Nothing but sand, rocks, and despair surround Bir Hakeim, a desolate outpost in the Libyan desert. In May 1942, 3,500 Free French legionnaires committed themselves to one of the most extraordinary acts of bravery seen this side of mythology. For two weeks, they holed up in Bir Hakeim while tens of thousands of German and Italian troops with panzers and air support rained hellfire around them.

The Battle of Bir Hakeim is now considered one of the greatest sieges of the African war. Although the battle took place a continent away, it became a symbol of defiance and courage for the scattered Resistance clinging to the embers of life in occupied France. Despair that had gripped French souls with steel hooks was shaken off, and hope finally emerged from its long slumber. In no small part, it was thanks to a British socialite named Susan Travers.

10The Socialite

Susan Travers was born in England in 1909 with a silver spoon shoved down her throat. From the time she first opened her blue eyes as an infant, she never wanted for anything. Her father was rich, her mother was richer, and the marriage was acrimonious at the best of times.

As a young girl, Susan was surely loved but largely ignored. Her father had been promoted to admiral in the Royal Navy, which brought the strict brand of discipline that soldiers often carry from the barracks into their own homes. According to her memoirs, Susan’s happiest moments in childhood were spent with her grandmother, away from her parents.

While Susan was still young, her father moved their family to the French Riviera to be closer to his new naval posting in Marseilles. As she transitioned from child to adult in the Mediterranean climate of southern France, Susan began spending more time away from home. She attended parties, went on skiing trips in the Alps, and learned tennis, as all the other fashionable women of the time were doing. She even competed at Wimbledon once.

Glamorous though her life was, it left a sour taste in Susan’s mouth. It was too tame. She wanted adventure, sex, and danger. “Most of all, I wanted to be wicked,” she said later. And in this universe, some wishes are granted. Even as she dreamed of a life more perilous, Hitler’s forces in the north were assembling like a storm cloud to bring all the danger that Susan could have hoped for.

9The Red Cross

When World War II broke out, Susan was 29 years old. Her family had moved back to England, but she was still enjoying the Cannes high life on a monthly allowance. She’d grown into a beautiful, high-spirited woman with an appetite to match, leaving her free to reject as many potential suitors as she took.

In her own words, life was “parties and champagne, and tangos and Charlestons, Vienna and Budapest and all sorts of places. I had lots and lots of friends. Lots and lots of young men. Well, lovers, really.” Her father, disapproving as always, once called her une fille facile—basically, a slut. Life was fun but increasingly empty.

When the papers announced the war, Susan jumped at the chance to do something more with her life. Like so many women at the time, she volunteered for the Red Cross. But Susan was a terrible nurse. She’d lived her whole life on tennis courts and ski slopes, and the sight of blood made her squeamish. She switched to driving ambulances, an occupation that suited her freewheeling spirit much better.

Susan soon found herself en route to Finland to ferry wounded soldiers off the battlefield. The Finnish Winter War was a bleak period, but Susan used it to hone her ability to drive under pressure, a skill that later saved the lives of thousands of men.

She was still in Scandinavia in 1940 when the French government signed an armistice granting Germany control of the country. With that single act, Susan’s old life disappeared in the blink of an eye. There was no going back. She was now a part of this war, for better or for worse.

8The Driver

After the fall of France, Susan worked her way circuitously back to London. The French government had been split asunder, but there was still one man fighting to bring France back under the control of the French—General Charles de Gaulle. He had fled occupied France and set up his headquarters in England. There, he commanded the remains of the French military forces who were still loyal to his ideals of freedom. His army became known as the Free French.

Susan Travers found de Gaulle in London and volunteered to help the Resistance. The Free French were desperate for whatever help they could get, and Susan was immediately put to work as a nurse. In August 1940, she sailed to West Africa on a ship filled with rough-and-tumble Free French legionnaires.

For nearly a year, she went wherever she was needed. From Cameroon to the Congo and from Sudan to Eritrea, she mopped up gallons of blood and tended to the needs of dying men.

By June 1941, Susan was again desperate for change, so she volunteered to drive for a doctor while serving in the Middle East. To her surprise, her offer was accepted. Life was finally more exciting. When her doctor died by a land mine, she was assigned to another doctor.

Quickly, her reputation grew among the fighting men. She was a woman who refused no assignment. She would grit her teeth, clench the wheel, and drive straight through a minefield if it lay between her and where she needed to go. More than once, she arrived at her destination with bomb shrapnel embedded in her vehicle.

The legionnaires began to call her “La Miss,” an honorary title for the plucky Englishwoman who never backed down. As Trisha McFarland would have said, Susan had ice running through her veins—she never lost her cool. Then, on June 17, 1941, a man got blown up in a fruit garden, forever changing Susan Travers’s life.

7The General

June 1941 found Susan Travers in Beirut, just another sandy, war-torn city in a long line that never seemed to end. On the Western Front, Britain was still shell-shocked by the devastation of the blitzkrieg. In the East, Minsk was in ruins, and the German Wehrmacht was rolling deeper into Soviet territory. The war seemed interminable, the deaths endless.

It’s possible, though, that the brutality of war has provided as many lovers as it’s taken. Susan certainly found that to be true. While in Beirut, General Marie-Pierre Koenig of the Free French lost his driver to a bomb. La Miss was the next obvious choice. By that time in the war, General Koenig was one of the most respected officers of the legionnaires, so he required an equally respected chauffeur.

They took to each other immediately and soon became lovers. Since Koenig was married, they carried on their affair in secret. When Susan was bedridden in the hospital with jaundice, General Koenig brought flowers to her bedside and assured her that her job would be waiting for her when she got better. Even well after the war when Susan was in her nineties, she remembered her time with the general more fondly than any other period in World War II, perhaps even in her whole life.

But her cautiously built dreams of a life with General Koenig came crashing down at Bir Hakeim.

6The Fort

Bir Hakeim was originally constructed in the 16th or 17th century during the reign of the Ottoman Empire. Built from rusty sandstone plucked from the surrounding desert, Bir Hakeim gives the appearance of having slowly risen from the landscape of its own accord, imbued with the begrudging sentience of an old and tired god. It’s a guardian of sand and howling winds, the kind of outpost where men were stationed to disappear from the sanity of civilization.

Italy had taken a turn at building up Bir Hakeim after gaining control of the territory in the aftermath of the Italo-Turkish War in 1912. But the desert is a lonely place to die, and the fortress was largely abandoned in the years to follow.

As winter faded in early 1942, the Allies were in dire straits in northern Africa. They’d been caught by surprise by General Erwin Rommel in Benghazi, leading to an Allied retreat along the Libyan coast.

Somehow, they’d managed to regroup and form a defensive line, known as the Gazala Line, between the coastal city of Gazala and Bir Hakeim, 80 kilometers (50 mi) south of the coast. The line was marked by “boxes,” fortified outposts from which the Allies hoped to repel the German attack. Playing red rover with the Axis, the Allies hoped that wherever they were attacked, the line would hold.

5The Brigade

In the swirl of preparation along the Gazala Line, General Koenig was ordered to Bir Hakeim. As his personal driver, Susan dutifully followed. Time was short—intel held that an attack on the line was imminent—and the Gazala Line at the time was no stronger than an idea.

Worse, when Koenig and the Free French arrived at Bir Hakeim, they found that their predecessors hadn’t finished the job of fortifying the outpost. With less than 4,000 men at his disposal, Koenig went to work.

For the next three months, the Free French dug in. They surrounded the Bir Hakeim with an array of V-shaped minefields that pointed away from the central position. They dug hundreds of foxholes, trenches, and underground shelters.

In less than 12 weeks, they turned the bare desert surrounding the crumbling fortress into a death trap. Travers helped wherever she could, ferrying workers and carting supplies around the work area.

As the circle of death grew complete, however, the same question weighed on everyone’s mind: Would it be enough?

4The Desert Fox

While the Frenchmen toiled under the unforgiving sun in the Libyan Desert, a fox prowled just out of sight. General Erwin Rommel, newly appointed commander of the Afrika Corps, was marching East with 320 German tanks that were reinforced by another 240 Italian tanks. No stranger to African warfare, Rommel had been nicknamed “The Desert Fox” by journalists, and he carried the name proudly.

Rommel had spent the preceding months gathering his strength, but he knew that the British were doing the same. He needed to attack fast and hard before the defensive line got any stronger if he was going to have any hope of eventually taking Egypt and the vital supply lines afforded by the Suez Canal.

At the end of May 1942, Rommel approached Gazala with the full force of the 21st and 15th Panzer Divisions. All along the Gazala Line, soldiers hunkered down for the fighting to come. Nobody knew where he was going to attack the line.

But Rommel had no intention of playing a child’s game. He marched straight to the center of the line and engaged the British troops before making a show of moving north, hoping to draw most of the defenders with him.

It was all a trick. Under cover of nightfall, Rommel turned and led his army south. His plan was to flank the southern end of the Gazala Line and move north behind the Allied defenses, cutting off the army’s head by severing its supply lines.

The only thing that stood in his way was the tiny, undermanned Bir Hakeim outpost. It was going to be easy.

3The Siege

May 27, 1942, dawned hot and dry over Bir Hakeim. Colonel Koenig had ordered all the women at the fort to be evacuated days earlier, but Susan Travers had refused to leave, telling him, “Wherever you will go, I will go, too.”

As a result, she was the only woman in the fort when Rommel’s first probing attacks landed. Besides her, there were 3,700 men left to defend Bir Hakeim. But the Desert Fox was attacking with seven times that number.

Rommel sent an armored Italian division to make the first attack on Bir Hakeim. At this point, he fully expected to burn through the fort “in 15 minutes.” To everyone’s surprise, the Free French sent the Italian force running with their tails between their legs. Forty Italian tanks were left behind, destroyed by mines and French artillery.

Rommel was incensed. He sent Koenig an ultimatum: Surrender or be destroyed. Koenig replied, “We are not here to surrender.”

For two grueling weeks, the 1st Free French Brigade traded bullets with the Germans and withstood the massive barrage of tank fire. Rommel called in wave after wave of bombers to gut the fort, but the French persevered with suicidal tenacity. Susan Travers spent the entire siege in a foxhole sweating in the intense heat and waiting for the right bomb to fall that would blow her to pieces.

Finally, though, the French reached their limit. By the second week of June, they were out of food, ammunition, and most importantly, water. By their own design, they’d boxed themselves in with layer upon layer of trip wires and mines. They had to surrender or die. Koenig, however, saw a third option: They were going to break out of their self-constructed prison.

2The Escape

Escape from Bir Hakeim was a difficult proposition: They were surrounded by thousands of mines, and the Germans had encircled the fort with three concentric ranks of panzers.

Nevertheless, Koenig arranged the mission. They left in the dead of night, departing quietly in a line of vehicles just before midnight on June 10. Susan was driving Koenig’s car near the front, and all was going well until one of their trucks struck a land mine.

The night caught fire around them. Rommel quickly zeroed in on the would-be escapees and ordered his men to fire at will. Tracer rounds streaked through the black night, highlighting their position for the heavy artillery.

Escape had been a gamble, a suicide charge. While vehicles and soldiers were blown to bits by tanks and land mines, Susan Travers finally got the chance to experience her brief moment of destiny. Over the roar of the tank shells, Koenig told Susan, “If we go, the rest will follow.”

