. and every government with a terrorism problem wanted the SAS to train their forces. But the single most important consequence of operation Nimrod was something that had been building for nearly two decades and it played out not in London but across the Atlantic. Remember Charlie Beckwith, the American captain who had served with the SAS in 1962? After his exchange tour in Malaya, where he fought alongside SAS troopers

in the jungle and nearly died from a tropical disease that shut down his kidneys, Beckwith had gone home convinced that the US military was dangerously unprepared for counterterrorism. He spent the entire rest of the 1960s writing proposals, giving briefings, and practically begging the Pentagon to let him create an SAS- style unit. Every proposal was rejected or shelved. The Army brass did not see the need. Special forces, the Green Berets, could handle anything they figured. Then came the Munich Olympics

massacre in 1972, where Palestinian terrorists murdered 11 Israeli athletes. Then came a wave of airline hijackings across Europe. Then came more kidnappings, more bombings, more hostage situations. The world was changing and the United States had no dedicated unit designed specifically to handle this kind of threat. In 1977, 15 years after Beckwith first walked through the gates of SAS headquarters in Herafford, the Pentagon finally said yes. Delta Force was officially established on November 17th, 1977 with Beckwith as its founding

commander. He modeled it directly on the SAS. The squadron structure with four assault squadrons matched the SAS Saber Squadron system almost exactly. The selection process built around solo land navigation under heavy load over mountainous terrain was taken straight from the Breen Beacons model. Even the philosophy was borrowed. small autonomous teams where experience and ability mattered more than rank. But Delta Force’s first real mission would end in disaster. In April 1980, just weeks before the SAS stormed the Iranian

embassy in London, Beckwith led Delta on Operation Eagleclaw, the attempt to rescue 53 American hostages held at the US embassy in Thran. The mission fell apart in the Iranian desert when helicopters malfunctioned and two aircraft collided during the abort, killing eight American servicemen. The contrast could not have been sharper. The British had pulled off a flawless live television rescue in the heart of London. The Americans had crashed in the desert and lost eight men without ever reaching the target. It was a

humiliation that haunted the US special operations community for years. But Beckwit’s legacy was not failure. It was the creation of a unit that would grow into one of the most lethal fighting forces in history. And Delta Force would prove that in the decades to come, fighting alongside the very unit that inspired its existence. Which brings us to the frozen desert of western Iraq. January [music] 1991, an eight-man SAS patrol with the call sign Bravo 20 was dropped behind enemy lines by a Royal Air Force Chinuk helicopter

on the night of January 22nd. Their mission was to locate and destroy mobile Scud missile launchers that Saddam Hussein was firing at Israel, threatening to drag the entire Middle East east east into the Gulf War. The patrol was led by Sergeant Steven Mitchell, who would later write about the experience under the pen name [music] Andy McNab. Among his men was Corporal Colin Armstrong, who would become known as Chris [music] Ryan. They carried everything on their backs, no vehicles. Each man was loaded with the

Bergen ruck sack weighing over 25 kg packed with ammunition, [music] explosives, rations for 7 days, spare radio batteries, claymore mines, and plastic explosive. [music] They wore desert camouflage with World War II era sand colored smoks over the [music] top. The problem started almost immediately. The terrain was nothing like the intelligence briefings had promised. Instead of the empty desert they had been told to expect, the landscape was littered with Iraqi military positions and civilian settlements. Within two

days, the patrol was compromised. An Iraqi goat herder stumbled across their position. What followed was one of the most harrowing escape [music] attempts in modern military history. The eight men split into smaller groups and began moving northwest toward the Syrian border, roughly 290 km away through freezing rain and sub-zero temperatures. They had no vehicles, limited water, and their radio was not working properly, which meant they could not call for helicopter extraction. Over the next 5 days, they fought running gun battles

with Iraqi soldiers and armored vehicles. They waited through freezing rivers. They hid under bridges during daylight hours and moved only at night. The temperature dropped so low that men began suffering from hypothermia, their bodies shutting down one system at a time. [music] Three members of the patrol died. Trooper Steven Lane and Sergeant Vince Phillips succumbed to hypothermia during the escape. Trooper Robert Coniglio was killed in a firefight with Iraqi troops near the Syrian border. Four others, including

McNab, were captured by Iraqi forces and endured weeks of interrogation and mistreatment before being released after the war ended. Only one man made it out. Chris Ryan walked 290 km across the Iraqi desert to the Syrian border over 7 days [music] alone, surviving on two packets of biscuits and water collected from muddy irrigation ditches. [music] It remains the longest successful escape and evasion journey in SAS history. The Bravo 20 patrol became the most decorated British patrol since the Bore

War. [music] Manab was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal. Ryan and two others received the Military Medal. But within the SAS, the mission was viewed with distinctly mixed feelings. [music] It was a story of extraordinary endurance and bravery, but it was also an operational failure. None of the primary objectives were achieved. The patrol [music] never destroyed a single Scud launcher. What the patrol did prove, however, was something the SAS had always known about itself. That the value of special forces is not just in

what they accomplish on paper. It is in the kind of human being the selection process creates. Men who will walk through a frozen desert for a week rather than surrender. men who will fight armored vehicles with rifles and keep going. In the years after the Gulf War, the SAS and Delta Force would grow closer than ever. The bond that Charlie Beckwith had forged in 1962 deepened into a genuine operational partnership. The two units began conducting regular exchange programs, cross trainining exercises, and eventually fighting side

by side in some of the most intense combat operations of the 21st century. Exchange and shared training became routine. In 2003 during the invasion of Iraq, SASG squadron and Delta Force B Squadron jointly captured Lieutenant General Abid Hammed Mahmud Alakriti, Saddam Hussein’s personal secretary and the fourth most wanted man in Iraq. The operation involved a combined helicopter and ground assault and it went off without a single casualty [music] on either side. Later that same year, during Operation Abalone on the

outskirts of Rammani, the SAS assaulted a terrorist compound alongside Delta Force operators. When the SAS assault stalled at one of the target buildings and took casualties, Delta Force operators moved in and finished clearing the structure, killing several terrorists inside and bringing the operation to a successful close. That is what a real special forces partnership looks like. Not rivalry, not competition, but two units that trust each other enough to step into the breach when one of them needs help. At

the SAS headquarters in Heraford, there is a clock tower. It was originally built at the regiment’s old base, Sterling Lines, and rebuilt when the unit moved to Credinhill. Inscribed on the tower are the names of every SAS soldier who has died on active service. Within the regiment, those men are remembered as having failed to beat the clock. At the base of that tower, there is a verse from a poem by James Elroy Flecker. It reads, “We are the pilgrim’s master. We shall go always a little

further. It may be beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow, across that angry or that glimmering sea.” Further on the line rings in the regiment’s ethos. From a hospital bed in Cairo to the rooftops of the Iranian embassy. From the frozen deserts of Iraq to joint operations with the unit they helped create. The SAS has spent eight decades proving that a small number of extraordinary individuals can change the outcome of wars, rescue the innocent, and redefine what soldiers are capable

of. Who dares wins. And the SAS has been daring since 1941.