Some people refused to accept impossible odds, while others risked everything to save lives, win battles, or change history. These incredible true stories celebrate remarkable men and women whose courage, determination, and sheer audacity turned them into unforgettable legends.
Tiny Force Held Town
1. In 1961, around 150 Irish soldiers held off 3,000 African tribesmen and foreign mercenaries for six days while defending a Congo town. They killed 300 of them and suffered no losses themselves.
2. Werner Forssmann was the first person to carry out cardiac catheterization. He defied his department head and got the operating room nurse to help him. She consented on the condition that he perform it on her instead of on himself. He faked a local anesthetic and an arm incision while actually doing the procedure on himself. He then went downstairs to radiology to have the x-ray taken as proof that he would survive. He was dismissed, became a Nazi, and later received the Nobel Prize.
3. By 1918, Canadian fighter ace William George Barker had already survived three years of war after destroying 46 enemy aircraft. On his final flight before heading home, he shot down an enemy plane that was actually a decoy. Sixty German fighters then dropped on him at once, and an explosive round shattered his right thighbone. He swung his plane around and rammed through the formation, bringing down two aircraft and injuring his other good leg in the process. He passed out and came to after falling 6,000 feet. He recovered control and again charged through two more planes before his left elbow was shattered, causing him to faint again. He then came to only to crash his plane nose-first at 90 mph. He slipped into a coma and awoke two days after the war had ended.
4. Although he had never had naval training or taken part in naval combat before the war, Admiral Yi Sun Shin defeated 333 Japanese ships with just 13 Korean ships during the Battle of Myeongnyang in 1597, despite being badly outnumbered and out supplied throughout.
5. The real Grizzly Adams captured a brown bear when it was one year old. He then trained her to trail after him, carry a pack, and pull a loaded sled. In freezing weather, she even snuggled beside Adams to help keep him warm. In the end, the bear he called Lady Washington let Adams ride on her back.
6. Future King Henry V was hit in the face by an arrow in his first battle while leading soldiers. Instead of quitting the field, he supposedly said that he would rather die than ruin his soldierly reputation by fleeing. He was 16 then.
7. After fighter pilot Thomas G. Lanphier, Jr. flew the longest interception mission of World War 2 to shoot down and kill Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who was responsible for the attack on Pearl Harbor, he broke radio silence to tell everyone, “That son of a b*tch will not be dictating any peace terms in the White House.”
8. During the Second Boer War, Robert Baden-Powell was ordered to hold Mafeking for the British. Since his unit was short on explosives, he told his men to bury mysterious boxes of sand around the town’s edge and claimed to people and enemy sympathizers that they were powerful landmines. When barbed wire ran out, he simply nailed wooden posts around the town boundary and had his men behave as if real barbed wire were stretched between them. From enemy positions, it appeared believable. They never attacked, and Powell held Mafeking for 217 days.
9. A man named Chen Si has spent his free time patrolling the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge since 2004. It is the world’s most popular suicide site, and he has rescued more than 300 people from jumping.
10. In 1941, when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, Zinaida Portnova was a 15-year-old girl at a Soviet summer camp and could not get back to her home in Leningrad. She joined the Belarus underground as part of a group nicknamed the Young Avengers. At 17, she was assigned to scout, meaning she had to go out into the field to search for possible targets. She was eventually captured and taken by the Gestapo for questioning. During the interrogation, she grabbed an officer’s pistol from the table beside her, killed the interrogator and two armed soldiers, and escaped. Although she was caught again and executed a year later, she was named a Hero of the Soviet Union.
Wrong-Lane Rescue Chase
11. In 2015, MMA fighter Matt Hamill saw a car speeding along the wrong side of the highway. He turned his own car around, pursued it, and safely forced it onto a grassy area. He then broke a window with his fist to stop the car, possibly saving the lives of the child passenger and the intoxicated mother.
12. Colonel Eduardo Abaroa Hidalgo was a Bolivian hero in the War of the Pacific involving Chile, Bolivia, and Peru. He met death with a joke about “Yo Gramma.” After a standoff with Chile, Abaroa, wounded and outnumbered, was told to surrender. He refused to abandon the battle and replied, “Surrender? Your grandmother should surrender, you bastard!” He died as a martyr for his nation.
