five war heroes
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Five War Heroes
Simo Hayha
Simo Hayha had a normal life in Finland. He served his one mandatory year in the military,
and then later on he became a farmer. However when the Soviet Union invaded hishomeland 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 theinvasion 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 became alarmed. 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, but he killed themall. Then the Russians tried getting together a team of counter-snipers (which are basicallysnipers 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 already dead or too scared to go anywhere near him,
the Russians just carpet-bombed everywhere they thought he might be. Supposedly, theyhad the location right, and he actually got hit by a cloud of shrapnel that tore his coat up,
but didn't actually hurt him.
Finally on March 6th, 1940, by chance, a Russian soldier finally shot Hayha in the headwith 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 wasstill very much alive, and regained consciousness on March 13, the very day the war ended.
Yogendra Singh Yadav
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 huge 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 thecliff as he went, so everyone else could climb up the easy way. Yadav, being awesome,volunteered.
Half way up the icy cliff-of-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
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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, andkilled the four heavily-armed men inside with his bare hands. Meanwhile, the remainder of
his squad was standing at the top of the cliff looking at him in astonishent. They then all
went and took the third bunker with little trouble.
For his gallantry and sheer insanity, 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 "rarestof 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 justmistook him for someone less brave. Or they just figured no real human being could
survive a broken leg, shattered arm and 10-15 fresh bullet holes in one sitting.
"Fighting 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 man in the whole 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 thingslike some armies have. No, Jack carried one and used it too. He's 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 tocatch up, all but six of them were killed. Of those six, half were wounded and all any of
them had left were pistols. Then a mortar shell swung in and killed or 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 themright next to his sword.
After being sent to a concentration camp, he got bored and left. Jack simply walked out oit. 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 (withgreat 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 Yanks, we could have kept the war going another 10
years!"
Alvin York
Born to a family of farmers from Tennessee, Alvin York spent much of his youth getting
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drunk in bars and getting into wild barfights. When his friend got killed in one of the
aforementioned barfights, he swore off the liquor, and then became a pacifist. When he
received his draft notice in 1917, York filed as a "conscientious objector" but was denied.They shipped him out to basic training.
About a year later, he was one of 17 men designated to sneak around and take out afortified 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. York's troupe
began to run away. The few survivors that didn't run away, left York standing there takingfire 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 Germanmachine 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 justabout 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 "shooting wild turkeys back home." Atthis 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 or awesome 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 thestunned officer asked how many, York replied "Honest, Lieutenant, I don't know."
Audie Murphy
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 couldalways 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 halfwaythrough training. He insisted that he wanted to fight though, so they sent him into battle.
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 toremember 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
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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 bunch 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 fromFrance and one from Belgium), including the Medal of Honor.
After the war, he came down with Shell-Shock (PTSD), and was prescribed theantidepressant 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 anactor.