The True WWII Story of SAS Original Reg Seekings

Reg Seekings intrigued me from the moment I stumbled on him during a spot of channel-hopping during one of the lockdowns.

I had never encountered Seekings until I glanced archive footage of him in a BBC documentary. Indeed, before that I had not taken much more than a passing interest in the Special Air Service.

However, Seekings’ interview – conducted in the 1980s – drew me in. Sixty-something years old, he still possessed a striking steeliness. Also, his sharp and insightful perspectives on the early days of the SAS captured the imagination.

But the interest levels scaled fresh heights when a quick internet search flagged up that he hailed from a mile or two from where I lived in Ely. Come to think of it, maybe it was the hint of a recognisable accent that had registered subliminally with me.

Anyway, my curiosity had been well and truly piqued that night. From that point, I dived deep into the world of Seekings and the wartime Special Air Service. Suffice to say, Reg seemed to pop up everywhere in the history books.

The ‘Seekings Way’ bypass bridge.

Then, in the spring of 2021, the bypass bridge on the outskirts of Ely was given his name…’Seekings Way’. Its unveiling felt like a sign – I knew that I wanted to write a book about the man.

Over the following two and half years, I studied and I wrote. It proved to be a thoroughly absorbing experience. I listened to his voice through endless hours of recorded audio reels. I read his private notebooks (generously shared by a private collector) that gave in-depth and fresh information on his first years in the Special Air Service. And I sought the opinions of many that knew him, including Long Range Desert Group navigator turned legendary SAS figure Mike Sadler.

Through the process, ex-amateur boxer Seekings’ physical attributes soon became clear. For example, on the SAS’s first-ever successful operation (at Tamet airbase in Libya in December 1941) he smashed up a Stuka’s dashboard with his revolver. His courage was also undeniable – a point underlined by the manner in which he led his sub-section in an assault on a Sicilian gun nest. ‘Sgt Seekings himself rushed the pill box’ records his Military Medal citation. He had earlier received a Distinguished Conduct Medal for gallantry on operations in North Africa.

But through my research I also discovered personality traits and details that demonstrated the depth of Seekings’ character. Alongside the brawn and bravery, there was brain. At one point, ahead of the Eighth Army’s advance on Tripoli, even Generals Harding and Freyberg consulted him at length about the region. Reg had just got back from Tripolitania in early 1943 after a lengthy mission in which he had engaged in ambush work, as well as battled through starvation and exhaustion.

As well as guile, he had a heart that previous accounts of the wartime SAS perhaps did not shine a light on. There was a real humanity about him, an aspect that became very apparent to me when I read through the notes of fellow SAS man Eric Musk, born and raised in Soham, just a few miles from Seekings’ own roots. Musk and Seekings were both in the Italian port town of Termoli on the Adriatic coastline where the unit suffered sickening losses as a result of a shell strike on a truck. In sparse prose, Musk detailed how his fenland friend ‘collected all the arms, legs, heads etc and made sure they were all belonging to the right person – we then buried them.’

Seekings understood loss, even if he didn’t want to elaborate on it. Years later he would simply say, ‘Termoli was bad, very bad.’

There is one other undeniable element about the man – he enjoyed good fortune on a string of occasions. At Termoli, he reckoned the deadly shell that caused such devastation and destruction landed closest to him and yet he escaped from the blast with a damaged fingernail.

A year later in France he took a bullet to the back of the head and survived. Through his subsequent rest and recuperation, Reg got to know and appreciate the SAS’s famous wartime padre, Fraser McLuskey. A friendship blossomed as did Seekings’ understanding of what the man of the cloth brought to the Regiment. Within weeks of being shot, Seekings was back in the thick of the action with the bullet still lodged at the base of his skull.

His luck remained intact through the SAS’s operations at the tip of the spear as the Allies surged into the Rhineland in the early spring of 1945. Indeed, in May of that year he admitted to being a ‘bit amazed’ that he had somehow survived his own event-packed war.

Equally, I was amazed that nobody had ever written a book about this exceptional soldier.

And that was my own stroke of good fortune…

Tony Rushmer is the author of SAS Duty Before Glory: The True WWII Story of SAS Original Reg Seekings, published by Michael O’Mara Books.