1. Ching Shih
She was a Chinese prostitute who married a pirate and took over his fleet when he died. She ran her ships with an iron fist and took no shit and was super successful, to the point that the Chinese government sent out an armada to stop her. She kicked their asses and captured 63 of their ships. They fought for two years and even brought in Dutch and British ships before they gave up and offered amnesty to her and her 17,000 crewmen. She got to keep ALL of her loot, spent her later years running a brothel/casino and lived to be 69.
2. Jack Churchill
He was a WW2 Commando who served with distinction in a number of theaters, his exploits earned him the Military Cross.
He was known as ‘Mad Jack’ by his men and his fellow officers for his ferociousness in combat. Unlike his more conventional peers his weapons of choice were not the traditional British fire arms of the period, instead he chose to rush in to combat with a fucking long bow, a fucking sword and his trusty bag pipes.
In 1943 him and a corporal infiltrated a German held town in Sicily capturing 42 men and a mortar position. With only his bagpipes, sword and bow.
When the war ended in 1945 after the dropping of the bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, he was extremely disappointed and was quoted as saying “If it wasn’t for those damn Yanks, we could have kept the war going another 10 years.”
3. Khutulun
This Mongolian Princess insisted that any man who wished to marry her must defeat her in wrestling, forfeiting horses to her if they lost.
She gained 10,000 horses defeating prospective suitors.
4. Genghis Khan
“I am the punishment of God. If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me to you.”
Only someone badass enough to know they are badass enough to say that can be considered the baddest ass in history.
5. Simo Häyhä
6. “Tank Man”
Tank Man, of Tiananmen Square fame.
We tend to think that you need an army at your back to be a badass, but when you’re a true badass you face the army in front of you even when there’s no one behind you.
7. Rasputin
Trusted advisor to the Romanov family and was nearly impossible to kill (poisoned, shot, drowned).
8. Christopher Lee
*worked in military intelligence during WW2, the character of James Bond is supposed to be part based on him (Ian Fleming was his cousin.)
About his war service (from wikipedia): Lee spent time with the Gurkhas of the 8th Indian Infantry Division during the Battle of Monte Cassino. -While spending some time on leave in Naples, Lee climbed Mount Vesuvius, which erupted three days later. – During the final assault on Monte Cassino, the squadron was based in San Angelo and Lee was nearly killed when one of the planes crashed on takeoff and he tripped over one of its live bombs.
*played Count Dracula in a string of popular Hammer Horror films; a James Bond villain in The Man with the Golden Gun; Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man; Saruman in The Lord of the Rings films and The Hobbit films; and Count Dooku in the final two films of the Star Wars prequel trilogy.*released a Heavy metal album at the age of 88; has won awards for his metal music; the single he released in his 90th birthday made him the genre’s oldest performer; he had a song in the Billboard Hot 100 in December 2013 making him — at 91 — the living oldest performer to ever chart; released an EP earlier this year, at 92.
If he’s not the world’s baddest ass, he might still be the worlds most interesting man.
9. Subutai
Subutai, Ghengis Khan’s primary military strategist. Tore through Eastern Europe like tearing toilet paper, with only a scouting force. Check out the wiki link, because he was unbelievable.
10. Roy P. Benavidez
11. Anne Boleyn
I’ll always stand by Anne Boleyn – she manipulated an infamous king into turning away from his beloved religion, kill his supporters who objected (Cardinal Wolsey), and broke with the church to marry her. She’s usually seen as conniving, a witch and evil, but in a male dominated world she cut out her own path and went from low born to the queen of England. She’s such an interesting person in my opinion
12. Frederick the Great
Frederick the Great is one of the most underrated badasses in history. The guy took on Austria, France, Russia, Poland, Sweden, and a bunch of smaller German and Italian states and won with his tiny kingdom-Prussia. He turned a small obscure German state into the nation that would end up uniting Germany and guide it on its path to evoking the most powerful country on Earth…until WW1. He was also a very wise monarch. He was friends with Voltaire and passed reforms that helped out the serfs and Jews.
13. Boudicca
The Queen of the Iceni tribe of ancient celts, she led a ragtag army of Celtic tribes against the invading and highly organized roman army. She burnt Londonium (modern day London) to the ground and wiped out a decent portion of Roman forces. And, oh yeah, this is after the Romans came and ignored her rule, beat her up, and raped her two daughters. Boudicca didn’t mess around.
