10 of History’s Biggest Badasses

Simo Hayha Was the Deadliest Sniper Who Ever Lived

Nicknamed “White Death”, Simo Hayha (1905 – 2002) was a Finnish sniper who was credited with killing 505 Red Army soldiers during the Winter War of 1939-1940. He was born in a farming community, and from early childhood, was accustomed to hard work on the farm. He also got an early start in learning how to stalk and hunt game in the Finnish wilderness, and had a passion for target shooting. So from early on, Hayha picked up the traits of toughness, patience, and accurate shooting, that would come in handy and serve him well when he went to war.

In 1925, Hayha did his one year mandatory service in the Finnish army, and after his honorable discharge, he signed up for the Civil Guard – Finland’s equivalent of the National Guard in the US. In the Civil Guard, Hayha’s years of hunting and target practice made him his unit’s best shot. So he was trained as a sniper, first with a Russian Mosin-Nagant bolt action rifle, and later, with an improved Finnish variant. In due course, he was able to accurately hit targets 16 times a minute from a distance of about 200 yards. In the heavily forested Finnish landscape, there were few unobstructed lines of sight, and thus few targets at distances longer than that.

Hayha was mobilized when the Soviets invaded Finland in November of 1939. Although greatly outnumbering the Finns, the invaders were still reeling from Stalin’s recent military purges, which removed many experienced officers and left the Red Army in disarray. The Finns by contrast, while numerically inferior, were better trained and organized, and were more familiar with the local terrain. They were also highly motivated, since their own homes and families were in the invaders’ path.

It was in the course of resisting the invaders that Simo Hayha became “White Death”. Every day, he would don white winter camouflage to blend into the snowy landscape, take his rifle and a day’s supply of food and ammunition, and go hunting Soviets in the Finnish wilderness. He would then pick a kill zone along a likely Soviet route of advance, and select a position overlooking it. Hayha would then burrow into the snow, and patiently wait for enemies to enter his death field. He did not use a scope, because he did not want to risk sunlight glare exposing his position. Instead, Hayha relied exclusively on iron sights, making his 505 kills that much more impressive.

Later, sources from his unit pointed out that “only” 259 of those kills were confirmed sniper kills, while the rest were probable, but unconfirmed. However, even if he had “only” killed 259 enemy personnel, 259 kills would still make Hayha one of the deadliest warriors to have ever bestrode a battlefield. Especially considering how relatively brief the Winter War had been: it began on November 30th, 1939, and ended on March 13th, 1940. Meaning that Hayha had killed at least 259 enemy soldiers, and perhaps as many as 505, in only three and a half months.

With a Hangman’s Noose Around His Neck, Stjepan Filipovic Continued Defying the Nazis

Stjepan Filipovic (1916 – 1942) was a Croatian born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in territory that would become part of Yugoslavia after World War I. Hailing from a working class family, he left home at 16 to become a metalworker, and in 1937, he joined the local workers’ movement and became an activist member. Workers’ rights did not sit well with the powers that be, so Stjepan was arrested for prohibited political activity. He was sentenced to a year in jail, but prison only hardened his resolve, and when he was released in 1940, he joined the Communist Party.

In 1941, Germany invaded and overran Yugoslavia. Stjepan volunteered to join the partisan resistance against the Nazi occupiers, and was posted to a guerrilla unit near Valjevo, in today’s Serbia. He was tasked with recruitment and with securing arms, and he did such a great job at both, that by year’s end he had risen in the ranks to command an entire partisan battalion.

In February of 1942, Stjepan was captured by the Nazis, and after an interrogation, was sentenced to be publicly hanged in Valjevo’s town square. That was when Stjepan Filipovic stepped into the history books. At death’s door, he found the courage and presence of mind to seize the moment and defy his captors during his last seconds on earth. Mounting the gallows, with the hangman’s noose around his neck, Stjepan defiantly thrust his hands in the air in a “V” shape, and struck a dramatic pose that was captured on camera. Urging the gathered crowd to continue the struggle against the Nazi oppressors and their Yugoslav collaborators, he cried out just before he was hanged: “Death to fascism, freedom to the people!” – a preexisting partisan slogan that Filipovic’s martyrdom helped popularize.

Stjepan’s courageous and defiant death transformed him from a promising but otherwise unexceptional partisan, and into a national legend. After the war, Stjepan Filipovic was designated a national hero of Yugoslavia. A monumental statue was erected in the city of Valjevo in his honor, replicating his Y shaped pose in an artistic rendition reminiscent of a Goya painting.

