Give my great uncle Paddy Mayne the VC – it’s not just for his jaw-dropping bravery but ALL SAS heroes

ON the BBC’s brilliant World War Two TV blockbuster SAS Rogue Heroes, Lt Col Paddy Mayne is ­portrayed as a foul-mouthed, heartless killer.

But his family and friends would disagree and point out he very rarely swore, and cared deeply about those under his command.

IWMBBC’s SAS Rogue Heroes portrays Lt Col Paddy Mayne as a foul-mouthed killer, but his loved ones say he was deeply caring and rarely swore[/caption]

Times Newspapers LtdPaddy, far right of middle row, in Ireland’s national rugby team in 1939[/caption]

BBCJack O’Connell playing the hero in hit TV show SAS Rogue Heroes[/caption]

The TV portrayal does, however, capture his effectiveness as a ­soldier and leader in Britain’s hour of need.

 And the expected third series is likely to showcase even more of his bravery ­during D-Day and beyond.

Robert Blair “Paddy” Mayne — also an amateur boxing champion and rugby star capped for Ireland and the British Lions — had already won the Distinguished ­Service Order medal three times when, in Germany in 1945, he almost single-handedly routed a heavily armed Nazi unit.

He drove his Jeep repeatedly into machine-gun fire to ­rescue his ambushed men from ­annihilation.

He was set for the highest possible award for gallantry, the Victoria Cross. But, perhaps due to enemies of the SAS within Whitehall at the time, it was downgraded and instead he received a fourth DSO by the time the Special Air Service soldiers had returned to their HQ at Hylands House stately home in Essex.

Fast-forward 52 years and an SAS Willys Jeep was once more being steered down the gravel drive of Hylands House where, legend has it, Paddy once tried to drive a Jeep up the grand staircase.

This time, in 1997, the driver was an excited schoolboy, Paddy’s great-nephew — under instruction from SAS veterans including some of the ­originals, enjoying a Paddy Mayne Association reunion.

For Rob Menown, 11, it was his first realisation of the remarkable ­status of his great-uncle Paddy, who died aged 40 in a car ­accident in his native Newtownards, Co Down, in 1955, and it sparked a lifelong ­fascination. Rob, now 38 and a roofing merchant, says: “My bookshelves at home were quite quickly full of SAS books after that.”

Now Rob has thrown the ­family’s weight behind a campaign for Paddy’s fourth DSO to be posthumously upgraded to the Victoria Cross he should have been given in 1945.

He says: “It has been well documented that even King George VI, when he presented Paddy with his fourth DSO at Buckingham Palace, questioned  how the VC had ‘so strangely eluded’ him.

He [Paddy] gave a very Paddy-type response, to the effect that he did not take the actions he did for the ­medals. It was his job, he was protecting his men.

“He said, ‘I served to my best my Lord, my King and Queen — and none can take that honour away from me.’”

Sitting alongside the permanent SAS display at Hylands House, Rob recalls: “My granny Margaret, Paddy’s niece, had a lovely glass cabinet which had all sorts of ­memorabilia from Paddy.”

It included an SAS regimental tie-pin engraved with Margaret’s name, one of Paddy’s Lions rugby badges and Luftwaffe mess cutlery, marked with swastikas — which may have been grabbed by the SAS hero on one of his daring raids on German airfields in North Africa.

Rob admitted that, as a young boy, the items were “just war memorabilia for a dead relative” — until that day in 1997.

Afterwards, he began reading up on his famous relative.

Rob says he had a “vivid interest in everything World War Two” and recalls, aged 15, getting into “a heated debate” with his history teacher when, during a lesson, she had insisted that SAS stood for Special Army Soldiers and he proudly put her right.

By then he had eagerly read as much as he could about his legendary great-uncle.

He was also told that Paddy did not actually drive a Jeep up the grand staircase at Hylands House, which would have been impossible.

