Badass

by Ben Thompson

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  Thomas Edison spent much of his life engineering a massive mudslinging propaganda campaign aimed at slandering Tesla’s good name, as well as his alternating-current method of bringing electricity into homes. Edison’s most brazen display of the dangers of AC power was when he invented the world’s first working electric chair, demonstrating it on August 6,1890, by electrocuting an axe murderer named William Kemmler. One reporter described the event as “an awful spectacle, far worse than hanging.”

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  Section IV

  The Modern Era

  31

  MANFRED VON RICHTHOFEN

  (1892–1918)

  I no longer know any mercy. For that reason I attacked him a second time, whereupon the aeroplane fell apart in my stream of bullets. The wings fell away like pieces of paper and the fuselage went raring down like a stone on fire.

  DOGFIGHTING ISN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE. Sure, there’s something to be said for doing insane barrel rolls, hurtling through the atmosphere at Mach Five Million, flipping on the afterburners, and taking it right into the danger zone, but at the end of the day most modern fighter pilots are really just launching missiles at the giant green blobs on their heads-up displays. Back in the day of the Great War, however, when fighter planes were little more than flying metallic deathtraps with large-caliber machine guns strapped to their wings, dogfighting was a much more up-close-and-personal affair. Taking down an airplane from a range of only a couple of hundred feet with nothing more than a few hundred bullets isn’t exactly like shooting hippies in the face with a water cannon—it takes steel nerves, the lightning-quick reaction time of a schizophrenic cat, and the ability to accurately use the iron sights of a 7.92 mm machine gun from a standing position while deftly maneuvering a barely airworthy flying contraption so that it evades enemy bullets and doesn’t crash nose-first into a mountain and explode into flaming shrapnel.

  Alternately known to cowering Allied pilots by the dope nicknames “the Red Baron,” “the Bloody Baron,” and “that goddamned Richthofen,” Manfred von Richthofen was undisputedly the most balls-out and successful airplane-destroying maniac to ever hop into the cockpit of a piece-of-crap triplane and send dozens of enemy fighter planes spiraling down in flames. He kicked ass in the skies above France in a blood-red death plane that was seemingly impervious to gunfire, and to most British, Canadian, French, and American pilots the mere mention of his name was more frightening than the thought of being woken in the middle of the night by the sound of a chainsaw revving up.

  An accomplished rifle marksman and an avid hunter from an early age, Manfred always had a rather keen and moderately unhealthy interest in shooting things with firearms until they were dead. He was also a damn good horseman, a tack-eating hardass, and an unyielding competitor who thought that anything less than the best was a felony. One time in cadet school he participated in a horse race, and the jackass horse had the audacity to throw Manfred into the mud. Richthofen face-planted the turf and broke his collarbone, but this only served to make him pissed off—he got up, dragon-punched the horse, jumped back in the saddle, and rode the final forty-five miles with a goddamned broken clavicle. Oh yeah, and he won the race.

  Richthofen enlisted in the cavalry when he finished cadet school. Of course, developments such as barbed wire, trenches, hand grenades, and machine guns made most cavalry about as useful as a bachelor’s degree in liberal arts, so Richthofen spent his first days on the Western Front shoveling horse manure, sleeping in ankle-deep mud, and fantasizing about the day when he would finally get to impale Frenchmen with his sharpened, gleaming saber. But Richthofen wasn’t the sort of bastard who was going to be content sitting around with his thumb up his rectum when he could be out there turning British people into giant bloody conflagrations, so despite the fact that he’d never even so much as flown in an airplane before, he applied for a transfer to the German air service. He received a little bit of training (pull back on the stick to go higher, don’t crash into any mountains, shoot as many people as you can, etc.) and was shipped out to the front.

  It wasn’t long before he got the opportunity to start putting his soon-to-be-infamous airplane-smashing skills to use. He scored his first kill on September 17, 1916, blowing the ass out of a French scout plane and igniting a ravenous thirst for human blood so intense that it makes the Vampire Lestat look like a triage nurse at St. Jude’s. In under a month Richthofen took out five planes, officially earning the title of fighter ace. Soon afterward he destroyed a rogue bomber that had been secretly dispatched to strafe the headquarters of a prominent Austrian duke. The rescued nobleman was so pumped up about this daring display of awesomeness that he personally pinned a one-of-a-kind Medal of Duke-Saving +1 on Richthofen’s chest.

