5 Nobodies Who Stumbled into Wars and Kicked Everyone's Ass

Youra Livchitz, Robert Maistriau, and Jean Franklemon were medical students dissatisfied with a career of saving lives one at a time, so they decided to operate in bulk. The friends set up a plan to ambush the XXth Convoy to Auschwitz -- the train line that transferred Jewish captives to their deaths at the Nazis' most infamous concentration camp.

Pierre Salmon
The Nazis died out. The train lived on.

Yep: Three untrained civilians essentially set up the great Nazi train robbery.

On April 19, 1943, the XXth Convoy was carrying 1,631 prisoners to their likely demise, and three students were all that stood between them and the worst shower this side of a dorm. Armed with a hurricane lamp, red tissue paper, a pair of pliers, a pistol, and balls the size of planetoids, the students set about stopping the train to Auschwitz. They knew that engineers would slow the train if they saw an emergency signal on the track, so they glued the red tissue paper around a hurricane lamp, placed it on a bend in the track, and forced the train to a halt.

Yad Vashem 
Livchitz volunteered to stop it with his bare hands, but the others just really loved lamps.

Step 1 complete! Now, on to Step 2: Dealing with the 15 trained soldiers and their commander, who were guarding the prisoners.

Clearly, this operation had a rather steep difficulty curve.

So the plan was for Livchitz to take on any Nazi soldiers with just a pistol, while Maistriau and Franklemon used the pliers to get the transport car doors open? How bloody improbable does that sound? Toss a mohawked black dude into that mix, and you've got one of the less believable episodes of The A-Team. And yet the three students managed to get 115 people off of that train, and to freedom. You gotta love it when a plan comes together.

While priests from Axis countries had to evacuate the Vatican after the entire country was surrounded by an Axis power, priests from neutral countries were allowed to remain hassle-free. However, after Italy surrendered in 1943, things started to get messy. Allied POWs in POW camps were now technically free, but stranded -- and it looked like the German forces were marching in to take them back. They needed someone to help them -- someone with shining moral character, a heart of solid steel, a haircut some would describe as "a drunken cloud," and a bitchin' orange silk cloak. Someone who could possibly be described as "the Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican."

O'Flaherty sprang into action, accepting every POW (over 4,000 of them!) who came to the doors of the Vatican. From there, he began smuggling them out of Rome using his gigantic network of contacts, helpers, and disguised safe houses.

Pima Air and Space Museum
Sometimes he disguised refugees as priests. Or cattle.

When the local German forces began to suspect O'Flaherty, did he abandon his hasty life of heroism? Oh no, he kept right on, wandering Rome in disguise, dodging assassination attempts -- he even had the balls to walk POWs right down the stairs of the Vatican in full view of the SS battalion watching from just outside the border. The last one, unsurprisingly, got him a bounty on his head. Despite being in the cross hairs of the SS and apparently priest-hatin' bounty hunters, O'Flaherty still managed to get every last one of the POWs who came to him to safety. When the war was over, O'Flaherty visited the very man who ordered him killed, Colonel Herbert Kappler, in prison. After what we have to assume were more than a few awkward conversations full of hateful pauses, O'Flaherty converted Kappler to Catholicism.

We're not even sure how that's a burn, but we are sure it's a pretty friggin' sweet one.

Fraser organized an underground network that channeled British soldiers and spies to the coast, where she would hide them until they could be transported back to England. By day, Fraser was known as an ordinary housewife, but by night, she was the mastermind behind the underground network of the French Resistance. She plotted hidden paths and trails for British agents, devised distractions and cover stories -- hell, the woman once shuffled a man out of France in a hearse. We're pretty sure we saw that in a Bond movie.

In 1941, Fraser was betrayed and sent to a Belgian prison for 15 months, but she wasn't just playing at war hero hausfrau. She wasn't about to be dissuaded by a paltry year and change in a brutal enemy prison. Upon release, she went right back to organizing her network. She spent another three years saving numerous lives until she was betrayed again in 1944.

By one of the agents she had just saved.

Marcin Sad‚owski/Photos.com
Turns out he wasn't a coffin fan.

She spent six months in solitary confinement at Loos. There, she was tortured every day -- flogged, stripped, and beaten -- but would not talk. Eventually, she was condemned to die, but Fraser's life really was scripted by a Hollywood screenwriter: On September 1, right before her scheduled execution, Allied forces stormed the prison and rescued her, to which she coolly replied: "Thank you, boys, you are just in time."

Presumably followed by an embarrassing cheek pinch and some hot cocoa.

Her mother was presumably just about to start passive-aggressively asking about babies, as all mothers do, when Pakistani militants rushed into Kausar's village. Four guards posted up outside of her house, while three gunmen went in and beat Kausar's parents and uncle in front of her and her siblings. Luckily for Kausar, her parents had stuffed her under a bed before they came in.

But after her parents fell to the ground in front of her, she found she could take no more. Kausar leaped up behind one of the gunmen (who was also armed with an ax), grabbed him by the hair, bashed his head into the wall, and threw him down. She clocked the floored invader with his own ax, seized his rifle, and blasted commander Abu "I feel like my name was made up by racists" Osama into pieces.

Shanker Chakravarty
A pretty definitive way of rejecting his marriage proposal.

She tagged another as he fled, and started a pitched battle with the rest of the militants that lasted for hours. After seeing their commander smoked by a teenage girl, then trying to take her out for half a day with only injuries on their side, the rest of the militants decided they'd rather not risk getting made fun of quite so hard in hell, so they packed up and fled. Kausar's family and village were safe ... for now.

But watch out for Kausar: First Blood Part 2, coming to a hotly contested valley near you.

Evan V. Symon is a moderator in the Cracked Workshop. When he isn't playing David Bowie's Heroes while researching kickass people, he can be found on Facebook. Be sure to bookshelf and vote for his new book, The End of the Line. Matt Moffitt has a blog here and Twitter account here. Also, he thanks George L. for his input on writing this article.

Related Reading: For more civilians taking on armies, click here and read about the real-life answer to the Inglorious Basterds. For creepy war stories, click here and get a load of this Nazi baby factory. Oh, and also the CIA faked vampire attacks.

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