[Music] [Birdsong] [Music] On the 10th April 1945 in the heart of Nazi Germany, eight British soldiers were caught in a brutal ambush.

They were pinned down by a hail of machine gun and sniper fire.

As the enemy closed in, the end seemed inevitable.

[Music] [Gunfire] But then, out of nowhere, a Jeep stormed into view.

Two British soldiers were charging headlong into the bullets.

-At the wheel was Paddy Mayne, the most notorious leader of the SAS.

[Music] [Gunfire] [Music] The SAS was a radical new combat forged in the heat of the North African desert.

A handpicked group of rogue warriors who attacked the enemy from behind their own lines.

But in 1943, the SAS had left the desert, to enter a darker and far more complex theatre of war.

With unprecedented access to the SAS files, unseen archive footage and exclusive interviews with its original members, this is the remarkable story of the SAS' fight for Europe.

A new phase of the war that hurled them into their bloodiest battles yet.

Well I didn't hear it, the one that hits you, you never hear.

They would face the terror of execution and the trauma of civilian casualties.

We were there quite literally to liberate an enslaved people.

-And they would be the first allied soldiers to witness the nightmare of Belsen concentration camp.

There is no way of describing the horror of that camp.

[Music] [Music] [Explosion] The SAS was a unit of battle hardened desert commandos who fought in small groups behind enemy lines and wreaked untold damage.

But the man who had created the SAS, David Archibald Stirling, was an aristocratic dreamer who had once held lofty ambitions to be an artist or perhaps a famous mountaineer.

Many at British HQ did not like his unconventional tactics, or the rogues and reprobates he had handpicked to fight with him.

Every man knew the risks.

Through a combination of intuition, imagination and self confidence, he had made a success of his radical new method of warfare.

But in 1943, Stirling was captured and thrown into the Nazis most secure prison: Colditz.

Now the SAS was under a very different commander.

The unpredictable and violent former Irish Rugby International, Major Paddy Mayne.

Mayne had built his reputation on the battlefield as a warrior of the first rank, but unlike Stirling he had no interest in charming high command, was often drunk and disorderly and prone to acts of savagery.

[Gunfire] [Music] The original men of the SAS have long since passed away but in 1987, a handful of them told their story on film.

"57 Take 1" They all remembered the unit's most notorious fighter, Paddy Mayne.

-He had a marvelous battle nostril and what looked to be absolutely foolhardy was legitimate with Paddy because this extraordinary skill.

-Paddy who was a man that if you walked behind you had no fear at all, if you were with Paddy Mayne there was no fear at all.

But I think Paddy always needed an eye on him.

We wondered whether Paddy had got the right connections and he'd certainly ruffled a lot of feathers, we wondered whether he could weather the storm.

For two years Stirling had lead his men across the desert.

In July 1943, Paddy Mayne led them out of it.

For the first time the SAS would be taking the fight to mainland Europe.

The liberation would begin with invasion of Sicily.

In July 1943, 160,000 soldiers on 3000 ships prepared to set sail across the Mediterranean.

The SAS would be leading them into battle.

Mayne was ordered to leave Stirling's original tactics in the desert, his men would not be fighting behind the lines but at the spearhead of the invasion.

The desert war was over.

Paddy Mayne was now leading his troops into a different sort of conflict.

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] Their target was the coastal defence battery at Capo Murro Di Porco.

A "veritable fortress", defended by a range of heavy guns.

If Mayne's men failed to knock out the battery, the invasion fleet could be blasted to shreds long before it reached the shore.

[Loud Bangs] [Boat Noise] As the unit approached the coast, conditions turned against them.

And the weather got very, very rough.

It got rougher and rougher.

And I remember Paddy saying to the captain, you have got to land us you know and you must land you do, we've got to be landed.

-At 1am the men climbed down into their landing craft, bucking in a heavy sea.

Many were sick into cardboard buckets, which immediately fell apart in their hands.

