History’s 50 Most Awesome Badasses You Should Know About – Part 5

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.

In 2015, when a Montana man named Chase DelIwo came face-to-face with a 400-pound grizzly bear, he used a tip he had received from his grandmother (large animals have bad gag reflexes) to save his life. He shoved his right arm down the bear’s throat and the bear left him. He survived with a couple of hundred stitches to his head and a punctured leg.

When Jimmy Carter was a young nuclear office in the US Navy, they sent him to help a partial meltdown in a Canadian nuclear reactor. They built an exact copy of the reactor to train with and then lowered him into the still extremely radioactive reactor to take it apart one piece at a time.

Allstate’s “Mr. Mayhem” Dean Winters has survived 17 surgeries and 9 amputations, including his nose and thumb. He also once died for 2.5 minutes en route to the hospital after contracting a bacterial infection.

Gotz von Berlichingen was a 16th century Imperial Knight who during one of the battles lost his right hand. He went on to build a new hand out of metal with adjustable fingers with the ability to hold small and large objects, anything from a playing card to a sword. He became a mercenary and fought for the highest bidders, ransomed people and even robbed merchants. With his ill-gotten gains, he eventually bought the Hornberg castle and continued warring into his 60s.