Best Opening Paragraph in Wikipedia

[quote]sonnyp wrote:

Side note: This was also at a time when fielders did not use mits and had mangled fingers from fielding the ball with their bare hands. [/quote]

like everyday in cricket?

[quote]Brett620 wrote:

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.

read that again

[/quote]

I didn’t have to. My jaw had already dropped onto my chest so hard it knocked the wind out of me. Wow. Wow.

Brett, thanks so much for these. You are really making my Sunday afternoon. These guys should all have movies made about them. They make Spiderman look like a hikikomori.

[quote]Brett620 wrote:
Alvin York

World War I

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.

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.”

[/quote]

OMG!!! These are the most fantastic stories! More! Please!

Here is a whole website of hard as hell motherfuckers http://www.badassoftheweek.com/ makes the hours fly by.

[quote]Cortes wrote:

[quote]Brett620 wrote:
Alvin York

World War I

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.

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.”

[/quote]

OMG!!! These are the most fantastic stories! More! Please!
[/quote]

Have you never seen the 1941 Gary Cooper movie Sgt. York? It is one of the most inspirational movies I can think of. Netflix has it.

[quote]Nards wrote:

[quote]superdad4 wrote:

[quote]AliveAgain36 wrote:
Adrian Carton de Wiart

Lieutenant-General Sir Adrian Paul Ghislain Carton de Wiart[1] VC, KBE, CB, CMG, DSO (5 May 1880 Ã???Ã??Ã?¢?? 5 June 1963), was a British Army officer of Belgian and Irish descent. He served in the Boer War, First World War, and Second World War, was shot in the face, head, stomach, ankle, leg, hip and ear, survived a plane crash, tunneled out of a POW camp, and bit off his own fingers when a doctor refused to amputate them. He later said “frankly I had enjoyed the war.”[2]

[/quote]
It sounds like this guy was the Chuck Norris of his era.
[/quote]

“Chuck Norris? Never heard of her.”[/quote]

The only reason Chuck Norris is still alive is because he knows Bruce Lee waits for him in the next life.

I have Netflix and I will check it out CD, thanks.

Got another Bad-Ass you might like.

First, he didn’t the body count isn’t as high as the others, but we have to put this in context. The other guys were all Infantrymen or combat guys. This man is a medic.

And he is unarmed.

Sgt. David B. Bleak

Korean War. Medal of Honor

"On 14 June 1952, Bleak was part of a patrol of the 2nd Battalion, 223rd Infantry, sent north to probe Chinese forward positions and attempt to obtain Chinese prisoners of war for interrogation. Bleak volunteered to accompany the 20-man patrol of an I&R Platoon on this mission, which was to send them to a sparsely-vegetated feature called Hill 499, where Chinese forces were known to be operating. The patrol left United Nations lines at 04:30 Korea Standard Time on 14 June, under cover of darkness. It was preceded by an attack by F Company, 223rd Infantry, to the west which was intended to distract Chinese forces. However, as the patrol ascended the hill, it came under heavy Chinese automatic weapons fire which struck the lead elements, injuring several soldiers. Bleak, at the rear of the formation, rushed forward and treated and stabilized several soldiers hit in the initial volley, then followed the remainder of the patrol as it continued its mission.

As they attempted to continue up the hill, several Chinese soldiers from a nearby trench opened fire, injuring another soldier. According to witness reports, Bleak rushed the trench and dove into it, tackling one Chinese soldier and, with only his hands, broke the soldier’s neck, killing him. Bleak was then confronted by a second soldier, whom he reportedly grabbed by the neck, fatally crushing his windpipe. A third Chinese soldier then approached, and in the ensuing scuffle, Bleak used his combat knife to stab and kill the soldier.

Bleak then returned to the patrol and attempted to treat more wounded members, but soon thereafter a Chinese hand grenade bounced off of the helmet of the soldier standing next to him and landed nearby. Bleak tackled the soldier over and covered him with his larger frame to protect him from the grenade, but neither was injured in the ensuing blast. The patrol then continued on its mission, and was successful in capturing several Chinese prisoners. However, as it descended Hill 499 to return to UN lines, they were ambushed by another group of Chinese hidden in a trench with an automatic weapon. Three of the other soldiers were wounded in the attack, and as Bleak attempted to run to them, he was hit in the leg. Bleak dressed all four wounds, but one of the men had been hit too critically to move. In spite of continued Chinese fire and his own injury, Bleak picked up the wounded soldier and began to carry him down the hill.