So Susan went. She maneuvered into the front of the train of vehicles and floored it, blasting past panzers with mere meters to spare. She swerved around mines and bomb craters. Her reckless charge opened a hole in the German dragnet, allowing more vehicles to follow in her wake.

It’s estimated that she was responsible for the escape of almost 2,500 soldiers. By the time she reached safety, her vehicle had nearly a dozen bullet holes and chunks of shrapnel embedded in the metal.

1The Legionnaire

All too often, love is as much a force of sorrow as of joy. Although Susan had risked her life to stay with Koenig, their affair wasn’t meant to last. He was, after all, a married man. After Bir Hakeim, Koenig’s wife joined him in Africa. Susan only saw him once after that, a decade later.

Susan spiraled into depression and contemplated suicide, but her indomitable spirit won out as always. In May 1945, she applied to the French Foreign Legion and was accepted, becoming the only female to serve as a legionnaire. She even sewed her own uniform because the legion didn’t have any designed for a woman.

Susan Travers eventually married and settled down. In 1956, she was awarded the Medaille Militaire for her actions at Bir Hakeim. The man who pinned the medal to her lapel was none other than Pierre Koenig. She never saw him again. Susan Travers died in 2003.

Eli Nixon is the author of Son of Tesla and its sequel, Mind of Tesla.

Considering the Vietnam War was one of the most controversial conflicts in recent history, there is a lot we don’t know about the war. Many of us have heard either only the basics of the war, or we have heard misconceptions about the war. There really is more than meets the eye. In fact, the Vietnam War was filled with many little-known details that never truly reached the public eye, with many details either hidden or distorted by the myths that arose during this time.

10CIA Abandonment Of The Hmong During The ‘Secret War’

In 1965, the CIA began fighting what would later be known as the “Secret War” under the airline Air America, which was owned secretly. By 1961, 9,000 Hmong guerrillas had been recruited to help the airline with its goals. Laos, where these Hmong men were from, claimed to be neutral during the war, but the NVA (North Vietnamese Army) had influence in the country. In 1965, the number of Hmong guerrillas had increased to 20,000, and the true reason for the “Secret War” was fully put into place.

The Hmong were to destroy NVA supply depots, ambush trucks, disrupt supply lines, and generally harass the NVA. When America began to leave Vietnam, Air America was forced to leave Laos, and on June 3, 1974, the last Air America aircraft left Laos, but the Hmong guerrillas were abandoned. Shortly after, the Laos government began to charge the Hmong guerrillas for fighting alongside the CIA, and many fled to the jungle where they have lived since the end of the Vietnam War. Many of these Hmong guerrillas claim that they are still hopeful that the US will one day come rescue them from the jungle, but many still remain in hiding to this day.

9Most Men Volunteered For Service

We often hear stories of men resisting the draft, and even fleeing the country to avoid being drafted. While the draft certainly was a real issue, it was nowhere near what the media and stories from the time make it seem. Three-quarters of all American soldiers had volunteered to be enlisted. More specifically, 9,087,000 military personnel served during the entire war, but only 1,728,344 men were drafted. This was a very low number of draftees compared to other wars.

In fact, in World War II alone, 8,895,135 men were drafted. This made up two-thirds of the entire American World War II military personnel, which is considerably larger than the amount of Vietnam War draftees. So, while the draft was fought and there was a large number of draftees, it was nowhere near as bad as the media and stories from this time make it seem. It’s just one more thing your grandparents exaggerated about.

8Draft Inequality

One of the other issues that was blamed on the draft was social inequality. Most of us have likely heard of this inequality, hearing that the draft was unfair to certain races or certain social classes. Despite this misconception, the draft was completely randomized. Men were chosen based on 366 blue capsules, each containing a day of the year. The very first capsule drawn had the date September 14 inside, so men born on September 14 in the years 1944 to 1950 were all assigned the number one in the lottery, meaning that the draft was fully randomized. Despite this method of drawing, many still believe that the draft was skewed.

This simply wasn’t the case, as 88.4 percent of men who served in the Vietnam War were Caucasian. Additionally, 86.3 percent of the men who died were Caucasian, meaning that the myth of minorities being “cannon fodder” simply isn’t true. Seventy-nine percent of men also had high school diplomas, higher than any other war, and three-quarters of all men were above the poverty line, disproving this social inequality. If anything, it was said that the men who came from wealthier backgrounds were much more likely to die, as they were trained for the most dangerous jobs.

7Payment Of Spies

South Vietnamese spies were important to the United States, but their work was dangerous. The challenge in recruiting these spies was that many came from barter societies, where money did not exist. This led to the use of rice and other commodities as payment, which worked for a while. However, the spies themselves were not getting all of the rice, and there was no need for some of the other commodities. There was a need for a new form of payment.

The solution? Let potential spies browse through the Sears catalog and pick what they wanted. The first order was six red velvet blazer vests with brass buttons, each in exchange for a 20-day mission. The spies would go on to order other garments, such as a large bra used to harvest fruit, and the program only came to a stop when the work became too dangerous.

6Not All Men Were Young

While the Vietnam War was unpopular for many reasons, one of the main criticisms was that it was sending young men to die. While it is true that many men were young when they enlisted, many older men enlisted as well. In fact, the oldest man known to have died in Vietnam was Kenna Clyde Taylor, who was 63 years old at the time of his death. There were also many pairs of father and son who fought in the war, with three of these pairs on the Vietnam Memorial Wall.

Additionally, there wasn’t an enlisted grade with an average age under 20, and the average soldier was 22 years old. Other categories of military personnel held higher averages. For example, the average age of an officer was 28 years old. While some of these men were certainly very young to be enlisted, they weren’t nearly as young as many of us may believe.

5Super Glue

Most of us have heard of the horrible injuries that occur on the battlefield. For the medics tending these wounds, quick thinking was often all that could save a life, as many of these wounds would result in a soldier bleeding out if not treated immediately. So, what did doctors turn to in these situations? Super glue.

The glue was accredited to saving many lives during the Vietnam War, as it was able to quickly stem bleeding as soldiers awaited surgery. While super glue isn’t recommended for quick fixes anymore, unless it’s an emergency, this shows contrast to the advancements made during this time. Essentially, the military had numerous advancements, but was unable to come up with a better quick fix than super glue. It was certainly effective considering the lives it was able to save, and some of us can probably thank super glue for our parents or grandparents being around today.

4Life After The War

There is a common misconception that Vietnam Veterans were treated poorly upon returning home. We’ve all heard the stories of protesters greeting them at the airport to throw garbage or spit on the veterans as they went to greet their families. While this seems way too outrageous to be real, rest assured, it isn’t. However, this wasn’t the case for the overwhelming majority. Some veterans simply stopped mentioning the war, as there was very little reaction to the veterans returning home, making it no different than any other military deployment.

Those who were greeted with a large reaction typically did not find a negative one. In fact, 87 percent of all Americans hold these veterans in high esteem, and many Veterans went on to live successful lives despite the misconception that many resented them. At least 85 percent of all of these veterans successfully transitioned back to civilian life, and are both less likely to be unemployed and have an 18 percent higher personal income compared to non-veterans. They’re also less likely to be imprisoned. In fact, only around .5 percent of all Vietnam veterans have served jail time.

3Cloud Seeding

When we think of the fighting itself, sabotage isn’t our first thought. However, this was something that the United States Army used to its advantage. One of the biggest ways they hoped to sabotage the NVA was through the practice of cloud seeding. The cloud seeding was first practiced in Project Popeye, where over 50 of these experiments took place, and the project had an 82 percent success rate. The cloud seeding would cause additional heavy rains and would effectively stop military movement in the affected areas.

It was also intended to flood specific areas, damage crops, and, in some areas, drastically change the weather. This was also seen as an alternative to bombing, as both would have the same effect on military movement, as the rain would simply make certain roads unusable. However, this project tended to kill fewer people, so it was used in place of bombings.

2The United States Was Not Alone

When we hear of the Vietnam War, we mainly hear of American involvement. While the United States had the highest number of soldiers in Vietnam, troops had backup from South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, Australia, and New Zealand. South Korea alone sent 312,853 soldiers to Vietnam between September 1963 and April 1975.

South Korea was also among the deadliest of these “backup” forces, killing 41,000 North Vietnamese soldiers and causing 5,000 civilian casualties. Only 4,687 South Koreans were killed during the war, with estimates of more than 5,000 wounded. The South Koreans had an overall kill ratio of 11 to 1. While South Korea sent the most troops, second only to the US, a large amount of troops came from other countries, such as the 60,000 military personnel from Australia, or the 3,000 from New Zealand during the conflict. It’s too bad the United States keeps hogging the spotlight.

1The Death Card

It’s likely we’ve all seen the ace of spades in the context of the Vietnam War. While Hollywood has taught us a thing or two about how these cards were used, many of us have no idea as to the true story behind this famous symbol. The ace of spades was left on dead Viet Cong soldiers as a warning. The Vietnamese are very superstitious people, and when American troops found out that they were scared of the card, it became widespread.

The only flaw was that it had little to no effect on the Vietnamese. In fact, this psychological warfare was only seen as a campaign by the soldiers: There were no headquarters, intelligence, or Psychological Operation experts behind this campaign. It was actually three lieutenants that asked for the first “Bicycle Secret Weapons,” while none of them had any psychological operation authority. The cards only spread in popularity due to their use as calling cards, which made fellow soldiers want them. So, while it was said that the cards would cause other Viet Cong soldiers to leave, the fear was more likely linked to fear of nearby Americans than of the cards themselves.

America’s bloodiest and most costly conflict, the US Civil War claimed the lives of 620,000 men (roughly 2 percent of the population) with over 800,000 wounded or missing. Although the battlefields were covered with death, perhaps the most frightening places were the field hospitals. From the echoing screams of men undergoing amputations to the inexperienced doctors and lack of medical knowledge, many believed it was better to die on thefield than to face the surgeons, who were often considered to be butchers. The following 10 cases describe the horrors as well as astonishing, lesser-known facts about what the men endured throughout their time in Hell.

10 Drunken Surgeons

Alcohol was a vital commodity during the Civil War and was primarily used as an anesthetic during amputations. However, use quickly became abuse. Some took the occasional nip to dull their fears, while others, including the surgeons who were operating, got flat out drunk.

Phoebe Yates Pember, a Confederate hospital matron, once wrote of a patient who was brought in after his ankle had been crushed by a train. She described how after his ankle was set, the man was still in agonizing pain, and upon further investigation, Pember discovered that the patient’s bandaged leg was perfectly healthy and that the other leg was “swollen, inflamed and purple.” The surgeon was so intoxicated that he had set the wrong ankle. Soon after, fever set in, and the patient died.

Such stories of surgeons, officers, and even generals being intoxicated on the battlefields were not uncommon, given their access to whiskey and brandy. At the First Battle of Bull Run, a group of civilians and medical assistants who were supposed to drive medical wagons and collect the wounded from the field got into the medicinal liquor (aka whiskey) and became too drunk to be of any use. They ignored their wounded comrades, leaving them to die where they lay.

9 Smuggling Drugs Past Enemy Lines

The majority of medicinal drugs in the mid-1800s were manufactured in Europe and shipped to the United States. During the Civil War, the Union blockade of Southern ports prevented the Confederates from receiving shipments, including arms and medicine. This ultimately forced the Confederacy to obtain drugs through other means, such as processing indigenous medicinal plants, capturing enemy supplies, and smuggling.

