5 Real Life Soldiers Who Make Rambo Look Like a Pussy
#2.
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.
What's left of York's troupe.
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."
The Best Hollywood Could Come Up With:
John Rambo from Rambo.
Why it Doesn't Compare:
Sure, Rambo takes on a huge chunk of the Vietnamese soldiers guarding a POW camp and slaughters them all. But that was a good 10 years after the war ended. It's not like they were expecting some guy to come charging into the camp, mowing everybody down.
York pulled his badassery off in the middle of a war, while outnumbered every bit as badly as Rambo was. And York's the one who was a pacifist.
#1.
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 is a seriously tiny man.
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.
The Best Hollywood Could Come Up With:
Audie Murphy (Audie Murphy) from To Hell and Back:
He is a seriously tiny man.
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.
Why it Doesn't Compare:
When some Hollywood producer wanted to make a movie based on Murphy's autobiography, he was determined to have Murphy play himself in the film. Murphy was afraid people would see the complete insane awesomeness the story had to offer, and think he was embellishing or trying to cash in on his fame, so he actually had them take parts out for fear that they wouldn't be believable to a Hollywood audience. Seriously.
Sometimes killing a dozen men at once isn't what makes you badass, but how a dozen men failed at killing you. Check out those men (and a lady) who were impervious to death in 7 Historical Figures Who Were Absurdly Hard To Kill. Or check out the badasses who opted to just spit in Death's face, in The 11 Most Badass Last Words Ever Uttered.
You didn't mention that Hayha shot the guy who shot him after being shot himself.
ReplyDUDE HOLY s**t !!( IN AN Indian ACCENT) EXCELLENT !
ReplyWhoever said that bit about truth being stranger than fiction because truth needs to make sense must have retroactively read this article...
ReplyThey're awesome.
Awesome they are indeed. I read a post earlier where someone said they did not even feel like a male next to these guys. I would like to call your attention to a woman named Lyudmila Pavlichenko. She had 309 confirmed kills.In her area of operations in the Crimea she was as feared as Vasiliy Zaitsev at Stalingrad. She was wounded by mortar fire, but after recovery, she went on to train snipers, so she was to be responsible for more Nazi deaths. She became the first Soviet citizen to be received by the US President.
^ Yeah, and some of her activities weren't even unsealed from Soviet military archives until after the Cold War. It's like "what more could this woman possibly have done?" LOL.
Audie Murphy tried to enlist in the Navy not the Air Force. The Air force wasn't a separate branch until after WW II. There was an Army Air Corp but technically you still would have been in the army. That's O.K. Cracked.
Replyand Churchill was also the first man to ride the River Severn’s five-foot tidal bore and designed his own board. that's right, he was a fkin surfer too
ReplyOw. My balls are growing so much that they hurt. Thanks, Cracked.
ReplyTeabagging vacuum cleaners can do that to you. My recommendation is a fifteen minute break every hour.
About Simo Häyhä, he was actually specially trained as a sniper in the 1930s, and was one of the top scorers in his home province's militia's shooting competitions (even winning many of them), and he was not by far the badassest man in his unit; his own company commander was ex-foreign legionaire and crazy as f**k, but damn if he didn't know how to do his job, also the unit served in the Kollaa front, which at the end of war saw a living hell where companies were commanded by lance corporals, but the stubborn bastards refused to know the meaning of "give up", only reason why they retreated from their positions was because the peace agreement gave the area to the Soviets.
Replyabout the company commander, his name was Aarne Juutilainen (his younger brother, Ilmari Juutilainen was the top-scoring non-german fighter pilot of all times with 126 victories, it's said that it was Aarne who first encouraged Ilmari to join the Finnish Air Force), and he was given the nickname "The Terror of Morocco" due to his past in the French Foreign Legion, the stories about him are just hilarious, one story says that he feared nothing but the messengers of his commanders as he was afraid he would be ordered to retreat if he let the messengers catch him. Another story is that when couple of fresh soldiers reported in during the Winter war, one of the rookies almost immediately told (then-) lieutenant Juutilainen that he refused to bear arms, Juutilainen replied "do as you please, but you WILL stand on guard on your own turns like all the others, ward off the russkies with snowballs if you want", after which the rookie went looking for a rifle.
