Inside life of SAS: Rogue Heroes’ Paddy Mayne who took down 100 Nazi planes and had unlikely famous career before Army
HE was the hard-as-nails rugby-playing warrior whose extraordinary acts of bravery helped turn the tide against the Nazis.
But for decades, the secret war chest of Lieutenant Colonel Blair “Paddy” Mayne was hidden from history.
The World War Two hero — whose exploits as a founding member of the SAS are told in new BBC1 series SAS: Rogue Heroes, based on Ben Macintyre’s book of the same name — led a series of extraordinarily daring operations, including missions that saw him personally destroy more than 100 German aircrafts.
After a bruising ambush with the enemy in Hanover in 1945, his battle-weary men stumbled across a huge leather-bound book gifted by Adolf Hitler to the local council.
Within its hollowed-out pages, Blair — played by Jack O’Connell in the six-part series — stashed the Regiment’s war diary, alongside invaluable photos that The Sun can today reveal for the first time.
Following his death, aged 40, in a car crash after a booze session in 1955, his niece Fiona Ferguson guarded the chest for decades.
READ MORE ON WW2
Last night’s opening episode showed her 6ft 2in uncle as a heavy drinking, wild-living hero who was almost out of control.
She tells The Sun: “So many stories have been written about Blair over the years, getting more and more embellished with every telling.
“To many he was a war hero but to me he was a loving, generous uncle.”
Fiona, now 77, was born in 1945 and was ten when Blair died.
Most read in The Sun
But she kept his memory alive by reading his amazing diary, which was hidden in a chest in the cellar at his home in Northern Ireland.
She says: “At the SAS’s darkest hour, when the fledgling unit faced a do-or-die mission to prove its worth at all costs, my uncle was the first to lead a band of SAS raiders on to an enemy airbase on foot.
“He knew they had to strike hard, both to ensure the unit’s survival and to spur the failing Allied war effort in North Africa.
“When he stole on to the airstrip, and planted all of his incendiary bombs, he realised that a dozen or more enemy warplanes remained without charges.
“He climbed into the nearest and, with the incredible strength of the rugby international and boxing champion he was, ripped out the control panel with his bare hands.
“Ten warplanes received the same treatment and, in all, 24 were destroyed in that first-ever successful SAS raid.
“After five years of waging war deep behind enemy lines, Blair returned to the family home laden with war memorabilia.
“I’m happy to have been able to safeguard that unique treasure trove, enshrining the memory and history of a rightfully proud regiment but also preserving the true picture of my uncle.”
Softly spoken, sandy-haired Blair, who was capped for Ireland and the British Lions in rugby union before his military career, won four Distinguished Service Orders.
He was nominated unsuccessfully for a Victoria Cross for his last great feat of daring — rescuing his men, who had been pinned down in a ditch following an ambush near Oldenburg, Germany.
On April 9, 1945, Blair drove off or killed enemy snipers who were hiding in nearby farm buildings.
Then he tackled enemy troops in a patch of woodland by driving a jeep up and down the nearby road while his gunner poured fire into the German positions.
One of his officers wrote: “The sheer audacity and daring which he showed in driving his jeep across their field of fire momentarily bewildered the enemy”.
Despite such selfless heroics, military top brass initially dismissed the SAS — founded in summer 1941 — as a private army of “cut-throats”, and ordered them to return to their units or lives as ordinary civilians four years after their formation.
Although they were championed by PM Winston Churchill, the SAS was disbanded in October 1945, before being reinstated two years later.
In the hidden chest — along with Blair’s sand-coloured beret, war medals, photos and copies of letters to the families of his men killed in action — were touching notes to Fiona’s older sister Margaret, who he called “Funny face”.
Military historian Damien Lewis, who was given access to the war chest a decade ago by Fiona, says the documents reveal an “utterly unique piece of history”.
He says: “The wealth of material was a testament to a very different kind of man to the one history has built him up to be.
“Yes, he was a warrior, arguably without equal — but he was a caring individual.
“What came through from his war chest was just what care he had for his men, and the belief and faith and love they had for him.”
Nearly half a century after his death, Fiona and her family donated Paddy’s diary to the SAS Regimental Association but they kept the rest of his war chest intact.
In his book SAS: Brothers In Arms, Damien argues that stories of Blair and regiment founder David Stirling — played in the TV drama by Connor Swindells — having a massive falling out is untrue.
He says: “There is no evidence of it. They had one major argument then shared a bottle of whisky and bonded. Mayne never said a bad word against Stirling. Together they were terrifying. Stirling was the man with the flights of fancy. Mayne was the man who made them happen.
“Much is made of Mayne’s some-times wild behaviour but he was undoubtedly suffering from undiagnosed PTSD.
READ MORE SUN STORIES
Read More on The Sun
“He remained tortured by his demons but how could he not have been, given what he had done and seen, the close friends he had lost?”
- SAS Brothers In Arms, by Damien Lewis is published by Quercus. SAS: Rogue Heroes continues on BBC1 on Sunday at 9pm.