26Gordon Cooper
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.
27. 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.
28. 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.”
29. 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.
30. 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.
Latest FactRepublic Video:
15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
31Gander
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.
32. 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.
33. 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.
34. 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.”
35. 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.
36Joseph Bolitho Johns
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.
37. 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.
38. 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.
39. 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.
40. 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.”
41Bishnu Shrestha
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.
42. 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.
43. 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.
44. When Genghis Khan sent a trade caravan to the Khwarazmian Empire, the governor of one city seized it and killed the traders. Genghis Khan retaliated by invading the empire with 200,000 men and killing the governor by pouring molten silver down his eyes and mouth. Genghis Khan even went so far as to divert a river through the Khwarezmid emperor's birthplace, erasing it from the map.
45. In 1943, an Australian soldier named Leslie Charles Allen single-handedly carried 12 American casualties to safety whilst under heavy fire at Mt. Tambu in spite of being injured. He acquired his nickname ‘Bull’ for charging through the opposition while playing Australian Rules Football with the battalion.