-Through the gloom as they approached the target, shapes bobbed on the surface of the sea.

Allied paratroopers, blown off course, were fighting for their lives in the water.

Sergeant Pat Riley could hear the men drowning and screaming for help.

-When we come to do the landing on Murro di Porco, the Americans I think it was, that flew the airbourne in but unfortunately they dropped them short and they found the sea.

And as we went along there was a lot of airbourne boys in the water which we picked up but then it came to a thing where we couldn't, couldn't, it was jeopardising the operation so we had to push on.

-Why couldn't you stop them?

-Well we got an operation.

Please, those people, the casualties.

You can't.

People might find it hard to understand these days, perhaps ordinary units understand, but my idea that my first objective is to get there.

I've got gun batteries to destroy.

The guns were positioned atop towering cliffs more than a hundred feet high.

Mayne ordered his men to scale them and storm the gun batteries.

But each one was protected by a ring of concrete pillboxes.

SAS veteran Reg Seekings had worked out a plan of attack.

-What I'd done on board ship, I'd got the designs and measurements of the different type pillboxes and I'd worked out angles of fire got a certain distance where the fire crossed, you could get underneath there in between the two guns and all you had to do was just stick a grenade through the slit.

It was finished and then run round and any survivors you finished off.

Mayne's men had put the guns out of action allowing the invasion fleet a safe landing.

But they were about to come up against something that they had never experienced in the desert.

[Music] [Music] As they began clearing the bunkers, Reg Seekings found terrified civilians cowering in the darkness.

-I heard voices, I called them and they came out, came filing out these civvies, they'd all taken cover when the thing started on this gun battery.

And drawing up the rear was a young girl.

The only difference between her and my sister is she was dark, my sister was fair and a young girl about 14 or something like that come out so proudly and just as she got past me, a grenade went off nearby and that just broke her and she grabbed her what obviously was her grandfather I suppose sobbing her heart out and this really cooled me down, and I thought of my kid sister.

[Music] [Music] Now civilians were being dragged into the conflict, the clarity and gentlemanliness of the desert war suddenly seemed very distant.

[Music] [Music] As Mayne led his men up through Sicily, confidence in their commander was growing.

-During the house-to-house combat Mayne was a ferocious whirlwind but during breaks in the fighting, he was a beacon of calm, nonchalantly strolling the streets, camera in hand.

[Music] [Music] The port of Augusta was next to fall, this unique footage shows Mayne's men throwing a boisterous looting party, instigated by their leader.

Paddy Mayne was seen pushing a baby's pram up the street, filled with bottles of booze.

He then used a hand grenade to blow open a safe in the bank and was disappointed to find only a handful of silver spoons and an old brooch.

They'd have been Viking raiders without a doubt I think most of them.

If ever there was a raider he was one, wasn't he?

He was the leader of a raiding squadron in fact.

Drink and be merry boys and so on was very typical of the attitude in which the Vikings sailed across the North Sea to ravage the coasts of Britain and Europe.

[Music] The Allies had liberated Sicily and on September 8th 1943, the Italian government surrendered.

Now, the battle for Italy would be fought against crack German troops who had no intention of giving up without a fight.

So far, Mayne had fulfilled his orders to attack head on and was succeeding.

But Stirling's unique idea was being eroded, the Unit was losing the advantage that came with fighting in small groups behind the lines.

The full consequences of this would become horribly apparent when they were ordered to storm the fortified port of Termoli.

Termoli was it was terrible.

It was one of the worst times of the unit, actually.

The port of Termoli, on the Adriatic coast of Italy, was the lynchpin of the German line and the Allies were determined to break it.

After a morning of fighting, the port was in allied hands.

It felt like a pushover but their confidence was misplaced.

At dawn on October 5th, the Germans launched a counterattack so fierce, it looked like the town was about to be recaptured by the enemy.