As he attempted to withdraw with the wounded soldier, Bleak was confronted by two more Chinese. Putting down the wounded soldier, Bleak reportedly surprised the Chinese soldiers by charging them and smashing their heads together with such force that he may have fractured the skulls of one or both of the assailants before pushing them out of his way. Eventually, all 20 men of the patrol returned to the UN lines, but a third of them were wounded. Bleak was credited with saving the patrol, both by promptly treating the wounded and by aggressively attacking and killing or neutralizing five Chinese soldiers."

Imagine if he was armed.

Brett–you’re pulling those stories from one of my very favorite sites on the web!! Badassoftheweek.com is fucking amazing!

There’s a mindblowing story about one of the Indian commandos somewhere…I’ll try to find it and post it. This guy…retarded awesome.

[quote]Brett620 wrote:
The Indian John McClain:

Yogendra Singh Yadav

[/quote]

That’s the guy I was thinking of!!! You cut down the longer post–understandable–but you forgot this:

“He received notification of his â??posthumousâ?? award from his hospital bed, as he was recovering from a broken arm, a broken leg, and somewhere between five and fifteen gunshot wounds to various parts of his body. Apparently, nobody that heard the story believed that he could have possibly survived”

Also, the initial barrage of bullets SHOT HIM IN THE GROIN…after which he continued to scale another 60-80 feet of vertical ice wall to slit throats and take charge. Fuck.

Here’s another one of my favorites–This is the long original post btw, but totally worth it…cuz the guy has balls of granite.

Bishnu Shrestha

“It is better to die than be a coward.”

  • Gurkha motto

Bishnu Shrestha wasn’t looking for a fight on the evening of 2 September 2010. As his express train roared through the darkness of the jungles of West Bengal, this Nepalese ex-soldier sat quietly, looking out the window into the calm stillness of the night sky above. The 35 year old veteran was finally on his way back home, having just retired from his position as a Naik (Corporal) in the 7th Battalion of the 8th Gurkha Infantry â?? a famous, battle-hardened regiment of ass-whompers that had produced balls-out awesome war heroes like Lachhiman Gurung, and a unit in which Shrestha’s own father had served during Vietnam. One in a long line of warriors, Bishnu himself had seen plenty of combat in Iraq, Afghanistan, and probably a half-dozen other locations that may never be declassified, and now, after having spent a good part of his adult life crushing his foes with the stock of his assault rifle and charging enemy positions armed with a bayonet and his ultra-badass kukri knife, he was looking forward to finally seeing an end to the constant fighting, settling down, and building a family in the quiet mountains of his homeland. On this evening he rode the Maurya Express, a passenger train appropriately sharing it’s name with historical badass Chandragupta Maurya, enjoying the serenity of the Indian night.

But there would be no rest for the weary. Around midnight, the mighty locomotive ground to a halt unexpectedly, sending passengers lurching forward in their seats. Without warning, while everyone was still trying to figure out what the crap hell was going on, suddenly from seemingly every direction passengers stood up and began to whip out all manner of frighteningly gruesome-looking weaponry â?? guns, knives, clubs and fucking giant swords(seriously, who robs a train with a sword!) â?? and started shouting for everyone to sit still, get out their valuables, and prepare to get ripped the fuck off.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, from a side door more armed thugs leapt into action, pouring into the train from the jungle beyond. Dozens of unscrupulous goons began making their way down the aisles, shaking down everyone for their shit, stealing wallets, tearing jewelry from the necks of old women, snatchin laptops and cell phones, and waving knives in the faces of terrified hostages.

Despite the chaos around him, Naik Bishnu Shrestha just sat there quietly. Not saying anything. Not betraying his emotions. Even when the thugs took his own wallet, he remained silent. Like a true badass, he knew that this wasn’t his fight. Just be quiet, give them what they want, and survive. It’s just a few hundred bucks. It’s not worth dying over.

But then shit got out of hand. You see, it just so happened that Shrestha was sitting near a cute 18 year-old girl, and when this gang of baby-kicking terrorists came by her seat they decided it would be awesome to be the complete fucking slime of the earth and gang-rape her in front of her own terrified parents just for shits and giggles. The terrorist leader cut open her shirt while she cried for help.

That was fucking it. Bishnu Shrestha couldn’t just sit by any longer.

Unfortunately for the douchebags of West Bengal, when the thugs had robbed Bishnu they’d made one fatal mistake: They didn’t take his kukri. This ultra-hardass Gurkha warrior, one in a long line of head-cleaving soldiers battle-hardened by centuries of hand-to-hand combat (and a steady diet of steel tacks and the corpses of their slain enemies), had given up his money, but knew better than to ever relinquish his weapon. Slowly, effortlessly, he eased the hilt from its hiding place. Now these fuckers were going to see what it felt like to get a taste of their own steel-tipped medicine, and it was going to taste like dental-grade pain and a roll of nasty old pennies.

Corporal Shrestha leapt to his feet, drawing the ultimate symbol of Gurkha badassitude with one fluid motion. He flew across the train car, grabbing the would-be rapist from behind in a sleeper hold, pulled him up off the girl, and used him as a human shield while he lunged out and slashed one of the sword-swinging thugs, sending the hapless dude spinning off in a vicious tornado of blood. One of the other motherfuckers, unwilling to stab in the direction of his own boss, instead took the manly man’s route and tried to cut the girl, slashing his knife wildly at her neck, but the girl only took a minor wound before Shrestha dropped him with a lightning-quick strike. With the terrorists in the immediate vicinity disposed of, he sliced the throat of his human shield and went looking for more fuckers to get his blood-rage off on.

The news reports are pretty vague about what happened during this epic battle, where one balls-out Gurkha face-wrecker carved his way through a pack of 40 merciless cutthroats (indeed, even the above paragraph is a little bit of pulp fiction editorializing â?? merely my interpretation of the phrase “he took control of the attacker and killed everyone around him”) but the fact of the matter is that after his initial ambush this ex-military mecha-hardass from one of the world’s most over-the-top batshit-insane military organizations suddenly found himself in the middle of a hostage-filled train crawling with well-armed, highly-organized terrorists. This was Die Hard without the cowboy references. Delta Force without Lee Marvin. Under Siege without the Dramamine. and Passenger 57 without the always betting on black thing. And, worse yet, it was happening in real life.

Over the next twenty minutes, Corporal Bishnu Shrestha raced through the aisles giving those wanna-be punk-ass thugs a first-class ride on the Pain Train to Severed Arteryville, cutting, dodging, and back-alley knife fighting anything carrying a weapon larger than a ball-point pen. He took on the entire train â?? 40 men â?? at once, killing three and wounding eight more with a ferocious series of face-stabs and Limit Break Whirlwind Slashes so badass they would make Jet Li proud. Even after he took a nasty sword blow that severed every major artery and vein in his left hand, he continued carving up douchebags with his kukri, all the while spraying what I like to imagine to be a pseudo-comical amount of blood from his non-killing hand.

The sight of a real man was too much for those weak-willed thugs, and once they realized that they weren’t just beating up schoolchildren and robbing crippled old ladies of their wedding rings and were instead facing a goddamned psychotic Gurkha with balls so gigantic they barely fit through the doorway of the train car, they dropped all their look and ran for it like fucking pussies. The whole thing was over in about 20 minutes. When the train pulled into the next station, police and emergency personnel were there to treat the wounded and rush Shrestha to the hospital, where he spent two months recovering from the injury to his hand. When the police searched the dead and dying thugs, they recovered 40 gold necklaces, 200 cell phones, 40 laptops, and nearly $10,000 in stolen cash. Those idiots lucky enough to be left alive were hauled in to jail.