Make Rambo look like a pussy? You really missed the point of First Blood, didn't you? It's okay, so did the sequels.
ReplyPossibly one of the few movies to make the hero more badass than his book counterpart.
"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."
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesOh, so, I guess in the USA they hand out the Medal of Honor for no reason at all. You should get your ass kicked for belittling the recipients of the Medal of Honor.
Last nine words, the medal is awarded for doing something that cannot be done, like taking 15 bullets and surviving after having destroyed two objectives and enabling the destruction of a third.
Hey, he's disagreeing with something in this article. Better rate all of his comments down as much as possible! Cracked is law!
Some of the things the US has awarded MoHs for don't really warrant it.
"And not one of those sissy ceremonial things the Marines have."
Reply Hide All See All 4 RepliesYou people really are assholes, aren't you?
I haven't seen a marine use his sword in combat, also it's a freaking claymore
I mean, even if it was a katana...
It's comedy...and also, the swords ARE ceremonial. Do they give Marines swordplay lessons? I doubt it. That sword is not a part of the combat uniform, either, so that should tell you something.
^Er, what should that tell me? That Marines are hardly used for boarding pirate ships anymore?
"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.' "
Reply Hide All See All 4 RepliesCracked: Do not belittle the recipients of the Medal of Honor.
Whoa there pal, how dare you disagree with the article using something so trite as human decency. I better down vote you 93028923083 times! Whoops, I hit the thumbs up by mistake.... my 'bad'
We f*****g get it man, shut up.
I always get the impression that Cracked is painfully aware that they don't compare to the least bad ass soldiers. Which I appreciate.
Meh, the standards for awarding it has gotten a lot looser in the past decade.
Jack Churchill was also the first man to surf the river severn, on a surfboard he designed himself. What a guy.
ReplyJust looked him up, turns out he lived just down the road from me in his last few years. Wish I'd known that when he was alive.
You left out one huge badass point for Jack Churchill, and that's that he is the only soldier of the modern era to have a confirmed kill with a bow and arrow on a battlefield. Yeah, he had a bow and arrows in addition to a claymore and bagpipes!
ReplyEnormous testicles. That's why the Scots wear kilts, I guess. They'd burst out of pants.
Just to be clear the M10 you have in that picture is an M10C, which mounted a 17 pounder and was only used by commonwealth forces (that particular model is one of the 11th armor) anyway nice article and sorry but I felt a need to point that out.
ReplySimo Hayha is so far above and beyond any normal definition of "badass" that even the other legends in this article pale in comparison.
ReplyOk, I honestly thought that this article was going to say Captain America was based off Audie Murphy because if Cap didn't take the super serum, this is EXACTLY how Captain America would of been like in the army with out it. If the Captain America comics werent made before Murphy was in the Army, I would think thats where the inspiration came from.
ReplyYork actually had a movie made about him. It was called Sergeant York starred Gary Cooper from 1941 and it was still more badass then rambo.
Replyim sorry but come on cracked, weve got a finnish, scot and indian. highest recorded confirmed kill count by a sniper EVER +150 with a machine gun, in -20 degrees celcius, looses his face but doesnt die is last place, followed by a scot that prefered two handed swords to automatic weaponry and an indian that took out two bunkers whilst being turned to swiss cheese (and not dieing) and then in the two top spots we have a couple of americans who shot quite a few people
ReplyDamn, these complaints are as annoying as they are predictable. Apparently, the author thought single-handedly capturing 133 enemy soldiers men while facing down machine gun nests in trench warfare was cooler than capturing 42 enemies using a claymore during WWII. Maybe he just put the bad-ass at #5 in that slot to get our attention at the beginning. Or maybe it was because out of these five men, the author felt his funniest bit was the one he wrote on the guy in #1. Who cares!? And if you want to go by body count then the order would be #1, #5, #2, #4, #3. There! Would THAT improve the flow of the article? Would you have complained if the guys in #1 and #2 had done the same thing but were not American? If not, then the list is just fine and their nationalities shouldn't matter.
Something to keep in mind - often the most bad ass examples are put on the first page to pull the reader in. They're numbered because it makes things simpler, not because number one is necessarily better than number two.
As soon as I read #5, I immediately thought it would be a BADASS movie...
Replycheck out Simo's wiki picture...
Reply