Most of the regular troops retreated, leaving Mayne's men and the commandos to hold their positions until the rest of the force could regroup.

Mayne ordered Reg Seekings and his troop to move as quickly as possible to reinforce a point in the line where another counter attack was expected imminently.

Seeking's 17 men boarded a truck unaware that they were firmly in the Nazi's sights.

Hiding at the top of the town clock tower was a German artillery spotter watching their every move.

Unknown to the British, he was pinpointing targets for the German Panzer gunners in the hills.

-We loaded on to the trucks.

And well I didn't hear it.

The one that hits you, you never hear.

[Fire crackling] Even Reg Seekings, known as the hardest man in the unit was haunted by that attack.

The memory would stay with him for the rest of his life.

It landed right in the middle of us, just a foot or so behind me actually.

It was a shambles, terrible.

There was Sergeant McNinch.

He was actually sick but he had volunteered to drive the truck and he sitting there and I said, for Christ sake Mac come on, and he's there with a big grin on his face and I said, don't sit there with a bloody grin on your, you bloody idiot, come on out, and I grabbed him and felt his body and he was stone dead, a piece of shrapnel had gone right through him and killed him instantly with a grin on his face.

And another one, Henderson, Sergeant Henderson he was hanging upside down on the truck and one arm had gone and you could see his heart, lungs all pumping away, and he called to me, and he said take this tommy gun off my chest, it's hurting my chest and so I took him, got him, lowered him down and then Sergeant Major Skinner who had just, the one that got the grenade on his leg he'd just returned from hospital to us, recovered from that and he was on fire, I never realised a body burnt so fast and I don't know it was just one of those things, all the other carnage around you but the sight of one of your friends burning I thought hell, the first thing came into mind, I've gotta put it out and I went to look around and there was these woman who used to do our washing, her and her daughters, they were laying there, blown open, all their stomachs blown open like a balloon, and on, alongside the heap was her eldest son, and as I stepped over the top of him to get some water out of this building, the front of the building, that he jumped up and ran around screaming with this huge balloon of gut.

So I caught him and I shot him, there was nothing you could do.

Couldn't have him running around like that.

You could do no good for him.

Seekings turned back to try to find other survivors.

In the town square he was confronted by another harrowing scene.

A few minutes later, Seekings caught sight of the boy's teenage sister, she was shell-shocked but uninjured, he would never forget her expression of peculiar, dreadful calm.

[Music] The destroyed truck was photographed shortly after.

In the battle for Termoli the unit had lost 21 men killed and 24 wounded.

It's shattering because these were the first men I'd actually commanded.

Men which i'd trained, new men and moulded them together.

They'd become more than just your men.

They were more your friends, your pals your know.

And they were good chaps, you know, nice chaps apart from anything else.

[Music] [Music] The fight for the town raged for another 12 hours but then suddenly the counter attack ceased and the Germans began to pull back.

Against incredible odds Mayne and his unit had held Termoli.

The top brass at HQ were delighted with the victory but Mayne was deeply affected by the loss of his men.

He had accepted a change of tactics and now felt a personal responsibility for the outcome.

When things got rough, Paddy got more and more determined and I think he came, became more clear cut in, in what he wanted, and what he was going to do.

He didn't go ranting and raving mad.

He just became colder and colder and colder.

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] Late one evening in October 1943 a young British prisoner of war sat down to a delicious meal with a Nazi General.

[Music] Lieutenant John Tonkin of the SAS had been captured during the raid on Termoli and imprisoned in central Italy.

After refusing to divulge anything under interrogation he was surprised to be invited for dinner with a German divisional-commander.

At the end of an oddly pleasant evening, the enemy general shook his hand and wished him good luck.

Tonkin would soon find out why.

[Music] This is of interest to me and it might be to future generations of our family.

-In 1987 John Tonkin recorded his own, very personal, war memoir.

Our motto was who dares win which we somewhat irreverently transferred into who cares who wins?

