Simo Hayha
Who Was He?
Simo Hayha had a fairly boring life in Finland. He served his one mandatory year in the military, and then became a farmer. But when the Soviet Union invaded his homeland in 1939, he decided he wanted to help his country.
Since the majority of fighting took place in the forest, he figured the best way to stop the invasion was to grab his trusty rifle, a couple of cans of food and hide in a tree all day shooting Russians. In six feet of snow. And 20-40 degrees below zero.
Of course when the Russians heard that dozens of their men were going down and that it was all one dude with a rifle, they got fucking scared. He became known as "The White Death" because of his white camouflage outfit, and they actually mounted whole missions just to kill that one guy.
They started by sending out a task force to find Hayha and take him out. He killed them all.
Then they tried getting together a team of counter-snipers (which are basically snipers that kill snipers) and sent them in to eliminate Hayha. He killed all of them, too
Over the course of 100 days, Hayha killed 542 people with his rifle. He took out another 150 or so with his SMG, sending his credited kill-count up to 705.
Since everyone they had was either too dead or too scared to go anywhere near him, the Russians just carpet-bombed everywhere they thought he might be. Supposedly, they had the location right, and he actually got hit by a cloud of shrapnel that tore his coat up, but didn't actually hurt him, because he's the fucking White Death, damn it.
Finally on March 6th, 1940, some lucky bastard shot Hayha in the head with an exploding bullet. When some other soldiers found him and brought him back to base, he "had half his head missing." The White Death had finally been stopped...
...for about a week. In spite of having come down with a nasty case of shot-in-the-face syndrome, he was still very much alive, and regained consciousness on March 13, the very day the war ended.
Yogendra Singh Yadav
Who Was He?
Yogendra Singh Yadav was a member of an Indian grenadier battalion during a conflict with Pakistan in 1999. Their mission was to climb "Tiger Hill" (actually a big-ass mountain), and neutralize the three enemy bunkers at the top. Unfortunately, this meant climbing up a sheer hundred-foot cliff-face of solid ice. Since they didn't want to all climb up one at a time with ice-axes, they decided they'd send one guy up, and he'd fasten the ropes to the cliff as he went, so everyone else could climb up the sissy way. Yadav, being awesome, volunteered.
Half way up the icy cliff-o'-doom, enemies stationed on an adjacent mountain opened fire, shooting them with an RPG, then spraying assault-rifle fire all over the cliff. Half his squad was killed, including the commander, and the rest were scattered and disorganized. Yadav, in spite of being shot three times, kept climbing.
When he reached the top, one of the target bunkers opened fire on him with machine guns. Yadav ran toward the hail of bullets, pitched a grenade in the window and killed everyone inside. By this point the second bunker had a clear shot and opened fire, so he ran at them, taking bullets while he did, and killed the four heavily-armed men inside with his bare hands.
Meanwhile, the remainder of his squad was standing at the top of the cliff staring at him saying, "dude, holy shit!" They then all went and took the third bunker with little trouble.
For his gallantry and sheer ballsiness, he was awarded the Param Vir Chakra, India's highest military award. Unlike the Medal of Honor, the Param Vir Chakra is only given for "rarest of the rare gallantry which is beyond the call of duty and which in normal life is considered impossible to do." That's right, you actually have to break the laws of reality just to be eligible.
It has only been awarded 21 times, and two thirds of the people who earned it died in the process. It was initially reported that Yadav had as well, but it turns out that they just mistook him for someone less badass. Or they just figured no real human being could survive a broken leg, shattered arm and 10-15 fresh bullet holes in one sitting.
Jack Churchill
Who Was He?
An allied commander in WWII, and an avid fan of surfing, Captain Jack Malcolm Thorpe Fleming Churchill aka "Fighting Jack Churchill" aka "Mad Jack" was basically the craziest motherfucker in the whole damn war.
He volunteered for commando duty, not actually knowing what it entailed, but knowing that it sounded dangerous, and therefore fun. He is best known for saying that "any officer who goes into action without his sword is improperly dressed" and, in following with this, for carrying a sword into battle. In WWII. And not one of those sissy ceremonial things the Marines have. No, Jack carried a fucking claymore. And he used it, too. He is credited with capturing a total of 42 Germans and a mortar squad in the middle of the night, using only his sword.
