World War Two

The Two-Time War Hero the N***s Couldn’t Break

The N**i patrol wasn’t afraid of Charles Uphman, awkwardly running with uneven legs through the storm of gunfire raining down on the island of Crete.

With a few shots, he fell to the ground.

The men took their time as they approached with their weapons lowered. But as they closed the distance, something didn’t add up.

There was no blood darkening the dirt. No torn fabric. Not a single sign of their bullets hitting him at all.

Then, Upham's eyes snapped open.

The Germans thought they had shot down an easy target, but what they had really done was anger the most dangerous sheep farmer New Zealand had ever borne.

The US Soldier Who Went Completely Insane

A burst from a German MG 42 shatters US Sergeant Sylvester Antolak's right arm. He jams his Tommy gun under the broken limb and keeps firing left-handed — charging alone across open ground toward the nest that's pinning his entire platoon in the dirt.

May 24, 1944. The only road off the Anzio beachhead for 150,000 trapped Allied soldiers runs straight through this position outside Cisterna, Italy. 770 hand-picked U.S. Army Rangers had already attempted a night infiltration of the town.

Six came back.

But now German prisoners would later say they had never seen anything like what this one single man was about to do next.

He’ll have to cross it HIMSELF.

The Soviet Ice Base That Wasn’t a Weather Station

A hastily abandoned Soviet station sits marooned on the polar plain—its antennas frozen stiff, its machinery half-sunk, everything left behind for the Arctic to swallow. Too far inland for a ship, too icy for a runway, too remote for a helicopter, it's unreachable.

But the CIA wants those secrets, and now, a few yards away from the collapsing station, two near-frozen volunteers hold a strange stance. They crouch, knees flexed and boots biting the floe. Each one is clipped into a harness that sends a nylon tether rising from their chests and disappearing into the clouds above.

Then the hum of engines breaks the air.

A shape pushes through the haze: a B-17, with two scissor-like horns jutting from its nose, lines up with the strange silver object at the end of the tether.