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  I MAINTAIN THAT, AS LONG AS YOU TELL A GERMAN LOUDLY AND CLEARLY WHAT TO DO, IF YOU ARE SENIOR TO HIM HE WILL CRY “JAWOHL” [YES SIR] AND GET ON WITH IT ENTHUSIASTICALLY AND EFFICIENTLY WHATEVER THE SITUATION.

  Personally, I think it’s just human nature to surrender when a damned crazy person is holding a three-foot blade to your throat, but maybe that’s just me.

  Churchill continued to lead his men in action against the German forces in Yugoslavia, but was eventually captured by the enemy while fighting for Point 622 on the island of Brac in the Adriatic Sea, when every man in his Commando team was killed or wounded and he ran out of ammunition for his pistol. Knowing that he was not going to escape, and having no further means of killing Nazis, Jack started playing sad songs on his bagpipes until he was finally fragged by a grenade and hauled off to the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen.

  But not even something as formidable as a goddamned Nazi prison camp stood a chance against Mad Jack. When he arrived, Churchill met up with veterans from the famous Great Escape and joined them in an attempt to dig a secret passage out of the camp. Churchill spent several hours a day tunneling through rock and soil with little more than a broken spork he ganked from the mess hall, eventually carving out a huge cavern leading under the walls of the prison and up through the ground like a spastic gopher. Fighting Jack made a break for it, eluded enemy patrols, and evaded capture for fourteen days, but was eventually tracked down by the Gestapo and shipped back to Sachsenhausen.

  Not long afterward, word came down that the prisoners were going to be relocated to the Nazi death camp at Dachau. Churchill didn’t want to get in on that rodeo, so he escaped by breaking free from his bindings, jumping out of a moving prison truck, and sprinting into the woods. He spent seven days living off the land and traveling through the enemy-infested wilderness before crossing Allied lines, meeting up with an American armored unit, and hitching a ride back to Britain.

  The war was pretty much over by that point, but Jack’s adventures weren’t quite finished yet. At the age of forty, Churchill completed jump school and qualified as a paratrooper. He went on to serve in action in Palestine, where he earned fame for defending a Jewish medical convoy from an Arab ambush by carjacking an armored personnel carrier, calling in an artillery strike, and providing small-arms fire while wearing his full military dress uniform. And then another time, he helped evacuate a hospital filled with Israeli medical personnel when they came under attack by Arab rockets.

  After Palestine, Fighting Jack Churchill went on to serve as an instructor at land-air warfare school in Australia and become a hardcore surfer. He retired from the army in 1959, one of the most awesome and badass heroes in the long and storied career of the British Army, and a man who exemplified everything that it means to go completely balls to the wall in the service of king and country.

  * * *

  After the war, Jack went to Hollywood and played a bit part as an archer in the 1952 film Ivanhoe, starring Elizabeth Taylor. Taylor was in the film Rhapsody with Vittorio Gassman, who was in Sleepers with Kevin Bacon.

  The Great Escape occurred on March 24,1944, when seventy-six inmates of the German POW camp Stalag Luft III escaped through a three-hundred-foot-long tunnel dug, by hand, thirty feet below the ground. Of the escapees, only three soldiers successfully made it back to Allied lines. The others were recaptured, and fifty of them were summarily executed by the SS. The Nazis were dicks.

  * * *

  35

  IRINA SEBROVA

  (1914–2000)

  We slept in anything we could find—holes in the ground, tents, caves—but the Germans had to have their barracks, you know. They are very precise. So their barracks were built, all in a neat row, and we would come at night, after they were asleep, and bomb them. Of course, they would run out into the night in their underwear, and they are probably saying, “Oh, those night witches!” Or maybe they called us something worse. We, of course, would have preferred to have been called “night beauties,” but, whichever, we did our job.

