•The first strike from a carrier against a land target took place on July 19, 1918. Seven Sopwith Camels launched from HMS Furious attacked the German Zeppelin base at Tondern, with two 50lb bombs each. Several airships and balloons were destroyed, but as the carrier had no method of recovering the aircraft safely, two of the pilots ditched their aircraft in the sea alongside the carrier while the others headed for neutral Denmark.
•The flight of Zeppelin L59, a cargo Zeppelin dispatched on a one-way trip from Bulgaria to resupply German forces in east Africa. When it received a (false) message that said forces had already surrendered, they turned back—and completed a 10,000 km intercontinental round trip, in 1917.
•There is a record of one V-2, fortuitously observed at launch from a passing American B-24 Liberator, being shot down by .50 caliber machine-gun fire.
I’m surprised you don’t suggest the story of the Airship Italia, as well. While it’s not quite as tragic as Andree’s balloon expedition - the larger portion of the crew did surive and most of the resuers, too - it makes up for that by offering a chance for the audience to scorn and lampoon Mousolini’s government, almost tailor-made for modern audiences.
For that matter the construction, flight and loss of the R-101 makes for an excellent little morality play on the cost of hubris. All very contrived, and suitable for all sorts of modern prejudices. Just the sort of thing that I could imagine Hollywood making up. (Well, aside from the lack of a plucky young engineer/reporter/housewife who just knows what’s going to go wrong.)
One more suggestion: The campaign (or series of campaigns) that lead up to Henry Morgan’s sack of Peurto Bella and Panama. How could a pirate reasonably expect to capture and loot two of the major ports of Spain’s New World empire? It has to be movie magic, right?
I highly recommend the book The Sack of Panama, by Peter Earle. Originally published in 1982, it has just been reissued, so I am inclined to take it as a more accurate report than the Wiki article I’d linked. Which it contradicts in several places.
The incredible journey of Thomas Stevens who was the first person to ride around the world on a bicycle
This title was often stolen by others some decades after his effort. But what most folks fail to realise is that Stevens did the deed on one of those big wheeled Penny Farthing bicycles. He also did this in the 1880’s when there was no such thing as a paved road…or in many areas a road at all. Because of some of the things he had to do at times (carrying the bicycle) his title is often stolen by later riders.
Merely “OK?” I could tell where I was from the photos and maps I’ve seen of Stalingrad and if THAT doesn’t, when combined with Rachel Weisz bedroll sex, make it a great movie then I don’t know what could.
Ernest Shackelton doesn’t need more admirers, having passed from mortality to godhood, but we cannot forget the man who, using dead reckoning (when he could usually take only one sighting per day, using an unfamiliar sky), guided that rowboat 800 freaking miles to a speck of land, Capt. Frank Worsley. THAT is preternatural navigation.
As for the entire Shackelton crew, “there were giants in the earth in those days.” I compare myself with any of them and come up short.
Another giant: intrepid aviator Cal Rodgers, who was the first to fly across America (“crash by crash,” according to one biographer) in Vin Fiz, a Wright Bros. aircraft named after his sponsor, a soft-drink maker. The plane was practically entirely rebuilt along the way. I always thought his story would make a great movie: Calbraith Perry Rodgers - Wikipedia
The Hunley, the first submarine used in combat, built by the besieged Confederates in Charleston, and powered by the crew turning a large crank to power the screw, would certainly seem like a rather outlandish idea, even without them successfully sinking a blockading Union warship with a weapon that required them to ram the heavily armed enemy ship first.
Oh, and of course, Firefly. The idea that a sci-fi TV show which was cancelled before it’s first season even finished production could be made into a theatrical motion picture sounds like a plot for a self-mocking episode of StarGate: SG1.
O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series were based Cochrane’s many exploits. So they did in a way.
Of course England’s celebrated Lord Horatio Nelson deserves a mention, responsible for two decisive victories against Bonaparte’s fleets, among other achievements.
Can I really be the first to mention Lance Armstrong? His doctors tell him he’s probably going to die of cancer, but instead of dying he wins the Tour de France seven straight times.
If you know anything about WWII firearms, that’s not really all that surprising. There was an Australian sniper during the Korean War (fought in similar conditions at times), who was armed with an SMLE Mk III* HT sniper rifle (of WWII vintage, but admittedly equipped with a telescopic sight) who acheived a similiarly high number of kills over the course of the Korean War (which was longer than a year). The difference is, he didn’t talk about it publicly until very recently.
Incidentally, the Mosin-Nagant M91/30 is not a “knock-off”, and the Finnish M39s that the Finns used weren’t “knock-offs”, either- they were captured Russian M91/30s that were rebarrelled and re-stocked.
As for historic events that you’d never believe were true if they hadn’t actually happened:
A British intelligence officer in Cairo with an interest in Archaeology finds himself in Arabia c. 1915, and soon ends up uniting Arab tribes and blowing up the Hejaz Railway to thwart the Ottoman war effort. A lot of what Lawrence of Arabia got up to back then has affected things in the Middle East to this very day, in ways that no-one could have foreseen at the time.