Bishnu Shrestha was temporarily un-retired from the Gurkhas for the purposes of being promoted and subsequently awarded two medals for bravery and awesomeness. His former unit also awarded him with a presumably-rightously-looking silver-plated kukri (kind of like how when you beat Goldeneye you unlock the Silver PP7) and a cash bonus of 50,000 Rupees, which is enough to buy like 200 Blue Rings in The Legend of Zelda. The Indian Government also awarded him the bounty that was on the heads of this vicious gang, and granted him discounted airfare and train tickets for the rest of his life. I guess after hearing this guy’s insane story they just decided to say, “fuck those backscatter ultra-invasive x-ray machines, the best anti-terror homeland security measure our country can take is to make sure this guy is on as many flights and trains as possible.”

Ultimately, like a true badass, Bishnu Shrestha doesn’t need any thanks for doing what he needed to do. The family of the girl he saved offered him a reward of $6,500, but the dude never stopped by to collect it. That wasn’t the point. The man himself said it best, responding to reporters by saying, “Fighting the enemy in battle is my duty as a soldier. Taking on the thugs on the train was my duty as a human being.”

[quote]AliveAgain36 wrote:
Adrian Carton de Wiart

Lieutenant-General Sir Adrian Paul Ghislain Carton de Wiart[1] VC, KBE, CB, CMG, DSO (5 May 1880 Ã?¢?? 5 June 1963), was a British Army officer of Belgian and Irish descent. He served in the Boer War, First World War, and Second World War, was shot in the face, head, stomach, ankle, leg, hip and ear, survived a plane crash, tunneled out of a POW camp, and bit off his own fingers when a doctor refused to amputate them. He later said “frankly I had enjoyed the war.”[2]

[/quote]

He’s no prima donna! And I get mad when stuck in traffic. :frowning:

[quote]Aragorn wrote:
Here’s another one of my favorites–This is the long original post btw, but totally worth it…cuz the guy has balls of granite.

Bishnu Shrestha

“It is better to die than be a coward.”

  • Gurkha motto

Bishnu Shrestha wasn’t looking for a fight on the evening of 2 September 2010. As his express train roared through the darkness of the jungles of West Bengal, this Nepalese ex-soldier sat quietly, looking out the window into the calm stillness of the night sky above. The 35 year old veteran was finally on his way back home, having just retired from his position as a Naik (Corporal) in the 7th Battalion of the 8th Gurkha Infantry â?? a famous, battle-hardened regiment of ass-whompers that had produced balls-out awesome war heroes like Lachhiman Gurung, and a unit in which Shrestha’s own father had served during Vietnam. One in a long line of warriors, Bishnu himself had seen plenty of combat in Iraq, Afghanistan, and probably a half-dozen other locations that may never be declassified, and now, after having spent a good part of his adult life crushing his foes with the stock of his assault rifle and charging enemy positions armed with a bayonet and his ultra-badass kukri knife, he was looking forward to finally seeing an end to the constant fighting, settling down, and building a family in the quiet mountains of his homeland. On this evening he rode the Maurya Express, a passenger train appropriately sharing it’s name with historical badass Chandragupta Maurya, enjoying the serenity of the Indian night.

But there would be no rest for the weary. Around midnight, the mighty locomotive ground to a halt unexpectedly, sending passengers lurching forward in their seats. Without warning, while everyone was still trying to figure out what the crap hell was going on, suddenly from seemingly every direction passengers stood up and began to whip out all manner of frighteningly gruesome-looking weaponry â?? guns, knives, clubs and fucking giant swords(seriously, who robs a train with a sword!) â?? and started shouting for everyone to sit still, get out their valuables, and prepare to get ripped the fuck off.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, from a side door more armed thugs leapt into action, pouring into the train from the jungle beyond. Dozens of unscrupulous goons began making their way down the aisles, shaking down everyone for their shit, stealing wallets, tearing jewelry from the necks of old women, snatchin laptops and cell phones, and waving knives in the faces of terrified hostages.

Despite the chaos around him, Naik Bishnu Shrestha just sat there quietly. Not saying anything. Not betraying his emotions. Even when the thugs took his own wallet, he remained silent. Like a true badass, he knew that this wasn’t his fight. Just be quiet, give them what they want, and survive. It’s just a few hundred bucks. It’s not worth dying over.