One way that the South smuggled medicine past the Union blockades was through the use of children’s dolls. They would pack the medicine into the dolls’ hollowed papier-mache heads in order to avoid detection by the North’s blockades. The Union troops wouldn’t inspect the toys, since they were looking for obvious contraband.

Two drugs that were of great importance on the battlefield were morphine for pain and quinine. Quinine was vital for troops stricken with malaria, which spread like wildfire and claimed the lives of thousands of soldiers. Around 900,000 Union troops contracted malaria. The numbers of Confederates who fell ill hasn’t been well-documented, but given their lack of medicinal supplies, the numbers are presumed to be staggering.

8 Compassion In Gettysburg

Even though hundreds of thousands of men were dying on the battlefields from gunfire to hand-to-hand combat with bayonets, acts of humanity and compassion were evident in the Union hospitals, where doctors set aside their differences to care for the wounded. On July 1, 1863, the first day of the three-day Battle of Gettysburg, which claimed the lives of 7,000 men in the first 24 hours, Union officers overran the Lutheran Theological Seminary, converting the church into a hospital.

Although the church was officially a Union hospital, the doctors and local volunteers tended to both Union and Confederate soldiers as well as black soldiers, treating every injured man equally. The men were cared for and slept beside one another under the same roof for several days at a time. At its peak, the small church accommodated 150 wounded soldiers from both sides and continued to do so throughout the month, with 78 patients remaining on August 3.

7 Unqualified Doctors

During the Civil War, United Sates medical schools were far behind the educational quality of their European counterparts, which had four- year cirriculums. US medical schools, however, ran only two years, the second year primarily being a repeat of the first. In fact, US medical schools were so far behind that Harvard Medical School didn’t even have one stethoscope or microscope until after the war had ended. The majority of Civil War surgeons had never even performed surgery, let alone seen a gunshot wound.

To make matters worse, both the Union and Confederate armies were extremely understaffed. The Union Army only had 98 doctors, while the Confederates had 24. With the growing numbers of wounded soldiers reaching into the thousands every day, both the North and South began to take anyone who considered themselves a doctor. For the most part, their only medical knowledge came from a military surgery manual written by Dr. Samuel Gress, which would be their guide to performing life-saving emergency operations.

6 Bizarre Medical Treatments

Because medical education and knowledge during the Civil War was substandard to say the least, bizarre and absurd medical treatments were practiced, only making the injured and sick worse off. For instance, severe gonorrhea was “treated” with whiskey mixed with silkweed root, pine resin, and small pieces of blue vitriol. We can assume that such a concoction did nothing to combat the venereal disease. If a patient was suffering from syphilis, which caused genital ulcers, swollen lymph nodes, pustule rashes, fever, sore throat, and even neurological problems, a doctor would prescribe mercury, an extremely toxic chemical element.

Doctors considered pus a good sign, believing that a wound was healing when in fact, the injury was infected. To make matters worse, doctors unknowingly infected other patients by intentionally transferring pus from patients who had it to those who didn’t, assuming that it would be beneficial. Patients suffering from diarrhea were given chloride of mercury, a violent laxative also known as a purgative. This would cause the already dehydrated soldiers to lose even more fluids via vomiting and extreme diarrhea, thus compounding their illness, ultimately leading to death.

5 Working Around The Clock

If it wasn’t bad enough that the physicians during the Civil War were unqualified and practiced bizarre treatment regimens, the fact that they were greatly understaffed made a terrible situation far worse. Melvin Walker of the 13th Massachusetts Infantry described how surgeons operating at the division hospital where he was taken worked without rest or sleep for 36 hours straight, often with little food and no help.

Following the Battle of the Wilderness, roughly 7,000 wounded soldiers were taken to Fredericksburg, a trip that took many over 24 hours to make due to the clogged roads and primitive ambulances, which were horse-drawn wagons. Upon arriving at the hospital, the 7,000 wounded men were met with only 40 surgeons available to tend to their needs. Surgeon George Stevens of the 77th New York regiment described how hundreds of ambulances were continuously arriving, men were dropping dead all around him one by one, and that he and his fellow surgeons “were almost worked to death.” It’s understandable why there were more casualties off the battlefield than on.

4 The Great Anesthesia Myth

One of the greatest myths of the Civil War was that there were no anesthetics for operations such as amputating limbs, which was commonplace in the hospitals. Amputation was so common, in fact, that piles of arms and legs would be strewn around in every direction the eye could see. Contrary to popular belief, those undergoing surgery were often sedated with chloroform and whiskey, causing them to partially lose consciousness and not feel pain. The screams that field hospitals were so known for were often from soldiers who’d just learned that they were going to lose a limb and hadn’t yet been sedated.

Although the men were reported to be only partially sedated, when properly anesthetized, the wounded would feel no pain at all during surgery. Although it’s uncertain as to how many successful operations took place in terms of the anesthesia working, the best example of proper sedation is that of Stonewall Jackson’s amputation. Jackson, whose left arm needed to be amputated, described how once the chloroform kicked in, the only thing he noticed was the sound of the saw cutting through the bone of his arm. Other than that, Jackson claimed that he faded into a stupor while repeating the words “blessing, blessing, blessing,” free of pain.

3 Battling The Real Enemy

During the Civil War, disease ran rampant. The battlefields, camps, and hospitals were filled with typhoid, pneumonia, measles, tuberculosis, and malaria, just to name a few. With the exception of malaria, there were no medications or cures available. Those infected would only become more ill, further spreading disease. The local streams were quickly contaminated, leading to the development and spread of yet more diseases, including dysentery, which accounted for 45,000 Union deaths and 50,000 Confederate deaths.

Lack of sanitation and hygiene only made the situation worse. Surgeons would use the same tools continuously on hundreds of patients without ever cleaning their instruments, thus causing cross contamination. Often, the surgeon would hold his bloody tool in his mouth while operating, possibly infecting himself.

Of the 620,000 soldiers who died during the Civil War, two thirds succumbed not to enemy fire but to the endless array of diseases lurking all around them. Their frail and weakened bodies, exhausted and worn from continuous battle as well as horrendous diet and lack of food took an immense toll on their immune systems, making it impossible to stand any chance of overcoming an illness. It’s a misconception that the greatest danger was on the battlefield, when in fact the real enemy was visible only under a microscope.

2 The Dawn Of Modern Medicine

Although the greatest number of casualties during the Civil War stemmed from the lack of medical knowledge and understanding, it did become apparent to physicians that a change in medical practice was necessary, thus paving the way to new research and knowledge. Physicians began to document their observations from hundreds of different cases, which would ultimately aid researchers after the war.

For instance, medical officers realized that sanitation could greatly reduce the spread of disease. Some hospitals took notice that washing bandages in hot, soapy water in order to reuse them caused the infection rates to decrease, unlike other hospitals that weren’t conducting such practices. Because of this correlation, the birth of sanitation had begun.

The Civil War also gave rise to modern emergency medicine and ambulatory evacuation, not seen prior to the 1860s. It was of great importance that the wounded be carried off the battlefields to a nearby station, where they were attended to prior to being taken to a hospital. This gave way to the bigger concept of moving someone swiftly in order to provide care to save their life, a standard which will forever be practiced in warfare.

1 Dr. Mary Walker

The story of Dr. Mary Walker is not only one of sacrifice and courage, but heroism that has broken down barriers for female physicians ever since. After Dr. Walker received her medical degree, she headed to the front lines, where she worked in tent hospitals in Warrenton and Fredericksburg, Virginia. The following year, Dr. Walker was stationed in Tennessee, where she was appointed assistant surgeon in the Army of the Cumberland by General H. Thomas.

Dr. Walker was captured by the Confederate Army in April 1864. She was imprisoned in Richmond, Virginia, for four long months. Following her release, Dr. Walker began to supervise a hospital for women prisoners and an orphanage after becoming an acting assistant surgeon with the Ohio 52nd Infantry, a feat no woman had ever accomplished.

Dr. Walker served honorably until the war had come to an end. In 1865, she was awarded the Medal of Honor. Dr. Walker wore the medal with great pride every day from that point on until her passing in 1919. To this day, Dr. Walker remains the only woman to have ever received the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Adam is just a hubcap trying to hold on in the fast lane.

We tend to think of history as a collection of abstract facts that have no bearing on the “real world,” but everything connects across the timeline. Big, world-changing events don’t just change things when they happen; they send out shock waves that reverberate into the present. Like William Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

10 Espionage And Sedition Acts

When Woodrow Wilson declared war in 1917, he gave a speech before congress warning of the disloyalty of many Americans. To deal with those who wanted to undermine the war effort, Wilson advocated “a firm hand of repression.”

Thus, Wilson enacted the Espionage and Sedition Acts to prosecute people who threatened “national defense.” The acts granted the government the power to censor newspapers and movies as well as jail those who resisted the draft and made it federal crime to slander the Constitution. The government imprisoned thousands during Wilson’s administration.

Cooler heads never really prevailed. By 1919, the Supreme Court decided that the laws were not in violation of the First Amendment and freedom of speech, and their use continues to this day. They were most recently employed to imprison Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning, and they would be used to put Edward Snowden behind bars if he were to be captured.

9 Iron Harvest

Farmers in France, Germany, and Belgium are still at risk of becoming casualties due to the amount of munitions launched during World War I. When they plow their fields, they’re still dredging up tons of unexploded weaponry, and sometimes the bombs go off. Entire teams are dedicated to finding these weapons and disarming them before that happens. People like Michael Colling even have to wear gas masks, as if the war never ended.

In 2012, Belgium uncovered 105 tons of munitions, including poisonous gas. They call the haul, like a macabre crop grown in Hell, the “iron harvest.” In 2004, one site in Germany yielded 3,000 unexploded bombs. Those hauls are only a drop in the bucket. During World War I, 1.4 billion shells were launched. People still occasionally die. The Great War is still claiming lives.

8 Champagne

You may have, at some point, heard a snob proclaim, “Champagne is only champagne if it comes from the Champagne region in France.” Here’s why:

The French regions that could produce champagne were effectively destroyed during World War I. To ensure that champagne would remain exclusively French, a clause was added to the Treaty of Versailles, stipulating that the entire world wouldn’t be able to call any sparkling wine “champagne.” The countries that ratified the Treaty of Versailles agreed.

This stipulation remains at work today, though not completely as intended. If you’re in the US, you may have noticed that a lot of cheap wine is still called “champagne.” This stuff is made in the United States. In the US, you can a get terrible hangover from “champagne” instead of “sparkling wine” because the Senate never ratified the Treaty of Versailles. The US remains technically exempt from the clause.

7 The Red Zone

Some towns in France were so destroyed and contaminated that the French government seized an area of land larger than Paris and deemed it uninhabitable.

Several towns in the Champagne-Ardenne region experienced some of the war’s most devastating fighting. The people that lived there fled, and the towns succumbed to the guns of August. The ground was contaminated, and there were too many unexploded bombs. People didn’t return after the war.

On April 17, 1919, the French government bought the land and declared it uninhabitable. Henceforth, it was to be known as the “Zone Rouge,” a place fit for military training and nothing else. People have returned to some of the towns as the ground became safer, but a large strip of land is still considered impossible for human life.

