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

During the first major raid against the Germans in 1941, Canadian chaplain John Weir Foote was told to sit it out. He dared his officer to arrest him to keep him out, so he was assigned as a stretcher-bearer. During the raid, he helped carry 30 wounded soldiers to safety under fire and provided them with morphine. While retreating from the beach, he disembarked and surrendered himself as he considered a POW camp needed religious guidance more than a hunch of soldiers returning to base. After three years’ imprisonment with one serious escape attempt, Foote was released. He was awarded the Victoria Cross.

Werner Forssmann was the first man to perform cardiac catheterization. He ignored his department chief and persuaded the operating room nurse to assist him. She agreed, but on the promise that he would do it on her rather than on himself. He pretended to locally anesthetize and cut her arm whilst he actually did the procedure on himself. He then walked downstairs to the radiology department to take the x-ray to prove he would not die. He was fired, became a Nazi and then won the Nobel Prize.

In 1961, about 150 Irish soldiers defended a Congo town from 3000 African tribesmen and foreign mercenaries for six days. They killed 300 of them and didn’t lose any men themselves.

In 634, when Eastern Roman Empire met Rashidun Caliphate, among them was Zarrar Ibn al-Azwar, who was a tax-collector, but whenever war broke out he was charging the battlefield without armor earning him the nickname of “the half-naked warrior.” During this war, when the caliphate was on the verge of losing, they challenged the Byzantine officers with a series of duels against Azwar. He killed two governors and every other Roman champion, leaving the Roman army with no officers to lead. Caliphate won Syria and Palestine and ruled there for more than 1000 years.

A grandma named Sue Aikens lives in total isolation as the manager of river camp north the Arctic Circle in Alaska. She was once attacked by a bear and escaped. Because bears were known to be carriers of bacteria, she cleaned up the wounds, sewed her scalp, reset her dislocated legs, went out again and shot him dead. Then her hips gave out and she could only pull forward. She laid there for 10 days until a pilot found her.

Robert Landsburg, while filming Mount St. Helens volcano eruption in 1980 realized he could not survive it, so he rewound the film back into its case, put his camera in his backpack, and then lay on top of the back to protect the film for future researchers.

During World War 2, the Japanese were known to execute POWs on a whim if there was even a hint of rescue. So to rescue allied POWs from the Cabanatuan City, in the Philippines, allies devised a ridiculous plan. Capt. Kenneth Schrieber and Lt. Bonnie Rucks flew their P-61 low, backfired their aircraft several times while performing aerobatic maneuvers for 20 minutes over the POW camp. Every Japanese guard watched waiting for them to crash. While they were distracted, several hundred allied soldiers were able to sneak into the camp unnoticed and when the orders came they were able to kill every Japanese soldier within 15 seconds and liberated the camp.

In 2014, a 3-year-old Russian girl named Karina Chikitova survived for 11 days in Siberian taiga forest by drinking from a creek and eating berries while being protected by her dog, which went to get help after 9 days and returned with rescuers.

Bryan Cranston wore a suit of 10,000 live bees while filming an episode of Malcolm in the Middle. He was only stung once. After the writers asked him jokingly if he would be willing to wear a suit of live bees, he said he would, so they wrote a script around the idea.

In World War 2, when his submarine sank, John Capes swam 170 feet to the surface and swam 5 miles to shore. He then hid from Italians for 18 months before escaping to Turkey.