Badass

by Ben Thompson

  For his heroic stand in the Argonne Forest, Johnson became the first American to ever receive the Croix de Guerre, the highest award for bravery offered by the French government. Just in case you think “the highest award for bravery offered by the French Government” is an oxymoron, I should mention that he also received the U.S. Distinguished Service Cross and was nominated for the Congressional Medal of Honor. His one-man frenzy against dozens of enemy troops made him a hero in the States almost overnight, and the soft-spoken sergeant’s hospital bed was soon flooded with a deluge of letters from admirers back home. Despite the fact that he was pretty much covered from head to toe in incredibly painful, life-threatening injuries, Johnson passed up the opportunity to take a free ride home, refusing to be separated from the men in his unit. He remained on the Hellfighters’ muster roll until the end of the war, at which point he and the rest of his comrades returned home as heroes, receiving a ticker-tape parade down Fifth Avenue in New York City. Johnson became a public speaker, had a son who went on to be one of the Tuskegee Airmen (no small feat of awesomeness in and of itself), and is now remembered as one of the toughest American heroes of World War I.

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  The pilots of the 332nd Fighter Group, better known as the “Tuskegee Airmen,” made a name for themselves by blowing the hell out of anything and everything over the skies of Germany, Italy, and North Africa during World War II. Fighting the Nazis wherever and whenever the opportunity presented itself, these daring African American pilots flew 15,000 missions, won 111 aerial victories, destroyed hundreds of planes on the ground, derailed 57 trains, and flew over 200 consecutive escort missions without losing a single bomber.

  A bolo is an extra-long, single-edged mix between a knife and a machete. Originally designed in the Philippines and ranging from nine inches to three feet in length, it was generally used by peasants to hack through dense underbrush and harvest sugarcane. Despite the bolo’s seemingly innocuous agricultural roots, badass Filipino berserkers did manage to use these terrifying melee weapons rather effectively in their numerous wars against the Spanish and the Americans.

  Archduke Franz Ferdinand hated the sight of creases or wrinkles, so any time he appeared in public he demanded to be sewn into his suit. Unfortunately, this ended up being his downfall—after he was shot by a Serbian assassin in Sarajevo, he was unable to receive prompt medical attention because the medics couldn’t get his jacket off without cutting the entire suit apart.

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  33

  ELIOT NESS

  (1903–1957)

  We were a rugged-looking crew, I suppose, to a man unaccustomed to violence.

  CHICAGO, 1929. An American war zone. A once-proud city now dominated by a seamy underbelly of remorseless gangsters, machine-gun-toting bootleggers, angry street prostitutes dancing the Charleston, and crooked jackass cops on the take from the mob. An intricate web of lies, corruption, and murder kept the terrified citizenry firmly wedged between the fat, ever-clenching fingers of the steel-plated, gonad-mashing iron fist of one man—the notorious criminal kingpin “Scarface Al” Capone, a guy so tough that the mere mention of his name caused grown men to go into respiratory failure and reach for their inhalers. An uncompromising, dangerous murderer who had violently clawed and scratched his way up from the ranks of Mafia enforcer and built his vast criminal empire one bullet-riddled corpse at a time, Capone would just as soon have pumped you in the face with a clip of .45-caliber ammunition and beaten your family to death with the empty gun as spit on your mother’s corpse. The far-reaching tendrils of his all-powerful syndicate cast a Mecha-Godzilla-sized shadow over the city; no one was safe from his terrible and often misguided wrath, his overpowering garlic breath, or his obscenely foul temper. Rival gangs, cops, innocent douchebags, and even federal prosecutors fell victim to his uncontrollable ’roid rage as this brazen tyrant ran his brutal regime through a steady diet of fear, bribery, and delicious freshly baked lasagnas. Those who refused to play ball on Capone’s recreational-league softball team of murder, blackmail, and extortion quickly found themselves on the wrong end of a Louisville Slugger—and even though Scarface’s swing wasn’t exactly the second coming of the Great Bambino, trust me when I say that you didn’t want to have this guy playing home run derby with your skull.

