1Thomas Fitzpatrick
In 1956, for a bet, while drunk, Thomas Fitzpatrick stole a small plane from New Jersey and then landed it perfectly on a narrow Manhattan street in front of the bar he had been drinking at. Then, two years later, he did it again after a man didn't believe he had done it the first time.
2. During World War 2, a German soldier named Fritz Christen stood his ground for 3 straight days and knocked out 13 Soviet tanks and killed nearly 100 enemy soldiers single-handedly.
3. In 2010, a retired Gurkha soldier of the Indian Army Bishnu Shrestha was returning to his village in a train when it was hijacked by armed robbers. When they tried to rape a young teen in front of him, he brandished his Kukri blade and attacked all forty captors. He managed to kill 3 men and injure 8 before he was subdued. The rest of the robbers quickly panicked and dispersed.
4. Theodore Roosevelt once gave a speech immediately after an attempted assassination. He started the speech by saying “Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.”
5. During World War 2, Bhanbhagta Gurung was a Gurkha soldier who served in the British army. When his unit was pinned by a sniper, he didn't wait for orders, calmly stood up in open sight and killed the sniper with his rifle. He then proceeded to rush to the nearest foxhole, taking out the enemies with grenades, his bayonet, and Kukri; taking 5 enemy positions single-handed, against light machine guns.
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6Simo Hayha
Simo Hayha (a.k.a The White Death) was a 5’3” Finnish Sniper, who in 1940 had 505 confirmed Soviet kills in a span of only 3 months, using a rifle with no magnifying scope and in temperatures routinely reaching below -40°Fahrenheit. He was shot in the face six days before the singing of a treaty but survived and lived to the age of 96. He wasn't even a soldier before the war, but actually a farmer.
7. Dip Prasad Pun, a British Gurkha soldier, single-handedly fought off at least a dozen Taliban insurgents assaulting him in Afghanistan. He fired more than 400 rounds, launched 17 grenades, detonated a mine, and used his tripod as a weapon when his gun failed. He was awarded Conspicuous Gallantry Cross, United Kingdom’s second highest medal for bravery.
8. In the 1800s, there was a man named Joseph Bolitho Johns who escaped Australian prisons so many times that the authorities built a special cell just to hold him. It was so strong that they promised to forgive his crimes if he could escape again. He escaped that as well.
9. During World War 2, when Sergeant Leonard A. Funk was confronted by 90 German soldiers that had captured his squad, he began to laugh hysterically at the situation. Many of the enemy soldiers began to laugh along with him, until Funk wiped out his machine gun, gunning down 21 and capturing the rest.
10. In 1983, when a 61-year-old Australian potato farmer named Cliff Young took part in a 544-mile ultramarathon race, he won and broke the record by almost 2 days. He had no formal training and beat sponsored, young athletes because unlike them he didn't stop to sleep. He remarked that the race “wasn’t easy.”
11Susan Kuhnhausen
In 2006, a man in Portland, Oregon hired a hitman to kill his 51-year-old wife. When his wife Susan Kuhnhausen, an overweight ER nurse, was confronted in her house by a crab-hammer wielding hitman, she struggled with him, got her hands on his neck and asked him “Tell me who sent you here and I will call you a fu*king ambulance!", before choking him to death.
12. In 2005, a 73-year-old man named Daniel M'Mburugu in Nairobi, Kenya killed a leopard which had attacked him, with his bare hands by shoving his fist into its mouth and ripping out its tongue. He dropped the machete he was carrying while he was being attacked and instead chose to fight with his bare hands.
13. During World War 2, a Newfoundland dog named Gander fended off two Japanese ambushes. When they came back again, with a grenade this time, Gander picked it up and charged back at them, killing more Japanese, saving his wounded team, going out in a blaze of glory and earning a posthumous medal.
14. During World War II, American soldier John R. Fox died when he deliberately called an artillery strike on himself. Realizing that German troops were overrunning his party's position, the strike delayed the enemy long enough for other American units to organize a counterattack.
15. An Indian flight attendant named Neerja Bhanot was aboard the Pan Am Flight 73, which was hijacked by terrorists during a stopover in Karachi, Pakistan in 1986. She hid the passports of American passengers on board the flight to save them from the hijackers. She died while shielding three children from a hail of bullets.
16Jack Churchill
Jack Churchill is the only man with a confirmed Longbow kill in World War 2. He carried a longbow, broadsword, and bagpipes. He played the pipes before battles, and survived the war. He is known for the motto “any officer who goes into action without his sword is improperly dressed.”
17. When faced with over 1,000 North Vietnamese Army troops, Roy R Benavidez flew into a gunfight to save 12 Special Forces soldiers with only a knife. He was shot multiple times and was believed to be dead until he spit in the face of the medic trying to put him in a body bag. He survived 37 separate bayonet, bullet, and shrapnel wounds over the course of the six-hour fight.
18. After losing power and automatic control of his Mercury capsule, astronaut Gordon Cooper was forced to use his knowledge of constellations, wristwatch, and math estimations to manually land his spacecraft. He ended up splashing just 4 miles from his recovery ship, the most accurate landing up to that point in 1963.
19. David B. Bleak, an American Soldier from the Korean War was given the Medal of Honor for killing 5 Chinese soldiers, out of which, he killed 4 with his bare hands. He did all this while he was shot and giving medical aid to his fellow soldiers. He broke one of the enemy soldiers’ neck and crushed the windpipe of the other one with his bare hands. He severely fractured the skulls of two other soldiers by smashing their heads together
20. During the 1950s, when the Canadian government forced the Inuit into settlements, an elderly Eskimo wanted to escape the government settlement. When his family took away all of his tools to force him into the settlement, he made a knife out of his own feces and frozen spit, killed a dog with it and used its ribs and organs to make a sled. He tied his sled to other dogs and rode off.
21Jeanne de Clisson
A Frenchwoman name Jeanne de Clisson became a pirate in the 1300s to revenge her husband's death, who was beheaded for treason. She sold her family's land to buy 3 ships and painted them black with red sails. For the next 13 years, she went on a pirating binge, targeting King Philip VI's ships and personally beheaded the French noblemen she captured with an ax.
22. Ernest Hemingway in his lifetime survived through anthrax, malaria, pneumonia, dysentery, skin cancer, hepatitis, anemia, diabetes, high blood pressure, two plane crashes, a ruptured kidney, a ruptured spleen, a ruptured liver, a crushed vertebra, a fractured skull. Once when his plane burst into flames on the runway and the door jammed, he used his head as a battering ram, butted the door twice and got out.
23. Sergeant Stubby was a stray dog found during military training in 1917. He served with the 102nd Infantry Regiment during World War 1. He saved his regiment from surprise mustard gas attacks repeatedly due to his ability to smell mustard gas at a distance, found and comforted the wounded, and even once caught a German spy by the seat of his pants, holding him there until American soldiers found him. He is the only dog to have been promoted to sergeant through combat in World War 1.
24. In 2009, when 18-year old Rukhsana Kausar from Kashmir, India saw her parents being beaten as part of a forced marriage proposal by a militia commander, she killed one militant with an ax, gunned the commander down and then started a 4-hour gun battle with the militia.
25. Manute Bol, the tallest player in the history of the NBA was also the only player in the NBA to have killed a lion with a spear and to have paid 80 cows for his wife.
