How they got screwed:

The Free French Army fought victory after bloody victory right up to Paris' doorstep, and they were ready and willing to march in and liberate the capital, with a little help from their American and British allies. Unfortunately, their allies said, "Hell no. Not with all those darkies."

This was a time in history where blacks and whites were still segregated in the American military and forbidden from fighting together. The Allies had an image to uphold, after all -- better for the people to watch Paris liberated by square-jawed, chiseled Aryan superheroes than a ragtag bunch of African natives and Muslims. Before de Gaulle was granted permission by America to take back his own country, he had to scramble to find enough white people to replace anyone in his army who failed the melanin test.

Whoa now. Can't have this guy in battle-scarred Nazi-held Paris.

Of course, that had been de Gaulle's entire problem in the first place. His ultimate solution was to borrow a whole bunch of Spanish soldiers, dress them in berets and pencil mustaches and hope nobody would notice. In the meantime, the Africans were sent home without any of the glory, but at least they enjoyed the benefits of having served -- that is, until 1959, when the French inexplicably cut off their military pensions and tried to cover up their role in the war.

Yes, that Auschwitz.

They needed to set up an entire second camp for his balls.

For the next two and a half years, Pilecki smuggled intelligence out of the Germans' all-time most notorious death camp, stoically reporting on the horrors of Auschwitz like he was reporting the goddamn weather:

"We were slightly sprinkled by cold water. I got a blow in my jaw with a heavy rod. I spat out my two teeth. Bleeding began. From that moment we became mere numbers -- I wore the number 4859."

Pictures of Auschwitz don't really belong on a comedy site. Here's Teddy Roosevelt riding a moose instead.

After realizing that the Allies were just sitting on their hands about the whole Nazi death camp situation, Pilecki escaped the camp in 1943. But although infiltrating and escaping Auschwitz both individually qualified him as the most badass person in Europe, Pilecki went back to go another round with the Gestapo, fighting in the Warsaw Uprising, after which the Nazis threw him right back into another concentration camp.

How he got screwed:

Like many countries in Europe, Poland was so scarred and horrified by their run-in with fascism that it overcompensated after the war and went full communist. You'd think Pilecki would have earned major brownie points for the work he did fighting the Soviet Union's mortal nemesis, but the problem was that Pilecki was not a socialist sympathizer, suspecting that the only difference between Hitler and Stalin was mustache-width.

Marxism gives hair more body!

So he went right back to Poland to continue his hobby of infiltrating and researching horrific, murderous regimes. The Polish Soviet government decided that this was especially not cool, and they swiftly arrested their greatest war hero and gave him three death sentences, we imagine because they rightly suspected that killing him once would not be enough to stop Witold Pilecki.

Right up until the Soviet Union collapsed in the 90s, even mentioning the name of the guy who exposed the Nazis' villainy was enough to get you shot in Poland. They've recently repealed this policy and named a street after him, though we think they probably should go ahead and rename the whole country "Pileckiland."

Marcinko became so elite in the Navy SEALs that they started having to invent new, more elite teams just to find somewhere to put him. Eventually, he wound up commanding something called Red Cell -- his job was to fly around the world, attacking and infiltrating the U.S. military's own bases, in order to test their security and show how the military would cope if the enemy had somebody like Marcinko on its side.

How he got screwed:

Ironically, Red Cell was so good at what it was being paid to do that it embarrassed the shit out of a military that, as it turns out, couldn't cope at all against it. And Marcinko took his job dead seriously, kidnapping high-ranking personnel and even their families, "mildly torturing" them to get nuclear codes and wound up kidnapping one admiral twice.

Red Cell, moments before ambushing President Ronald Reagan on vacation in the Hamptons.

It wasn't long before a bunch of bruised, disgruntled commanders decided to have Marcinko railroaded out of the military, if only so they could sleep a full night again without him swinging through their windows like Batman.

Naval Investigative Services spent a reported $60 million on an investigation to find something -- anything -- to pin on him. Their investigation fell flat, making fools of them yet again, so even after Marcinko retired, they kept going after him in an effort to find anything that would stick. The FBI eventually did convict him on trumped-up charges and sentenced him to a year in some minimum-security prison, but he used that time to write a No. 1 bestselling autobiography, Rogue Warrior, which embarrassed the hell out of the military again.

Some (read: all) of you are probably more familiar with the Xbox adaptation.

Demo Dick is currently forbidden by law from writing any more about the military, so he now exclusively writes popular "fiction" about the adventures of an elite badass who is totally not him embarrassing a bunch of pussies who are totally not the U.S. Navy.

The charges against Perry were eventually dropped due to lack of evidence, but not before they were all pressured out of the military and their names dragged through the mud to the extent that they never received the respect they deserved. Because seriously -- one and a half miles.

How he got screwed:

As we've just mentioned, the Serbs and the Croats hate each other more than cats and dogs, and during World War II, the highest-profile Croat in the world was Yugoslavian leader Josip Broz Tito. It just so happed that Tito and his communist regime were instrumental American allies, and the only thing he hated more than Nazis were those blasted Chetniks.

Who could hate these wacky, bearded misfits?

To maintain good relations with Tito, the American government classified the Halyard Mission, covering up the fact that they had collaborated with a bunch of filthy Serbs. The sad ending for the Chetniks is that, after the war, Tito hunted them down and executed their leader, Draza Mihailovich, while the American government looked at the sky and whistled complacently.

As for Vujnovich, he was awarded the Bronze Star for his efforts... in October of 2010, because Tito has only been dead for, well, 30 years now.

We at Cracked believe that it's never too late to hate.

During World War II, Japanese Consul-General Chiune Sugihara and his wife Yukiko saw how bad things were getting for the Jews and figured God's chosen might be safer in Japan than playing hide-and-seek throughout an increasingly Nazified Europe. But the Japanese government, having taken a liking to this Hitler fellow, refused permission for Chiune to issue visas to Jews to get them out of harm's way.

He did anyway, in direct disobedience to his superiors. As the Nazis encroached, Chiune and his wife started issuing Japanese visas around the clock, blazing through them like bureaucrats on meth. In the eleventh hour, even as they were forced to flee the country, Sugihara was still issuing visas and throwing them out the train window as it pulled away.

He also had streaks in his hair, apparently.

In the end, it's estimated he saved the lives of up to 6,000 Jews in his manic spree. Pretty impressive when you consider that Oskar Schindler's list is estimated to have saved 801.

Lazy.

How he got screwed:

Japan was, at that time, still a country that lived by the fake samurai code of honor the government had conveniently fabricated in the early 20th Century, of which a very important tenet was total obedience to one's superiors. The fact that Chiune saved thousands of people from slaughter took a distant back seat to the fact that he disobeyed an order, pretty much the worst thing a Japanese person could do at the time. He may as well have been working around the clock stabbing 6,000 puppies.

When the government found out what he had done, he was pushed out of government without ceremony, and was forced to live the life of a dishonoured samurai until he died in 1986. The Japanese only begrudgingly apologised to his family in October of 2000, acknowledging that, yeah, he was probably a decent guy.

The Lithuanians gave him this nice tree. So, uh. That's ... something?

For more of Eric Yosomono's articles you can visit his website at Gaijinass.

For more badass warriors, check out 5 Real Life Soldiers Who Make Rambo Look Like a Pussy and 6 Soldiers Who Survived Shit That Would Kill a Terminator.

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