Sometimes I think of humans as fragile creatures,
quick to welcome death when subjected to suffering. Though every now and then,
I'll hear a story that borders on miraculous, in which the sufferer grits their teeth and
endures through agonies I couldn't in my worst nightmare conceive. War is one of
the vile mounts on which suffering rides and claims its victims. It's no revelation then,
to say that the battlefields of war are catalyst to those cases in which humans endure suffering
against all odds — cases in which they cling to life despite gruesome injuries and/or illnesses.
In this video, we're going to look into several cases where soldiers in World
War II survived injuries, illnesses, and other impairments when, maybe, they shouldn't have.
Nepalese Gurkha Lachhiman Gurung joined the British Indian Army in 1940, despite being just
four feet eleven inches tall at twenty-seven years of age. He fought in the 4th Battalion of the 8th
Gurkha Rifles, and while his entire experience in the disease-ridden jungles of Burma was tough,
one particularly gruesome event, taking place between the 12th and 13th of May 1945,
certified Gurung as one of toughest Gurkhas in history, and that's saying something.
Part of a smaller unit, Lachhiman Gurung was ordered to hold an entrenched position
just north of the Burmese river village Taungdaw,
where the bulk of the 4th Battalion was resting. Retreating from horrific
losses at both Kohima and Imphal in India, the Japanese were expected to pass through Taungdaw,
though no one could've expected how fiercely one child-size man would cling to his orders.
Over 200 Japanese soldiers assaulted Gurung's forward position, hurling grenades into the
Ghurka-held trenches. When the first grenade slapped into the mud at the bottom of Gurung's
trench, he hurled it right back, as he did for the second. Though, the third had been cooked a little
longer, and when Gurung picked it up, it exploded, blowing the fingers off of his right hand,
splintering his right arm, and spitting searing shrapnel into his right leg, body, and face. The
other men in Gurung's trench were down, and the lone Ghurka wasn't going to join them without a
fight. Heart throbbing in his ears, blood drooling from the stumps that used to be his fingers,
Gurung clenched his teeth, put his right-handed bolt-action rifle in his left hand, and held the
Japanese off his position, preventing up to thirty-one of them from reaching the village.
While Gurung was hospitalised, the shrapnel ultimately stole the vision from his right eye,
and his right hand would never be much more than a meaty club. This
didn't stop the Ghurka, however; he remained in service until 1947.
We've covered Finnish sniper Simo Häyhä, the White Death, in a previous video, so this will be brief.
While Häyhä used many tricks to make himself "invisible" to enemy snipers, such as using
iron sights over telescopic sights and putting snow in his mouth to prevent his breath rising
in the cold air, he was not truly invisible, and he was certainly not impervious to damage. On
the 6th of March 1940, a Soviet sniper saw Häyhä and hit him in the jaw with an explosive bullet,
smashing out his teeth, bursting his cheek open, and knocking him into oblivion.
Despite pretty much being shot in the head, Häyhä survived, requiring several operations to
make his face somewhat normal, though he could not have returned to war even if he wanted to.
On the 13th of March 1940, Finland and the Soviet Union signed the Moscow Peace Treaty,
and the Winter War was over. I'd wager that if the Winter War hadn't come to an end when it did,
the White Death's kill count would have continued to climb.
Among other operations, Japanese flying ace Saburō Sakai flew for Axis in the Guadalcanal
Campaign and was friends with fellow ace Hiroyoshi Nishizawa; he even joined
Nishizawa in his legendary aerobatic stunt over the Allied airbase in Port Moresby,
which we've also covered in a previous video On the 7th of August 1941, Sakai shot an American
F4F Wildcat and then a Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bomber out of the sky. On that same day,
over Tulagi, an island of the Solomon Islands, Sakai and his fellow pilots engaged what they
believed to be eight more American Wildcats. These eight aircraft were actually Grumman TBF Avengers,
and after wasting two of them, the rear gunner on one of the remaining Avengers scored a direct hit
on Sakai. One of the American gunner's .50 calibre bullets carved a valley through the top of Sakai's
skull while the glass from Sakai's shattered canopy sunk into and blinded his right eye. To
top it off, the entire left side of his body was paralyzed. Blood spilling down his face, A6M2 Zero
wreathed in hellfire, Sakai plummeted towards the sea. He considered smashing his plane into
an American warship, thinking, "If I must die, at least I could go out as a Samurai." Though,
the rushing air soon swatted out the flames, and Sakai decided against "[going] out as a Samurai."