  Only one man had the gigantic titanium nut sack to stand up to this madman and his army of fedora-wearing gangster hoodlums: federal agent Eliot Ness. Ness was an out-of-control freight train of justice who slugged punks in the jaw with brass knuckles and saved the questions for the AP American history exam, and he alone had the guts to tell the toughest mob boss in U.S. history to go to hell—and fornicate with livestock once he got there.

  The twenty-eight-year-old Ness had served on the Treasury Department’s Prohibition Bureau for a couple of years, compiling an impressive list of arrests despite the notable setback that pretty much every other bastard in his outfit was on Al Capone’s payroll. Totally bitter that this large, unwieldy force was roughly as impotent as a eunuch with acute radiation poisoning, Eliot decided to put together his own crew—ten men, hand-selected for their detective skills, toughness, and loyalty to the cause of pistol-whipping Mafia thugs unconscious with their boners and confiscating all their beer.

  The year before, Al Capone’s massive criminal syndicate had raked in $75 million in illicit bootlegging operations. Ness’s moderately suicidal mission was to demolish this obscenely lucrative racket at its source by locating Capone’s supersecret beer-manufacturing plants and using a hatchet to violently annihilate everything in his wheelhouse. Eliot figured that if he could put the breweries out of commission by repeatedly bashing homemade stills, beer barrels, and Mafia brewmasters with a gigantic axe, Capone would run out of money—and once he could no longer afford to buy off corrupt cops and politicians, his entire criminal empire would collapse around him.

  Of course, the Mafia is pretty good at concealing things they don’t want the feds to find, and Capone’s breweries were certainly no exception. It took some badass, hard-boiled 1920s pulp-fiction-style detective work to track these hideouts down, but Eliot Ness was more than up to the task. Ness and his men tailed delivery trucks, went on stakeouts in seedy motels, and set up clandestine wiretaps on Mafia phone lines. Since this was back in the days before the government could just shoot you in the face with a satellite beam and download the entire contents of your brain onto a DVD, Ness’s men needed to personally access the phone lines and cross the wires by hand. As you can probably imagine, plugging into the Capone brothers’ private business line (an act Ness accomplished) was not a task undertaken by men who were testosterone-challenged.

  Once Ness and his crew tracked down the locations of the syndicate’s secret breweries, his plan for assaulting these fortified installations was just as straightforward as he was. He simply drove up outside the building in a completely insane ten-ton flatbed death truck fitted with a gigantic custom-built steel bumper that looked like a cross between a medieval torture device and the cowcatcher on a nineteenth-century locomotive, revved the engine, and plowed right through the front door of the building at top speed. The 1920s version of the A-Team van would obliterate the brewery doors in a giant cloud of twisted iron and splintered wood, and before any stupefied mob thugs had any damn clue what the cake-eating whomp-ass was going on, Ness would leap out of the still-moving vehicle, train his sawed-off shotgun on the nearest gangster, and dare somebody to make a move.

  Eliot Ness was basically like a head-smashing mix between Sherlock Holmes, Batman, and a cinder block. While leading a one-man war against the nation’s most dangerous criminal organization, Eliot Ness crashed through the sixth-story windows of a warehouse to get the drop on some punks, chased down a fugitive while hanging on to the running board of a speeding cop car, sweet-talked hot babe secretaries for information, and leapt onto the tailgate of a truck full of murderous cop-killing gangsters to try to bring them down. One time, Ness, who was trained in jujitsu, actuall
y took a thug out by judo-chopping him in the throat. Seriously, he just kung-fued the ass out of the dude with a Captain James T. Kirk–style knife hand to the goddamned neck. Another time, a Mafia enforcer thought it would be a catastrophically brilliant idea to tear up a federal warrant and throw it in Eliot’s face. Ness stared at the hulking goon for a moment, his expression as grim as a funeral, and then, out of nowhere, belted the dude unconscious with one punch.