Tamerlane Terrorized the World While Alive, and Maybe Wreaked Havoc From Beyond the Grave

The last of the great barbarian conquerors to erupt from the Eurasian Steppe and terrify the civilized world was Tamerlane (1336 – 1405). He is remembered for his savagery, and his wide ranging rampage from India to Russia and the Mediterranean, and points in between. His depredations are estimated to have killed about 17 million people, or five percent of the world’s population at the time. That five percent figure, if extrapolated to 2018’s global population of 7.6 billion, would be the equivalent of 390 million deaths today.

Tamerlane was a Muslim Turko-Mongol who claimed descent from Chinggis Khaan. Born in the Chagatai Khanate in today’s Uzbekistan, Tamerlane’s rise began in 1360, when he led Turkic tribesmen in a power struggle following the Chagatai Khan’s murder. When the dust settled, Tamerlane was the power behind a throne occupied by a Chagatai puppet, through whom Tamerlane ruled. His claimed descent from Chinggis was questionable, but that did not stop Tamerlane from justifying his conquests as a restoration of the Mongol Empire. He claimed that he was simply reimposing legitimate Mongol rule over lands seized by usurpers.

Tamerlane then spent 35 years sowing death and destruction far and wide. Among the cities he left depopulated and wrecked were Baghdad in Iraq; Damascus and Aleppo in Syria; Sarai, capital of the Golden Horde, and Ryazan, both in Russia; India’s Delhi, outside whose walls he massacred over 100,000 captives; and Isfahan in Iran, where he massacred 200,000. Among his fiendish atrocities, Tamerlane liked cementing live prisoners into the walls of captured cities, piling up pyramids of severed heads, and erecting towers of his victims’ skulls.

His greatest victory came at the expense of the Ottoman Turks, a rising power in their own right. Tamerlane and the Ottoman Sultan, Bayezid had exchanged insulting for years, until Tamerlane finally showed up and defeated Bayezid in 1402. Taken captive, Bayezid was humiliated by being displayed in a cage at court, while his favorite wife was made to serve Tamerlane and his courtiers, naked.

Tamerlane’s rampage finally came to an end in 1405, when he took ill and died as he was preparing to invade China. He supposedly continued to wreak havoc even after death. Centuries after his demise, Tamerlane’s body was exhumed by Soviet anthropologists on June 19th, 1941. Carved inside his tomb were the words “When I rise from the dead, the word shall tremble“. Two days later, Germany invaded the USSR, in an onslaught that the Soviets survived only by the skin of their teeth. Just to be on the safe side, Tamerlane was reburied with full Islamic ritual in November of 1942, shortly before Operation Uranus. Tamerlane’s curse – if a curse it had been – was lifted, and the operation led to the first major Soviet victory at Stalingrad.

Subudai Was Probably History’s Most Successful (and Overlooked) General

Who is the only general in history to have won over 20 campaigns, conquered or overran over 30 nations, and won over 60 battles? That would be Subudai (1175 – 1248), the Mongols’ most brilliant and successful general, and the main military strategist of both Chinggis Khaan and his successor, Ogedei. He holds the distinction of having conquered more territory than any other commander in history.

He joined the Mongol army at 14, and was appointed Chinggis Khaan’s door attendant. From that close proximity to power, Subudai learned strategy and the Mongol art of war. In his first assignment, he convinced an enemy garrison that he was a deserter from the Mongol army, and after lulling them into letting down their guard, signaled the Mongols to attack. Deception played a huge role in his military career, as he exhibited on a bigger stage in 1211. That year, he secured a major victory in China by surprising the enemy with a flank attack, after having convinced them that he was hundreds of miles away.

Subudai also led the Mongol vanguard in the conquest of Khwarezm, and chased its ruler to his death. After that campaign, he led a reconnaissance in force through the Caucasus, where he twice defeated the Georgians, then subjugated the Cumans. That brought him into conflict with the Cumans’ Rus allies, who came after him with a force four times greater than his own. So he led them a merry chase for days in a feigned retreat, before destroying them at the Battle of Kalka River in 1222.

He then returned to the east, to conduct successful campaigns against the Chinese for the next decade, before returning to the west and subjugating the Rus in the late 1230s. Subudai then invaded Eastern Europe in 1241, and coordinated the operations of Mongol armies separated by hundreds of miles. He brought them to victory over their respective opponents, in Poland and Hungary, within one day of each other.

Subudai was in command of the Mongols at the second victory, the Battle of Mohi, which destroyed the Hungarian army and left Central Europe open. He was drawing plans to advance on Vienna and subjugate the Holy Roman Empire, when news arrived of Khan Ogedei’s death. Although he wanted to press on into Europe, politics necessitated the return of Subudai and his forces to Mongolia to participate in choosing a new Khan. Europe was spared, as Subudai never returned, and instead spent his final years campaigning in southern China.

