AS Performance

ithaca rising 🇫🇷 🇬🇧 (@ithacarising) Achille Muller, now 101, remains the last survivor of the Free French SAS, those small bands of paratroopers who served with the British Special Air Service and lived by the simple motto "Qui ose gagne" - Who Dares Wins. After the annexation of Moselle, he slipped away from Forbach on a bicycle at 17 years old, crossed into Spain and Gibraltar, and eventually reached England, where the British held him for weeks on suspicion of being a German agent before de Gaulle's people claimed him. Trained in Scotland, he later drove one of the armed jeeps that harassed German columns across Brittany in the summer of 1944. One afternoon, with only a dozen men in a few vehicles, he and his companions talked a force of roughly 2500 Germans into laying down their arms; the enemy, cut off from news and convinced the Allies had already closed the net, preferred surrender to further resistance. When the glider that carried his jeep touched French soil for the first time in years, Muller stepped down and kissed the ground. Even now, the old soldier still embodies that SAS spirit -he did a tandem parachute jump just last year at 101.

Out now: Focus On Jock Lewes, one of the founders of the SAS. The soldier who helped create SAS training and selection and who perfected the ingenious Lewes Bomb ... damienlewisspecialforcesclub…

Some excellent and very rare photos here of SAS commander Blair 'Paddy' Mayne in Antarctica, 1946. Immediately after the war, he and two of his SAS close friends, Mike Sadler - former LRDG navigator turned SAS stalwart - and John Tonkin - Operation Bulbasket commander and escapee - joined a Falklands Islands Dependencies Survey to Antartica, which not only offered adventure and a purpose, post the summary disbandment of the SAS in October 1945, but also offered these men who had spent five years soldiering deep behind the lines the opportunity to decompress and reflect on all that had transpired during the war years, and upon fallen comrades. Sadly, an early back injury that Mayne had suffered during the war - and which he'd typically remained silent about, for fear of being grounded - came back to plague him with a vengeance, and he was forced to return from Antartica early. Mayne was a keen photographer and writer, and many of these photos are his. He also kept an Antartica diary, chronicling his, Sadler's and Tonkin's experiences and adventures. Read more and see more of the images here: facebook.com/photo/?fbid=145…