"The 7 Most Badass Last Stands in the History of Battle" Topic

"Let me not then die ingloriously and without a struggle, but let me first do some great thing that shall be told among men hereafter."
- Hector of Troy, Iliad XXII, Lines 304-5

Throughout the course of history, certain individuals have stood out as being completely ing awesome.

Whether it's cleaving monsters' faces in half with a chainsaw bayonet in Horde Mode, defending a makeshift fortress from a sea of brain-devouring zombies or manning a machine gun nest against an unstoppable sea of charging soldiers; people have always been fascinated with badass stories of one man, by himself, taking on a endless waves of assailants, refusing to back down in the face of insurmountable odds, dying with his fingers still clutching his weapons and leaving behind a smoldering, heaping pile of severed limbs, carnage and dead enemies. These are badass one-man last stands…."
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Amicalement
Armand

No matter how fluent the hipsterese language, in which the low end of the scale is "epic", I think most of the really "badass" last stands never got recorded for posterity, or are only recorded in the sparsest of terms. I think of the Finnish soldier who's frozen body was found deep in the forests of Finland, holding an empty pistol and surrounded by Soviet corpses.

"Severed limbs, gaping wounds, crushed heads, burning flesh: these, are a few of my favorite things."

The Stamford Bridge Berserker section has a picture of toy soldiers.

School boy level prose, if the school boy skipped most classes. He also missed quite a few actions such as Camerone and Thermopylae where a number of defenders made epic last stands.

Really? He heads his article with Spartans and leaves out Thermopylae?

And he leaves out the Ghurkas, maybe because they didn't loose overall when doing the 'Last Stand' thing.

US Marine "Manila John" Basilone . Roarke's Drift.

Yeah Basilone would be one of mine, the Viking at Stamford bridge when I first read of it left me in awe.
To me Camarone is one of the definite last stands an also as an American I am a little fond of the Marines at Wake. Those guys showed right from the get go that the IJN and IJN Marines could be beaten.