Churchill and his team were tasked with capturing a German fortification creatively called "Point 622." Churchill took the lead, charging ahead of the group into the dark through the barbed wire and mines, pitching grenades as he went. Although his unit did their best to catch up, all but six of them were lost to silly things like death. Of those six, half were wounded and all any of them had left were pistols. Then a mortar shell swung in and killed/mortally wounded everyone who wasn't Jack Churchill.
When the Germans found him, he was playing "Will Ye No Come Back Again?" on his bagpipes. Oh, we didn't mention that? He carried them right next to his big fucking sword.
After being sent to a concentration camp, he got bored and left. Just walked out. They caught him again, and sent him to a new camp. So he left again. After walking 150 miles with only a rusty can of onions for food, he was picked up by the Americans and sent back to Britain, where he demanded to be sent back into the field, only to find out (with great disappointment) the war had ended while he was on his way there. As he later said to his friends, "If it wasn't for those damn Yanks, we could have kept the war going another 10 years!
Alvin York
Who was he?
Born to a family of redneck farmers from Tennessee, Alvin York spent much of his youth getting piss drunk in bars and getting into crazy barfights. When his friend got killed in one of the aforementioned barfights, he swore off the liquor, and became a pacifist. When he received his draft notice in 1917, York filed as a "conscientious objector" but was denied. They shipped his ass out to basic training.
About a year later, he was one of 17 men designated to sneak around and take out a fortified machine-gun encampment guarding a German railroad. As they were approaching, the gunners spotted them and opened fire, tearing nine of the men to pieces.
The few survivors that didn't have enormous balls of steel ran away, leaving York standing there taking fire from 32 heavy machine gunners. As he said in his diary,
"I didn't have time to dodge behind a tree or dive into the brush, I didn't even have time to kneel or lie down. I had no time no how to do nothing but watch them-there German machine gunners and give them the best I had. Every time I seed a German I just touched him off. At first I was shooting from a prone position; that is lying down; just like we often shoot at the targets in the shooting matches in the mountains of Tennessee; and it was just about the same distance. But the targets here were bigger. I just couldn't miss a German's head or body at that distance. And I didn't."
After he killed the first 20 men or so, a German lieutenant got five guys together to try to take this guy from the side. York pulled out his Colt .45 (which only had eight bullets) and killed all of them with it, a practice he likened to "shoot[ing] wild turkeys back home."
At this point lieutenant Paul Jurgen Vollmer yelled out over the noise asking if York was English. See, in WWI, no one really took the Americans very seriously, and everyone thought of them as the rookies. Vollmer figured this crazy/awesome/ballsy soldier must be some kind of English superman who was showing these sissy Americans how it was done. When York said he was American, Vollmer replied "Good Lord! If you won't shoot any more I will make them give up."
Ten minutes later, 133 men came walking towards the remains of York's battalion. Lieutenant Woods, York's superior at first thought it was a German counter-attack until he saw York, who saluted and said "Corporal York reports with prisoners, sir." When the stunned officer asked how many, York replied "Honest, Lieutenant, I don't know."
Audie Murphy
Who Was He?
When Audie Murphy applied to the Marines in 1942 at the tender age of 16, he was 5'5" and weighed 110 pounds. They laughed in his face. So he applied to the Air Force, and they also laughed in his face. Then he applied for the Army, and they figured they could always use another grunt to absorb gunfire, so they let him in. He wasn't particularly good at it, and they actually tried to get him transferred to be a cook after he passed out halfway through training. He insisted that he wanted to fight though, so they sent him into the maelstrom.
During the invasion of Italy he was promoted to corporal for his awesome shooting skills, and at the same time contracted malaria, which he had for almost the entire war. Try to remember that.
He was sent into southern France in 1944. He encountered a German machine gun crew who pretended they were surrendering, then shot his best buddy. Murphy completely hulked out, killed everyone in the gun nest, then used their weaponry to kill every baddie in a 100-yard radius, including two more machine gun nests and a bunch of snipers. They gave him a Distiguished Service Cross, and made him platoon commander while everyone apologized profusely for calling him "Shorty."