-For the first time, his family has given permission for this unique and poignant testament to be broadcast.

[Car Noise] As Tonkin was being driven back to his cell, the guard told him he was about to be handed over to the secret police.

Almost his exact words, very precise words were "I want you to listen very carefully to what I have to say, we now have orders which we can't disobey, that we must hand you over to the German special police and they are people, that I will tell you quite frankly, we do not like and I must warn you that from now on the German army to its shame can no longer guarantee your life.

Infuriated by the success of units like the SAS, Hitler had issued the infamous Kommando Order.

All enemy soldiers caught operating behind the lines were to be executed without trial.

His officers knew that the order was inhumane and illegal.

But as the Nazi zealots of the SS took control of the German army the SAS could expect no mercy.

Tonkin realised he faced a stark choice; escape or die.

Every hour on that drive the truck stopped and the Germans used to get out and they'd all congregate out there and have a cigarette for a ten minute 'smoko'.

And I then got my idea and I started to work on the rope that held the canvas down and slowly bit by bit I managed to get it off.

A way down this very rough mountainside as hard as I could go and in due course the truck started up without any hullabaloo, they hadn't missed me and drove on its way.

Tonkin trekked south for days until he stumbled into an Allied patrol and returned to safety.

Tonkin had narrowly escaped becoming a victim of Hitler's commando order, but others were not so lucky.

A week earlier, four captured SAS men were murdered in cold blood, the Fuhrer's revenge on the SAS had begun in earnest.

When my father was captured, he was a big believer that most people were good, so he actually had a great deal of sympathy in a way for the normal Germany soliders but not for the others, he said, he can't, he couldn't understand how anybody could be so cruel and horrible.

I think he felt very patriotic, he just wanted to do his bit for the country.

[Music] In the spring of 1944, the SAS was stationed in Britain for the first time, preparing for the last great push of the war: D-Day.

160,000 thousand British, Canadian and American troops were preparing to invade Nazi occupied France.

But the SAS would not be joining the invasion forced.

Instead they would be going back behind the lines.

This secret battle map reveals the plan to launch an unprecedented 40 SAS operations all across occupied France.

Each with a very British codename that gave no clue to their true intent.

Their task was to blow up supply lines, blockade roads, arm the local resistance and stop the northward advance of the Panzers in any way they could.

The SAS had grown into a mighty force of some 2,500 men.

This rare footage shows Paddy Mayne parading his new troops on home soil for General Montgomery.

Mayne was fiercely proud of the SAS and their reputation as hard fighting rogues and reprobates but he was about to enrol a man with a different kind of zeal.

He would meet him at dawn after an all night drinking session with desert original, Johnny Cooper.

-At that stage, I was struggling to get the blackouts down.

There was a bang at the front door, so he said go on Johnny go and find out what it is, because none of the mess staff were on duty, I mean everybody was still in bed.

I opened the door and there stood this Padre.

He said "Captain McLuskey reporting for duty".

-The Reverend James Fraser McLuskey was a gentle, devout man of God who firmly believed his calling was to help the British war effort.

He had been training for months and had even learned to parachute but so far his new commanding officer had been chiefly interested in spirits of the alcoholic kind.

'Film Role 30, 34 Take 1' The Padre's memories of that first meeting were also recorded in 1987.

-What were your first impressions?

Somewhat chaotic.

The commanding officer and some of his best friends had been celebrating the night before and indeed into the morning, so the appearance of the mess was pleasantly confused.

-So the shout from inside, from Paddy, who's that John?

I said, new Padre reporting for duty.

"Bring him in, pull him a pint of beer".

So I went across and pulled him a pint of beer, and said, right we're going for breakfast.

We went in for breakfast with the Padre with a pint of beer, Paddy and myself with a pint of beer and that was his initiation into the 1 SAS regiment.

McLuskey, dubbed 'the parachute Padre", would join the men on their missions behind the lines and bring a spiritual energy to this most ungodly bunch of warriors.