6 The Hungarian Diaspora

The Treaty of Trianon was the peace agreement established between the Allies and Hungary in 1920, and like all of the treaties dealing with Central and Southern Europe, there was the messy issue of what to do with the losing side’s land. Breaking up the Austro-Hungarian Empire meant dividing the land among the various nations that used to make up the empire.

Hungary really lost hard in the deal. Roughly two-thirds of its territory was given to surrounding countries like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. The unintended consequence of this is that millions of Hungarians are in other countries. The Hungarians who found themselves outside their borders did not assimilate into the new nations and essentially created Hungarian exclaves.

Hungary’s solution to this problem today is basically to recreate the Hungarian Empire. They’re creating countries within countries by granting full citizenship, including voting rights, to hundreds of thousands of Hungarians in places like Romania. This has brought the two countries to the brink of war as recently as 2013. It has also promoted the rise of far-right demonstrations chanting “Down with Trianon!” a century after the fact.

5 Debt

World War I was expensive, so much so that Britain went from the world’s creditor to a debtor nation in just four years. No one could have predicated just how devastatingly expensive the war was and how long it would take to pay back all the borrowed money.

Germany was famously stuck with the bill for World War I with the reparations and “war-guilt” clause in the Treaty of Versailles. The country has only recently paid off its debt. They made their final payment of $94 million to the Allies in 2010. They weren’t alone, either. Britain finally paid off its £1.9 Billion debt in 2015.

4 ISIS

ISIS wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for World War I. In fact, the organization makes of point of saying how they will be destroying all of the World War I treaties that created the modern Middle East.

Keep in mind that all of the current nation-states in the Middle East did not exist before 1914. They were (mostly) part of the Ottoman Empire. When it started to look like the Allies would win, the UK and France (again, mostly) decided how they would carve up the new land and add it to their empires. This included the Sykes-Picot agreement.

France and Britain brokered a secret treaty during World War I about who would have what in the Middle East. In the agreement, they decided to create Iraq and Syria and add these newly created territories to their empires. The trouble is that they didn’t take into account how the people living there would feel.

Destroying these borders is now a huge part of the ISIS agenda. In 2014, in one of ISIS’s first videos, they filmed a bulldozer knocking down a chuck of dirt between Iraq and Syria, and then the camera panned down to a sign that said, “End of Sykes-Picot.”

3 Divided Ireland

At the outbreak of World War I, Ireland was part of the UK, but by the end of the war, the Irish had started their own Brexit. Typically, historians have treated the Easter Uprising of 1916 as the origin of modern Irish problems and violence, and it could not have happened without the conditions facilitated by World War I.

Participation in the British military helped to widen the cracks between Irish loyalists and republicans. Northern Ireland fought and died for Britain, and they weren’t about to join Irish nationalists and republicans, who, in their view, weren’t joining or joined for the wrong reasons. Ulster loyalists also supported the conscription of Irishmen, while republicans, nationalists, and Roman Catholics violently resisted.

Things came to a boiling point on Easter 1916, when James Connolly and a group of volunteers stormed Dublin, occupied the General Post Office, and declared the Irish Republic. This event set the tone of violence that would dominate Ireland throughout the 20th century and up until the present day.

2 Pilates

Pilates, the popular fitness fad that has swept the suburbs, was actually born in a World War I internment camp. Joseph Pilates, a native of Germany, moved to England in 1912 to work as a defense instructor for Scotland Yard. Two years later, the war broke out, and the British rounded up thousands of German nationals, whom the British believed represented an enemy threat.

While interned as a potential German saboteur, Joseph developed a method of exercise that could be performed inside the camp. He rigged together what was on hand to enable others to perform effective exercise with little more than their body weight. It worked well and was a hit, and he eventually moved to the US in 1926. He brought his fitness system along with him and opened a studio in New York City. From there, it spread throughout the country.

1 Passports

Papers for travel weren’t always a common necessity. They mostly existed for sailors to pass through ports. By the end of the 19th century, railroads had made travel so popular and easy that Europe simply abolished any legal paperwork that might have been required for travel. From the 1860s to 1914, borders were essentially open.

World War I changed everything. Free and open travel was simply not a reality for nations at war, and the UK was the first to set up the system we recognize today. The British Nationalist and Status Alien Acts of 1914 gave birth to the modern passport. It was a piece of paper with a picture and other identifying criteria encased by a cardboard cover. Besides some minor changes made in the 1920s, these passports became the template for all international travel. Other than increased sophistication in technology, they haven’t really changed.

These days, much of the history of the Americas before Europeans arrived has been lost or forgotten. This is a shame because the great civilizations of Central America hold stories as epic and intriguing as those of Ancient Greece and Rome. Take the cities of Tikal and Calakmul, which spent four centuries locked in a titanic struggle with twists and turns straight out of Game of Thrones.

10The Rise Of Tikal

The classic Mayan civilization stretched from the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico through Belize, Guatemala, and northern Honduras. This was difficult terrain, prone to drought and soil erosion. Yet here the Maya built one of the great civilizations of ancient America, mastering writing and mathematics. (They arguably invented zero before anyone else).

Unlike the Aztecs or Toltecs, the Maya were never united in one empire. Instead, they formed a squabbling network of city-states, not unlike ancient Greece. Warfare was limited and somewhat ceremonial. Trade was extensive.

The cities of Calakmul and Tikal grew particularly wealthy. Both dominated large areas of fertile territory and had access to chert mines. They traded in jade, obsidian, feathers, and other tropical luxuries, and their priests and merchants grew rich on the profits. During the reign of King Chak Tok Ich’aak, Tikal surpassed Calakmul and reached new heights of splendor and prestige.

Yet Chak Tok Ich’aak’s success was also at the root of his downfall. Even as Tikal’s palaces and monuments rose more splendid than ever before, the city’s wealth attracted attention from far beyond the Mayan lands. In the distant highlands of central Mexico, powers vast and cool and unsympathetic regarded Tikal with envious eyes and slowly drew up plans against it.

9The Invasion

Over 1,000 kilometers (600 mi) from Tikal in the Valley of Mexico near what is now Mexico City, an immense and mysterious city rises. We still don’t know who built it or how to read their language. We don’t even know its real name. The Aztecs, who wandered awed through the ruins a millennium later, dubbed it Teotihuacan, “the place where men become gods.”

It’s understandable that the Aztecs were impressed because Teotihuacan was huge. Its population was well over 100,000, making it easily the largest city in the Western Hemisphere at the time. Its monuments were gargantuan: The Pyramid of the Sun is one of the largest ever built, and the Pyramid of the Moon is only slightly smaller. The Street of the Dead runs for 2.5 kilometers (1.5 mi) between the main temples. Its warriors roamed far and wide, distinguished by their unusual shell goggles and the obsidian mirrors strapped to their backs.

Immigrants from all over Central America flocked to Teotihuacan, turning it into a melting pot of different cultures and languages. From atop the pyramids, a priestly class occasionally carried out human sacrifices. The city’s political structure remains subject to debate, but by the AD 370s, it seems to have been under the control of a powerful figure known as Spearthrower Owl. In 378, he watched as his army marched out of Teotihuacan and headed east for Tikal.

8‘Fire Is Born’

Spearthrower Owl didn’t accompany the army himself. Instead, it was commanded by a general the Maya called Siyaj K’ak’ (“Fire Is Born”). They also dubbed him “Ochk’in Kaloomte” (“Lord of the West”), reflecting his origins in Teotihuacan. Mayan cities quailed as his army passed, and at least four of them seem to have recorded the event in murals depicting elaborately costumed and heavily armed Teotihuacano warriors. They easily stand out compared to the Maya, who are depicted in simple breechcloths and headdresses.

In January 378, Siyaj K’ak’ appeared in Waka’, a town just west of Tikal. Exactly eight days later on January 14 (8.17.1.4.12 on the Mayan calendar), he arrived in Tikal. In their helmets and goggles, the warlike Teotihuacanos must have been a fearsome sight and Chak Tok Ich’aak was apparently unable to mount any meaningful resistance. Siyaj K’ak’ forced his way into the palace that very same day, and King Chak Tok Ich’aak “entered the water” of the Mayan afterlife. We can assume that he was either quietly murdered or encouraged to commit suicide.

Siyaj K’ak’ presumably had the dead king’s family murdered as well. (They certainly disappear from the historical record immediately afterward). His soldiers also broke or damaged all of Tikal’s preconquest monuments and inscriptions. A year after the invasion, Spearthrower Owl’s son came down from Teotihuacan and was crowned the new king of Tikal.

7Building An Empire

While Spearthrower Owl’s son sat on the throne, Siyaj K’ak’ continued to expand his new empire. Shortly after the conquest of Tikal, the city of Uaxactun seems to have been overrun and made part of the Tikal kingdom. Stelae in the city depict heavily armed Teotihuacan warriors, and historians believe these show Siyaj K’ak’ conquering the city. Archaeologists found five murdered noble women and children buried beneath one of the stelae—the slaughtered family of Uaxactun’s last king.

In 393, Siyaj K’ak’ marched into Rio Azul, a city in what is now Guatemala. Clearly, the Maya remained no match for his goggled warriors. An altar depicts the sacrifice of eight members of the city’s old ruling class, and Rio Azul became subject to Tikal. This was a huge victory since Rio Azul lay on the River Hondo, a crucial trade route to the Caribbean coast. The city’s conquest secured this route and allowed Tikal to suck trade away from rival cities like Calakmul.

At some point, Siyak K’ak’ also seems to have installed a new ruling family in the famed Mayan city of Palenque. As a new Mayan calendar cycle approached (the year 9.0.0.0.0 was in 435 AD), it seemed that Teotihuacano-Tikal was poised to dominate the entire Mayan world.

6Tikal Consolidates Power

Spearthrower Owl’s son died in AD 411, and Siyaj K’ak’ presumably passed away a few years earlier. The new king of Tikal was Spearthrower Owl’s grandson, Siyaj Chan K’awiil II, who tried to consolidate the new kingdom by appealing to his Mayan subjects. His monuments and murals depict him in Mayan dress and emphasize his Mayan mother. Even his name was taken from an earlier Mayan ruler of Tikal rather than his Teotihuacano ancestors.

But that doesn’t mean he tried to hide his central Mexican roots. While Siyaj Chan K’awiil had himself depicted in Mayan costume, he kept Spearthrower Owl’s glyph on his crown. In several monuments, Siyaj Chan K’awiil sits in Mayan dress while the spirit of his father looks on wearing full Teotihuacan military gear. This must have been an effective propaganda campaign: “I’m one of you,” the monuments declared, “but remember the power I have behind me.”

Meanwhile, “New Tikal” continued to expand. In 426, Siyaj Chan K’awiil raised a warrior known as K’inich Yax K’uk’ Mo’ to the rank of king and sent him to seize the city of Copan in what is now Honduras. K’inich Yax K’uk’ Mo’ also conquered the city of Quirigua, giving the Tikal-Copan entity control of the entire Motagua Valley. Under Siyaj Chan K’awiil’s immediate successors, Tikal continued to expand and consolidate its dominant position. And it seemed the other Mayan cities could only look on in fear and jealousy.

5The Star War

Today, the temples of Calakmul rise like icebergs out of the immense jungles of Campeche. But in its heyday, the city ruled one of the largest and most powerful Mayan kingdoms. It was the home of the Kaan dynasty, a particularly long-lasting and resourceful family of priest-kings who had relocated to Calakmul after their ancient power base at El Mirador went into decline.