About half a year later, his company was given the job of defending the Colmar Pocket, a critical region in France, even though all they had left was 19 guys (out of the original 128) and a couple of M-10 Tank Destroyers.
The Germans showed up with a shitload of guys and half a dozen tanks. Since reinforcements weren't coming for a while, Murphy and his men hid in a trench and sent the M-10s to go do the heavy lifting. They got ripped to shreds.
Then, this five-and-a-half-foot-tall kid with malaria ran up to one of the crippled M-10s, hopped in behind the .50 cal machine gun, and started killing everything in sight. Understand that the M-10 was on fire, had a full tank of gas and was basically a death-trap.
He kept going for almost an hour until he was out of bullets, then walked back to his bewildered men as the M-10 exploded in the background Mad Max style. They gave him literally every medal they could (33 in all, although he had doubles of a few, plus five from France and one from Belgium), including the Medal of Honor.
After the war, he came down with Shell-Shock, and was prescribed the antidepressant placidyl. When he became addicted to the drug, rather than enter a program like some kind of sissy, he went cold-turkey, locked himself in a motel room for a week and got over it. He wrote an autobiography entitled To Hell and Back, and later became an actor.
In To Hell and Back, Audie Murphy plays Audie Murphy, a badass war hero who proves his worth on the battlefield with his awesome badassery. The movie was the highest-grossing film Universal made, a record it held for 20 years until the making of Jaws. That's right, they actually needed a movie about a giant, man-eating, shark to top Audie Murphy's awesomeness.
Now the Badass of the of them all
Dan Daly
Who was he?
God has a hard-on for Marines, because they kill everything they see. Marines are the motherfuckers we send in when shit needs to be taken care of, and if you were to say that the USMC was one of the most badassed military organizations of all time I don't think you've have too many people try to debate the subject with you. It's pretty much understood that when jackasses need to get their shit fucked up, the Marines are the President's first phone call.
Among the United States Marine Corps, Sergeant Daniel Daly is something of a legend. Now that's saying something in and of itself, considering some of the men and women who have served the Corps during the years. The 5'6", 135lb soldier was fearless, tough, and well respected among officers and enlisted men alike. The man epitomized what it means to be a Marine.
In January of 1899 the United States and Spain went to war over Cuba. Well Dan Daly heard about all the asskickings Teddy Roosevelt and his men were laying all over the place, so he decided to enlist in the Marine Corps and try to get in on the action. Unfortunately by the time his drill instructors were done whipping him into shape old-school-style at boot camp on Parris Island, the war was already over.
When Private Daly got out of Basic he was assigned to the Asiatic Fleet, which was trolling around the Far East eating sushi and drinking some fine-ass saki. Well around this time shit was getting pretty whack in China, as the Qing Dynasty was in the early stages of the Boxer Rebellion. While it would be awesome if the Boxer Rebellion was a bunch of guys like Muhammad Ali running around beating the shit out of everyone, it was really just an uprising by the Chinese peasantry against foreign influence in their country. Since these Boxers were getting a little bit more violent every day, the U.S. decided to send in some Marines to make sure their diplomatic legation was safe. Dan Daly's Marines were deployed.
Well no sooner did the Marines show up then they found a small contingent of German soldiers camped outside the American embassy in Beijing. The Corpsmen were like, "fuck this", and assaulted the German positions, pushing the Krauts the fuck out of there. Since the defensive positions surrounding the legation were badly damaged, the rest of the Marines headed off to gather reinforcements and supplies to rebuild the fortifications around the embassy. Private Daly volunteered to stay back and hold the fort while they were gone.
That night, shit hit the fan. Dan was just hanging out, smoking a cigarette, when all of a sudden a huge force of Chinese Boxers started bull-rushing the American Embassy with torches, rifles, and various other weaponry raised above their heads, screaming like madmen. They had come to destroy the consulate, and Daly was the only man between this rampaging horde and the diplomatic legation. In the face of this seemingly unending onslaught, Dan Daly knew it was time to be a Marine. He jammed an ammunition belt into his squad machine gun, took a deep breath, and squeezed the trigger.
