In 1941, a 25-year-old Scottish officer named David Sterling was lying in a hospital bed in Cairo with a back injury from a botched parachute jump. He had no authority, no official support, and no reason to believe anyone would listen to what he was about to propose. But Sterling had an idea that would change the way wars are fought forever.

He wanted to take a handful of men behind enemy lines in the North African desert and blow up German airfields while everyone was sleeping. The British military thought he was insane. So he snuck past the guards at Middle East headquarters, limped into a senior officer’s room on crutches, and pitched his plan uninvited.

Within weeks, the Special Air Service was born. And over the next 80 years, this unit would become so feared that even America’s best trained soldiers would be warned never to engage them. Sterling’s first mission was a catastrophe. He took 66 men on a parachute drop to raid access airfields near Tbrook. The weather turned brutal.

Wind scattered his team across the desert, and only 22 men made it back. A third of his unit were gone on night one. Any normal commander would have been shut down after that, but Sterling adapted. He ditched the parachutes, hitched a ride with the long range desert group, and drove his men right up to the enemy airfields under cover of darkness.

That second mission destroyed 60 aircraft on the ground without losing a single man. Over the following months, the SAS destroyed more than 300 Axis aircraft, a handful of soldiers in modified jeeps mounted with Vicers machine guns, tearing across the Sahara [music] at night and vanishing before dawn.

Hitler called Sterling the Phantom Major and issued his commando order in 1942, declaring that all captured special forces commandos were to be executed immediately. No trial, no prisoner of war status. That order was carried out. 34 captured SAS men were executed by the Germans after a mission in France in 1944.

Another 31 were killed in cold blood a few months later. The Germans feared the SAS so much they changed the rules of war to deal with them. But even with the death sentence over every operation, the SAS kept going. By war’s end, they had expanded into into [music] a full brigade operating behind enemy lines across France, Italy, and into Germany itself.

Then the British government disbanded them. The war was over. That decision lasted about 18 months. By 1947, Cold War tensions forced the government to bring them back and the regular 22nd SAS regiment was established near Herafford. The selection process they created to fill those ranks would become the hardest military entrance test on Earth.

Twice a year around 200 soldiers show up at the Bracken Beacons in South Wales. These are not civilians. They are trained soldiers from elite units like the Parachute Regiment. [music] 90% of them will fail. The Hills phase lasts 4 weeks. Candidates carry weighted packs and rifles across mountain terrain.

Navigating alone with the map and compass. The directing staff give you nothing. Not encouragement, not criticism, not even a clue whether you are on pace. You are completely alone with your own doubt. The climax is the fan dance. A 24 km march over penny fan carrying 40 lbs and a rifle. [music] Soldiers have died attempting it.

After that comes the long drag. 64 kilometers carrying 55 pounds in under 24 hours. Then jungle training in Brunai. Then a brutal combat survival and interrogation phase. By the [music] end 200 candidates have become roughly 25. Some years nobody passes. [music] The SAS would rather have empty slots than lower the standard.

And what those men are capable of became clear to the entire world on a single evening in May 1980. Six armed men stormed the Iranian embassy in London, taking 26 hostages. The British government refused to negotiate. B squadron of 22 SAS raced from Heraford to London and set up in a building next door.

For six days, they lowered microphones down chimneys to track hostage positions, built a full-scale replica of the embassy at a nearby barracks, and rehearsed the assault daily. [music] On day six, the lead gunman shot a hostage and threw his body out the front door. Margaret Thatcher authorized force immediately. At 7:23 that evening, with news cameras rolling live, the SAS launched Operation Nimrod.

Red team repelled from the roof. Blue team breached from the rear. One soldier got tangled in his rope and hung suspended above the building as fire erupted below him. His teammates could not wait. They blew in the windows and went in without him. [music] Stung grenades detonated on every floor. CS gas flooded the hallways.

The assault teams swept through 56 rooms across six floors and gas masks and black assault gear. 17 minutes later, five gunmen were dead. 19 hostages were rescued and the entire thing had played out on live television in front of millions. The SAS went from a unit most Britain had never heard of to a national symbol overnight.