Cleisthenes Led a Revolution That Overthrow Tyranny, Then Created Democracy

Cleisthenes, born circa 570 BC, overthrew tyranny in Ancient Athens, and replaced it with democracy. Before that, Athens had been ruled by strongmen known as “tyrants”. The most famous and successful of them, Peisistratos, died in 527 BC and was succeeded as co-tyrants by his sons Hippias and Hipparchus. After Hipparchus was assassinated in 514 BC, his brother Hippias grew paranoid, and his rule became oppressive as he lashed out at enemies real and imagined.

Hippias’ descent into violence eroded the popularity that tyranny had enjoyed in the days of Peisistratos, and the number of victims and exiles forced to flee Athens grew. Cleisthenes was an exile who organized other exiles to overthrow the tyranny. Invasion was considered, but Hippias had a well equipped army, and the exiles did not. So they sought to enlist Sparta, which had the Greek world’s best army, to liberate Athens.

The Spartans were known for their piety, so to enlist their help, Cleisthenes bribed the priests of Delphi, the Greek world’s most important religious site and home of the Oracle of Delphi. The Oracle usually gave petitioners cryptic answers that could be interpreted in a variety of ways. Now, it suddenly began giving every Spartan who showed up the same uncryptic answer: “Liberate Athens!“.

So the Spartans marched into Attica in 508 BC, liberated Athens, then marched back home. Left to govern themselves, the Athenians immediately split into rival camps. An oligarchic camp wanted government by the wealthy, while a populist camp, led by Cleisthenes and comprising a majority of Athenians, wanted a democracy ruled by a popular Assembly. The populists prevailed, but the oligarchs solicited Spartan aid to overthrow the democracy.

The Spartans were extremely conservative, and no fans of democracy. So they sent another army to Attica, overthrew Athens’ democracy, and replaced it with an oligarchy. Cleisthenes and 700 democracy-supporting Athenian families were exiled. However, Cleisthenes and the exiles soon returned, the population rose up in revolt, and the aristocratic faction and the Spartans were besieged in the Acropolis, Athens’ fortified hilltop. Cleisthenes allowed the Spartans to leave, but the Athenian anti-democrats were massacred.

Having decisively dealt with the oligarchic threat, Cleisthenes set about establishing the Athenian democracy, and reorganizing the city body of Athens. Before, Athenians had been grouped into four tribes, based on kin groups that fostered factionalism. Cleisthenes replaced that with an artificial classification system that divided the citizen body into ten at-large tribes, with membership drawn at random from all classes and all parts of Attica. With each tribe containing a representative sample of the entire population, parochialism would be eliminated, as no tribe would have cause to act out of geographical or familial loyalties at the expense of Athens as a whole.

At a stroke, Cleisthenes eliminated a parochialism that had plagued Athens for generations, and granted the entire male citizen population access to institutions and powers previously reserved for aristocrats. His reforms established basic democracy in Athens, and created the constitutional structure for further incremental reforms to transform Athens into a direct democracy.

Attila the Hun Was the Scariest Man in Late Antiquity

Nicknamed “The Scourge of God” by a terrified civilized world, Attila (406 – 453) ruled a multi-tribal empire dominated by the Huns, that spanned Eastern and Central Europe. He invaded Persia, terrorized the Eastern and Western Roman Empires, plundered the Balkans, and extorted vast sums of gold from Constantinople. He then invaded Gaul and was beaten back, recoiled, then struck into Italy the following year, before drinking himself to death on his wedding night.

Born into the Hun royal family, Attila inherited the crown jointly with his brother Bleda in 434. The brothers were challenged early on, but crushed the opposition. Their surviving opponents fled to the Roman Empire, so the brothers invaded and forced the Romans to surrender the fugitives, and pay an annual tribute of 230 kilograms of gold. The brothers then invaded the Persian Empire and plundered it for years until they were beaten, at which point they returned to Europe.

In 440, they crossed the Danube, plundered the Balkans, and destroyed two Roman armies. They then forced the defeated Roman emperor to sign a new treaty that paid them 2000 gold kilograms up front, plus an annual tribute of 700 gold kgs. Soon thereafter, Attila consolidated power by murdering his brother and becoming sole ruler. Attila returned to the Balkans in 447, pillaging and burning until he reached the walls of Constantinople.