But then shit got out of hand. You see, it just so happened that Shrestha was sitting near a cute 18 year-old girl, and when this gang of baby-kicking terrorists came by her seat they decided it would be awesome to be the complete fucking slime of the earth and gang-rape her in front of her own terrified parents just for shits and giggles. The terrorist leader cut open her shirt while she cried for help.

That was fucking it. Bishnu Shrestha couldn’t just sit by any longer.

Unfortunately for the douchebags of West Bengal, when the thugs had robbed Bishnu they’d made one fatal mistake: They didn’t take his kukri. This ultra-hardass Gurkha warrior, one in a long line of head-cleaving soldiers battle-hardened by centuries of hand-to-hand combat (and a steady diet of steel tacks and the corpses of their slain enemies), had given up his money, but knew better than to ever relinquish his weapon. Slowly, effortlessly, he eased the hilt from its hiding place. Now these fuckers were going to see what it felt like to get a taste of their own steel-tipped medicine, and it was going to taste like dental-grade pain and a roll of nasty old pennies.

Corporal Shrestha leapt to his feet, drawing the ultimate symbol of Gurkha badassitude with one fluid motion. He flew across the train car, grabbing the would-be rapist from behind in a sleeper hold, pulled him up off the girl, and used him as a human shield while he lunged out and slashed one of the sword-swinging thugs, sending the hapless dude spinning off in a vicious tornado of blood. One of the other motherfuckers, unwilling to stab in the direction of his own boss, instead took the manly man’s route and tried to cut the girl, slashing his knife wildly at her neck, but the girl only took a minor wound before Shrestha dropped him with a lightning-quick strike. With the terrorists in the immediate vicinity disposed of, he sliced the throat of his human shield and went looking for more fuckers to get his blood-rage off on.

The news reports are pretty vague about what happened during this epic battle, where one balls-out Gurkha face-wrecker carved his way through a pack of 40 merciless cutthroats (indeed, even the above paragraph is a little bit of pulp fiction editorializing â?? merely my interpretation of the phrase “he took control of the attacker and killed everyone around him”) but the fact of the matter is that after his initial ambush this ex-military mecha-hardass from one of the world’s most over-the-top batshit-insane military organizations suddenly found himself in the middle of a hostage-filled train crawling with well-armed, highly-organized terrorists. This was Die Hard without the cowboy references. Delta Force without Lee Marvin. Under Siege without the Dramamine. and Passenger 57 without the always betting on black thing. And, worse yet, it was happening in real life.

Over the next twenty minutes, Corporal Bishnu Shrestha raced through the aisles giving those wanna-be punk-ass thugs a first-class ride on the Pain Train to Severed Arteryville, cutting, dodging, and back-alley knife fighting anything carrying a weapon larger than a ball-point pen. He took on the entire train â?? 40 men â?? at once, killing three and wounding eight more with a ferocious series of face-stabs and Limit Break Whirlwind Slashes so badass they would make Jet Li proud. Even after he took a nasty sword blow that severed every major artery and vein in his left hand, he continued carving up douchebags with his kukri, all the while spraying what I like to imagine to be a pseudo-comical amount of blood from his non-killing hand.

The sight of a real man was too much for those weak-willed thugs, and once they realized that they weren’t just beating up schoolchildren and robbing crippled old ladies of their wedding rings and were instead facing a goddamned psychotic Gurkha with balls so gigantic they barely fit through the doorway of the train car, they dropped all their look and ran for it like fucking pussies. The whole thing was over in about 20 minutes. When the train pulled into the next station, police and emergency personnel were there to treat the wounded and rush Shrestha to the hospital, where he spent two months recovering from the injury to his hand. When the police searched the dead and dying thugs, they recovered 40 gold necklaces, 200 cell phones, 40 laptops, and nearly $10,000 in stolen cash. Those idiots lucky enough to be left alive were hauled in to jail.

