British Special Air Service (SAS), Second Regiment 2SAS
The Special Air Service, or SAS, is the United Kingdom’s premiere military anti-terrorist special force. The second regiment of the SAS was formed in 1943 and was listed as 2SAS. Its first commanding officer was William “Bill” Stirling, who was the younger brother of David Stirling, the man who first conceived of, formed, and led the SAS.
With such great raw material to work from, you’d think it’d be easy to make a great series from it. Apparently it wasn’t. The BBC1 series Rogue Heroes based on the Robert MacIntyre book of the same name is an altogether silly comic-book effort to tell the incredible story of the formation of the elite British Special Air Service during…read more
The silver medal won by German athlete Luz Long in the long jump at the 1936 Munich Olympics fetched $488,435 at auction on October 16, 2022, a record for an Olympic silver medal sold at public auction. In all, 20 bids were made for the medal, which had attracted a significant amount of worldwide media attention. Many other pieces of…read more
Just shy of 6 months after he became the second person in the UK to receive a Covid-19 vaccine (he got the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine), William “Bill” Shakespeare passed away on May 26, 2021. Shakespeare became famous on December 8, 2020 when he received his first Covid vaccine jab. It was a momentous occasion for him, as well as everyone…read more
The United Kingdom on December 8, 2020 became the first nation to begin widespread distribution of a working Covid-19 vaccine. At the University Hospital in Coventry, in what hopes to be the beginning of the end for the pandemic that effectively shut down the world for most of 2020, 90-year-old Margaret Keenan became the first person in the world outside…read more
It didn’t have as compelling a birth as the first Special Air Service regiment. It didn’t have its great founder driving point in a souped-up jeep during attacks on German air bases. It didn’t have the romance of the desert as its initial stomping grounds. About the only thing it seemed to have going for it was the reputation of…read more
When it comes to polar exploration, history is the mother of all excursion. To close out 2018, Louis Rudd became the second person to complete a solo crossing of the continent of Antarctica. In what seems a repeat of the Shackleton/Amundsen race to the pole (that was a race to the pole and not a traversal of the continent), the…read more