  Now, here in America there are two things you really aren’t supposed to mess with—Texas and the Italian Mafia. First, Capone generously offered Ness a cash bribe of $2,000 a week. Ness, whose yearly salary amounted to $2,800 (before taxes), responded by having the local paper photograph him giving Capone the finger and quote him as saying, “Big Al can eat a giant bowl of my dick”—an act of defiance that led the press to anoint his squad with the sweet nickname “the Untouchables.” When it became obvious that Ness wasn’t going to be bought off, the syndicate decided it would be cheaper (and easier) to just bust a cap in his ass and leave him in a ditch somewhere. They broke into his office, tried to run him down in the street, planted a car bomb under his hood…hell, they even dispatched a hardcore Mafia hit man to whack him, but Ness discovered the plot, ambushed his would-be assassin, and pummeled the guy unconscious with the butt of his service revolver.

  Not even the ever-constant fear of being splattered across the streets of Chicago by cheesed-off mobsters could stop Ness from his mad desire to annihilate Al Capone’s bootlegging operations. The Untouchables closed thirty breweries, each capable of producing hundreds of barrels of booze a day, seized forty-five delivery trucks, and destroyed millions of dollars’ worth of liquor, beer, and brewing equipment. They successfully dried up all illicit booze operations in Chicago, put Capone’s mob in dire financial straits, and captured stacks of critical evidence that would eventually be used by the Treasury Department to nail Scarface for tax evasion. When Al Capone was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to eleven years in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison in 1931, it was Special Agent Eliot Ness who personally escorted the handcuffed mob boss to the train station for his trip to the pen.

  But that’s not even the end of Ness’s story. After bringing down the Capone mob, he was sent to Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio to purge the mountains of renegade moonshiners while hillbillies took potshots at him with their varmint-huntin’ rifles and played “Dueling Banjos” with their amps cranked all the way up. Later, as the director of public safety for the city of Cleveland, he eliminated corruption in the police department, declared war on the Mafia, established the city’s first police academy, and guillotined the aristocracy. He also went on to win the Navy’s Meritorious Service Citation for smashing prostitution rackets on military bases across the East Coast during World War II (probably much to the dismay of many sailors). He died of heart failure in 1957.

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  The Thompson submachine gun, developed in 1916 by U.S. Army colonel John Thompson (no relation), accepted two different magazines of .45-caliber ammunition. The straight, twenty-round clip was popular among American GIs serving in World War II, while the circular, fifty-round drum was employed in the arguably more serious business of drive-by shootings and crazy 1920s gangland warfare.

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  34

  JACK CHURCHILL

  (1912–1996)

  In my opinion, sir, any officer who goes into battle without his sword is improperly dressed.

  JACK MALCOLM THORPE FLEMING CHURCHILL WAS IN THE MIDST OF HIS SECOND TOUR OF DUTY WITH THE BRITISH ARMY WHEN WORLD WAR II BROKE OUT IN EUROPE. In his first hitch in the queen’s service he spent most of his time learning to play the bagpipes, riding his motorcycle across the entire Indian subcontinent, and representing England in the 1939 World Archery Championship, but he really hadn’t had the opportunity to prove to the world that he was an officer, a gentlemen, and a righteously awesome destroyer of Nazi asses who eagerly undertook obscenely dangerous missions with an almost fanatical zeal for adventure. This time, things would be different.

  Churchill went to France in 1940 to assist the rest of the British Expeditionary Force in their mission to reinforce the Maginot Line, but when Hitler decided to send his goose-stepping legions to break all the toys in France, the Brits found themselves right in the middle of a gigantic crapstorm. The Nazi blitzkrieg ripped through France like a maelstrom of heavily armored steel death as elite SS panzer regiments obliterated the French army and occupied the country in the span of just a few weeks. This put the Brits in a particularly nasty spot—they quickly found themselves surrounded, backed up against the sea by the unstoppable onslaught, and doing whatever they could to stall the Germans’ seemingly inexorable advance.