14. Albert “Hard” Jacka
“On the morning of 7 August 1916, after a night of heavy shelling, the Germans began to overrun a portion of the line which included Jacka’s dug-out. Jacka had just completed a reconnaissance, and had gone to his dug-out when two Germans appeared at its entrance and rolled a bomb down the doorway, killing two of his men. Emerging from the dug-out, Jacka came upon a large number of Germans rounding up some forty Australians as prisoners. Only seven men from his platoon had recovered from the blast; rallying these few, he charged at the enemy. Heavy hand-to-hand fighting ensued, as the Australian prisoners turned on their captors. Every member of the platoon was wounded, including Jacka who was wounded seven times; including a bullet that passed through his body under his right shoulder, and two head wounds. Fifty Germans were captured and the line was retaken; Jacka was personally credited with killing between twelve and twenty Germans during the engagement.”
And that was the second time he had done something like that.
I suspect he was a terminator sent back to save some historically important grandfathers.
15. Bruce Lee
“He was a ruthless boxer, dominated street fights, and created his own style of martial arts, “the style of no style.” He could do one-handed two-fingered push-ups, fifty one-handed pull-ups, and play ping-pong with nunchucks. He’s the father of the “unstoppable punch” and two human kids. He inspired the Tekken character Marshall Law, and his feature-length films made him a cultural icon.”
16. Michael Malloy
Malloy was a homeless alcoholic man. Five men took out life insurance policies on him and tried to get him to drink himself to death by giving him unlimited credit at a bar that one of them owned (so that they could collect the money from the insurance company). This wasn’t working fast enough, so they started putting anti-freeze in his drink… then turpentine, then horse tranquiliser, and finally rat poison. None of them killed Malloy.
The men then tried feeding him raw oysters with wood alcohol and poisoned, spoiled sardine sandwiches (filled with carpet nails). Again, none of this worked, so they waited for him to pass out drunk one night, then dragged his body out into the -26 °C night and left him there to sleep (pouring 20 litres of water on him for good measure). The next day, Malloy came into the bar and ordered another drink.
The group then ran him over with a car at 70km/h. This hospitalised him for a few weeks, but again, didn’t kill him. Eventually they succeeded by putting a gas pipe down his throat (after he passed out drunk of course) and pumping gas into him for an hour. The group were later convicted of murder (due, in no small part, to the fame of Malloy’s durability), with four of them receiving the death penalty.
17. Daniel Inouye
Second longest serving Senators in US History (representing Hawaii since it gained statehood in 1959) and a WWII vet with this remarkable story to tell:
“On April 21, 1945, Inouye was grievously wounded while leading an assault on a heavily-defended ridge near San Terenzo in Tuscany, Italy, called Colle Musatello. The ridge served as a strongpoint along the strip of German fortifications known as the Gothic Line, which represented the last and most unyielding line of German defensive works in Italy. As he led his platoon in a flanking maneuver, three German machine guns opened fire from covered positions just 40 yards away, pinning his men to the ground. Inouye stood up to attack and was shot in the stomach; ignoring his wound, he proceeded to attack and destroy the first machine gun nest with hand grenades and fire from his Thompson submachine gun. After being informed of the severity of his wound by his platoon sergeant, he refused treatment and rallied his men for an attack on the second machine gun position, which he also successfully destroyed before collapsing from blood loss.
As his squad distracted the third machine gunner, Inouye crawled toward the final bunker, eventually drawing within 10 yards. As he raised himself up and cocked his arm to throw his last grenade into the fighting position, a German inside the bunker fired a rifle grenade that struck him on the right elbow, severing most of his arm and leaving his own primed grenade reflexively “clenched in a fist that suddenly didn’t belong to me anymore.”
Inouye’s horrified soldiers moved to his aid, but he shouted for them to keep back out of fear his severed fist would involuntarily relax and drop the grenade. While the German inside the bunker reloaded his rifle, Inouye pried the live grenade from his useless right hand and transferred it to his left. As the German aimed his rifle to finish him off, Inouye tossed the grenade into the bunker and destroyed it. He stumbled to his feet and continued forward, silencing the last German resistance with a one-handed burst from his Thompson before being wounded in the leg and tumbling unconscious to the bottom of the ridge. When he awoke to see the concerned men of his platoon hovering over him, his only comment before being carried away was to gruffly order them to return to their positions, since, as he pointed out, “nobody called off the war!”
18. Stanley “Swede” Vejtasa
He was an American pilot during WWII. At the Battle of the Coral Sea, he shot down two Japanese Zeroes in an SBD Dauntless – a dive bomber – and rammed a third. Upon learning of this, the Navy transferred him to a fighter wing flying F4F Wildcats. Later, at the Battle of Santa Cruz, he became an “ace in a day”, shooting down seven Japanese planes in a single sortie. At least one of these kills was accomplished after running out of ammunition; he charged an enemy plane (which was also out of ammunition) head-on at low altitude and forced it to crash. He survived the war, as well.
19. Grainne Mhaol (known as Grace O’Malley by the English)
16th Irish noblewoman, when she was a child her father (the chieftain of the Uí Mháille clan) refused to take her to sea and she cut off all her hair to embarrass him into taking her (her nickname means Bald Grainne).
She was born at a time when the Tudor conquest of Ireland was picking up the pace. Throughout her life she was a pirate, she was leader of fighters, under her leadership castles and forts were taken and withstood sieges, she was a revolutionary and war-leader and when Elizabeth I captured her sons and brother, she came to the royal court and negotiated their release in Latin, as she spoke no English and Elizabeth spoke no Irish. Her life would seriously fill about ten books.
20. Audie Murphy
Audie Murphy, aka real life Captain America. He was 16 in 1942, weighing 110 pounds and standing 5’5″. He applied to both the Marines and Air Force, but was turned down by both, and eventually managed to get into the Army, where he passed out halfway through training but insisted on going to fight.
He contracted malaria in Italy, but was still sent into France in 1944, where he found a German machine gun crew who pretended to surrender, then shot his best friend. Murphy flipped shit, killed everyone in the gun nest, then used their weaponry to kill every Nazi in a 100-yard radius.
6 months later, his company (down to 19 men out of the original 128) was tasked with defending a critical region in France. The Nazis showed up with a ton of guys, so Murphy and his men sent out their M-10’s, which didn’t do much. They were about to be overrun when the skinny short kid with malaria ran to one of the burning M-10’s, grabbed the machine gun, and started mowing down every enemy he could see. He kept going for an hour, until he ran out of bullets, then walked back to his men as the tank exploded behind him.
21. Leo Major
For starters, he was part of the D-Day invasion. That very day, he killed a squad of German soldiers and captured a half-track that was loaded with intelligence information.
Quite a while later, he ran into 4 SS soldiers and killed all of them. However, one hit him with a phosphorous grenade, blinding him in one eye. He refused discharge, saying that as long as he could see through the scope, he had enough eyes.
During the Battle of the Scheldt, Major single-handedly captured 93 German soldiers and was offered a Distinguished Conduct Medal. He refused, saying that the man awarding it, General Bernard Montgomery, was an incompetent, so any award from him was worthless.
In the beginning of 1945, he was in a vehicle that struck a landmine. He broke both ankles, 4 ribs, and fractured 3 vertebrae. He still continued, refusing evacuation.
In April of that year, his unit came upon the Dutch city of Zwolle. His commander asked for two volunteers for a reconnaissance mission. Major and his friend Willie volunteered. They were expected to go see how many German soldiers were in the town. Shortly into their mission, Willie was killed, and the plan changed. Major was out for blood. He went down the street guns blazing and throwing grenades while yelling in French to convince the Germans that the Canadians had sent their whole force into the town. He captured nearly one hundred German troops who went fleeing from their cover. Later that night, he came upon the Gestapo HQ and burned it to the ground. He barged into the SS HQ later that same night, killed 4, and ran the other 4 out of town. At 4:30 a. m. He discovered that the city belonged to the Dutch again, and the Germans had been run out. He received a Distinguished Conduct Medal for single-handedly liberating the town of Zwolle.
But he still wasn’t done. In the Korean War, he was asked to lead a strike team of elite snipers to support an American division. He and his twenty men took the hill single-handedly and held it while nearly 20,000 Chinese soldiers attacked their position. He was ordered to retreat. Instead, he held the hill for three days until reinforcements arrived. For this action, he received a bar to his DCM.
22. Hugh Glass
While the story is probably embellished some, it’s still amazing. While on a fur trapping expedition, he was mauled by a grizzly bear, which he killed with some help, then passed out. Later, he woke up to find his party abandoned him and he had no equipment. So he cleaned his multiple wounds, used the bear’s skin as a bandage, and spent the next six weeks making it back to civilization. Along the way he fought off wolves, made his own raft to travel down a river, and with the help of natives sewed the bear skin in place to replace his own.
23. Witold Pilecki
Witold Pilecki was a Polish soldier and resistance member who volunteered to get imprisoned in the Auschwitz concentration camp in order to gather intelligence and escape. While in the camp, Pilecki organized a resistance movement and as early as 1941, informed the Western Allies of Nazi Germany’s Auschwitz atrocities. He escaped from the camp in 1943 after nearly 3 years of imprisonment.
24. Louis Zamperini
To elaborate, he was a tiny guy that ran track for the US Olympic team in Germany. He got cleated up so bad by the other runners he was bleeding all over the place and he busted it down the final stretch, didn’t win but the crowd was going nuts for the guy so much so that hitler asked to shake his hand after the race.
Plane gets shot down in ww2, survives longer a drift than anyone has ever survived while fighting off sharks.Washes ashore a Japanese prison camp, much badassery ensues here. Gets tortured for a couple years and after he’s released, this cat returns to japan to tell his torturer that he forgives him, the coward won’t meet him.
This guy even died on the Fourth of July. Oh and some say he was actually the first to run a mile in under four minutes, in the sand.
25. General John J. Pershing
If Commanding General of the American Expeditionary Forces in WWI, John J. Pershing was alive today, he would probably say the following on how to deal with suicide bombers and deter Islamic terrorists: further action can be taken once they blow themselves up; there is an effective substance that can deter these bombers. Its pork, and it will deny any Muslim extremist what they seek after death.
During the Philippine Wars 1899-1913, we fought another Islamic terrorist group called the Moro’s, which were decisively quelled by John J. Pershing. One tactic he employed is said to have happened in 1911, when Pershing was serving as commander of a garrison.
Following numerous Islamic terrorist attacks, Pershing captured fifty of the Moro’s, and used their religion against them. Forced to dig their own graves, the terrorists were all tied to posts, for execution by firing squad. American soldiers then brought in pigs, slaughtered them, and then coated their bullets with the blood and fat from the pigs. Pershing turned the tables, and terrorized these terrorists; he ensured they saw that once struck by the firing squad’s bullets, they would be contaminated with the pig’s blood.
Even worse, their bodies would be dumped in a grave with a pig carcass, meaning that they could not enter Heaven, even if they were engaged in a Jihad. Pershing followed through with the operation.
Forty-nine Moro’s were shot, their bodies dumped into the graves, and the dead pig carcasses and entrails poured all over them. The Fiftieth Moro was spared, and allowed to return to his camp, to spread the word to his fellow Jihadists what happened to the others. He must have made it clear what fate awaits any Jihadists caught by the Americans from that point forward, as it brought an end to terrorism in the Philippines for the next 50 years.
While it is nearly impossible to capture, or even identify a suicide bomber in the current situations in Iraq and Afghanistan prior to an attack (such as Pershing’s men did), it’s also not necessary in the age of video and media. In 1911 it was important for Pershing to take some prisoners, so these terrorists could clearly see the act of being buried with pigs was upon them, and then let one go to spread the word.
Today, we need only to film it and pass the documented acts to CNN and Al-Jazeera. The whole world will get the picture; especially the whole radical Muslim world. We don’t have to line anyone up in front of a firing squad.
We only need to scoop up the remaining body parts from the next suicide bomber, and video the mixing of the bombers remains with pig meat. Then provide the statement: “from this point forward, the United States Army will send plenty of pork and some personnel to each bombing site, to perform this ritual of combining the bomber’s parts with pig parts as standard operating procedure and in commemoration of General Pershing’s victory over earlier Islamic Extremists in 1911.”
After seeing one of these video clips, many would-be suicide bombers will probably pass on the chance, rather ran run the risk of having his still intact foot or arm mixed with pig parts. And hopefully, the over fifty percent (by some polls) of Muslim’s who think it is a good idea to kill American soldiers will change their thinking about that too.
The same should be applied on US soil as well. Let’s make it clear any Islamic terrorist caught dead or alive will have their remains subjected to the same fate exacted by John J. Pershing in 1911. Any suicide pilot who attempts using an aircraft as a missile, or suicide bomber who plans to detonate a vest of explosives in a mall or subway, better hope all of his remains are vaporized, because whatever is found will be contaminated with pork, filmed and made available for public broadcast. And any Islamist terrorist, who gets the death penalty, will get the pig parts treatment too.
Having to do something like this may seem somewhat disgusting. Who wouldn’t find the physical handling of bloody body parts and greasy bloody pig parts disgusting? But then it is only disgusting so far as a normal human revulsion for medical procedures. The truly disgusting part of this action is what it is designed to combat; the cowardly act of the suicide bomber.