After the Teotihuacanos arrived, the Kaan watched helplessly as they were eclipsed by the rising power of Tikal. (The conquest of Rio Azul was a clear attempt to cut Calakmul out of the rich Caribbean trade routes). But as time passed, the Maya began to master central Mexican weapons like the spear-thrower and Tikal’s warriors began to lose their mystique.

But Tikal remained too large and powerful for Calakmul to challenge head-on. So a Kaan ruler known as Sky Witness decided to outflank it instead. Doubtless appealing to Mayan solidarity and jealousy of the Teotihuacanos, Sky Witness constructed a delicate alliance of Mayan cities surrounding Tikal. The noose was complete by 556 when Tikal’s most powerful vassal, the huge city of Caracol, betrayed it to join the alliance. Between Calakmul in the north and Caracol in the south, Tikal was caught in a pincer.

After years of strangling Tikal, Sky Witness decided to finish it. In 562, Calakmul and Caracol launched a “Star War.” This was basically the Mayan equivalent of total war: The aim was to completely crush the opposing state. Their combined armies overran Tikal, defaced its monuments, and ritually sacrificed its king. It was a huge victory. But things weren’t over yet.

4The Wrath Of Kaan

The Kaan were unimaginably ancient and power-hungry. From the great city of El Mirador, they had been at the forefront of the preclassic period of Mayan history, and now Calakmul looked set to dominate the classic period. After defeating Tikal in 562, they installed a puppet king and an onerous peace agreement. For the next century, no new monuments were permitted in Tikal and much of the city’s wealth was siphoned off to Calakmul.

Shortly afterward, the Kaan destroyed Rio Azul, cementing their control of the Rio Hondo trade. They also probably attacked Copan, whose monuments were destroyed or defaced during this period. The Kaan ruler Scroll Serpent lead a huge expedition to distant Palenque where he executed the king, a descendant of the ruler put in place by Siyaj K’ak’ all those years ago. No challenge to Sky Witness’s alliance was allowed. When the city of Naranjo tried to leave the alliance to attack Caracol, the Kaan ransacked it and tortured its king to death.

But Tikal’s size and resources meant it remained a potential threat, and the Kaan watched it like a hawk for any sign of defiance. In 629, Tikal tried to found a new city at Dos Pilas. In response, the Kaan invaded and forced the ruler of Dos Pilas (the king of Tikal’s own brother) to become a vassal of Calakmul instead. But they were never able to fully destroy Tikal, which remained a sleeping giant waiting to be awakened.

3Tikal Turns The Tide

In 682, a new king rose to the throne in Tikal. Jasaw Chan K’awiil was possessed by an iron determination to restore Tikal’s power. As a child, he had seen his father humiliated by Calakmul and Dos Pilas. But he also sensed that the Calakmul alliance was weakening. As soon as he took the throne, he began work on giant monuments and inscriptions, the first in Tikal for over a century.

Tikal’s situation was precarious: The city was still surrounded by the great ring of the Calakmul alliance, including El Peru in the west, Naranjo in the east, Dos Pilas and Caracol in the south, and Masaal and Calakmul in the north. Faced with this formidable league, Jasaw Chan K’awiil decided on a bold roll of the dice. Bypassing the smaller cities, he launched a surprise attack on Calakmul itself. In 695, his army “brought down the flint and shield” of Calakmul and won a dramatic victory.

Jasaw returned to Tikal covered in glory and held a great triumph on the anniversary of Spearthrower Owl’s death. A carving of the event from Tikal’s royal palace shows Jasaw bedecked in full Teotihuacan military gear, looming triumphantly over an imprisoned Kaan lord being prepared for sacrifice.

With Calakmul on the back foot, Tikal’s rulers set about dismantling the alliance that hemmed them in. Jasaw himself subdued Masaal in the north while his son, Yik’in Chan K’awiil, defeated El Peru and Naranjo in a single year-long campaign. Yik’in Chan K’awiil also launched another attack on Calakmul itself, capturing and sacrificing the Kaan ruler.

However, Dos Pilas in the south remained stubbornly defiant, defeating a Tikal invasion force in 705. That must have particularly hurt because Dos Pilas was still run by a distant branch of Tikal’s ruling family.

2A Tropical Cold War

With the alliance broken, Calakmul watched jealously as Tikal’s wealth and power grew. But neither city was ever able to completely destroy the other. This period of Mayan history has been compared to the Cold War, with the two superpowers warily watching each other and engaging in numerous skirmishes and proxy wars.

For example, Tikal had been allied with Copan since it was conquered by K’inich Yax K’uk’ Mo’ (see entry 6). K’inich Yax K’uk’ Mo’ had also conquered the city of Quirigua and made it a vassal of Copan. But in 738, the Kaan encouraged Quirigua to revolt. With support from Calakmul, the Quiriguans seized and decapitated Copan’s king, severely weakening Tikal’s most important ally.

Such proxy wars became increasingly common as Tikal and Calakmul repeatedly invaded neighboring cities to put friendly rulers on the throne. Without confronting each other directly, their fortunes ebbed and flowed and the records of neighboring cities are full of nervous mentions of the two titans. Teotihuacan had long since declined, and Spearthrower Owl was forgotten in the Valley of Mexico. But in the Yucatan, his descendants fought on against the ancient snake glyph of the Kaan.

Warfare became increasingly common and frantic across the region. As Calakmul’s sphere of influence receded, Dos Pilas lost control of its vassals and the Petexbatun region descended into complete chaos. The people of Dos Pilas tore down their temples to build defensive walls while the ruling family (still distant relations of Tikal’s kings) fled to the fortress of Aguateca, guarded by a mighty ravine. At Punta de Chimino on Lake Petexbatun, the people built a formidable network of walls and moats. But the fighting was terrifyingly intense, and both Aguateca and Punta de Chimino were stormed and destroyed.

Meanwhile, both Calakmul and Tikal continued to grow. The city of Calakmul alone now housed more than 120,000, with larger numbers in its surrounding kingdom. But there were already signs of decline. As the centers struggled to hold on, things were falling apart.

1The Great Collapse

Beginning at the start of the ninth century AD, the classical Mayan civilization dramatically collapsed. The great cities of the lowlands lost most of their population or were abandoned entirely, to be swallowed up by the jungle. The great dynasties vanished, and monuments and temples fell into ruins. Mayan civilization continued in the north in trading towns like Chichen Itza, dominated by merchants rather than autocratic priest-kings. But the era of sprawling cities and huge building projects was over.

The reasons for this collapse remain one of the great mysteries of history. We now know that it coincided with a period of sustained drought, which almost certainly played a role. Probably the land could no longer sustain the huge population. Tikal, for example, built huge reservoirs to keep the city going through the four-month dry season. But years of low rainfall would have defeated even Mayan ingenuity. However, drought alone can’t explain the collapse—the cities of the north lasted far longer than those of the lowlands, even though the north was much drier.

Whatever the reason, the collapse finally ended the 400-year conflict between Tikal and Calakmul. Locked in their titanic struggle, the two cities probably never saw it coming. The war almost certainly sapped the Mayan ability to respond to the catastrophe facing them. Calakmul was one of the first cities to go, losing all cohesion by about AD 810. Tikal held on for another 50 years, but eventually, it was abandoned, too. The sons of Spearthrower Owl and the Kaan dynasty disappeared from history.

After the collapse, a small population hung on in Calakmul and occasionally erected crude monuments in imitation of their ancestors. But the writing inscribed on them was nonsensical. They no longer remembered how to write.

World War II affected every person who lived through it. Hundreds of stories from that time have become part of our history, but there are millions more that have gone untold.

Even some famous names you know for something completely different had incredible experiences during the war. Most of their war stories get overshadowed by their more famous accomplishments, but these stories are so incredible that they deserve to be heard.

10 George Bush Barely Escaped Being Eaten By Japanese Cannibals

At age 20, George H.W. Bush, the future 41st president of the United States, was nothing more than a navy pilot. During a bombing raid against the Japanese Bonin Islands, he was shot down—and nearly eaten.

Bush was one of nine men who escaped damaged airplanes during the raid, but he was the only one who survived. He waited on a life raft protected by Allied planes while a submarine rescued him.

The other eight men were not as lucky. They were captured by Japanese soldiers and put through hell. The men were tortured, beaten, and ultimately executed. Some of their bodies were then butchered by surgeons, who served their livers and thigh meat to Japanese officers at a feast.

Thanks to the crew of the USS Finback, Bush made it out alive. But if it hadn’t been for them, the 41st president of the United States would have been served as dinner.

9 Star Trek’s ‘Scotty’ Survived Being Shot Six Times

Before he was “Scotty,” James Doohan was a lieutenant in the Royal Canadian Army. Trained as a pilot, Doohan had a reputation as the “craziest pilot in the Canadian Air Forces” because he did things like slam a plane between two telegraph poles just to prove it could be done.

When D-day came, he was put on the ground and joined the raid on Juno Beach. Doohan personally shot two enemy snipers and led his troops through a field of antitank mines—only to be taken out by his own army.

While Doohan was moving between two command posts, a nervous Canadian soldier opened fire on Doohan, shooting him six times. One of the bullets hit him in the chest. Luckily, Doohan’s life was saved by a cigarette case in his breast pocket.

8 JFK Saved His Crew With A Coconut

John F. Kennedy was deemed medically unfit to fight, but he used his connections to get into the navy anyway. Disaster struck, however, when the ship he commanded was rammed by a Japanese destroyer and cut in half.

Kennedy and his crew clung to the boat for 12 hours before deciding to swim through shark-infested waters to get to land. One injured man couldn’t make the trip, so Kennedy put a life jacket on him and swam him to shore—dragging the man by clenching the strap between Kennedy’s teeth.

The crew was stranded on the island for days before Kennedy carved a message into a coconut, gave it to two natives, and asked them to bring it to a nearby Allied base. His coconut message got through, and the crew was saved. Kennedy kept the coconut shell ever after and even used it as a paperweight in the Oval Office.

7 Tony Bennett Was Demoted for Eating Lunch With A Black Soldier

Before he was a singer, Tony Bennett was a corporal in the US Army and part of a troop fighting its way through France and Germany. For Bennett, that battle didn’t end with the fall of Berlin. It ended at lunchtime.

Bennett invited an old friend to lunch—which would have been fine if his friend hadn’t had black skin. Bennett’s commanding officer objected and ordered the black soldier to take his meal in the kitchen.

Tony Bennett launched into an angry tirade against his racist commander. It was so vitriolic that Bennett got demoted to private, kicked out of his troop, and put on assignment digging up mass graves to send the bodies back home.

6 Gene Roddenberry Created ‘Khan’ To Get In Touch With A Military Friend

When World War II began, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry signed up for the US Army Air Corps. He flew alongside a soldier who would be his best friend during the war—and the inspiration for one of his most famous characters.

Roddenberry’s friend was named Kim Noonien Singh, and the two lost touch after the war. Wanting to get back in touch with his old friend, Roddenberry wrote a character into Star Trek—Kirk’s nemesis Khan Noonien Singh—hoping his friend would see it and get in touch.

Singh never called, but Roddenberry didn’t stop trying. In Star Trek: The Next Generation, Roddenberry named Data’s creator “Dr. Noonien Soong,” again hoping to reach out to his old friend.

