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I've been working to dance knows history. We're going to controversial

subject today with other revision Gavin Mortimer. He's been on the podcast for a while. He has written a new

biography of the Phantom Major, David Sterling, the man who founded the SAS, Gavin Mortimer, says he's the phony major.

Was Sterling a military genius, a maverick thinker? Always just a master manipulator. Get with spin, write his own legacy.

As Churchill once said, history will be kind to me because I intend to write it. Is that what Sterling did as well?

Sterling was a Scottish aristocrat. He came for a military family who was descended from a long line of highland warriors.

And he was instrumental in the founding of the Specialist Service, the SCS, and an organisation which helped to opine a really special forces operation.

The idea that a small number, highly motivated, well-armed, highly trained and efficient troops, can have a disproportionate impact on the wider battle in the theatre in which they're operating.

And in this episode we discuss the formation of the SCS, we discuss Sterling. We talk about his older brother, but we also talk about the legendary Robert Blair, aka Paddy Main.

Paddy Main was an ordinary down in the car crash, age 40. He talked about him on this podcast, so please go back and listen to previous episodes.

Paddy Bader Bin Salaf, record in 1938, as a member of the British Irish Lines, wrote B Squad. He was an exceptional athlete, an exceptional soldier.

And when you do talk to those early veterans, the Special Forces of the Long Range Desert Group of the SCS, they do tend, in my experience, to talk about Paddy Main more than Sterling.

But Gavin Mortimer has conducted a far more systematic investigation into the genesis of the SCS. And what he has to say is actually quite shocking.

If you wish to listen to those other SCS podcasts, we've got lots of them actually. They're all available on History Hit TV. You may have seen in Vogue the other day. That's very classy publication magazine. They recommended History Hit TV as one of the best subscriptions on the planet.

So thank you very much to them. If you want to do what Vogue say and me, you can go to History Hit TV. If you follow the link in the description of this podcast, you get taken straight there on the interweb.

Just click it with your little old thumb right now. And you get two weeks free if you sign up today. And you can join the tens of thousands of people subscribing to History Hit TV, fans of Vogue and fans of World War Two Military History.

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