The Western Roman Empire’s turn came in 450, when the Western Roman Emperor’s sister sought to escape a betrothal by begging Attila’s help, and sent him her engagement ring. Attila interpreted that as a marriage proposal, accepted, and asked for half of the Western Roman Empire as dowry. When the Romans balked, Attila invaded, massacring and looting, until he was halted at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains in 451.

A year later, he invaded Italy, pillaging, burning, and wreaking havoc as he advanced down the peninsula, before he was persuaded by the Pope to withdraw. Attila intended to attack Constantinople again in 453, but he drank himself into a stupor while celebrating his wedding to a new wife, suffered a nosebleed, and choked to death on his own blood.

Themistocles Won One of History’s Most Decisive Battles

Greece was saved from Persian conquest by Themistocles (524 – 460 BC). He was the creator of Athens’ sea power, and the naval strategist who defeated the Persians at the historically pivotal Battle of Salamis in 480 BC. He was born to an Athenian father and a non Greek concubine, which made Themistocles ineligible for Athenian citizenship, until Cleisthenes’ democratic reforms made all free men citizens. That made Themistocles a lifelong champion of democracy.

In the 480s BC, Athens’ state owned silver mines struck a rich vein, and many Athenians wanted to divvy up the windfall. A few years earlier, in 490 BC, Athens had beaten back a Persian invasion at the Battle of Marathon. Themistocles was convinced that the Persians would be back, so he advocated for investing the new riches on warships.

He faced powerful opposition: a strong navy meant higher taxes borne by the rich, even as it enhanced the political clout of the poorer classes who would row those ships. A land strategy based on hoplites, such as those who had won at Marathon, would cost less. It would also leave the middle and upper classes – the ones who could afford to equip themselves as hoplites – with the prestige of being the city’s sole protectors and bearers of arms. Themistocles maneuvered in the Athenian Assembly to have his opponents banished, then won approval for his ship building program. By 480 BC, when the Persians returned, Athens had over 200 triremes – as many as the rest of Greece, combined – and booming shipyards that were kept busy churning out new warships.

The Persians overcame a Spartan force at Thermopylae, then advanced on and seized a nearly deserted Athens, whose citizens had been evacuated to the nearby island of Salamis. The Persians then razed the city’s walls, and burned Athens to the ground. The decisive battle of the war was fought soon thereafter off Salamis. It almost never took place, and only did because of Themistocles.

After Athens was burned, her Greek allies wavered, and were on the verge of taking their ships and going home. So Themistocles forced a battle. First, he tricked the Persian king into believing he had changed sides. Then, he convinced him to attack the Greek ships in restricted waters with tricky tide and wind patterns that the Greeks knew, but the Persians did not. The Persians lost, and the Greeks won a decisive victory.

Afterwards, Themistocles led a naval expedition that toured the Greek islands, demanding contributions to pay for the war effort. However, his political fortunes declined soon thereafter when the Athenians, who were never big on gratitude, ended up exiling Themistocles. Despite having tricked the Persian king into disaster at Salamis, Themistocles went to Persia, and ended his days governing some Greek cities in Asia Minor for the Persians.

A Teenage Girl Terrified Medieval Armies

In the first half of the fifteenth century, France was demoralized after a string of humiliating defeats at the hands of the English during the Hundred Years War. The victorious English were rampaging through the French countryside, and the French throne was in dispute between the French Dauphin, or heir to throne, and the English king, Henry IV.

To France’s rescue came an incongruous savior: a teenage girl with no military experience. Joan of Arc (1412 – 1431) appeared seemingly out of the blue, and by the time her brief life was over, she had become France’s national heroine, and history’s most famous female warrior. She led French armies into battle, and terrified the English by winning a series of miraculous victories against them, fighting in the front ranks. She restored French morale, revived France’s national spirit, and turned the tide of the war.

Joan was born into a peasant family, and was passionately religious from an early age. She began seeing visions from saints, who told her to save her country from English domination. So she left home at age 16, and travelled to join the Dauphin. In 1429, she convinced the French heir to give her an army, which she took to relieve French forces besieged by the English at Orleans. There, she led her forces in a whirlwind campaign that broke the siege in nine days, and sent the English fleeing. It was a turning point victory, which ended an English drive to conquer France.

Following her victory at Orleans, Joan convinced the Dauphin to crown himself king of France. She then set out on a variety of military expeditions, always leading from the front. In one such expedition in 1430, she was thrown off her horse and captured by Burgundians. Her captors kept her for several months, while negotiating with the English, who were eager to get their hands on the teenage girl who had terrified them so much.