5 Bill Nye’s Father Used A Sundial To Find The Location Of His POW Camp

Bill Nye the Science Guy’s father was captured during the war and sent to a Japanese POW camp, where he displayed some of the scientific ingenuity that would later make his son’s reputation.

When the elder Nye wasn’t being watched, he gathered up pebbles and scattered them around a fence post to create a makeshift sundial. By comparing the dial on his creation with the stars, Nye figured out the latitudinal location of the camp.

His trick never got him rescued, and he never managed to share the information with anyone outside the camp. However, Nye said that playing with the sundial kept him sane. After the war, he went into the sundial business professionally.

4 Ernest Hemingway Posed As An Officer And Led A French Militia

Although Ernest Hemingway was just a reporter during World War II, that didn’t stop him from leading an army.

While in France, Hemingway found a ragtag group of French resistance fighters and decided they needed better leadership. Specifically, his leadership. He tore off his noncombatant insignia, convinced the group that he was a US colonel, and took charge.

Hemingway led the group into the town of Rambouillet and stationed them there. By telling the US Army that he was ferrying weapons for another troop, he convinced them to arm him with machine guns and grenades. Then Hemingway marched his militia toward Paris.

Although the plan was to lead an assault on some major cities, Hemingway mostly liberated bars so he could get drunk in them. His group went all the way to the Ritz in Paris, where Hemingway partied through the war. Later, Hemingway used this to claim that he was the first person to liberate the Ritz.

3 Audrey Hepburn Ate Tulip Bulbs To Survive

In 1944, Audrey Hepburn was in Holland when the Nazis locked down the city and began a season that would be remembered as the “Winter of Hunger.”

Food was nearly impossible to come by, and Hepburn claims that she and her family had to resort to eating nettles, boiled grass, and tulip bulbs to survive. Toward the end, Hepburn had whittled away to a mere 40 kilograms (88 lb). The malnutrition racked her body with jaundice and asthma, and she very likely could have died.

On the day before the end of the war, a Dutch soldier gave the future actress seven candy bars. Hepburn shoved all seven of them into her mouth immediately.

2 Lenny Bruce Pretended To Be Gay To Get Discharged

After serving 30 months in the navy, comedian Lenny Bruce was determined to get out. So he wrote a letter to a medical officer saying that he was “attracted physically to a few of the fellows” and wouldn’t be able to fight his homosexual urges much longer.

He convinced the officers on his ship that he was a ticking gay bomb ready to explode—if he didn’t get away from all the hunky men on his ship, he would “give way to the performance of homosexual acts.” Surprisingly, it worked. Bruce was first relocated to a station where “heterosexual companionship was available” and later given an honorable discharge.

If the story sounds familiar, it’s because Bruce’s gay ruse was the inspiration for the cross-dressing character, Corporal Klinger, on M*A*S*H.

1 Coco Chanel Was A Nazi Spy

When the Nazis occupied France, some brave heroes rose up against their oppressors. But designer Coco Chanel definitely wasn’t one of them. Instead, Chanel became the lover of a Nazi officer. She also became a Nazi spy.

Chanel was given the code name “Westminster” and sent around Europe to enlist spies for the Nazis. She even made a trip to see Heinrich Himmler and offered to use her links to Winston Churchill to gather information.

At the end of the war, Chanel and her Nazi lover fled to Switzerland where they stayed together for 10 more years. She was only spared from execution by the intervention of Winston Churchill, who took her name off the death rosters.

+Further Reading

Lest We Forget . . .

10 Fascinating Snapshots From World War II
10 Heartbreaking World War II Diary Entries Written By Everyday People
10 Mind-Blowing Secret Operations From World War II
10 Unanswered Questions From World War II
10 Unsolved Mysteries From World War II

At the end of World War II, the death marches, which claimed the lives of countless people, were considered among the worst atrocities. Some were simply done to kill prisoners or to keep them from being freed by the advancing Allies, while some were marched for later use as hostages. Survivors were witness to the cold-blooded murder of family, friends, adults, and children. They lived to tell of some of the darkest days of World War II.

10 David Friedmann

Before the Holocaust, David Friedmann was one of Berlin’s most important and prolific portrait artists. Although he and his family escaped to Prague in 1938, they were deported to Lodz’s Jewish Ghetto in 1941. Friedmann was ultimately sent to Gleiwitz I and was a part of the death march to Blechhammer. His family died at Auschwitz.

Friedmann and the other prisoners left on January 21, 1945, and marched the 100 kilometers (60 mi) to the next camp. Friedmann wrote of the execution of those too weak to walk and remembers that he was nearly one of those people. Friedmann gave credit to a doctor named Orenstein and two friends for saving his life and getting him to Blechhammer, where they were liberated days later by the Soviets.

After the war, Friedmann continued to paint and immortalized scenes from the concentration camps he was in as well as the death march.

9 Salvator Moshe

Salvator Moshe was born in Greece, where his family had settled generations before, fleeing persecution by the Spanish Inquisition. Moshe and the other Jewish residents of Salonika were deported to German concentration camps in 1943.

Moshe and his brother-in-law were a part of the 4,000-person death march from the Warsaw Ghetto to Dachau in 1944. The march went on for days. On the third day, they were told to stop alongside a river, where the escorting officers told them they could finally have a drink. As they went to the water, Moshe recalled, “[A] fellow next to me, he was drinking water, but I heard bullets. They shooting. Zzz, zzz, zzz. Coming.”

The officers shot their charges as they kneeled to drink, and when the survivors made it back to the road, he saw another officer shooting those who couldn’t continue. Moshe and his brother-in-law survived and were liberated by US troops outside Seeshaupt.

8 William Dyess

A US fighter pilot, William Dyess was one of the soldiers who survived the Bataan Death March. He escaped in 1943 and made his way back to the States.

Dyess published an account of the horrors he witnessed, starting with the first murder. He described an Air Force captain being searched by a Japanese private, who found a handful of yen. As soon as the private, who Dyess described as a giant, saw the yen, he stepped to the side and beheaded the captain.

Dyess also talked about the so-called “Oriental sun treatment,” where captives were forced to sit in the blazing sun for hours on end, with no protection or water. The marchers were followed by a “clean-up squad” of Japanese soldiers who killed those who fell behind.

Once at San Fernando, Dyess and the other survivors found themselves in conditions so dire that they couldn’t even bring themselves to protest.

7 Eva Gestl Burns

When Soviet forces approached Auschwitz and the surrounding labor camps, those being held there were forced to walk. Eva Gestl Burns was working at an ammunition factory when they were told to start walking, and she later recounted a courageous escape.

The prisoners were clad in winter coats, and each coat was marked with a striped square. The women, many of whom were carrying scissors and thread, were able to remove the striped squares, cover the hole with a piece of plain material from somewhere else on the coat, and then replace the striped piece until they saw their chance for escape.

For Eva and a single companion, that chance came as they were being assembled into rows. When no one was paying attention, they ran, tore the striped fabric off their coats, and ultimately joined a group of German refugees heading to Sudentenland.

6 Stanislaw Jaskolski

In January 1945, prisoners at the Stutthof camp system were herded from their camps. Around 50,000 people were scattered. Around 5,000 were marched to Baltic Sea, ordered into the water, and shot. Others headed into Eastern Germany.

Stanislaw Jaskolski later described the march. He remembered freezing cold temperatures and the small bag of supplies they were handed. It included shirts, long johns, half a loaf of bread, and some margarine. They were given a scattering of blankets that were meant to be shared and were herded onto the road.

As they marched, Jaskolski thought of what they were leaving behind—the gallows, the gas chambers, and the crematorium. They were freezing, he remembered, but he also remembered thinking that they were, at that moment, doing pretty good.

5 Jack Aizenberg

Jack Aizenberg was one of 60 people (out of 600) who survived the 160-kilometer (100 mi) death march from Colditz Castle to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. The 16-year-old boy was already starving, and he marched for a week with no food. Those alongside him were so hungry they were eating grass.

When they stopped to spend the night at a factory, Aizenberg found a single pea. He wanted to boil it over a fire they had started, and he was terrified that someone was going to try to steal it. He cut it into four pieces to make it last longer, and it was the only food he had for the entire march.

Aizenberg made it to Theresienstadt, and he knew he was dying—but he no longer cared. Soviet forces liberated the camp days later, and he would be taken to Britain as part of a resettlement program for the war’s orphans.

4 John Olson

Colonel John Olsen survived the Bataan Death March and the horror that came after it—Camp O’Donnell.

When survivors arrived at the camp, locals were granted permission to give them food. They were also given a welcome speech by a Japanese captain who made it clear that his only regret was that the code of honor to which he had to abide forbade him from killing the prisoners outright.

As personnel adjutant, Olson kept a meticulous record of what went on every day in the camp and would later use his notes to write a book. His journal records things like an increase in daily sugar rations (to 10 grams each) and the daily death toll. He also wrote about the burial detail and how men would volunteer for the task in order to make sure that their friends could at least have a proper burial.

3 Ingeborg Neumeyer

After World War I, around three million ethnic Germans were living in the area that became Czechoslovakia. By the time World War II rolled around, those Germans were no longer considered racially pure and became subject to the wrath of the Third Reich.

Ingeborg Neumeyer was 15 when she and her family were dragged from their apartment on May 31, 1945, and herded into the streets to join what would be known as the Brno death march. Later, she would recall seeing people shot for falling behind as well as her mother’s attempt to make sure her daughter at least had clothing. She was wearing three dresses when they started the march, but when she tried to discard two of the dresses, she was seen. She was beaten bloody, her clothes were taken, and her shoes were thrown away.

2 Marie Ranzenhoferova

Marie Ranzenhoferova was 24 years old when she walked from Brno to the Austrian border. She was offered the chance to stay by a would-be suitor who promised that if she and her baby went to live with him, she would be safe. She refused, and he would later force her at gunpoint to join the march.

Marie talked about families forced to leave homes they had been in for generations, dropping priceless family heirlooms as they walked, unable to carry them anymore. She remembered being supervised by guards from concentration camps, who were nowhere near as cruel as the men from the Zbrojovka arms factory. Those men were violent drunks, and she remembered one grabbing a baby from a woman’s arms and throwing it into a field because it would not stop crying.

When they reached the border, Marie left the march, and around 700 people followed her into the village of Perna. She stayed there for a while and eventually moved to Mikulov.

1 Keith Botterill

Keith Botterill (pictured above on the right) is one of only six people who survived the Sandakan death march. He and the other survivors only lived because they were able to escape their Japanese captors on the march from Sandakan Camp.

Botterill would later remember the camp itself as decent enough for the first 12 months they were there. As the war dragged on, the beatings and starvation got worse. As he and his companions planned for their escape, they were caught stealing rice in preparation. Botterill’s friend, Richie Murray, stepped forward and confessed to the theft. He was bayoneted.

After their escape, another companion, weakened by dysentery, slit his own throat to keep from slowing them down. The other survivors were Owen Campbell, Nelson Short (pictured left above), Bill Moxham, Bill Sticpewech (pictured center above), and James Richard Braithwaite. All Australian, they had been warned to escape by a sympathetic Japanese officer who knew about an upcoming slaughter.

Botterill died in 1997, just after the completion of a book about the remarkable story of the Sandakan Six.

+Further Reading

Here is a small selection of lists from the archives based around World War II.