139 British Soldiers (some of them already wounded)- armed with somewhat unreliable single-shot rifles and bayonets- successfully fought off 5,000 Zulu Warriors, suffering suffering only 17 dead and 10 wounded in the process (c. 500 Zulu were also killed in the battle). The battle of Rorke’s Drift was later made into the film Zulu, which is a reasonably accurate description of the events that took place.
Hernan Cortez, Francisco Pizzaro, & Co. have already been mentioned, and rightly so.
Captain Scott and the Race To The South Pole- they endure incredible hardships to get to The Last Place On Earth, only to discover someone else beat them to it- and then they all freeze to death on the way back- and the guy who beat them to it later vanished whilst searching for a crashed Airship.
Marco Polo’s trip to China and adventures thereof- as well as the fact that his book became a best-seller when most people at the time were illiterate and the printing press hadn’t been introduced to Europe yet.
When you think about it, history is full of things that seem stranger than fiction, actually…
I think that a war between the United States and Spain being started as a result of an accident and a great deal of horrifically unprofessional reporting by the press would count, though I understand there was a fairly high degree of tension between the US and Spain even before the loss of USS Maine, hence the battleship’s presence in Havana Bay to show the flag.
Speaking of newspapers, the Newsboys Strike, where the newspaper delivery boys went on strike, cutting off newspaper circulation throughout New York City for two and a half weeks, over the rising costs of newspapers (they had to buy them before they could sell them).
I don’t recall which specific battle this is, but the Vikings invading England were caught on a island with only a narrow causeway between them and the English, who repel wave after wave trying to cross into the open. The Vikings ask to be let onto the mainland in order to have a fairer fight: permission was granted. The Vikings won the ensuing fight.[/QUOTE]
Sounds like Stamford Bridge but I thought the Anglo Saxons won that one but I could be wrong.
From the same era a guy called I think, Sir Henry Grenville ,was surrounded in his ship the Revenge somewhere in the Caribbean by Spanish Galleons .
Becalmed he couldnt get away and they fought until virtually the entire crew of the Revenge was dead or dying and his ship matchwood .
Though several times offered an honourable surrender by the Spanish.
The Mongols just about to conquer Western Europe ,all is lost !and then the Mongol Emperor dies back home and all the bad guys go back to central Asia to choose the new leader.
A small ,exhausted, starving army riddled by dissentery being stalked by a huge fresh and well supplied enemy in their own land .
The little armys leader decides its pointless trying any longer to escape,gives a pep talk to the lads then they stand and fight the French .
The English nobility and knights fighting dismounted to demonstrate that they either all win or they all die .
The result a devastating victory for the English killing a huge number of the heavily armed and well equipped mounted French nobility ,or the battle of Agincourt as it is known.
The Charge of the Light Brigade.
The Glosters fighting till the end even though surrounded at the Battle of Imjin during the Korean War so as to allow American forces to safely withdraw.
They and associated British units in the battle suffered virtually 100% killed or captured .
If it’s from the same era as Henry Morgan’s campaign(s), there is some reason to question whether the Spanish would have honored said surrender - if you read Earle’s book, you’ll see that one of the factors in Jamaica supporting the idea of a campaign specifically to sack Panama, Peurto Bello (again) or Cartegena was because an ahem English Privateer had been caught, surrendered, then the crew, including officers, were made to work like slaves.
My sympathy for the pirates is extremely limited, but I can see why Sir Henry Grenville might not have felt that surrender would be a viable option.
The fight of the United States Revenue Cutter *Eagle *, outgunned by her opponent, the 18 gun British brig Dispatch, in a failed attempt to free the captured merchantman Suzan during the War of 1812. Dispatch persued Eagle, forcing her captain to beach the cutter in order to prevent it’s sinking from the damage inflicted, at which point the Americans dragged the cutter’s guns ashore and started firing upon the British from a 160 foot bluff until they ran out of ammunition… at which point they proceeded to collect the shot that had been fired at them by the British so they could fire THAT back too, and eventually used up all available means of firing upon the British, including tearing up the cutter’s logbook for wadding.
Others have already mentioned Apollo 13 (seriously, stranded in the closest thing any human’s ever been to the middle of nowhere, and they fix their life support system with duct tape and the cover of an instruction manual?). So I’ll instead nominate some of Richard Feynman’s exploits.
During World War II, Feynman, like most physicists in the US, was working on the Manhattan Project. He was bored, and decided he needed a hobby. So he took up safecracking. In the most top-secret project in history, with the highest security ever, he was able to open any safe in under 8 hours, and most of them in seconds.
This is also the guy who wondered why dogs’ sense of smell is so much better than humans’, so he trained his own sense of smell to where he could identify not only which book on a bookshelf had been handled by a human, but who it was who did it.
And also the fellow who would take on the best technology of his day in fast calculation competitions, and after he won, would ask his opponent why he had so few digits.
