1Peter Freuchen
During the 1912 Thule Expedition, Arctic explorer Peter Freuchen got buried deep under snow after a snowstorm. Lacking any spears or daggers, he used his own feces to fashion a dagger with which he freed himself. During another expedition in 1926, gangrene got his toes because of frostbite and before it got worse, he amputated his own toes with a hammer without anesthesia and replaced his leg with a peg.
2. In 2012, a 56-year-old Russian grandmother named Aishat Maksudova fought off a wolf with her bare hands and killed it with an ax. She said, “So the wolf was just clawing into my left hand, pulling on it, pulling away like this and then I took the ax and hit him on his head.”
3. During the 2011 Japanese earthquake, 50 workers at the Fukushima nuclear power plant did not leave even though 750 others had been evacuated. For four days they kept the reactor from melting down until backup arrived, saving countless lives.
4. In 1945, a man named Tsutomu Yamaguchi survived the atomic blast at Hiroshima. He dragged himself to an air-raid shelter, spent the night. Next morning he caught a train so that he could arrive at his job on time in Nagasaki, where he survived another atomic blast. He went on to have two daughters and lived to be 93 years old.
5. In 2013, a Bosnian shepherd named Blazo Grkovic was attacked by a bear when he was tending to a baby goat. Unable to draw the small hand ax he kept on his person, he defended himself by grabbing the bear's throat and strangling it to death. He then traveled more than a mile over rough, mountainous terrain before he was able to contact an ambulance and be treated for a number of bruises and lacerations.
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6Piru Singh
During the 1947 India-Pakistan war, India's Major Piru Singh was tasked to lead his men through a narrow mountain ridge to recapture an Indian post. Singh picked up his submachine gun and charged up the ridge, bellowing loudly. They came under fire from machine guns and grenades. On reaching the top, he was out of ammo, all his men were dead and blasts tore off most of his clothes. In a rage, he hurled grenades at a trench and bayoneted the occupants, when an enemy grenade tore off half his face. Bleeding and blind in one eye, he threw another grenade at the second enemy trench when a bullet to the head took him out, but his grenade wiped out the last enemy position, accomplishing his mission.
7. Mikhail Panikakha was a Russian Marine who volunteered during the Battle of Stalingrad. When the Soviets were reduced to mere hundreds, Germans drove tanks over Soviet trenches to collapse them and bury their occupants. Out of antitank grenades, Panikakha lit a Molotov cocktail, when a bullet struck the bottle and engulfed him in flames. Despite being on fire, he picked up another Molotov, climbed on top of the tank and smashed the bottle on the engine compartment. The tank, along with Panikakha exploded almost immediately. Seeing this, the Germans retreated.
8. Actor James Doohan, who played Scotty in Star Trek served in the Canadian Army during World War 2. He first saw combat at Juno Beach. He shot two snipers, led his men through a minefield, but was later wounded by friendly fire (six rounds from a machine gun). One bullet to the chest was stopped by his cigarette case; another severed his right middle finger and four hit his leg. After recovering, he served as an air observation pilot and once slalomed a light observation aircraft between mountainside telegraph poles just to prove that it could be done.
9. Natwarlal was a noted Indian conman who is known for having repeatedly “sold” the Taj Mahal, the Red Fort, the President’s residence and also the Parliament House of India along with its 545 sitting members including the then Indian Prime Minister. He used more than 50 aliases, was a master of disguise, used novel ideas to cheat and was master in forging signatures of famous personalities. He was arrested several times, but in 1996, the wheelchair-bound octogenarian vanished while being transported from prison to a hospital for treatment.
10. In 1944, a Canadian soldier named Leo Major singlehandedly captured 93 Nazi soldiers in the Netherlands. In 1945, he again singlehandedly liberated the City of Zwolle in the Netherlands with a population of 50,000 from the occupation of several hundred German soldiers. He killed several Nazis and ran up and down the streets shooting a machine gun and tossing grenades. The Germans fled panicking that a large body of Canadian force was attacking them. He was blind in one eye at that time, from a grenade wound he had suffered in 1941.
11Sean Bean
Actor Sean Bean was once punched in the eye and stabbed in the arm with broken glass at a bar defending a former Playboy Model. He refused an ambulance and then ordered another drink.
12. After securing Ivory Coast’s place at the 2006 Football World Cup, the team’s star striker and national icon Didier Drogba pleaded with the combatants of Ivory Coast to lay down their arms, which resulted in a cease-fire after Ivory Coast was embroiled in 5 years of civil war. He also donated $3 million from his Pepsi signing bonus to build a hospital in his hometown.
13. In 2008, Florida wildlife officers shot a 375lb bear with a tranquilizer as it managed to wander into a residential area. The panicked bear ran towards the ocean and started drowning. That's when a man named Adam Warwick dived into the ocean to rescue it. Grabbing the bear by its neck, he brought it ashore. A couple of times the bear tried lunging at Adam to climb on top of him to stay afloat. Adam brought the bear to shore and only suffered minor cuts and scrapes.
14. When a Rocky Mountain grizzly bear attacked hunting guide C. Dale Petersen, he killed it with nothing but his hands and his teeth. Petersen wedged his right hand in the bear's throat and used his teeth and jaws to pinch off the bear's jugular vein. When the bear passed out from the lack of blood flow to the brain, he beat the bear on the head with a stick.
15. When Sean Connery was filming a love scene in the film ‘Another Time, Another Place’ (1958), his co-star's gangster boyfriend got jealous and pulled a gun on him. Connery grabbed the gun from his hand and twisted the guy's wrist until he ran off the set.
16Don Ritchie
Don Ritchie was an Australian who lived across the street from the most famous suicide spot in Australia. He officially rescued 160 people from suicide as of 2009 over a 45-year period, although his family claims the number is closer to 500. He would strike up a conversation with people contemplating suicide and invited them to his house for tea. He died in 2012 at the age of 85.
17. A 24-year-old New Zealander named James Grant was spearfishing with his friends in 2014 when he was attacked by what he believed was a sevengill shark. He fought off the shark by stabbing it multiple times with his knife. When he reached the shore, he saw bites up to 5 cm long. He stitched himself up using a first aid kit, before enjoying a pint of beer at a nearby pub with his friends.
18. In 1823, American fur trapper Hugh Glass was attacked by a grizzly bear during his exploration of the Upper Missouri River. After being thrown to the ground by the bear, he got up and repeatedly stabbed the bear with his knife until it died. He was left for dead 200 miles from the nearest settlement. He had a broken leg, cuts exposing his bare ribs, and festering wounds. He regained consciousness, set his leg, used maggots to eat his dead flesh, and crawled his way back to civilization over 6 weeks. He survived on roots, berries, and even chased wolves away from a bison carcass. When he returned home, he got his rifle back and continued his work as a trapper.
19. Fazal Din was a 24-year-old Indian allied sergeant during World War 2 who was fighting against the Japanese in Burma when his team was attacked by a team of six sword-wielding Japanese soldiers. One of them impaled his sword through Fazal’s chest and out through this back. When he withdrew his sword thinking that he died, Fazal Din, seized the sword from the Japanese officer and killed him with it. He then killed two more Japanese soldiers with it. He then stumbled back to Allied lines, dutifully filed an after-action report with his superior officer and then promptly collapsed and died.
20. Major Dick Bong is USA’s highest air ace, having shot down at least 40 planes during World War 2. He actually collided with one plane, claiming a “probable” victory. In 1945, he became a Lockheed test pilot and died in a P-80 fighter jet crash on the same day that the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
21John Perry
On September 11, 2001, Officer John Perry of the NYPD went to headquarters to file his retirement paperwork. When he heard the explosion at the World Trade Center, he immediately responded and was later killed when one of the towers collapsed. He was the only off-duty officer to be killed on 9/11.
22. During World War 2, Polish poet Stanislaw Jerzy Lec was imprisoned in a German concentration camp from which he made several attempts to escape. He received a death sentence for his second attempt to escape but managed to successfully escape in 1943 after killing his guard with a shovel when taken to dig his own grave. He escaped in the guard’s uniform.
23. In 2001, when a Florida man named Vance Flosenzier noticed that a 7-feet long shark had his 8-year-old nephew Jesse Arbogast by the arm, he grabbed onto the shark and wrestled the animal barehanded out of the water, while others freed Jesse to shore. He wrestled the shark for more than 10 minutes to keep it away from other children. Then they killed the shark and pried it open to retrieve Jesse's severed arm, which the surgeons were able to reattach.
24. In 2012, Anthony Omari took a machete to the face while defending an under-resourced Kenyan orphanage his family runs from attacking robbers. He saved 37 orphans that day. The attack was in revenge to the previously foiled robbery when Anthony threw a hammer at one of the thieves.
25. Italian adventurer Reinhold Messner has climbed Mount Everest without oxygen. He also climbed Nanga Parbat (8000+ meters) three times. The first time he lost his brother and 7 toes in the process. He then climbed it again to become the first person to solo climb it and climbed it the third time to retrieve his brother’s remains.