  —LIEUTENANT GALINA BROK-BELTSOVA

  THE WEST LOVES TO TALK ABOUT HOW IT SINGLE-HANDEDLY WON WORLD WAR II BY FACE-KICKING THE BEACHES AT NORMANDY AND THEN SMASHING HITLER IN THE BICAMERAL LEGISLATURE WITH A TACK HAMMER, BUT THEY OFTEN CONVENIENTLY TEND TO FORGET ABOUT HOW IT WAS THE SOVIET UNION THAT DID MOST OF THE HEAVY LIFTING FROM 1941 TO 1945. The Russkies took it kind of personal when Adolf broke a nonaggression pact, invaded their country, killed twenty million of their people, and rolled his panzers within a hundred miles of Moscow, and as such, they dedicated their entire lives to ruining Nazi asses. In fact, they were so epically cheesed off about the whole thing that they don’t even refer to the conflict as World War II—they call it the Great Patriotic War.

  So when things started getting seriously nuts in Russia, it was up to every red-blooded Communist worthy of their manifesto to get their asses out there and start serving up knuckle sandwich cockpunches to the Fascists courtesy of Uncle Joe Stalin. Men and women alike participated in the massive war effort, desperately trying to prove to the Nazis that any attempt to follow in Napoleon’s Russia-invading footsteps was going to result in a similar degree of ball-searing agony.

  Now, when I say that women were getting in on the ass-kickings, I mean that the chicks in the Soviet Union were out there on the front lines pulling the trigger and showing the Krauts what it was like to have bullets forcibly injected into their frontal lobes. This sisterhood of unstoppable ass-beatings was never better exemplified than by Irina Sebrova and the 588th Night Bomber Regiment—an ultra-hardcore unit of women aviators, pilots, mechanics, armorers, and all-around Nazi-hating sack-kickers.

  Irina was a humble Russian peasant girl who had clawed her way up from extreme poverty, learned to pilot an aircraft, and was working as a flight instructor when Hitler’s minions decided it would be really incomprehensibly brilliant to launch a massive invasion of the Russian motherland. When Sebrova heard that the Red Army was looking for a few daring chicks to undertake insanely dangerous missions and vaporize hordes of kill-hungry Nazis with C-4 and dynamite, she was one of the first ones to sign the liability waiver on the dotted line.

  Sebrova’s first stop was a brutal basic training regimen designed to smash three years’ worth of air combat instruction into six months of nonstop drilling with a giant proletariat-powered jackhammer. These chicks studied the fine art of aeronautical mayhem eighteen hours a day, every day, and the ruthless commandant had a nasty habit of waking the cadets up at midnight to simulate air raids and then marching the girls barefoot around the tarmac wearing nothing but their petticoats in the frigid, subzero temperatures of the Russian winter (it’s not as sexy as it sounds).

  The 588th finally got in on the Fascist-killing action in 1942, fighting the Nazis as part of the exceedingly bloody Stalingrad campaign. These borderline-insane women would fly out to the German positions in the middle of the night, drop bombs on their targets, and haul ass back to Allied lines as quickly as possible. From the cockpits of their Polikarpov Po-2 night bombers, these hardcore chicks blew the hell out of everything from barracks and supply depots to bridges and enemy tank concentrations, destroying the Fascist war machine with giant bombs painted with pictures of Stalin giving Hitler the finger, and generally just making it a horrible time for the German troops to be alive.

  Now, the Po-2 bomber was like the aeronautical equivalent of a 1978 AMC Gremlin with bald tires, faulty brakes, and a nasty habit of spontaneously combusting every time it got within two hundred yards of an open flame. For starters, these crap-tastic propeller-powered biplanes were originally designed in 1927 to serve as civilian crop dusters, so they weren’t exactly flying death fortresses capable of glassing entire continents with their limitless firepower. Already fifteen years old and technologically obsolete when the war began, these unwieldy machines were made entirely out of wood and canvas, meaning that basically anything more serious than lighting a match in the cockpit was going to sen
d this Wright brothers reject down in flames. Seriously, a friggin’ German soldier standing on the ground firing his submachine gun wildly into the air was a very real danger to these pilots, to say nothing of the antiaircraft flak cannons the Nazis conveniently stationed around every moderately interesting ground target larger than a portable toilet.

