Unforgettable Legends: 30 Badasses Who Made a Difference

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.