The next morning, the rest of Private Daly's squad arrived at the barricade Daly had been charged with defending. Through the smoke and the carnage, they saw Dan Daly sitting on the fortifications puffing a smoke, surrounded by the bodies of 200 slain Boxers. For his actions in single-handedly defending the legation in the face of impossible odds, Private Daly received the Congressional Medal of Honor.
But his job wasn't finished yet. In 1914 Daly was transferred to Haiti during the American occupation of that country. It was here that he would distinguish himself in combat once again.
Daly, who was now a Gunnery Sergeant at this point, was part of a platoon that had been sent out on a reconnaissance patrol deep into the Haitian countryside. One day, as they were fording a small river, the Marines found themselves in the middle of a deadly ambush. 400 Haitian Cacos rebels poured fire into the 35-man platoon from three sides of the river, tearing into the U.S. troops. The Marines fought hard and managed to push their way across the river, where they set up defensive positions and tried to fight off their attackers. Unfortunately, the platoon's heavy machine gun had fallen in the initial pandemonium and was now resting peacefully at the bottom of the river. Things looked pretty bleak for the heavily-outnumbered Marines.
Then Sergeant Daly stepped up. He made his way out from the American positions in the middle of the night, jumped into the river, pulled the machine gun up, strapped it to his back and snuck back to join his platoon. The following morning, the now-heavily-armed Marines split into three fire teams and swept through the jungle, tearing the Cacos new assholes all over the place. When all was said and done, the rebel units were completely annihilated and Sergeant Daly earned his SECOND Congressional Medal of Honor.
After Haiti, Daly served fleet duty aboard the USS Newark, Panther, Cleveland, Marietta, Mississippi, Ohio, and Machias, saw combat in Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico and Panama, and served on Marine bases in eight different U.S. cities. The man got around, because when you're as badass as Dan Daly was you're usually in pretty high demand.
In 1917 the United States once again needed the help of Sergeant Daly. Around this time France and Germany were in the middle of the biggest and deadliest war the planet had ever seen, and the U.S. decided to send in the Marines to help kick some ass in "The Great War", as it was now being called. Well Daly sure as shit wasn't going to miss out on an opportunity to fight in a World War, so he shipped out at age 44 for some more adventures. He fought in several campaigns with the American Expeditionary Force in France, and won combat medals three more times - once when he crawled out under heavy enemy fire and rescued a half-dozen wounded Marines who were pinned down, once when he single-handedly captured 13 German soldiers, and once when he took out a heavily-fortified German machine gun nest all by himself using nothing more than a handful of grenades and a Colt .45 Automatic. He was also wounded three times, but yeah right like that could slow him down.
Daly's greatest moment in World War I came during the intense fighting at the Battle of Belleau Wood. Daly's Marines were in the middle of a goddamned shitstorm. They were outnumbered two-to-one, outgunned, and facing down the barrel of a veritable assload of German machine gun nests. They had been pinned down for hours by a non-stop hail of artillery and gunfire, and things were looking bleak as hell for our boys.
Well all of a sudden, just as things were looking hopeless, a lone figure jumped up onto the earthworks the American Marines had been using for cover. Sergeant Dan Daly looked down the line, clutched his rifle and shouted, "Come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?" before charging out to meet the enemy. The men of the United States Marine Corps saw this act of bravery and decided, no, they did not want to live forever. They went "over the top" and charged the German positions.
On 26 June 1917 the U.S. High Command in France received the following telegram:
Woods now U.S. Marine Corps entirely.
For his actions in the Belleau Woods, Sergeant Daly received the Navy Cross and the French Croix de Guerre.
Daly would serve in the occupation army, then work in Fleet Reserve until he finally retired from the Corps. He worked as a banker for 17 years after his service and died in 1937 at age 65. He is one of only two Marines to ever receive two Congressional Medals of Honor, and to this day remains one of the most legendary figures in American military history. A true badass.