  It was up to men like “Fighting Jack” Churchill to buy the British Expeditionary Force time to load up their transports and escape, only instead of flying snowspeeders over the desolate wastes of some remote ice planet, Jack had an even more balls-out plan. Riding his trusty motorcycle and armed with an English longbow, he got medieval on the Germans’ asses, launching raids on enemy supply depots and shooting Nazis in the heart with a quiver full of steel-tipped arrows. As if that isn’t insane enough, Churchill also carried a Scottish claybeg broadsword with him at all times, and you’ve really got to love a guy who didn’t have a problem battling machine-gun-toting Nazi storm troopers with a pair of weapons that have been obsolete since the fifteenth century.

  Despite being shot in the neck by a goddamned Nazi machine gun, “Mad Jack” Churchill battled throughout the French countryside, at one point winning the Military Cross for bravery by rescuing a wounded officer from a German ambush and pulling him to safety. He probably popped a couple of totally sweet wheelies on his motorcycle while doing so.

  After the British evacuation at Dunkirk, Jack returned to England and promptly signed up to be a member of a new supersecret organization known as the Commandos. At the time he signed the paperwork Churchill wasn’t actually even sure what a Commando was, but he was excited about the prospect of kicking German asses, and he knew the work would be insanely dangerous, so he just couldn’t resist. He was promptly put through the grueling training regimen of the British Special Forces, and loved every minute of it.

  The newly commissioned Commandos’ first mission was an amphibious night raid on German shipping and war matériel operations along the coast of Norway. Churchill’s small squadron was assigned the unenviable task of assaulting the fortress on Maaloy Island, taking out four fortified coastal artillery positions, and clearing the way for the main body of the Commando force to land. While this highly dangerous suicide operation would have had left pussier men crippled by a severe case of vaginitis, Mad Jack spent the entire trip out there playing “The March of the Cameron Men” on the bagpipes to pump his soldiers up. When the assault ramp of their amphibious transport dropped into the knee-deep water off the coast of Maaloy Island and the covert operation was ready to roll, Jack unsheathed his broadsword, held the well-polished blade aloft, and led his men charging toward their objective, screaming battle cries like a host of somewhat misguided medieval knights with automatic weapons. Twenty minutes later, the commanding officer of the British operation received the following telegram:

  MAALOY BATTERY AND ISLAND CAPTURED. CASUALTIES SLIGHT. DEMOLITIONS IN PROGRESS. CHURCHILL.

  Awesome.

  Churchill won another medal for leading Number 2 Commando in a daring amphibious assault against entrenched German positions at the Italian port city of Salerno. His men went ashore in the middle of the night, ambushed a panzer crew before they could get to their tank, and captured the enemy positions with relative ease. When the Germans finally got their crap together the next morning and launched a full-on counterattack on the Commandos, Jack stood on the roof of his headquarters building (in full view of the enemy) with a pair of binoculars, calling out coordinates and directing mortar fire down onto Nazi heavy weapons teams.

  The following day, Churchill’s squad was charge
d with sneaking into the town of Pigoletti and taking out an artillery battery that was zeroing in on the landing operations. So in the middle of the night, Jack had his small group charge the town from all sides, screaming “Coommaaannnn-dooo!” as loudly as possible the entire time. The Germans couldn’t figure out what in the mother hell was going on, so, thinking they were under attack by a far superior force, they mounted a half-hearted defense and promptly surrendered. The fifty men of Number 2 Commando took 136 prisoners and inflicted an unknown number of casualties.

  Amazingly, that wasn’t even the most balls-out, borderline insane thing Mad Jack did on the campaign. One night, he single-handedly took forty-two German prisoners and captured a mortar crew using only his broadsword and his giant nut sack. He simply took a patrolling guard as a human shield and went around from sentry post to sentry post, sneaking up on the guards and then shoving his sword in their faces and yelling at them until they surrendered. His response when asked about how he was able to capture so many soldiers so easily: