SAS FOUNDER - DAVID STIRLING

David Stirling: The Phoney Major, by Gavin Mortimer, is published by Constable at £25.

Was the founder of the SAS really just a shameless self-publicist who stole all the glory from true war heroes? GAVIN MORTIMER paints a very different picture of Sir David Stirling - lauded as a lion-hearted maverick and military genius for 80 years

Sir David Stirling 'was a man of limited capacity with a troubling, error-strewn history'.

'He might have been the Phantom Major to the British tabloids but to his soldiers, Stirling was a liability who had repeatedly gambled with their lives in his pursuit of glory. 

'His languor and fondness for drinking and gambling in the clubs of Cairo, meanwhile, had earned him the nickname ‘the Giant Sloth’.'

Stirling's Keir House

According to Stirling - 'Jock Lewes could far more genuinely claim to be the founder of the SAS than I'.

SAS founder was a Nazi sympathiser | UK news | The Guardian