Aged 103, the final surviving member of the original SAS from the war has passed away.

David Stirling was the originator of the British Army’s elite Special Air Service regiment, which was established in 1941, and he recruited Major Mike Sadler.

After the D-Day Normandy landings in 1944, he first participated in nighttime attacks on Axis airfields in Libya before parachuting into Nazi-occupied France.

After serving in MI6, he received the Military Cross for his exploits in France, and a portion of the Antarctic was named in his honor.

The Legion d’honneur, France’s highest honor, was given to him in 2018 as additional recognition.

The hero received praise from historian Damien Lewis, who has written multiple books on the SAS’s history during the war. He told MailOnline, “Mike Sadler was one of the originals and one of the bravest of the brave, and we now have no surviving members of 1 SAS from the war.”

‘So this is the passing of a legend, the passing of a generation, the passing of an era. It is immensely tragic because our ability to capture these stories from first hand testimony is becoming so difficult. The lights are going out all over Britain.’

In 1937, Major Sadler dropped out of school to work on a farm in what is now Zimbabwe’s Southern Rhodesia.

Major Sadler enlisted in the Rhodesian Army artillery battalion after war broke out in 1939. He was promoted to sergeant in 1941, but he was punished after defying the commanding officer’s directive that his soldiers sleep in boots rather than sand shoes. Then he met a man who was stationed in the North African desert as a reconnaissance member of the Long Range Desert Group.

He was convinced to enlist by the soldier, who assumed the position of navigator right away. Before long, he was leading both the LRDG and SAS navigation teams.

Major Sadler took part in the first successful SAS raid on Wadi Tamet airfield in December 1941. The raid involved six men and destroyed 24 aircraft as well as a fuel dump.

Leading this was Lieutenant Blair ‘Paddy’ Mayne, a former rugby player for Ireland and later one of the most decorated troops in British history.