  About a month later, the baron found himself squaring off against notable British hardass Lanoe Hawker, a nine-kill ace, winner of the Victoria Cross, and the most famous and successful aviator in His Majesty’s service. Well, the baron didn’t give a flying fornication in the direction of a rolling donut about this dude’s reputation—he capped Hawker in the face and sent his corpse careening nose-first into the ground, where it exploded into tiny pieces of shrapnel (which subsequently exploded again). By January of 1917, the twenty-five-year-old Richthofen had shot down sixteen bogeys and was awarded the prestigious Blue Max—a great old Atari game, and the ultimate award for military badassitude offered by the German Empire, a place that was pretty much universally known for its military badasses.

  Next, Manfred von Richthofen transformed his squadron, Jasta 11, into the foremost fighting unit in Europe. The cocky, swashbuckling aviator’s prestige allowed him to recruit the best pilots and top-scoring aces in the empire to his crew, and with Richthofen flying at the head of the formation, Jasta 11 became the ultimate dream team from hell. Never was this more painfully obvious than during the carnage of April 1917, a time better known to the British as “Bloody April.” The Royal Air Force lost a third of their pilots—912 men—in the span of thirty days, with Richthofen accounting for twenty-one of those kills personally. By the end of the month, he was the war’s ace of aces, having added fifty-two fiery infernos to his scorecard. That’s like wiping out an entire professional football team, and MVR did it back in the days before heat-seeking missiles, photon torpedoes, and multibarreled rotary autocannons that shot giant silver hollow-point bullets filled with C-4, chlorine gas, and sulfuric acid.

  The famous I-dare-you-to-screw-with-me red paint job was symbolic of the Red Baron’s fighting style. He wanted to be seen by friend and foe alike and go completely balls-out, full throttle, guns blazing all the damn time. He didn’t have some prissy flyboy piloting style, either. He forbade his pilots from doing barrel rolls, loop-de-loops, and other such acrobatic garbage nonsense, requiring them instead to train relentlessly in machine gun marksmanship and ambush tactics. In fact, by most accounts, Richthofen was only marginally capable as a pilot. He would simply lie in wait for his enemies and then launch his plane full speed in steep dives with the sun at his back, pouncing on Allied pilots like a head-cleaving ninja getting the drop on an unsuspecting feudal lord. Not only did his unique fighting style help him score more kills than any other pilot in the war, but his leadership abilities and tactical skill melded the entire squadron into a formidable assortment of highly trained, über-efficient plane-killers.

  Jasta 11 shot down one hundred Allied planes in just three months, and Richthofen was then made commander of Jagdgeschwader 1, a fighter wing consisting of four squadrons and ten consonants. He led JG1 until he was hospitalized in July 1917 when a damned aircraft machine gun bullet capped him in the skull. He was totally hardcore, though: he spent his time off hunting in the forests, getting wicked headaches, and thinking about how awesome it was going to be when he finally got back into the air. The German government asked him to retire, knowing that if he were to die it would be a serious blow to imperial morale, but he was like, “Dude, do I look like some kind of
pussy?” and hopped right back in the cockpit. A mere forty days after taking a gunshot wound to the damn brain Richthofen got right back to the business of machine gunning Brits and Frenchmen to death like it was his job (which it was).

  The Red Baron was never really the same after returning from his head injury, which is kind of understandable because no matter how hardcore you are, you’re probably still going to be a little screwed up when a machine gun bullet splinters your skull. His kill total plateaued, and on April 21, 1918, the twenty-six-year-old pilot was shot down simultaneously by a massive horde of British, Australian, Canadian, and Scottish fighter planes, machine guns, zeppelins, large-caliber handguns, tanks, slingshots, water balloons, Stinger missiles, and antiaircraft artillery. The Allies recovered his body and gave him a full military burial with honors; they knew they had to do this worthy adversary justice, especially since he had rocked their asses so hard.

  Manfred von Richthofen ended his career with a brain-destroyingly astonishing total of eighty kills, and there were a couple of other adequately jacked-up aircraft that were never officially confirmed. He was undisputedly the top fighter pilot of the war, a twenty-time ace, and one of the biggest ass-kickers to ever put on a leather jacket and a pair of flight goggles and leave a trail of scrap metal and fireballs in his engine wash.

  BADASS ANIMALS

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  VOYTEK THE SOLDIER BEAR

  A Syrian brown bear cub taken in by a Polish artillery regiment, Voytek morphed into a massive ass-kicking soldier who enjoyed three things—smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, and Greco-Roman wrestling. This alcoholic, Nazi-killing bear was enlisted as a private in the Polish military, marched on his hind legs alongside the troops, and actually (seriously, no kidding) carried artillery shells to the front lines during the Battle of Monte Cassino in southern Italy. He also once thwarted a spy by cornering the dude in a bathhouse and growling at the terrified saboteur until the dumbass cried out for help and surrendered. Voytek served with the Poles throughout the war, then lived out the rest of his life in the Edinburgh Zoo, where his old comrades often used to visit him—throwing smokes down into his waiting hands or jumping into the enclosure to wrestle with him for old times’ sake. Voytek still appears on the official unit insignia of the Polish 22nd Transport Artillery Company.

