Unforgettable Legends: 35 Badasses Who Deserve Recognition – Part 2

21Natwarlal

Natwarlal

Natwarlal was a noted Indian conman who is known for having repeatedly “sold” the Taj Mahal, the Red Fort, the President’s residence and also the Parliament House of India along with its 545 sitting members including the then Indian Prime Minister. He used more than 50 aliases, was a master of disguise, used novel ideas to cheat and was master in forging signatures of famous personalities. He was arrested several times, but in 1996, the wheelchair-bound octogenarian vanished while being transported from prison to a hospital for treatment.


22James Doohan

James Doohan

Actor James Doohan, who played Scotty in Star Trek served in the Canadian Army during World War 2. He first saw combat at Juno Beach. He shot two snipers, led his men through a minefield, but was later wounded by friendly fire (six rounds from a machine gun). One bullet to the chest was stopped by his cigarette case; another severed his right middle finger and four hit his leg. After recovering, he served as an air observation pilot and once slalomed a light observation aircraft between mountainside telegraph poles just to prove that it could be done.


23Mikhail Panikakha

Mikhail Panikakha

Mikhail Panikakha was a Russian Marine who volunteered during the Battle of Stalingrad. When the Soviets were reduced to mere hundreds, Germans drove tanks over Soviet trenches to collapse them and bury their occupants. Out of antitank grenades, Panikakha lit a Molotov cocktail, when a bullet struck the bottle and engulfed him in flames. Despite being on fire, he picked up another Molotov, climbed on top of the tank and smashed the bottle on the engine compartment. The tank, along with Panikakha exploded almost immediately. Seeing this, the Germans retreated.


24Piru Singh

Piru Singh

During the 1947 India-Pakistan war, India's Major Piru Singh was tasked to lead his men through a narrow mountain ridge to recapture an Indian post. Singh picked up his submachine gun and charged up the ridge, bellowing loudly. They came under fire from machine guns and grenades. On reaching the top, he was out of ammo, all his men were dead and blasts tore off most of his clothes. In a rage, he hurled grenades at a trench and bayoneted the occupants, when an enemy grenade tore off half his face. Bleeding and blind in one eye, he threw another grenade at the second enemy trench when a bullet to the head took him out, but his grenade wiped out the last enemy position, accomplishing his mission.


25Blazo Grkovic

Blazo Grkovic

In 2013, a Bosnian shepherd named Blazo Grkovic was attacked by a bear when he was tending to a baby goat. Unable to draw the small hand ax he kept on his person, he defended himself by grabbing the bear's throat and strangling it to death. He then traveled more than a mile over rough, mountainous terrain before he was able to contact an ambulance and be treated for a number of bruises and lacerations.


26Tsutomu Yamaguchi

Tsutomu Yamaguchi

In 1945, a man named Tsutomu Yamaguchi survived the atomic blast at Hiroshima. He dragged himself to an air-raid shelter, spent the night. Next morning he caught a train so that he could arrive at his job on time in Nagasaki, where he survived another atomic blast. He went on to have two daughters and lived to be 93 years old.


27Fukushima 50

Fukushima 50

During the 2011 Japanese earthquake, 50 workers at the Fukushima nuclear power plant did not leave even though 750 others had been evacuated. For four days they kept the reactor from melting down until backup arrived, saving countless lives.


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28Aishat Maksudoya

Aishat Maksudoya

In 2012, a 56-year-old Russian grandmother named Aishat Maksudova fought off a wolf with her bare hands and killed it with an ax. She said, “So the wolf was just clawing into my left hand, pulling on it, pulling away like this and then I took the ax and hit him on his head.”


29Peter Freuchen

Peter Freuchen

During the 1912 Thule Expedition, Arctic explorer Peter Freuchen got buried deep under snow after a snowstorm. Lacking any spears or daggers, he used his own feces to fashion a dagger with which he freed himself. During another expedition in 1926, gangrene got his toes because of frostbite and before it got worse, he amputated his own toes with a hammer without anesthesia and replaced his leg with a peg.


30Keith Lovegrove

Keith Lovegrove

In 2002, when Keith Lovegrove saw his car being stolen, he jumped a fence and sprinted after it. He leapt through the air and clung to his vehicle's bumper, where he was dragged for over 20 meters. He opened the trunk and as the car went over a speed bump, he used its momentum to summersault into the trunk. He burst through the back seat and proceeded to grab the thief in a headlock, dragging him out of the car. Unfortunately, the thief then punched him in the face and escaped. Keith was a 54-year-old ex-soldier at that time and officially registered as disabled.

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