Two years later, they deployed 8,000 mi south to the Faulland Islands. Argentina had invaded and the British had no plan to retake them, but D squadron was aboard the carrier HMS Hermes heading into the unknown. Argentine aircraft on a tiny island called Pebble Island threatened the planned British landings.

[music] The Pukara ground attack planes stationed there could carry machine guns, cannons, bombs, rockets, and napal. If they got airborne during the amphibious landing at San Carlos Bay, British soldiers would be cut apart on the beaches. On the night of May 14th, 45 SAS soldiers flew in by helicopter carrying mortar bombs and explosives.

They landed 6 km from the airirst strip and marched [music] toward it in darkness. Within 30 minutes, every aircraft on the airfield was destroyed. Six Pukaras, four T-34 mentors, one transport plane, 11 aircraft gone. The Argentine garrison barely fired a shot in return.

The SAS withdrew, flew back to HMS Hermes, and sat down to a full English breakfast. If you are finding this useful, hit subscribe. We cover military history and special forces every week. Now, the Gulf War. In January 1991, an eight-man SAS patrol designated Bravo 20 was dropped behind Iraqi lines to hunt Scud missile launchers.

They were inserted by Chinook helicopter into the flat, freezing Iraqi desert on the night of January 22nd. Almost immediately, everything fell apart. Their radio could not reach headquarters. The terrain offered almost no cover. Then a goat herder stumbled across their position and alerted nearby Iraqi forces.

What followed was a desperate running fight northwest towards Syria across open desert in sub-zero temperatures. The patrol split up during a firefight. Some men ran out of ammunition. Others could not feel their hands or feet. Three men died, one in combat, two from hypothermia during the escape.

Four were captured and subjected to brutal interrogation at Abu Grae prison before being released at the end of the war. Only one man made it out. Chris Ryan walked 180 m 180 miles through hostile Iraqi territory, crossing the Syrian border alone and on foot, completing the longest escape and evasion in SAS history.

The patrol became the most highly decorated British unit since the Bore War, but the real test was still coming. After September 11th, the SAS was thrown into the most intense sustained combat of its existence. In Afghanistan, they carried out Operation Trent in 2001, their largest mission since World War II.

But Iraq is where they proved what they were truly built for. Starting in 2004, an SAS squadron joined Task Force Black in Baghdad, operating alongside America’s Joint Special Operations Command. Their process was called Find, Fix, Finish. Identify a target, pin down their location, hit the building in the middle of the night.

Multiple raids every single night, moving faster than insurgent networks could adapt. In February 2004, they almost got Abu Musab al- Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, when they assaulted a house in Baghdad. After breaching the door, they found a booby trap and had to pull back. Intelligence recovered from inside revealed Zarqawi had left just minutes before.

They had missed him by a razor’s edge, but they did not stop hunting. In April 2006, B Squadron launched Operation Larchwood 4, a series of nighttime raids near Yusfia that finally produced the intelligence leading directly to Zarqawi’s [music] death. By late 2005, the SAS had integrated so deeply with JSOC that they were described as joined at the hip with Delta Force, running missions side by side in Baghdad every night.

The results were staggering. Task Force Black captured or killed over 3,500 terrorists in the Baghdad area. Bombings dropped from over 150 per month to an average of two per month. A single SAS squadron rotating every 6 months helped break an insurgency that the entire conventional military was struggling to contain.

And that’s the core of what makes the SAS different. Their selection does not just find tough soldiers. It finds men who can make critical decisions alone [music] under impossible pressure with no one telling them on what to do. David Sterling understood this in 1941 when he [music] built the unit around small self-reliant teams instead of conventional formations.

80 years later, the philosophy has not changed. America’s Delta Force was explicitly modeled on the on the SAS by Colonel Charlie Beckwith who trained with 22 SAS in the early 1960s and spent the next decade building an American equivalent Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and dozens of other nations followed the same blueprint.

From a hospital bed in Cairo to the burning balconies of the Iranian embassy, from the frozen deserts of Iraq to the midnight raids in Baghdad, the SAS did not just pioneer modern special operations. They set the standard everyone else is still trying to reach. Their motto has been the same since 1941. [music] Who dares wins.

And after 80 years of proving it, nobody questions whether they mean it. Subscribe for more stories like this.