Despite having saved her country, the French king did little to try and ransom Joan, and when she was sold to the English, she was abandoned to fend for herself. The English charged her with witchcraft and heresy, and set out to break her spirit and will by locking her in a dark and dirty cell. Despite incessant harassment and prolonged interrogations day and night, Joan refused to confess to wrongdoing.

Unable to extract a confession, or to prove witchcraft or heresy, Joan’s accusers switched their focus to the male garb she wore in battle. They argued that such cross dressing went against the Bible, and convicted her of that. At age 19, Joan of Arc was placed on a cart and taken to an execution site in Rouen, where she was burned at the stake on May 30th, 1431.

Decades later, a Pope ordered a reexamination of her trial. The reexamination cleared her posthumously, and declared her a martyr. In 1803, Joan was made a national symbol of France Napoleon Bonaparte. She was beatified five centuries after death, in 1909, and canonized as a saint in 1920. Today, Saint Joan of Arc is one of the patron saints of France, and the most famous female warrior of all time.

Chinggis Khaan Was Probably History’s Scariest Figure

A 2003 genetic study revealed that 1 in 200 of the world’s population, about 38 million people, is descended from a single Medieval figure: Temujin, later Chinggis Khaan (1162 – 1227). Founder of the Mongol Empire, the world’s largest contiguous empire, Chinggis was probably history’s most terrifying figure, ever. He committed huge massacres, even genocides, during his conquests, and the Mongol conquests kicked off by him killed about 40 million people. As a percentage of the world’s population at the time, that would be the equivalent of almost 280 million deaths in the 20th century.

At age nine, Temujin’ father, a minor Mongol chieftain, was poisoned, and tribal rivals expelled the widow and her children. Left to fend for themselves in the wilderness, Temujin’s family endured years of extreme want. Things got so bad that Temujin killed one of his brothers for refusing to share a rodent. Growing up hard, Temujin grew into a hard man.

And a charismatic one. By the time he was a young man, Temujin had a devoted following, and led them into bringing the Mongol tribes under his sway, one after another. By 1206, Temujin had destroyed all rivals, and the formerly squabbling tribes had been united into a Mongol nation. So a grand assembly was held that year, where he declared that the heavens had ordained that he rule all under the sky. The Mongols proclaimed him ” Chinggis Khaan”, meaning Universal Ruler.

Chinggis organized the Mongols for war. He was a good judge of men and an excellent talent spotter, and his system was a meritocracy in which the talented rose. He imposed strict discipline, trained his men hard, then set out to conquer world. He started with China, which was fragmented into various dynasties. He began with the Western Xia, and reduced them to vassalage. In 1211, the shifted to the more powerful Jin. In 1215, he captured and sacked the Jin capital, following a victory in which hundreds of thousands of Jin troops were massacred.

Chinggis then found himself ruling a domain that included tens of millions of Chinese peasants. At first, he planned to simply kill them all, and transform their fields into pasturage suitable for the Mongols’ herds. He only changed his mind after taxation was explained to him, and he was persuaded that many live peasants translate into a steady stream of income.

Campaigning in China was interrupted in 1218, after Mongol envoys sent to the neighboring Khwarezmian Empire to the west were executed by its ruler. So Chinggis launched a brilliant invasion that extinguished the Khwarezmian Empire by 1221. It was in this war that the Mongols gained their reputation for savagery, as they marched thousands of captives ahead of their armies as human shields. Millions died, as Chinggis had entire cities and districts massacred for offering the least resistance.

By the time Chinggis was done, Khwarezm had been reduced from a thriving and wealthy empire to a destitute and depopulated wasteland. At the grand mosque in the once thriving but now smoldering city of Bukhara, Chinggis told the survivors that he was the Flail of God, and that: “If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you“. The world breathed a sigh of relief in 1227, when Chinggis was killed by a fall from his horse while campaigning in China.

Sources & Further Reading

Ancient History Encyclopedia – Attila the Hun

Ancient History Encyclopedia – Themistocles

Badass of the Week – Simo Hayha

Catholic Encyclopedia – St. Joan of Arc

Encyclopedia Britannica – Cleisthenes of Athens

Executed Today – Stjepan Filipovic, “Death to Fascism, Freedom to the People!”

Gabriel, Richard A. – Subotai the Valiant, Genghis Khan’s Greatest General (2004)

Great War Society, The – Legends and Traditions of the Great War: Sergeant Alvin York

Nicolle, David – The Mongol Warlords (1998)

Richey, Stephen W. – Joan of Arc: the Warrior Saint (2003)

Simo Hayha Website – Finnish Sniper

Turnbull, Stephen – Genghis Khan and the Mongol Conquests (2003)

Wikipedia – Subotai

Wikipedia – Tamerlane