One of my toughest assignments while working as a foreign correspondent and journalist in Africa in the 1950s was to cross the Sahara Desert to investigate how a small group of Allied troops changed the Second World War by halting Hitler’s determined southern advance towards the equator.
While preparing for this particularly arduous and dangerous trip, I had cause to contact a former British Special Air Services (S.A.S.) senior officer, Major Michael Sadler. He had worked like a human GPS by secretly leading a diminutive band of troops across the Sahara to successfully sabotage the highly planned North African war efforts of Hitler’s most prized senior soldier, Field Marshal Rommel.
My intrepid informant and adventurer had crossed the biggest desert in the world only 13 years earlier by navigating his way at night, only by a mystical self-taught method of following the wind, the stars and the direction of the sand dunes — or so he told me.
From our conversation, I gathered that Major Michael’s small group of brave fighters spent their days in the desert under heavy camouflage so as to not be detected by Luftwaffe spotter aircraft. It was, however, by night that they could stealthily make their advance towards discovering Rommel’s well-established — but hidden — enemy lines in complete darkness without even the help of headlights or a reliable map, of which in those days there were none.
I would like to think that Major Michael’s tips on desert travel may have possibly saved my life as my subsequent desert experience was nothing like my various other far easier safaris through the more southern and eastern semi-arid African bushlands. The Sahara’s shifting dunes continually bogged my old wartime Jeep and it was only the information I had acquired that prevented me from possibly being lost in an ocean of sand.
His advice enabled me to eventually cross the Sahara by braving the elements, including continuous 50 deg.C daily heat, a total lack of moisture and humidity, and the humbug of continually seeing water on the horizon when it is only a heat mirage.
It was therefore with great sadness that I heard that my S.A.S. hero had in the new year passed away in England at the age of 103 years. This news was all the more staggering to me as I am only a handful of years behind him.
I remember “Major Mike,” the name by which he was affectionately known as the last surviving member of the Second World War S.A.S. regiment. The man I met was a soft spoken gentleman who one would never have thought was a hardened war saboteur who had beaten Rommel at his own game.
Recruited into the S.A.S. by its founder, Colonel David Stirling, Major Mike was a self-made navigator of unknown foreign territory. He had discovered a complicated system of getting himself from A to B at night without as much as a compass when previously working in the wilds of Central Africa’s Rhodesia.
Armed with his self-acquired navigational beliefs, he had volunteered to cross the Sahara in 1942 with only five other S.A.S. men to locate Rommel’s secret desert outposts and to enable 18 truckloads of Allied soldiers to put the Nazis out of immediate action.
As I later found during my own Sahara adventure, Major Mike and his men had enabled the Allies to attack a highly camouflaged foreward Nazi air base at uninhabited Wadi Tamet with 24 Luftwaffe aircraft and fuel supplies being totally destroyed.
At another hidden and unnamed desert location many miles away, they also were responsible for an entire squadron of 40 enemy aircraft being put out of action. I had the personal satisfaction of seeing the remnants of both successful attacks due to Major Mike’s seemingly impossible abilities.
As an acknowledged war hero, he received the Military Medal for his valour and for basically helping to seriously halt Hitler’s plan to overrun the rest of Africa.
His bravery was also recognised when serving in France, also during the Second World War . On this occasion, he won France’s highest award of the Legion d’honneur for once again leading a special strike unit behind enemy lines, attacking vital Nazi military installations.
In my case when I crossed the hostile Sahara to visit Timbuktu Town, the middle of nowhere and the site of the world’s first university, I had no enemy to contend with, except for the searing sun.
As Major Mike had previously warned me,”treat the desert like the sea and understand the lines of sand dunes just as a sailor does the currents and waves — and treat your vehicle like you would a camel.”
I never quite understood the latter part of that comment other than to know that cars and camels both need water at all times, just as we all do to see yet another day.