While the Padre would be going into action, Paddy Mayne, to his frustration would not.

He was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel but the order was clear: stay in Britain and coordinate operations.

Instead, the missions would be lead by his most trusted men.

One of the first would be the former Nazi prisoner, newly promoted Captain John Tonkin.

He was to lead operation 'Bulbasket', and parachute into the forest near Poitiers in west central France.

We got a sudden flap and a sudden warning came into the came and Paddy called me over and he said well you are due to leave tomorrow morning and you'd better get on with things.

Just after midnight on June 6th, a few hours before the D Day invasion, Tonkin set out in secret, for France.

The pilot was running straight in, very very beautifully indeed and then the green light came on, so I just pushed off and it was absolutely beautiful dangling in the air, drifting gently down bright moonlight, no problems at all.

Soon after dawn, a young French secret agent greeted Tonkin at the drop zone.

A stilted change of passwords took place: -Is there a house in the woods?

-Yes, but it's not very good said agent Samuel whose fantastical real name was Major Rene Amedee Louis Pierre Maingard de la Ville-es-Offrans.

Major Maingard was Tonkin's link to the local French resistance.

The region contained more than 7,000 Maquis.

The name given to the complex constellation of local guerrilla fighters who were sworn to defeat the Nazi invaders and who would be vital to Tonkin's sabotage mission.

The Maquis were certainly brave but they were woefully under-equipped, largely untrained and prone to violent infighting.

And, worst of all, they had been infilitrated by Nazi informers.

John Tonkin decided to put his trust in the Maquis.

It was a risky strategy, but it was the only one available.

[Plane Noises] Tonkin's 40 men were parachuted in along with an airdrop of supplies, including Jeeps.

Suddenly the sky was absolutely full of Jeeps and men and containers.

They all came roaring in together.

One Jeep, I remember, one of its 90 foot parachutes tore and collapsed and that Jeep came down like a ton of bricks and the Jeep fairly thumped into the ground and dug itself a hole.

Tonkin was now ready to set up camp in the woods and begin his mission.

[Music] Our initial tasks were to blow up and encourage the resistance to blow up four main railway lines.

And we started up the Jeeps, put the guns on them, put the fuel in them and headed out.

Across France SAS units were parachuting in to conduct their sabotage missions.

Just as in the desert war, they would use Jeeps to attack targets of opportunity.

And they now had a new weapon; air strikes.

By spying on German movements, they could call in a deadly barrage of fire from above.

If we could tell the higher commands whether the German army or their airforce was being reinforced, withdrawn or just maintained in any one area the aircraft would pick them up.

[Gunfire] [Explosion] The results of their missions in France are recorded in a unique artifact, the War Diary, held in secrecy by the SAS for seventy years.

This extraordinary scrapbook of combat reports and original photographs was put together by the men themselves and kept in a leather binder liberated from Nazi Germany.

It lists the impressive tally of munitions, communications and rail links that the SAS destroyed.

But there is another terrible list that makes for chilling reading.

For every SAS success, the Nazis exacted bloody reprisals against innocent civilians.

On 27th June, the diary records, the Village of Vermont was burned to the ground.

On the same day, the Village of Duns les Place was given over to rape and murder; 21 civilians were shot by firing squad.

Fire [Gun-fire] In the face of such atrocities, the SAS needed someone to keep up their spirits.

To supply this one man took a leap of faith.

On June 22nd the Parachute Padre crashed to earth through a tree and was found lying unconscious.

The next thing I knew, the Padre had landed with us and I thought, oh Good God.

-Fraser McCluskey had parachuted in near Dijon, to minister to the men of Operation Houndsworth, another of the sabotage missions.

With him he carried everything required, should the need arise for an impromptu service.

[Music] Padres, by the Geneva Convention, are unarmed.

I never carried arms and I think the men were glad to see the Padre as a kind of symbol of the will of God for peace for all men.