Bishnu Shrestha was temporarily un-retired from the Gurkhas for the purposes of being promoted and subsequently awarded two medals for bravery and awesomeness. His former unit also awarded him with a presumably-rightously-looking silver-plated kukri (kind of like how when you beat Goldeneye you unlock the Silver PP7) and a cash bonus of 50,000 Rupees, which is enough to buy like 200 Blue Rings in The Legend of Zelda. The Indian Government also awarded him the bounty that was on the heads of this vicious gang, and granted him discounted airfare and train tickets for the rest of his life. I guess after hearing this guy’s insane story they just decided to say, “fuck those backscatter ultra-invasive x-ray machines, the best anti-terror homeland security measure our country can take is to make sure this guy is on as many flights and trains as possible.”

Ultimately, like a true badass, Bishnu Shrestha doesn’t need any thanks for doing what he needed to do. The family of the girl he saved offered him a reward of $6,500, but the dude never stopped by to collect it. That wasn’t the point. The man himself said it best, responding to reporters by saying, “Fighting the enemy in battle is my duty as a soldier. Taking on the thugs on the train was my duty as a human being.”
[/quote]

Wow! I could never look in a mirror again if I was one of those dickless thugs that survived.

Let’s not forget about George Zipp who lead the raid over Macho Grande.