10 Bizarre World War II Weapons That Were Actually Built
10 Little-Known Alternative Plans From World War II
10 Amazing Untold Stories From World War II
10 World War II Soldiers Who Pulled Off Amazing Feats

When fighter planes and ships were downed by their enemies in World War II, it didn’t always mean the death of every person aboard. Sometimes, a few people survived but found themselves stranded behind enemy lines. With no one searching for them, they were forced to find their way back home on their own.

Some of the people who made these journeys went through unbelievable experiences—and they made it back alive.

10 Five Americans On A Lifeboat Sailed Through A Typhoon

Calvin Graef, a prisoner of war aboard a Japanese vessel, was cooking rice when he heard his captors in a panic. US ships had found them, but this wasn’t the rescue he’d dreamed of. The US ships had fired torpedoes and destroyed the Japanese ship with Graef and other prisoners of war still trapped on board.

Graef survived by clinging to pieces of the wreckage. Soon, four American POWs who’d escaped picked him up on a lifeboat and helped him aboard. The men made a rudder for their boat by breaking up parts inside. Then they sailed west toward China.

Their trip took them through a typhoon and over 480 kilometers (300 mi) of ocean. In the end, Chinese fishing boats took them to shore, fed them, clothed them, and sent them home.

9 Japanese Soldiers Walked Through 16 Kilometers (10 Mi) Of Crocodile-Infested Waters

In January 1945, Japanese soldiers were forced off Ramree Island by a troop of invading British soldiers. One thousand of the men escaped, fleeing through a swamp. They thought they were going to make their way to safety.

Instead, the men began a 16-kilometer (10 mi) trek through a swamp infested with crocodiles, some weighing as much as 900 kilograms (2,000 lb). The blood of the injured soldiers lured the crocodiles in. Meanwhile, the men struggled through as crocodiles emerged out of nowhere, grabbed the men, and dragged them under, never to be seen again.

The soldiers fired their guns wildly every time one emerged, but it didn’t stop the crocodiles. One by one, the men were dragged into the water by the hungry animals. By the end, only 400 of the 1,000 men who’d entered the swamp made it out alive.

8 A Soviet Pilot Stole A Nazi Fighter Plane And Flew Home

When Soviet Lieutenant Kuznetsov was shot down by a German pilot, he crash-landed in an open field and ran for cover as his plane exploded behind him.

But the German pilot who’d shot him down made a mistake that saved Kuznetsov’s life. The German flew down to the wreckage, eager to take a souvenir of his kill home. He climbed out of his plane and went through the wreckage, unaware that Kuznetsov was still alive.

Kuznetsov sneaked out of his hiding spot, climbed into the German’s plane, and took off, leaving the man who’d shot him stranded on the ground.

Then Kuznetsov had to fly home, entering Soviet airspace in a German plane and having to dodge fire from his own men. Fortunately, he made it through alive and returned to the safety of home.

7 A Japanese Fighter Flew Home After Being Shot In The Face

In 1942, Saburo Sakai, one of Japan’s greatest flying aces, was nearly taken by an enemy bomber. The bomber riddled Sakai’s plane with bullets, one of which hit him in the face. Sakai lost sight in his right eye and couldn’t get the left side of his body to move.

Sakai was determined to go out as a hero. He planned on making a kamikaze run against the first ship he saw. But he didn’t stumble upon a single ship. For four hours, he flew over 1,050 kilometers (650 mi) with half of his body paralyzed.

But he made his way home.

6 A Soviet Pilot Dragged Himself Across A Forest For 18 Days

When Alexsei Maresyev’s plane was shot down by Germans, he found himself trapped inside German-controlled land. He was bleeding from several wounds and was quickly losing the use of his legs. But he was determined to survive.

Maresyev crawled through the forest, gradually making his way through enemy lines and back into Soviet territory. His legs were so badly injured that he eventually lost the ability to stand. It took 18 brutal days of pulling his body across the ground to get through. When he made it back, he was so badly hurt that his legs had to be amputated.

After being fitted with prosthetic legs, Maresyev went right back into his plane and back into combat. “There’s nothing extraordinary in what I did,” he told reporters later. “The fact that I’ve been turned into a legend irritates me.”

5 A Plane Crashed Into A Jungle Filled With Cannibals

In May 1945, a plane flying over New Guinea crashed into a jungle. The pilot, who couldn’t see past the clouds, just flew into the side of a mountain. His mistake killed 19 of the people aboard and left the last few survivors stranded 260 kilometers (160 mi) from civilization.

A tribe living in this jungle still used Stone Age technology, and rumor had it that they were cannibals. In time, the plane crash survivors were spotted by the tribe. The survivors were terrified, but they had no choice but to offer a greeting and hope for the best. To their surprise, this tribe of supposed cannibals just flashed them a smile and then helped to feed and protect them.

Meanwhile, US paratroopers staged a rescue. The lost crew was found and flown out of the thick jungle on gliders.

4 A Chinese Sailor Drank Shark Blood To Survive 133 Days At Sea

Poon Lim was a steward on a British ship traveling to Surinam when Germans attacked the ship with torpedoes. Lim grabbed a life jacket and jumped overboard just seconds before the ship exploded. He was the sole survivor.

Lim climbed aboard a raft in the wreckage and then set out on a grueling journey alone. After the rations on the raft were gone, Lim became so desperate for water and food that he actually tried to lure sharks to him.

At one point, he killed a bird with a knife he’d fashioned from a biscuit tin. Then he used the dead bird to lure a shark to his raft, bashed the shark’s head with a jug, and drank its blood.

Lim passed by several US and German vessels but was ignored by every one. Finally, he was spotted by Brazilian fishermen who brought him ashore after 133 days at sea.

3 Prisoners Escaped From A Soviet Camp And Walked 6,400 Kilometers (4,000 Mi) To India

Slavomir Rawicz spent two years in Siberia as a prisoner of war. Then, with the help of the camp commandant’s wife, he and six others escaped. But their trip to safety wasn’t easy.

The men left during a blizzard and had to wander through the Siberian Arctic, living off what they could catch or find. When they made their way out of the Siberian Arctic, they were stuck traveling through the Gobi Desert and then the Himalayas in their desperate journey to the safety of India.

By the end, they had traveled 6,400 kilometers (4,000 mi) and lost three men. Four of the men survived, though, after traveling through the harshest environments in the world.

2 An American Prisoner Of War Stole A Nazi Plane And Flew It To Holland

When Bob Hoover was trapped as a German prisoner near the end of the war, he saw an opportunity to escape. A German fighter plane had been left unattended, so he took it.

It wasn’t until Hoover was in the air that he realized how insane his plan was. He intended to fly to Holland, but he realized that he would undoubtedly be shot down when they spotted him in a swastika-adorned plane.

As soon as he saw an open farmer’s field, Hoover touched down. Dutch farmers charged at him with pitchforks, believing he was a downed Nazi pilot. Hoover tried yelling to them, but they couldn’t understand. It seemed like the end—until a British army truck drove over.

Hoover yelled, “I’m a Yank!” The British soldiers translated for the Dutch farmers and took Hoover home.

1 A Soldier Spent Nine Weeks Traveling Through Snow With One Foot Exposed

As Jan Baalsrud’s ship was attacked by Germans, he and his crew realized that they couldn’t win. Hoping for nothing more than a few more enemy casualties, the men lit a fuse, jumped overboard, and let their ship explode.

Baalsrud swam to shore and watched as his crew was rounded up by German soldiers. When they came for him, though, he shot two of them dead. Then he fled through the snow.

Baalsrud was wet, missing a boot, and trapped in frozen lands. For nine weeks, he traveled through the cold. His bare foot froze, and he had to cut off his own toe to stop the spread of gangrene. He was hit by an avalanche and buried under snow for four days.

Still, he dug through the snow and made his way to a group of villagers, who carried him to safety on a stretcher. Jan Baalsrud survived.

+Further Reading

For more astonishing tales of survival, look no further than the archives:

10 Epic Tales Of Survival Against All Odds
10 Freak Accidents People Somehow Survived (pictured)
10 Astonishing Desert Survival Tales
10 Off-The-Wall Survival Tricks And Tools
10 People Who Survived Against Nature

When we think of war heroes, most everyone thinks of men because women were barred from combat for most of history. Only recently, nations began to lift these bans and allow women to serve their countries and their interests openly. Here are 10 badass women who fought in combat alongside or in lieu of their male comrades.

10 Margaret Cochran Corbin
American War For Independence

Margaret Corbin was the first woman to receive a pension for military service from the US Congress. During the Battle of Fort Washington in 1776, her husband was killed while operating one of the two cannons providing defense against a charge of 4,000 Hessian troops. Instead of grieving, Margaret took his place on the cannon crew and fired at the enemy.

She was seriously injured in the jaw, arm, and chest before she was finally unable to continue. The British won the battle, and Margaret was captured and then released on parole. Though disabled from her injuries, she remained an active duty member of the Continental Army until her discharge in 1783.

9 Manuela Pedraza
Reconquest Of Buenos Aires

Manuela Pedraza fought during the reconquest of Buenos Aires after the first British invasion in 1806. She participated in the last and largest battle of the reconquest, which took three days.

She accompanied her husband into the fight and stood by him as he was killed by a British soldier. Then she took her bayonet and killed the man who had killed her husband. Picking up her husband’s musket, she killed another British soldier.

Manuela was given a military rank and placed in the Patricios Regiment. Her exploits during the reconquest have made her a hero in Buenos Aires culture, which gives an annual award in her honor to women recognized for social activism in Argentina.

8 Sergeant Milunka Savic
Balkan Wars And World War I

Milunka Savic is the most decorated female soldier of all time. She fought during the Balkan Wars and throughout World War I. During her service, she was wounded nine times, but that barely slowed her down. When her brother was called to fight for Serbia in 1912, she either accompanied or impersonated him and joined the army.

Due to her valor on the battlefield, she was not punished when her gender was revealed following her first injury from a Bulgarian grenade. Her commander offered to transfer her to the nursing corps, but she refused.

Standing at attention, Milunka proclaimed, “I will wait.” She remained there until he relented and returned her to the infantry. Her combat exploits continued into World War I where she was recognized for heroism by France, Russia, and Britain.

7 Senior Lieutenant Lydia Litvyak
World War II

Lydia Litvyak began flying small aircraft at age 15 and jumped at the chance to fight for her country when Germany invaded the Soviet Union. She forged her flight records by adding 100 hours of flight time and was admitted into a fighter regiment of all female pilots.

Lydia was later integrated into a mixed-gender unit. She brought down a fighter and bomber, earning her the nickname “The White Rose of Stalingrad” due to the misidentified lily painted on her fighter. She continued to fly for the Soviet Union and racked up a total of 11 solo kills and three shared kills.

Lydia was shot down in 1943 and confirmed killed in 1979. President Mikhail Gorbachev posthumously awarded her the Hero of the Soviet Union in 1990.

6 Nieves Fernandez
World War II

Nieves Fernandez was the only known female Filipino guerrilla leader who fought against the Japanese occupation of Leyte Island during World War II. She began her adult life as a schoolteacher but left that world behind when her nation was threatened by the Japanese. She rounded up 110 native men who crafted their own weapons and formed a guerrilla resistance.

With long knives traditionally used to cut vegetation and shotguns fashioned from sections of gas pipe, they successfully killed 200 Japanese occupiers. Captain Fernandez led her group for more than 2.5 years against the Japanese occupation, which caused the Japanese government to offer a bounty of 10,000 pesos for her head. She was wounded once in combat but survived the war and is remembered as a Filipino hero.