In the type of work they were doing, it was possible for a Padre to be there without being a nuisance to them.

That is to say there were jobs to be done and when we had drops from the air, another pair of hands were useful.

the doctor sometimes you know.

-He even came out and he was my driver on one or two things, only thing he didn't realise, that e such a big noise as they did.

-I had no doubt that the carriage of arms was necessary and I suppose you might have said I wasn't altogether unprotected because I had a large and burley batman who came with me in the Jeep or car or whatever I had and who was possibly armed to excess.

McLuskey provided something that the SAS had never had before someone who was prepared, without sentimentality, to tend to their spirits, even their hearts.

I had no doubt that the war was necessary.

I was quite sure that we were there, quite literally to liberate an enslaved people and to keep the torch of freedom burning throughout the world as far as we could.

Everybody liked him, a lot of them loved him.

Everywhere he went, he smoothed the feathers of fear.

He did a terrific amount of good in just his presence.

While the Padre was calming nerves in Operation Houndsworth, 200 miles away near Poitiers, Tonkin feared the net was closing around Operation Bulbasket.

Local intelligence indicated that a full-scale hunt for the British saboteurs was underway.

Tonkin's wireless messages to HQ reflected his mounting fears: troop movements in the area day and night; situation serious 400 Germans are looking for us; area unhealthy.

Running low on supplies and keen for adventure, some of Tonkin's men were becoming bored and careless.

-Two of my SAS troopers extremely stupidly had gone into the village from the camp to chat up the girls and to have some wine and then they'd stroll back again.

[Music] Well that was crazy At first light we were woken up extremely rudely.

[Gun-fire] Panic is an incredibly infectious thing.

The Germans are coming, the Germans are coming.

Run, run, run.

I was almost certain that they were trying to drive us into a trap.

Tonkin and a handful of men ran deep into the woods and escaped but most of the Bulbasket troop fled in the opposite direction, down the slope and into the valley and straight into the hands of the enemy.

31 captured SAS men were now at the mercy of the Commando order.

[Birdsong] [Footsteps] On the morning of July 7th the prisoners were taken deep into the forests of St Sauvant Burial pits had already been dug.

The prisoners hands were tied, each man was escorted by two German soldiers.

There was no possibility of escape.

Lieutenant Richard Crisp, the only officer who could speak German was read the execution order and relayed it to the men.

This picture was taken shortly before the ambush.

Only four of these men escaped with Tonkin.

The rest were executed, their bodies dragged into the forest and buried in the pits.

Today a memorial marks the burial site of the murdered SAS.

The victims of the single greatest atrocity carried out under Hitler's Commando Order.

Even long after the conflict, the battle hardened SAS officer in Tonkin couldn't allow any display of emotion.

31 SAS were caught and that was the sad and horrible story about that particular episode.

I think one of the hardest things for dad must have been that a farmer had been out looking for truffles I believe with his dogs and they found the graves, the shallow graves, of the men that had been murdered there in the forest.

So he had to go back and identify them.

There was supposed to be a certain amount of decency in war and that just disappeared.

Having escaped, the irrepressible Tonkin fought on.

With just eight men.

-We from then on started to get fairly rough with the Germans, where wherever we could find them and locate them we'd get the RAF to bomb them.

On July 14th he called in an air strike on the SS who had attacked his camp.

150 were reported killed.

In the operating period of 43 days we attempted 32 attacks and only two of them were unsuccessful.

[Explosions] Over a three month period Bulbasket and the other SAS operations had provided vital support in the successful invasion of France.

They had destroyed 60 railway targets, killed or wounded 760 of the enemy and taken 3,000 prisoners including a general.

In a theatre of war much darker and more brutal than the desert conflict, the SAS had proved their behind the lines tactics were as vital as ever.

[Music] [Cheering] On August 25th 1944, Paris was liberated.

Amid the throng of celebrations drove an SAS Jeep.