Birger Stromsheim Norwegian commando

Stromsheim, then 31, was the oldest of a team of six Norwegians trained by the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and parachuted into the Telemark region, in southern Norway, to blow up the Norsk Hydro plant. Set atop an icy ravine at nearby Vemork, the plant produced heavy water, or deuterium oxide, that was central to German hopes of mastering the atomic chain reaction which would lead to a Nazi bomb.
An attempt had already been made to blow up the plant the previous October, when a separate four-man team of Norwegian commandos had been dropped in to Telemark as an advance party for 30 Royal Engineers. But foul weather had led to a series of crashes as the British soldiers were towed into the area in gliders, with the result that some died instantly, and those who escaped were captured by the Gestapo, tortured, and eventually executed.
The failure had alerted the Nazis to potential sabotage plots, and as a result security was increased at Vemork: mines were laid and floodlights illuminated the only approach ? a bridge across a 660ft ravine.
Such was Allied concern about the plant, however, that despite these measures, a second bid to destroy the plant was quickly prepared. Operation Gunnerside, as it became known, was led by Joachim Ronneberg. Then aged just 23, he looked up for reassurance to Stromsheim, one of four explosives experts in the team and an expert skier who spoke good English and German. ?Birger was the oldest man in the group and was almost like a father to us,? said Ronneberg. ?He was a very calm and balanced person, who was extremely valuable.?
Just after midnight on February 17 1943 the Gunnerside team were dropped by parachute into Telemark, where they were to meet the surviving four-man Norwegian team from the previous autumn?s failed mission.
Once again, however, appalling weather intervened, and they landed 18 miles away from the drop zone. Stromsheim and his colleagues were forced to spend five days struggling through snowstorms and freezing temperatures on langlauf skis before finally meeting up with their compatriots.
Together they set off for Vemork at 8pm on February 27. The plant, perched at the top of a thickly-forested ravine, appeared impregnable, with Germans guarding the bridge that led to its entrance. The commandos, however, decided to climb down one side of the ravine, cross the icy River Maan at its base, and climb up the other side, following a railway track that led into the plant.
Arriving at the top of the ravine, a radio operator (Knut Haugland, who later took part in Thor Heyerdahl?s Kon-Tiki expedition) was left behind to report if anything went wrong, while the other nine abandoned their skis and began the perilous descent, frequently sinking up to their waists in the snow. It was close to midnight before they managed to get to the other side, tired and soaked to the skin.
Leaving another Gunnerside member, Hans Storhaug, with his Tommy-gun trained on the Germans guarding the bridge, the other eight began their assault on the plant. At exactly 30 minutes past midnight, one member of the party ran forward with bolt-cutters to force open the gate while Stromsheim and the six remaining saboteurs held back and provided cover.
Once the gate was opened, a covering party took up firing positions inside the plant while Stromsheim and the three other explosives experts headed through another gate to the basement door, behind which lay the electrolysis chambers that produced the crucial heavy water. This door was supposed to have been left open by a Norwegian mole who worked in the plant ? but he had been too ill to go to work that day. Confronted by this unexpected barrier, the explosives team split into two pairs to look for other ways in.
Ronneberg and Fredrik Kayser found an entrance through a cable duct, crawling in to surprise a Norwegian caretaker, whom they held at gunpoint while they began to lay their charges. Meanwhile, Stromsheim and Kasper Idland had found a window at the back of the basement. Unaware that Ronneberg and Kayser were already in, Stromsheim decided they had no choice but to risk alerting the Germans by smashing their way through.
Ronneberg had laid half the necessary charges when he heard the sound of breaking glass. Kayser swung round with his Tommy-gun ready to fire before realising the noise came from their fellow saboteurs. Stromsheim helped place the remaining charges while Ronneberg laid the fuses. Though they had initially planned to give themselves two minutes to get away, the risk of the German guards arriving was such that they instead placed 30-second Bickford fuses, despite knowing that this would not give them enough time to get clear of the plant before the explosion.
The tension was heightened further when, just as the fuses were being set, the caretaker announced that he had misplaced his glasses and refused to leave without them. Though desperate to make their escape, the commandos proceeded to spend precious moments in the search for the spectacles ? which were soon located. The foolhardiness of this benevolence was demonstrated when they heard footsteps approaching ? but fortunately it was another Norwegian civilian, who was ordered to put his hands above his head while the fuses were lit.
Kayser counted to 10 and then told the two civilians to run for their lives, while the raiders rushed out into the night. In the event they need not have worried. There was only a dull thud as the charges went off, too muffled to alert the guards, but it sent around 1000lbs of heavy water across the floor and down the drains, . ?The explosion itself was not very loud,? recalled one of Stromsheim?s colleagues. ?It sounded like two or three cars crashing in Piccadilly Circus.?
By the time the guards discovered what had happened, the Gunnerside team were already back across the gorge. Stromsheim, Ronneberg, Idland, Storhaug and Kayser then headed back into the snowstorms on a 250-mile cross-country ski to the safety of neutral Sweden.
Back in Britain, SOE chiefs would later deem Operation Gunnerside the most successful act of sabotage of the Second World War. For his part, Stromsheim was described in his military file by Ronneberg as ?beyond doubt the best member of the party?.
Birger Edvin Martin Stromsheim was born in the central Norwegian port of Aalesund on October 11 1911 and worked as a building contractor before the war. He spent the early months of the German occupation building quarters for German soldiers but was determined to get to Britain to join the Special Operation Executive?s team of Norwegian commandos.
He and his wife Aase travelled by boat to the Shetlands in September 1941 and Birger Stromsheim was soon being trained at a succession of SOE bases in weapons? handling and street-fighting.
The most important preparation he received was at Station XVII, the explosives-training base at Brickendonbury in Hertfordshire, where a full-scale model of the basement of the Norsk Hydro plant was built.
For his part in the raid, Stromsheim was awarded the British Military Medal; the Norwegian St Olav Medal; the US Medal of Freedom; and the French Legion of Honour and Croix de Guerre. The success of Operation Gunnerside convinced the Nazis to relocate their heavy water project and move their remaining stores of potassium hydroxide, from which heavy water was distilled, away from Vemork. The chemical was loaded on a ferry, Hydro, but this was sunk by another Norwegian resistance operation, finally sealing the fate of Germany?s atomic weapons programme.
The events of the two operations were so daring that they was made into the film, The Heroes of Telemark (1965), starring Kirk Douglas and Richard Harris ? though the participants were far from complimentary about Hollywood?s attention to detail.
Stromsheim subsequently took part in Operation Fieldfare, which in late 1943 and early 1944 sent him and other Norwegian commandos, including Ronneberg, back into Norway to disrupt German supply lines in the event of an Allied invasion.
After the war, Stromsheim returned to building and was involved in preparations for Norwegian ?stay-behind? units in the event of a Soviet invasion of his country.
Birger Stromsheim?s wife predeceased him. He is survived by a son and a daughter.
Birger Stromsheim, born October 11 1911, died November 10 2012

[quote]Cortes wrote:
I have Netflix and I will check it out CD, thanks. [/quote]

Thats a good movie.

Surprisingly light on the rah, rah, USA stuff, his commander actually takes his objections seriously.