5 Yevdokiya Zavaliy
World War II

Following the destruction of her village during World War II, Yevdokiya Zavaliy provided emergency medicine to the injured and convinced the local cavalry commander to allow her to enlist. She was 16 at the time but said she was 18.

Yevdokiya began as a nurse but quickly learned to use small arms. She was wounded in the abdomen but refused to be relieved from service. Due to her shaved head and uniform, she was mistaken for a man and ordered to the front lines.

Yevdokiya fought as a man and was promoted to command a reconnaissance squad. After she was wounded, she was found out to be a woman. But instead of being returned to the nursing corps, Yevdokiya was given command of a submachine gunner platoon in 1943.

Her exploits were so well-known and she was so feared by the Germans that they nicknamed her “Frau Black Death.” By the end of the war, she was awarded more than 40 medals for honor and bravery.

4 Sergeant Leigh Ann Hester
Operation IRAQI FREEDOM

Leigh Ann Hester holds the distinction of being the first woman to receive the Silver Star since World War II. She is one of only 14 women in American history to be so honored for combat.

In March 2005, Sergeant Hester was providing convoy security while searching for improvised explosive devices (IEDs) when an attack erupted all around the vehicles. More than 50 insurgents fired machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) at the trucks as she dismounted with her team and led them through the kill zone.

She took up a flanking position and assaulted a trench with grenades. Then she helped to clear two additional trenches, killing three insurgents in the process. When the dust settled, three American troops were injured while 27 insurgents were dead, six wounded, and one captured. For her actions—which helped to save the lives of her fellow convoy members—Sergeant Hester was awarded the Silver Star.

3 Major Laura Nicholson
Operation ENDURING FREEDOM

In December 2013, Laura Nicholson, a Chinook pilot for the Royal Air Force, was conducting medical evacuations in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, when she came under heavy fire on a mission. She was called to rescue a wounded Marine on the battlefield and took her chopper into the firefight.

The aircraft took immediate fire. The onboard security team held the hostile landing zone while the wounded Marine was taken aboard. Major Nicholson successfully took the Marine to the hospital.

Once again braving the ongoing firefight, Major Nicholson returned to the same hostile area to rescue a woman who had been shot in the head during the crossfire. A crew member was shot in the leg, but Major Nicholson was able to get everyone back to safety. For her heroism in the face of enemy fire, she was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

2 Staff Sergeant Stacy Pearsall
Operation IRAQI FREEDOM

Some soldiers carry weapons, others carry cameras, Staff Sergeant Stacy Pearsall carried both. She enlisted in the Air Force at age 17 and entered a program for war photography at Syracuse University before being accepted as a combat photographer—a rare opportunity for women.

Sergeant Pearsall was deployed twice to Iraq. There, she documented the daily lives of her fellow servicemembers as they helped to rebuild and open schools one day while going after high-value targets the next. She was recognized twice by the National Press Photographers Association as Military Photographer of the Year and has since written two books about her service and experience.

She was injured in two separate IED attacks on vehicles that she was in, forcing her to take a medical retirement. For her service, Sergeant Pearsall was awarded the Bronze Star Medal along with other notable awards.

1 Chief Warrant Officer 3 Lori Hill
Operation IRAQI FREEDOM

Chief Warrant Officer 3 Lori Hill, the pilot of an OH-58 Kiowa helicopter, became the first woman to receive the Distinguished Flying Cross for heroism. She was following a lead chopper that came under heavy enemy fire.

Chief Hill drew fire away while simultaneously providing suppressive fire to help the troops on the ground engaging with the enemy. Her aircraft was hit with an RPG, which caused significant damage. But she was able to remain airborne and continued to communicate with and support the ground personnel.

The aircraft began to lose hydraulic pressure, and she took a round in her ankle. Though injured and piloting a badly damaged aircraft, Chief Hill was able to return to base and save the lives of her crew. For her actions, she was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, one of the United States’ highest military honors.

We may have been fighting each other since the dawn of time, though the average person still has little idea of what war is really like. Our mental image of what happens on the battlefield is heavily influenced by pop culture, particularly the movies. Unfortunately, the people making those movies have usually never been around a real fight, either, and are mostly just making things up as they go.

See Also: Top 10 Awesome Films Hollywood Ruined With Lies

While we agree that fiction requires some suspension of disbelief to be enjoyable, that applies to genres like science fiction and horror. Misrepresenting serious subjects like war on the big screen comes with its fair share of drawbacks. Most of us grow up with a glorified idea of what war is really like, as movie writers are busy writing about dual-wielding guns rather than the stench of poop in the aftermath of a typical battle.

10 Showing off Your Dog Tag Isn’t Cool

Dog tags have always been a popular part of casual fashion. They admittedly look quite cool, which is probably because of their association with the military. Because of Hollywood, a lot of us assume that wearing dog tags as necklaces is something people in the forces do all the time. As any veteran would tell you, though, showing off your dog tag isn’t considered to be sound etiquette within the military.

While it’s true that you’re to wear your tags at all times for identification while on duty, most soldiers keep them tucked inside. Off duty, keeping your dog tag visible in civilian clothes is not in good taste, even—and especially—if you’re topless, unlike what the movies tell us.^[1]

9 “Military Grade” Is an Advertising Gimmick

From knives to antivirus software to alarm systems, companies across the board brand their products as ‘military grade’, usually to signify higher quality and price. If we were to ask you what that exactly means, chances are most of us wouldn’t be able to say. We have this idea of things made by the military to be of higher quality than consumer-grade products.

As it happens, military-grade quality actually doesn’t exist and is yet another one of countless gimmicks advertising agencies use to justify exorbitantly higher prices. While it may be true that civilians don’t yet have access to a lot of military tech, it’s because it’s classified for security reasons and not because they’re somehow making better things in there.^[2]

8 Almost No One Uses Automatic Fire

As we’ve mentioned before, movies exaggerate the effects of various weapons to make them look more impressive on screen. Take grenades as an example; invisible shrapnel paralyzing someone’s lower legs isn’t as impressive as a house blowing up with six people flying in the air. Apart from giving us a faulty idea of what a battle is really like, it also affects decision-making during real-time disaster situations.

One particularly glaring difference between real and fictional wars is “automatic fire” in assault rifles. While military rifles do have a setting to turn the automatic, continuous burst mode on, almost no one uses it in real battles. Apart from bullets costing a lot of money to buy—a fact we’ll come to in a bit—the distances in a real battle are simply too great for automatic fire to be efficient. That’s not to say that automatic fire isn’t used in real wars, though those guns are usually heavier and mounted on a bipod or tripod.^[3]

7 You Can’t Fire A Rifle From The Hip

Rambo may be the best example of this one, though it’s hardly the only movie that’s guilty of it. Many war movies feature an outnumbered hero picking up a mounted gun as a last resort and just mowing down his opponents like a walking machine gun.

There are no walking machine guns because machine guns are extremely heavy, and it’s almost impossible to walk with one, let alone shoot with it. Many movies do it with guns like an AK-47 too. The dangers of shooting out of stance aside, the recoil would make it impossible to continue holding and shooting it for an extended period of time. Moreover, shooting from the hip isn’t a part of any professional training schedule and is something only seen in Hollywood.^[4]

6 Slaughter Isn’t Usually a Part of Battle

Thanks to movies like Lord of the Rings, our mental image of an ancient or medieval war usually features both sides running into each other with their cavalries and actively engaging in hand-to-hand combat throughout the battle. That’s how video games see historical wars, too, influencing our idea of how wars were really fought.

While slaughter is obviously a widespread—and crucial—part of any battle, it usually comes at the end, when the winning side is chasing the routed force. Battles, at least before mass slaughter became a part of all stages of war because of artillery and gunpowder, used to be won through attrition and strategy and not trigger-happy fighters fighting to their last breath. Most battles of history involved calculatedly tiring out the enemy for hours with arrows or mobile units, fighting in isolated units at times, and moving in with full force only when there was a definite advantage.^[5]

5 Infinite Ammo

War movies are quite lenient about the amount of ammo a unit has access to. A part of that could be attributed to making it look amazing, as a battle with everyone saving their bullets would look quite drab on the big screen.

The difference between movies and reality, though, completely changes how battles happen in real life. Limited ammo—for you and the enemy—is an essential part of military tactics, which is especially true today when wars are fought in overseas, cut-off regions. In a real battle, most of the legwork is done by artillery and all of those other big explosives. Even in gunfights, you’re likely to not hear anything for several minutes, instead of the consistent hail of bullets we all imagine. That would also heat up your guns quite fast, which is yet another thing soldiers in real battles have to think about.^[6]

4 Throwing Knives Is Not a Thing

We’re not sure when the dreaded throwing knife showed up in a movie. We can trace its origins to the art of throwing knives, which—much like the art of throwing anything else for no reason—doesn’t have many uses in the real world. It’s unclear, however, when a director saw that and decided to make it a staple weapon in war movies.

A single throw of a knife has killed many people in the fictional world, though how does it stack to its kill count in real life? According to some, it’s even ridiculous to suggest that knives could be thrown to kill.

While throwing around anything pointy is not a good idea, throwing knives hardly produces the impact necessary to kill someone. Moreover, the steel has to be sharp enough to pierce flesh and bone, which is harder than movies make it look.^[7]

3 You Can’t Just Shoot Anyone

We think of the beginning of the battle to be a coordinated and single-minded affair. The commander issues an order to shoot at the other side, and his units just fire off indiscriminately. Much like the other myths on this list, this one only exists in Hollywood too.

In reality, there are specific, written rules around what you can and cannot do in a war. Every war has its own rules of engagement, and they keep changing depending on objectives. As an example, there are times when generals have to get court orders to move into certain territories, which can take hours.^[8]

2 Everything About Cavalry Charges

We think of the historical horse cavalry as an incredibly powerful unit that could decide the course of any battle for the better part of history. Until it was made defunct by tanks and artillery, it dominated battlefields around the world and remained a staple of some of the most powerful armies.

While it’s true that the heavy cavalry was an immensely powerful unit—the mere sight of an organized unit of horses just running towards you with armored warriors is enough to scare anyone—it was quite easily countered by many infantry units throughout history. Moreover, battles rarely started with a cavalry charge breaking the enemy ranks. For one, you don’t just send your most heavily armored and well-trained unit—which was usually the case for elite cavalry units—as an opening attack. More importantly, though, horses are surprisingly (or rather unsurprisingly) unwilling to run into a wall of visible spears. Cavalry charges were mostly used to chase down disorganized enemies or other specific roles in the middle or end stage of the battle.^[9]

1 Most Soldiers Don’t Shoot to Kill, or at All

War is imagined as an absolute rivalry between two sides, one in which everyone is personally involved. The soldiers must be doing their best to kill the other side and expect the same. It’s how movies feed war to us and how we’ve all come to imagine a typical battlefield.

In reality, most of the soldiers aren’t even shooting unless a senior ranking officer is around. According to one historian, one in three soldiers in Vietnam never fired their weapons. In an average battle in WW2, only around 15 to 20 percent of soldiers on the Allied side opened fire.^[10]

About The Author: You can check out Himanshu’s stuff at Cracked (www.cracked.com/members/RudeRidingRomeo/) and Screen Rant (https://screenrant.com/author/hshar/), or get in touch with him for writing gigs ([email protected]).