In the passenger seat was the hulking figure of Paddy Mayne, who had finally been allowed to join his men in France.

Three weeks earlier Paddy Mayne had been parachuted in behind the lines with orders not to lead attacks but to coordinate action.

He therefore drove around from one operation to another, treating the whole thing as if it was an enjoyable, if extremely dangerous, holiday.

Driving Mayne on this vacation was SAS navigator Mike Sadler, who had come to understand his commander's complex personality.

He was physically terribly tough and a very nice and kind fellow most of the time.

Once he had gone behind a certain point drinking he became somebody quite different.

After a splendid lunch that we had in a black market restaurant we were all sitting round drinking our coffee and so on and he suddenly produced a hand grenade and pulled the pin out and stood it in the middle of the table.

[Click] [Music] We didn't quite know what to do, we all sat wondering whether to dive under the table, some people did, others thought well he can't be intending to blow himself to pieces and us so we just sat there.

And of course he'd cut the detonator off so it was alright but it was the sort of you know iked to give somebody a fright.

-It was a typically macho Mayne performance but it was also symbolic of the kind of war the SAS was now fighting; filled with daring bravado, but with cruelty just beneath the surface.

[Music] [Music] For four years, the SAS had fought its unconventional war across baking deserts and through deep forests, battling against invaders who wished to conquer and enslave the world.

But as the war entered its final bloody chapter, the SAS found itself fighting against people defending their own land.

In March 1945 the SAS crossed the Rhine and entered Nazi Germany.

As the Allies chased the Nazis back into Germany, the SAS were in the vanguard.

Acting as a forward reconnaissance force, weeding out pockets of resistance and battling the fanatical SS.

The end of the war was in sight and Paddy Mayne plunged into his final conflict with a fervour that was either supremely brave or suicidal, and possibly both.

[Music] With orders only to co-ordinate the action, Mayne hadn't tasted battle since the massacre of his men at Termoli.

He was itching for a fight.

And he had brought along his own musical accompaniment; he parachuted in with a gramophone strapped to his leg.

Paddy Mayne would invade Germany to the strains of his favourite Irish music, the ballads of Percy French.

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Gunfire] [Music] [Gunfire] As they advanced through Northern Germany the forward column of Mayne's Jeeps came under intense fire.

The action was mapped in the War Diary.

A group of SAS men were pinned down by the roadside and cut off from any support.

Paddy Mayne realised that the only way to save them was with a full-blooded charge.

"Who wants to have a go?"

he asked.

[Music] [Tyre-screech] With a volunteer gunner at his side, Mayne hurtled into a storm of bullets, laying down his own barrage.

When he reached the end of the road, Mayne calmly executed a u-turn and under heavy fire ran the gauntlet again.

[Gun-fire] [Music] Mayne saved all of his men, picked up the wounded and dead and by some miracle emerged without a scratch.

He said "People think I'm a big mad Irishman but I'm not, I calculate the risks and have a go."

This, his final battle of the war was fought in much the same way as the first; saving his men with a complete disregard for his own safety and killing in prodigious numbers.

[Music] [Music] [Music] Paddy Mayne was recommended for the Victoria Cross, the highest British award for valour.

The war diary contains the many citations he received.

By a single act of supreme bravery he drove the enemy from their stronghold.

Not only did he save the lives of the wounded but also completely defeated and destroyed the enemy.

This officer is worthy of the highest award for gallantry and leadership.

And yet, Mayne was not awarded the Victoria Cross.

Here, on his commendation, the word VC is crossed out.

Quite why Mayne was denied the Victoria Cross was, and remains, a source of deep controversy.

[Music] Perhaps some at HQ didn't want the SAS to be given the distinction.

Perhaps Mayne's drinking and brawling had counted against him.

But the real explanation may be simpler.

To merit the Victoria Cross, heroic actions need to be verified by independent witnesses.