Despite slipping in and out of consciousness and being half paralyzed, Sakai flew all the way back
to the airfield at Rabaul, New Britain, where he made a precarious but successful landing.
Even though doctors in Japan, where he had surgery and recovered, told him he would never fly again,
Sakai flew Zeros at Iwo Jima, fighting American F6F-3 Hellcats for control of the sky,
and went on to survive World War II and become the second headshot survivor in this video.
While the story of Saburō Sakai is impressive,
this next World War II flying ace endured suffering on a different scale.
Russian pilot Aleksey Petrovich Maresyev was one kill off becoming an ace on the 4th of April
1942 when he was shot down by a German ace in a forest near the Russian city of Staraya Russa,
where he was almost captured by the Germans occupying the area. In his descent, Aleksey
tried to land on a frozen lake but failed, though he did manage to crash into the snow. Aleksey
dragged his broken, bleeding legs through the snow-covered forest for eighteen days,
in which time his blood became poisoned and gangrene set in. He eventually crawled to
the safety of a village, where the villagers tended to him as well as they could. Later,
a Soviet plane landed by the village and took Aleksey to a proper hospital,
where both of his legs, frostbitten and infected beyond repair, were sawn off above
the knee. Waking from the surgery, Aleksey was furious though keen to get back in the
cockpit. After a year adjusting to prosthetics, he learned to walk, dance, and fly once more,
and returned to combat in August 1943, taking vengeance on the Luftwaffe and becoming an ace.
Soviet author Sergei Prokofiev later wrote a book about Aleksey's experience,
titled "The Tale of a Real Man." Prokofiev wasn't exaggerating. Not only did Aleksey
grit his teeth through immense pain but also through immense physical toil. It's hard enough
to crawl without having to drag shattered bones and dying muscle behind you through the snow.
While the previous four cases were about isolated instances of survival despite
gruesome injuries and/or illnesses, these next two cases are on soldiers who were
chewed up by war piece by piece — soldiers who survived not only one freak incident but many.
This video likely would not exist without Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart, a Belgian-born
British Army officer who entered World War II after having fought in both the
Second Boer War and the First World War, as well as in lesser conflicts.
In the Boer War, Carton de Wiart was shot in the gut and groin, and after the Boer war,
while Carton de Wiart was hunting wild boars with a spear on horseback,
he fell from his horse, and the horse fell on him, cracking several of his ribs and an ankle.
When the Great War broke out, Carton de Wiart was already fighting a different war,
the Somaliland campaign, in which he was shot in the face... twice,
losing a piece of an ear and one of his eyes.
In the First World War Carton de Wiart's left hand was mangled by shrapnel, and he
tore off some of his own fingers when a doctor refused to remove them; the whole of that hand
was amputated soon after. In the Battle of the Somme, he was shot through the ankle and skull;
in the Battle of Passchendaele, the hip; and in two other battles, the leg and the ear... again.
In 1941, on a British military mission to Yugoslavia, Carton de Wiart was in a plane
crash. He woke up in the sea and swam away from the sinking aircraft — with one hand and a pirate
patch, bear in mind. When he reached the shore, he was arrested by Italians and kept as a POW.
