Mike Sadler, who has died aged 103, won both the military medal and the military cross as an honorary “founding member” of the wartime SAS before going on to a long career in the British secret intelligence service MI6. He was the last original member of the SAS, whose exploits were dramatised in the BBC series SAS: Rogue Heroes (2022), based on the 2016 book of the same name by Ben Macintyre.
When the second world war broke out, Sadler was working on a tobacco farm in what was then Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He joined the Rhodesian army and was promoted rapidly to sergeant, but established an early willingness to question the wisdom of his officers’ orders.
When his commanding officer threatened to strip him of his rank if he did not apologise to an officer with whom he had disagreed, he told him in no uncertain terms that he would reduce himself to the ranks.
As a result, he was highly receptive to an invitation in a Cairo bar to join the recently formed Long Range Desert Group (LRDG), which had been set up by the British in 1940 to mount behind-the-lines attacks on German and Italian forces on the Libyan-Egyptian frontier.
During the long journey from the Egyptian capital to the LRDG’s base at Kufra, in south-east Libya, Sadler became fascinated by the group’s use of stars and the position of the sun to navigate their way across more than 700 miles of largely featureless desert.
“It was a voyage of discovery because the maps, except in the very coastal regions, had nothing much on them except longitude and latitude lines and the odd dotted line marking a camel track or something,” he said. “It was entirely like being at sea.” As a result, when they arrived at Kufra, he was offered the role of unit navigator. “The idea of navigating by the stars was so fascinating I couldn’t resist.”
Sadler’s involvement with the newly formed SAS began some months later, in the immediate aftermath of its disastrous first mission. The regiment had tried to parachute into the desert in the dark during a fierce storm, and 34 of the 55 men taking part were killed or captured.
David Stirling, who had founded the SAS, needed to mount another operation quickly or see the unit disbanded, and asked the LRDG to ferry them on the next mission, in December 1941. Sadler was attached as navigator to the mission commander Blair “Paddy” Mayne, an Irish rugby international with a similar lack of respect for poor decision-making, and they got on well.
The raid, on an airfield at Wadi Tamet, on the Libyan coast west of Sirte, destroyed 24 aircraft, blew up a number of fuel dumps and killed or wounded around 30 Italian and Germans, ensuring the SAS survived.
During another raid on a German airfield at Sidi Haneish, 235 miles west of Cairo, in July 1942, Sadler, now officially transferred to the SAS, navigated 18 jeeps across the desert without headlights or maps. Storming across the airfield firing tracer bullets from their machine-guns, the men destroyed an estimated 37 aircraft.
Sadler was told to wait at the edge of the airfield and make sure everyone got out. “So I only got away from the airfield at dawn, after the raid, and found myself driving through a German column that had set out into the desert to look for us,” he recalled. “I drove through the column from the back and nobody noticed. I don’t think they expected anyone to be behind. They’d stopped to have a cup of tea on the roadside, and I drove on and out.” As a non-commissioned officer, Sadler was awarded the military medal for his bravery.
In January 1943, now a lieutenant, he was part of a small team led by Stirling looking for a route for the British forces to outflank the Germans and link up with allied forces in Tunisia.
They were captured by the Germans but Sadler and two colleagues escaped, crossing 100 miles of desert with little water and no compass or maps to meet up with US troops. An American journalist, Abbott Liebling, who saw Sadler when he arrived, said: “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 reprised his nonchalant approach to driving past German vehicles during an operation in France in August 1944. He was in the first of two jeeps crossing a busy road east of Orleans when they encountered a heavily armed German patrol.
Rather than abandon his mission, Sadler drove slowly up to the patrol, waved to them and crossed the road, less than 6ft from the Germans. It was only when they had passed that the Germans realised they were British, and opened fire.
Sadler whipped his own jeep around and fired on the Germans, giving the second jeep time to escape before withdrawing himself, having knocked out two German machine-gun crews. As an officer, he could now be awarded the military cross.
Born in Kensington, central London, Mike was the son of Wilma and Adam Sadler. When his father became director of a plastics factory in Stroud, Gloucstershire, the family moved to the nearby village of Sheepscombe.
Sadler was educated at Bedales, an early co-educational private boarding school in Petersfield, Hampshire, that was founded on Montessori principles, with children freed from rigid educational methods and encouraged towards independent thought. He left in 1937 for Rhodesia, to work on a farm.
By the end of the war, he was adjutant to Mayne, now the SAS commander, and with the SAS being temporarily disbanded, they both volunteered to go to Antarctica with the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey (later the British Antarctic Survey).
Sadler was awarded the Polar medal for his work setting up a new base on Stonington Island, which was connected to the mainland by a glacier. When the glacier melted, the area it vacated was renamed Sadler’s Passage in his honour.
On his return to the UK, he briefly worked for the US embassy in London, before being recruited into MI6 to help plan cold-war operations. During the Falklands conflict he was involved in a deception operation over the sale of Exocet missiles to the Argentinians.
He stayed with the intelligence service until the mid-80s, spending his retirement indulging his love of sailing.
Sadler married twice, first, in 1947, to Anne Hetherington, a former driver with the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (Fany) whom he had met when she drove him to an airfield. They divorced after two years. In 1958 he married Patricia Benson, who worked for the Foreign Office, and they had a daughter, Sally. Patricia died in 2001. Sally survives him.
• Willis Michael Sadler, SAS navigator and intelligence officer, born 22 February 1920; died 4 January 2024