In SAS operations, covert, fast moving, self-regulating, such criteria are often impossible to meet.

Paddy Mayne may have been denied this ancient honour because he was fighting a new sort of war.

For many in the SAS the failure to award Paddy Mayne the VC was proof that the regiment had never been fully accepted by the military establishment.

[Music] Mayne had led the SAS on their last charge against the Nazi die hards.

But as they advanced into the heart of Germany, it was John Tonkin who uncovered the full horror of what Hitler's SS could do to ordinary civilians.

The SAS were heading for Berlin, when John Tonkin, in the lead Jeep, caught the first whiff, a cloying stench of fleshly rot and excrement that seemed to hang in the air like a plague miasma.

The reek of pure evil, the appalling smell grew steadily stronger as they advanced.

That is the main entrance gate to the administration block of the totally infamous and unbelievable Belsen Concentration Camp.

[Music] [Music] There, there is no way of describing the horror of that camp, you can only describe it as meeting some 30,000 walking skeletons.

When a prisoner got to the stage where they couldn't walk any longer, they just dragged them out and threw them into the pit and there were living skeletons still in those pits.

A very very grim story altogether.

While we were there, they were just for fun taking pot shots at the prisoners, and nobody was paying any attention and I have never been so angry in my life.

[Music] So I went round and I got hold of all these, all their officers, I took my men with me and we lined them up and I said unless that shooting stops immediately you are all going to die very horribly and I said now get out and stop it and they went out immediately and the shooting stooped.

Tonkin gave orders to arrest the commandant of the camp along with the rest of the guards.

[Music] Instead of exacting revenge on the SS, Tonkin demonstrated the meaning of civilisation.

My father had huge self control when he was there in Belsen, not to have wanted to got rid of all of the officers.

Dad always said to us that we must never ever forget what happened there so that it never happens again.

What a creed like Nazism can do to people is unbelievable and this is a bit of a grim story but the truth should be known because its glossed over.

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] On May 8th the war in Europe was officially over.

Millions took to the streets to rejoice on VE day.

The Prime Minister Churchill made the speech that it was all over and so you can imagine the army Jeeps of the SAS driving right up the steps into bars.

And the men had another reason to celebrate.

David Stirling, the maverick visionary who created the SAS had been freed from Colditz and was on his way back to London.

But Stirling was not quite free yet, on his return he was held in a psychiatric evaluation camp.

They assumed anybody who came out of Colditz would require treatment before they were safe to be allowed back into normal circulation.

So we were put inside a camp which had a wire perimeter and so on, and they had all the official nannies there, we were told we had to be there for 2 days.

-For over two years Stirling had been trying and failing to escape from captivity.

He was determined not to fail this one last time.

I don't think there was anybody left in the camp by 11 o'clock, we were all in London or gone home.

By 12 o'clock that evening I was in a nightclub by 2 o'clock I was having my first roger for years.

[Music] Stirling was too later to rejoin his regiment.

It was assumed that a specialised unit like the SAS had no future in peacetime.

On October 4th 1945, the SAS received a crisp, unemotional memo from the War Office with the directive they knew was coming.

It has been decided to disband the Special Air Service.

Everyone was going to be sent back to their regiments, well you can imagine people being away from their regiments for years and all this comradeship in SAS, it was frightening.

-I asked for a favour and I was told your day is over, you're gonna you're not a blue eyed boy now.

And I said well, I'll stand on my own two feet and I'll survive where you won't you so and so, that was an officer too.

I'm inclined to think at my present age I must have been a bit of fool but I still wouldn't have missed it.

We certainly unsettled people.

I think that the Germans knew what the regiment were by the time the war came to an end and I think we probably helped to speed it up, we helped speed up the collapse in Europe.

-I think as you get older, you appreciate it more in different ways; it's not that you're so proud or so, what's the word I can think of?

It's the family, it's the people, the friends that you will never, ever, until you're dead forget!

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