13. Harald Hardrada was a Viking who left his homeland of Norway for Russia, then became an elite guard in the Eastern Roman Empire and fought in Iraq. He later returned to Russia to marry a princess, came back to Norway as a king, and finally invaded England with his army.
14. In a well-recorded incident, Captain Jonathan R. Davis killed 11 armed bandits by himself after they ambushed him in 1854. He shot 7 of them using both revolvers and then killed the other 4 with a Bowie knife. He received only two minor flesh wounds.
15. During the Afghanistan War, after his team was ambushed, outnumbered, and under fire, British Corporal Sean Jones told his men to fix bayonets and charge 80 meters across open ground against Taliban forces. The enemy broke apart and fled because of this unexpected action.
16. While filming an episode of Malcolm in the Middle, Bryan Cranston wore a suit containing 10,000 live bees. He was stung only once. After the writers jokingly asked him whether he would be willing to wear a suit of live bees, he answered that he would, and they then built a script around that idea.
17. During World War 2, Germans gave Matt Urban the nickname “The Ghost” because he kept returning from battles that would have killed ordinary men. In one battle, he destroyed a German tank with a bazooka, took a 31mm tank gun round in the leg, and still kept fighting. The following day, he was wounded again and evacuated. After waking up in the hospital, he hobbled back with a cane and operated a machine gun under intense fire. A few days later, he was hit in the chest by shrapnel and lived. After he recovered, he was shot in the neck and survived once more, losing only his voice. He made it through the war and lived for 51 more years.
18. In 1996, a Texas man named Valentin Grimaldo was bitten by a poisonous coral snake. He then killed the snake by biting off its head and used its skin as a tourniquet, which saved his life.
19. The Englishman Frank Bickerton served in both world wars, was assigned to Antarctic expeditions, created a golf course, became the hero of a novel, killed bears, wrote major motion pictures, worked as a treasure hunter in Costa Rica, and married the granddaughter of an Earl.
20. Owen J. Baggett became famous as the only person known to have shot down a Japanese aircraft with an M1911 pistol. He hit the pilot in the head while the pilot was parachuting down.
Gallipoli Turns Kemal
21. During World War 1 at the Battle of Gallipoli, Turkish Lt. Colonel Mustafa Kemal was informed that allied ships were moving toward his coast, and he ordered his troops to head there. After he got there, he saw Allied warships coming ashore and a group of Turkish soldiers running toward him, retreating from the battle. He told them, “I’m not ordering you to attack! I’m ordering you to die!” Despite being outnumbered and having less ammunition, the Turks won the battle, and Mustafa Kemal later became president of the Turkish Republic.
22. Adolphe Sax, the inventor of the saxophone, lived through a three-story fall, a gunpowder blast, drinking a bowl of sulfuric water, an almost fatal exposure to furniture varnish, and being swept into a fast-moving river, all before he was nine years old. His neighbors referred to him as “little Sax, the ghost.” He also endured at least one attempt on his life because instrument makers disliked his new invention, the saxophone.
23. Tilly Smith, a 10-year-old schoolgirl from Britain, saved her family and 100 other tourists from the 2004 Asian tsunami by recognizing the warning signs of tsunamis that she had learned in a geography lesson two weeks earlier.
24. In 1944, while Dirk Vlug and his men were guarding a roadblock, they came upon Japanese tanks. Vlug grabbed his rocket launcher, ran out into the open, and under machine gun fire destroyed his first tank. When the men in a second tank raised the hatch to get out and attack him, Vlug pulled out his pistol and shot the first man, reloaded, and destroyed the second tank, then a third, a fourth, and finally a fifth one in a row without missing a shot.
25. In 2014, a 3-year-old Russian girl named Karina Chikitova survived for 11 days in the Siberian taiga by drinking from a creek and eating berries, while her dog protected her, then went to fetch help after 9 days and came back with rescuers.
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