But when an American officer bet the SAS legend that he could not get a Jeep up the stairs, he got his men to dismantle it, carry it up piece by piece and reassemble it upstairs — so winning the bet.

Rob has thrown the ­family’s weight behind a growing campaign for Paddy’s fourth DSO to be posthumously upgraded to the Victoria Cross

Arthur Edwards / The SunPaddy’s great-nephew Rob Menown outside former SAS HQ Hylands House in Essex[/caption]

John MenownPaddy pictured with Rob’s granny Margaret[/caption]

PABBC’s SAS Rogue Heroes introduces Paddy to a new audience, showcasing his fiery character as portrayed by O’Connell[/caption]

Rob says: “He was a great man and I am lucky to be related to him.”

Much more has been written about Paddy since, but the BBC’s hit SAS Rogue Heroes TV series has now brought him to an even wider audience — not all of whom will have been impressed with his volatile and fiery character, as portrayed on screen by Jack O’Connell.

Rob says: “It’s hard not to be excited about it, with the SAS and their exploits being brought to the TV. Screenwriter Steven Knight has done a brilliant job and they make clear it’s not a ­history ­lesson, it’s a story.”

‘Pirate raiding force’

But the coarse caricature of Paddy would not be recognisable to his ­family, nor to the men who fought beside him and idolised him.

Rob says: “He was not a big swearer. He was definitely known for his violent outbursts but I don’t think he would have been so public and they would not have been directed at his men.”

Rob was pleased, though, that in the first series Knight has captured Northern Ireland Protestant Paddy’s unlikely friendship with Southern Irish Catholic Eoin McGonigal, who was tragically killed on the SAS’s first mission.

He was also delighted that the second series showed a very ­troubled Paddy, back in Ireland on leave, still tormented by the loss of his friend.

Rob says: “Paddy was constantly writing letters home but also letters to the families of the men he ­commanded, and he took the death of any of his men very personally.

“He knew the risks they were taking but he was always there at the front, leading, and he would never expect his men to go into anything he would not take on himself.”

That is why the succession of ­dangerous situations he put himself in — with the SAS fighting behind enemy lines in France to stop the ­Germans sending reinforcements in the wake of the D-Day invasion in 1944 — would have been enough to earn most soldiers a Victoria Cross for accumulated valour.

It is also why, as they later pressed into Germany and one of his units was ambushed near Lorup in Lower Saxony, Paddy, then aged 30, ­carried out a near-suicidal attack on the Germans to push them back and ­rescue his injured men.

His recommendation for a VC had been agreed by SAS chief Brigadier Mike Calvert and even Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, Commander-in-Chief of British ­forces in Germany.

But a Whitehall bureaucrat struck through the citation and scrawled “3rd Bar to DSO” instead.

So, Major General Bob Laycock, Britain’s Chief of Combined Operations, wrote to Paddy telling him: “In my opinion, the appropriate authorities do not really know their job.

“If they did, they would have given you a VC.”

King George VI asked Winston Churchill to intervene but by then the former PM was out of office.

Rob says: “I don’t know whether he was denied it because of backroom politics.

The SAS was certainly not popular with high-ups in the British military at the time and it was ­disbanded soon afterwards, only to be reinstated when they found they did need a pirate raiding force after all, in Malaya.

“It would be great if the current campaign could correct that wrong and they could posthumously award Paddy with a VC which, by all accounts, he deserved. It would say a lot about the actions not just of Paddy but also his men to see him recognised in that way.

“Their actions were incredible and those portrayed in the Rogue Heroes series might seem unbelievable to some, but you only have to read a couple of books on the subject to see they were very real.

“Paddy and his men did not think they had a choice. It was do-or-die.”

An early day motion — the latest of several — was tabled in the House of Commons last month calling for the VC to be posthumously awarded, and a ­petition at change.org has so far raised with thousands of signatures.

No VC has ever been awarded to a British member of the SAS, in spite of the heroic nature of their missions, and Rob says: “It would not just be Paddy’s VC but the SAS’s VC.”

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