Who was the greatest soldier ever?
The title pretty much explains itself. This is a single guy and I don't want any 'any soldier who does his duty' BS, it has to be a real person.
Round one- Personal achievements only (no points for leadership or anything others did for him/her)
Round two- Unrestricted.
Robery Henry Cain: Victoria Cross winner when during the battle of Arnhem, his company was cut off from the allies by a full enemy battalion. Throughout the time they were cut off, he personally engaged enemy tiger and panzer tanks with only spring-propelled shells and small arms. He personally destroyed 6 tanks and on several occasions walked right out infront of them...loaded his weapon and fired in direct view of the tank. On one of those occasions, the tank fired an 88 shell straight at him, missing narrowly and blowing the legs off his trousers and embedding pieces of shrapnel in them. His reaction was to reload again and fire before the tank could.
TUL BAHADUR PUN: A Gurkha, who in world war 2 ended up fighting off an enemy battalion singlehandedly after the other 4 members of his outpost were killed. For nearly 2 hours he kept reloaded and firing his mounted gun and drove back 4 seperate advances by Japanese soldiers. At one point the Japanese kept throwing grenades into his foxhole and he simply picked them up and threw them back. This went on until 1 went off in his hand and blew it off. His reaction was to keep on reloading and firing with one hand until support arrived.
Charles Upham: The only combat soldier to have won the VC twice.
GYSGT Carlos Hathcock
Dan Daly usmc
Originally posted by inimalist
http://www.cracked.com/article_17019_5-real-life-soldiers-who-make-rambo-look-like-pussy.html
I disagree, none of those guys make Rambo look like a pussy. Have any of them jumped off a cliff into a pine-wood forest? Stood and shot at a Russian Mil Mi-24 Hind gunship while in the open while groaning? Turned 50+ Burmese soldiers into butter with a .50 cal?
Originally posted by inimalist
http://www.cracked.com/article_17019_5-real-life-soldiers-who-make-rambo-look-like-pussy.html
Simo Hayha had a fairly boring life in Finland. He served his one mandatory year in the military, and then became a farmer. But when the Soviet Union invaded his homeland 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 the invasion 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.
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. The unofficial Finnish frontline figure from the battlefield of Kollaa places the number of Häyhä's sniper kills over 800.
Since everyone they had was either too dead or too scared to go anywhere near him, the Russians just carpet-bombed everywhere they thought he might be. Supposedly, they had 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, some lucky bastard shot Hayha in the head with 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 was still very much alive, and regained consciousness on March 13, the very day the war ended.
Borrowed from cracked.com and wikipedia.