After escaping imprisonment, he was caught again, only to be released later for the purposes of
negotiation between Britain and Italy. After the war, and on his way back home and to retirement,
Carton de Wiart — a battle-scarred, grey old war-machine of sixty-six — fell down a flight
of stairs, breaking several vertebrae and KO-ing himself. Even at this age, he went on to make a
full recovery and even got some shrapnel which had been in his body from fuck-knows-when taken out.
Carton de Wiart died peacefully at 83,
having been utterly thrashed over six decades of conflict. And, you know what,
I don't think the man considered any of it "suffering"; he bloody enjoyed it.
While not quite as much of a terminator as Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart, American Medal
of Honor recipient Matt Louis Urban saw more than his share of battle,
more than once refusing medical evacuation.
In North Africa, he was stung by grenade shrapnel in a German counterattack,
just after he'd stuck a German with his trench knife. In the Normandy landings, shrapnel from
a German tank shell sunk into Urban's left leg; the tank had fired on him before he could launch
his bazooka and destroy the tank like he had two Panzers a short while earlier. After this injury,
Urban refused to leave the battlefield and continued into the fray with his men,
giving orders from a stretcher. Only a day later, he was injured again and taken to a
medical tent for surgery. In August 1944, a shell fragment lodged itself in Urban's chest, just to
the side of his heart, and, again, he refused evac. In Belgium, just a month later, Urban
was shot through the neck while charging an enemy machine-gun position, holding two grenades. Urban
received a lifesaving tracheotomy — that's when they stick a tube into your trachea so you can
suck air into your lungs through a hole in your throat; I can't imagine it to be a lot of fun.
After recovering, Urban was barely able to whisper, as his larynx took irreparable damage,
and his request to see proper combat was denied. Urban was, however, he was allowed to stay with
his men, who thought that he'd been killed in action, and he thus acquired the nickname "Ghost."
Urban's military injuries eventually caught up with him,
however, when he died of a collapsed lung in 1995 at the age of seventy-five.
While the story of Matt Louis Urban is lesser-known in itself, this next story — a
bit of a bonus story — is about an American soldier I doubt any of you have heard of.
Robert John Harper, born in Lansing, Michigan was stationed in the Aleutian Islands,
which were used by the US Air Force as a chain of frigid stepping stones into
the Pacific Theatre. After the Japanese invaded two of the Aleutian Islands early in June 1942,
Harper was ordered to defend an airstrip on one of the islands.
In May 1943, American and Canadian forces began to push the Japanese off the volcanic shores and
back into the sea, Harper was fighting out of a foxhole abreast his fellow soldiers,
when a grenade landed by their feet. Harper — almost the Lachhiman Gurung
of the Aleutian Islands campaign — picked the grenade up and went to throw it back,
though as it left his hand, the grenade exploded, blowing off his right trigger-finger and lodging
a piece of shrapnel in his forehead. Harper collapsed in his foxhole, dead.
After the medics had zipped up his body bag, one of them happened to walk past Harper's
body bag just as Harper let out a zombie-like groan. The medic unzipped the bag, checked
Harper's pulse, and said, "Yeah, we got a live one!" and then moved Harper to a medical tent for
surgery, removing the shrapnel stuck in his head and replacing a piece of his skull with titanium.
While Harper may have wanted to get back into the fight, his trigger-finger was missing,
and he was sent back to Lansing, where he met and married a woman working in wartime industry.
There are thousands of miraculous World War II survival stories, though we mostly hear about the
more "heroic" stories, in which soldiers became famous for the circumstances of their injury,
like Aleksey Maresyev, or their actions following it, like Lachhiman Gurung. We're also more likely
to hear about soldiers who were famous prior to their injuries, like Simo Häyhä, the White Death.
I included Robert John Harper in this video not only because his is a great
story but because he didn't acquire fame in war. I also included it because I wanted
to encourage you to share the stories of your family in World War II. While
I'm already considering making a second part to this video, I'd be more inclined
to if I could include stories that have never been shared with a larger audience,
stories like that of Robert John Harper, which was told to me in person by his great-grandson.