The real-life legends behind SAS Rogue Heroes… including sergeant who killed boy, 12, for heartbreaking reason
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PINNED down by a hail of bullets and deadly accurate mortar shelling, the SAS fighters knew if they stayed put they were dead. But if they failed to silence the network of concrete machine-gun posts ahead of them, and the giant gun battery that the “pillboxes” were defending, then the whole Allied invasion force was in peril.
![[The new series of SAS: Rogue Heroes starts on BBC One on Wednesday]](https://www.thesun.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/17-09-2024-1st-looks-933655860.jpg?strip=all&w=960)
So who were the real soldiers who provided the inspiration for the BBC drama SAS Rogue Heroes?. Viewers of the first series of the historical drama watched gripped as a group of British mavericks reinvented the art of warfare in North Africa in the summer of 1942, ranging across the Sahara to attack German targets at will, destroying as many as 400 enemy aircraft, then melting back into the desert. But by February 1943 things had changed.
![[Sergeant-Major Reg Seekings had to shoot dead a mortally wounded 12-year-old boy to spare him his agony]](https://www.thesun.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/reg-seekings-268157532.jpg?strip=all&w=482)
David Stirling, who founded the SAS, was a prisoner of war, while the British military establishment could not wait to disband the unit they regarded as “raiders of the thug variety”. SAS leader Major Blair “Paddy” Mayne, who was fighting the top brass to win his young regiment even a temporary reprieve, agreed for them to spearhead a planned invasion of Italy.
![[Sergeant-Major Reg Seekings is played by Theo Barklem-Biggs]](https://www.thesun.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/01-01-2025-959930562.jpg?strip=all&w=640)
With his desert-hardened originals officially rebranded as the Special Raiding Squadron, Mayne put his men through four months of ferocious training at Azzib — then in Syria — on the steep shores of the eastern Mediterranean. The parachute-trained warriors, who had so much success with jeep borne missions in Africa, had to learn to launch seaborne raids from Royal Navy landing craft and to scale cliffs to attack onshore strongholds.
![[Major (later Lieutenant-Colonel) Robert Blair ‘Paddy’ Mayne led his men on numerous raids in North Africa, personally destroying more than 100 aircraft]](https://www.thesun.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/blair-mayne-dso-sas-one-604539.jpg?strip=all&w=960)