  The Po-2 had a crew of two—a pilot and a navigator. It didn’t have a radio, carried one machine gun, and mounted five hundred pounds of bombs on the wings. Of course, the bombs had a particularly lovely habit of not deploying when the pilot flipped the drop-bombs switch, meaning that it wasn’t uncommon for the navigator to have to climb out onto the wing of the moving plane in midflight and detach the bombs by hand. Seriously, read that last sentence again and give the utter insanity of that statement a moment to sink in. The vehicle boasted a top speed of 90 miles per hour, which is about 30 mph slower than the top speed of most modern automobiles. Meanwhile, German Bf-109 fighter planes cruised at a combat speed of 348 mph.

  You’d think that having an engine roughly half as powerful as a solar-powered calculator would at least mean that the aircraft was quiet, but this wasn’t the case either. In fact, the cacophonous thumping of the Po-2’s engines was so excruciatingly loud that the women of the 588th actually shut the engine completely off when they were about a mile out and silently glided through the night air toward their objectives. They released their bombs over the target, and the moment the explosions started the engines were switched on and the pilots slammed the throttle open and took off out of there as quickly as possible. These unnerving, completely silent nocturnal raids resulted in the angry, sleep-deprived Germans referring to these mysterious female daredevils as the Nacht-hexen, “night witches.”

  As a wing commander in the 588th, Senior Lieutenant Irina Sebrova was always the first woman off the tarmac every night and the last one to land in the morning. During her Kraut-smashing adventures in the skies above Russia, the Ukraine, and Germany, she flew a ridiculous 1,008 night missions and 92 day missions—more than any of the other Night Witches. Seriously, consider this crap—if an American bomber pilot successfully survived twenty-five missions over Europe, he was considered to have fulfilled his duty to the Allied cause and was given an honorable discharge from the military. To put this balls-out (not the right phrase, but tits-out just doesn’t carry the same connotation) hardass’s crotch-rupturingly awesome accomplishments into perspective, if she had been flying for the United States, she would have successfully completed forty-four tours of duty.

  Sebrova also survived being shot down twice, which is kind of a big deal considering that the Night Witches weren’t issued extraneous equipment such as, um, parachutes. Most of the time the Witches didn’t mind, since it was probably better to go down in flames than be captured by the Germans, but you’d have to think that they would have at least liked to have had the option of not careening hundreds of feet down to a gruesome death.

  Anyways, the first time Sebrova was shot down she ditched in a dark field, pulled her wounded navigator out of the cockpit, and traveled on foot toward enemy lines. At one point the two Soviet aviatrixes were riding on a ferry across a large waterway when a Nazi dive-bomber swooped down and blew the ass out of their boat, but the women somehow managed to swim to safety and successfully make it back to Russian lines unscathed.

  The second time, Sebrova was coming back from bombing Danzig (the city, not the band) when antiaircraft fire cut her oil line. She killed the engines and glided for a while, finally putting down in an unlit area deep behind enemy lines. Irina and her navigator drew their pistols and worked their way back toward Allied lines, traveling away from the sounds of gunfire, desperately trying to avoid being discovered. They covered ten kilometers, in the snow, in the middle of the pitch-black, potentially grue-infested night, successfully evading several German patrols and finally reaching friendly lines. When Sebrova got back to base, she sat in her tent, put her head in her hands, and felt utterly depressed—not because she had just been hunted down like a dog, but because she had been shot down on her first sortie of the night and wouldn’t get to go on any more bombing raids until the next day. Like I said, this chick was utterly hardcore.

  For her daring raids over the skies of Russia, Poland, Germany, and the Ukraine, Irina Sebrova was awarded the title Heroine of the Soviet Union—the highest award for military bravery offered by the USSR. After the war she stayed on with the Soviet air force and worked as a test pilot, flying recently repaired, structurally unsafe planes and making sure that they didn’t explode in midflight. After miraculously walking away from a particularly nasty plane wreck in 1948, she decided that she’d tested the Grim Reaper’s patience one too many times, and ended an illustrious career as one of the most underappreciated badasses in the history of military aviation. Not bad for a poor peasant girl from Moscow.

  Bf-109 vs. Po-2

  Designation:

  Messerschmitt Bf-109E-3

  Polikarpov Po-2

  Role:

  Fighter/interceptor

  Night bomber

  Crew:

  One

  Two (pilot, navigator)

  Length:

  28 feet 4.5 inches

  26 feet 9 inches

  Weight:

  5,875 pounds

  2,167 pounds

  Top Speed:

  348 mph

  93 mph

  Horsepower:

  1,175

  125

  Range:

  410 miles

  329 miles

  Ceiling:

  34,450 feet

  13,125 feet

  Rate of Climb:

  3,100 feet per minute

  546 feet per minute

  Armament:

  Two twin-linked 20 mm cannons Two twin-linked 7.92 mm machine guns

  One 7.62 mm machine gun

  * * *

  In 1942 the Nazis unveiled “Heavy Gustav”—the largest artillery piece ever built. This massive cannon weighed 1,344 tons, could only be transported by train, and required a crew of five hundred men to operate. Gustav’s 31.5-inch barrel fired a Volkswagen-sized 10,500-pound artillery shell a distance of more than twenty miles. Because of how impractically massive the weapon was, it was only fired forty-eight times during the entire war.

  * * *

  36

  BHANBHAGTA GURUNG

  (1921–2008)

  In the absence of orders, find something and kill it.

  —ERWIN ROMMEL

  THE GURKHAS ARE SUBTERRANEAN CRAZY. These take-no-prisoners Hindu hardasses from the Himalayan Mountains of Nepal have served the British Army with distinction since 1816, winning thirteen Victoria Crosses and fighting in every major British military action from India to Iraq. Over their long and storied career, courageous Gurkha troops have forcibly pacified rebellious Punjabi princes, fought two world wars, wrenched Baghdad from the hands of the Ottoman Empire, tracked elusive guerillas through the canopy jungle of Vietnam, spearheaded the assault on the Falkland Islands, and castrated terrorists in the mountains of Afghanistan. These brave soldiers’ impeccable service record and remarkable talent in the fine badass fields of melee combat, excessive profanity, alcohol consumption, and general hell-raising have earned them the respect of their allies and the deep-seated terror of anyone unlucky enough to wind up on the business end of a well-sharpened Gurkha knife.

  Bhanbhagta Gurung was a corporal in the 3rd Battalion of the 2nd King Edward VII’s Own Gurkha Rifles when World War II went off and turned the entire surface of the planet earth into one giant explosion. In 1943, the men of the 2nd Gurkha were sent to Burma (present-day Myanmar), where the imperial Japanese army was pushing through the dense jungles of Southeast Asia, preparing to strike a deadly blow into the heart of British-controlled India. Gurung saw action during the Chindit expedition, when the British general Ordo Wingate (doesn’t that sound like the name of a Star Wars character?) led a small force deep behind enemy lines to sabotage railway
stations, torch supply depots, and clandestinely disrupt the enemy’s operations by basically blowing up and/or incinerating everything they came across. Gurung participated in several brutal engagements against battle-hardened Japanese infantry and was commended for bravery when he saved a critically wounded comrade’s life by pulling the guy out of a raging firefight and carrying him three miles to the nearest field hospital.

  On March 5, 1945, Gurung led his ten-man rifle squad on a patrol toward the top of a strategically important hill known as Snowdon East—a heavily fortified ridge where just a few days earlier a small force of Gurkha troops had been violently dislodged by a horde of livid Japanese soldiers with samurai swords, welding torches, and submachine guns. As Gurung’s patrol approached the web of bunkers and machine gun nests near the top of the hill, a Japanese sniper opened fire on them from his concealed position in a nearby tree, wounding a couple of guys and sending the rest of the squad diving for cover. Almost immediately, heavy weapons and mortars started pasting their position, and the Gurkhas soon found themselves hopelessly outgunned and pinned down by heavy fire.

  Well, all the Gurkhas except Bhanbhagta Gurung. For him, it was on like Donkey Kong. This crazy bastard heard these bullets ricocheting all over the place, the heavy thumping of gunfire, and the pained cries of wounded soldiers and just got really insanely pissed out of his mind. He clenched his teeth, swore loudly, drew himself up to his full height, and carefully aimed his standard-issue service rifle at that son of a bitch who was sniping his buddies. With bullets zipping past his head and chopping up the vegetation around him, Gurung calmly drew a bead on the gunman and popped him in the medulla oblongata, sending the sharpshooter flying backward out of the tree and crashing to the ground below.