Historical Badass Archive – Part 5: 42 More Badasses Who’ll Truly Inspire You

Tilly Smith, a 10-year-old British schoolgirl, save her family and 100 other tourists from the 2004 Asian tsunami, by recognizing signs of tsunamis she had learned in geography lesson two weeks before.

In 1984, Robert Patrick (T-1000 from Terminator 2: Judgment Day), swam for 3 hours to rescue people after a boating accident on Lake Erie, nearly drowning in the attempt.

Future King Henry V was struck in the face by an arrow in his first battle leading soldiers. Rather than leaving the field, he reportedly stated that “I would rather die than stain my soldierly reputation by flight. He was 16 at that time.

In 1986, during the Namibian War of Independence, two Namibian guerrillas realized they were being followed and split up. One of them managed to escape. The trail of the second one was picked up by Special Forces trackers who tracked him in armored carriers. Despite this, he actually managed to increase the distance between himself and trackers. Even when helicopters were called, they could not keep up with him. They tracked him for 230 miles over five days with no evidence that he stopped to sleep. The only thing they ever found were used syringes. They found spots where he had collapsed from exhaustion, shot himself with methamphetamines, gotten back up and started running again. They never caught him.

Despite never having received naval training or participating in naval combat prior to the war, and constantly being outnumbered and out supplied during the Battle of Myeongnyang in 1597, Admiral Yi Sun Shin defeated 333 Japanese ships with only 13 Korean ships.

Captain Jonathan R. Davis in a well-documented incident single-handedly killed 11 armed bandits who ambushed him in 1854. He killed 7 with his dual-wielding revolvers and then finished the remaining 4 with a Bowie knife. He sustained only two slight flesh wounds.

On the first day of the assault on Iwo Jima, Corporal Tony Stein cleared multiple enemy pillboxes using his custom M1919 machine gun which he named “Stinger.” During the assault, he made a total of 8 trips back to the beach to reload on ammunition and carried a wounded soldier on his back each trip. He was killed in action 10 days later and posthumously received Medal of Honor.

Owen J. Baggett became legendary as being the only person to have downed a Japanese aircraft with an M1911 pistol. He shot the pilot in the head while he was parachuting down.

El Cid was a military leader in the Middle Ages who was so feared that after his death, his embalmed body was placed on a horse and sent into battle causing the enemy to flee.

During one of their numerous battles in the early 1700s, an unnamed South Carolina Catawba warrior was ambushed by a New York Seneca war party. He took off and shot and killed seven Senecas before being captured. They stripped him naked, tied him up and marched him back to New York, allowing people to whip him as he passed. When they untied him after traveling 500 miles, he dashed off into the nearby river, swam it without popping up once and took off into the woods. That night he killed the Seneca search party that was sent after him. The Senecas decided he was a wizard and gave up. He made his way back to South Carolina, dug up the bodies of the seven Senecas he had killed when he was caught and scalped them.