Earlier that year, a British team parachuted in suffered heavy losses against German General Erwin Rommel's Afrikakorps. This time, the Special Forces were trying to launch a surprise ground attack from the desert.
The British force penetrated Tamet Airfield and killed the German and Italian pilots and crew. At least twenty aircraft were destroyed or disabled. A fuel depot was set on fire. There was a simultaneous British attack on an air base in Sirte.
Both teams returned to the desert night to meet the navigator at the rendezvous point. The successes sparked a new guerrilla-style campaign in North Africa by a carefully selected group of British ordnance specialists, gunners, and cunning interlopers – and a fledgling navigator who may have never fired a shot.
“The SAS these days have a fearsome reputation, but I don’t remember ever wanting to kill anyone,” said Mr Sadler, who died on January 4 at the age of 103.
Mr Sadler is believed to be the last founding member of the SAS, or Special Air Service, the British Army's special forces unit. It was also the only remaining link to the Long Range Desert Group, the roving expeditionary force that helped the Allies win the Battle of North Africa.
Mr. Sadler once had to use his navigation skills to save his life. He and two British sergeants escaped after a German patrol captured their 15-man unit in January 1943. The trio covered 110 miles in five days, with little water, to reach a Free French garrison. They were handed over to American forces on suspicion of being German spies.
“We had long hair and beards and looked very ragged,” Mr. Sadler recalls. “Our feet were in a terrible state. I don’t think we looked much like soldiers.”
A group of journalists, including New Yorker reporter A. J. Liebling, was with the American forces when Mr. Sadler and the two other people arrived at the camp. “This man’s eyes were round and sky-blue, and his hair and whiskers were very light,” Liebling described Mr. Sadler in a New Yorker article. “His beard started below his chin, giving him a gaunt and slightly spotted appearance,” Liebling added, referring to the 19th-century French poet.
One of the American intelligence officers who interrogated Mr. Sadler and the two other people had a bottle of whiskey with him. “It was an excellent idea,” Liebling wrote, “because they had done a good job at the time.” “Half an hour later, he came out and told us he thought they were OK.”
Mr Sadler had arrived in North Africa as an anti-tank gunner. At a bar in Cairo while on vacation, he met some of the Long Range Desert Group's first recruits. He was first considered for the unit because of his weapons experience. On the way to the base, Mr. Sadler became fascinated by celestial navigation. He was offered the role of navigator.
He only had a few weeks to learn how to use a theodolite, an instrument used by surveyors, and how to read celestial charts.
“Desert navigation, like its counterpart at sea, is largely a matter of mathematics and observation, but the good navigator also relies on art, intuition and instinct,” author Ben McIntyre wrote in his book Rogue Heroes (2016), a sobering account of the story. SAS operations. “Sadler had an almost unerring, uncanny ability to know where he was, where he was going, and when he would get there.”
The Desert Assault Group was called L Detachment, a little trick to give the impression of Detachments A to K. Mr Sadler told BBC History Magazine: “I was very tickled by the idea of being able to find where you were. It was by looking at the stars.
Mr Sadler, who was working as a farmer in British colonial Africa when the war broke out, fit right into the mixture of personalities and background of the team – whose exploits have been chronicled in books and the current BBC series Rogue Heroes. (Tom Glenn Carney plays Mr. Sadler.)
Also alongside Mr Sadler was a Northern Irish war hero, Robert Blair “Paddy” Mayne, a hit-and-run expert who was credited with destroying more than 100 Axis aircraft.
Commandos attacked German bases along the Mediterranean coast, shooting down more than 325 aircraft and dozens of major fuel and ammunition depots. On one famous mission in July 1942, Mr. Sadler led about 100 men in a convoy of 18 jeeps — each equipped with Vickers K machine guns — to the German Sidi Heneish airfield in northwestern Egypt. The site was one of Rommel's bases for attempting to penetrate deep into Egypt.
Sadler, who was stationed outside the base to help evacuate any potentially wounded comrades, said the jeeps drove toward the airstrip at night and “started plowing into parked planes.” At least thirty aircraft – including Stuka bombers, Messerschmitt fighters and Junkers transport aircraft – were destroyed or badly damaged by machine-gun fire.
“Only one of our men was wounded and killed on the field,” Mr. Sadler said. “Everyone escaped one way or another.”
Mr. Sadler said he tried not to let his gut overwhelm his notes while on the move.
He once told a military historian: “You had to be confident because it was very easy, especially at night, to start feeling like you were getting it wrong, and you should be farther to the left or right.” “It was kind of easy to give way to that feeling if you weren't confident.”
Willis Michael Sadler was born in London on February 22, 1920, and grew up in Gloucestershire in the west of England. His father was the manager of a plastics factory, and his mother took care of their home.
At 17, Mr. Sadler traveled to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to work on a tobacco plantation. When war broke out two years later, he joined the Rhodesian Artillery in the British Army.
After leaving North Africa, Mr Sadler was sent to an SAS training center in Scotland and then parachuted into France in 1944 after the D-Day invasion and took part in sabotage operations. He retired as a major.
In the late 1940s, Mr. Sadler and Main, his former comrade in Battalion L, joined an Antarctic expedition that established a research base on a glacier (which has since melted) on Stonington Island.
Mr. Sadler later joined the British Foreign Office, where he worked in intelligence during the Cold War. He refused to discuss his duties publicly. Mr Sadler was confirmed dead at a nursing home in Cambridge, England A representative of the Special Air Service Regiment Association, a veterans group. No reason was given.
Mr. Sadler's marriage to Anne Hetherington ended in divorce. In 1958, he married Patricia Benson, who died in 2001. Survivors include a daughter from his second marriage, Sally Sadler.
Mr. Sadler has often said that he is well suited to the relative independence of desert missions. Before joining, he objected to a senior officer's order that soldiers keep their boots in their sleeping bags. Mr. Sadler voluntarily gave up his rank of sergeant rather than apologise.
He once told a military historian: “I was not at all keen on the extreme aspects of militarism, the ups and downs, although I did my best to be reasonably intelligent.”