  CHER AMI

  This brave carrier pigeon from the United States Signal Corps’s 1st Pigeon Division carried vital information between commanders throughout World War I, making trips in excess of nineteen miles in just about twenty minutes of flight time. When the American “Lost Battalion” was stranded in the Argonne Forest and started getting seriously jacked up by their own artillery, Cher Ami was dispatched to stop the barrage. During his dangerous flight, the bird lost an eye and a leg, but still delivered the message in time to save the Marines from complete destruction. This avian hero’s incredible effort earned him a wooden leg, a retirement pension, and the French Croix de Guerre. Cher Ami survived the war, and his taxidermied corpse is currently on display at the Smithsonian.

  PERUNA

  The official mascot of Southern Methodist University, this three-foot-tall Shetland pony might not look like the second coming of the nightmarish, fire-breathing black steed that relentlessly carried the Headless Horseman after Ichabod Crane, but he does hold the badass distinction of being the only live mascot to ever kill another live mascot in the middle of an athletics contest. On the sidelines of a football game in 1936, the Fordham ram got a little too close for comfort, so Peruna kicked it in the head, killing it instantly. Peruna, who is named after an old-school Prohibition-era alcoholic beverage, also knocked down the University of Texas longhorn with a back kick and tried to hump Texas Tech University’s horse mascot in his mad rampage of carnage.

  SINBAD THE SEA DOG

  This homeless mutt was adopted by the men of the Coast Guard cutter George W. Campbell in 1937 and sailed on many dangerous missions throughout the North Atlantic during World War II. As “chief dog” on the Campbell, Petty Officer Sinbad served the Coast Guard for fourteen years, crossing the ocean dozens of times and hitting the bars with the men at every stop along the way. He loved whisky, beer, and harassing sheep—a practice that earned him a permanent ban from ever setting paw in the country of Greenland. On one particularly ass-tastic mission in 1943, the Campbell was attacked by five German U-boats, suffering torpedo damage to her hull but somehow emerging victorious. Sinbad stayed on board and did what he could to cheer up the survivors, all of whom appreciated the friendly companionship of their best bud. Today, a bronze statue of the sea dog sits in the mess hall of the Campbell.

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  The highest-scoring fighter ace of all time was the German pilot Erich Hartmann. Fighting the Soviet Union in World War II, Hartmann recorded an unbelievable 352 aerial victories over the span of 1,400 combat missions, and survived having nineteen different planes shot out from under him. Fittingly, after the war he commanded a West German fighter wing named after Richthofen.

  World War I pitted the armies of the Central Powers—the German Empire, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire—against the Entente Alliance of France, Russia, Britain, Italy, and the United States. Seeing as how none of the Central Powers currently exists today, I’ll let you go ahead and guess who won.

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  32

  HENRY LINCOLN JOHNSON

  (1897–1929)

  No, I ain’t scared. I came over here to do my bit, and I’ll do it. I was just letting you know there’s liable to be some tall scrappin’ around this post tonight.

  IN EARLY 1918, HENRY LINCOLN JOHNSON WAS WORKING AS A HUMBLE REDCAP IN THE NEW YORK CITY SUBWAY SYSTEM, WHICH BASICALLY MEANS THAT HIS JOB REVOLVED AROUND PICKING UP INCREDIBLY HEAVY THINGS AND PUTTING THEM WHEREVER THE MAN TOLD HIM TO. As you can probably imagine, this type of work sucks serious donkey tits. So when the United States decided it was sick of Germany’s bad attitude and joined in the twenty-four-hour all-night European booze-and-babes fiesta known as World War I, Johnson knew that this was a perfect opportunity to quit his stupid job, go to France, and do something epically awesome. He enlisted in the New York National Guard and was shipped out to Europe as a member of the all-black 369th Infantry Division, a formidable unit of soldiers better known as the Harlem Hellfighters.

  Unfortunately, early on in the campaign the Hellfighters really didn’t have the opportunity to dole out these much-needed ass-beatings because American High Command decided to give the African American regiment every single bullcrap job on the Western Front. They unloaded cargo vessels, dug ditches, and did all sorts of lame menial tasks, the extent of which fell somewhere between janitorial work and dishwashing on the Badassery Scale. Finally, after weeks of this with no end in sight, the French generals were like, “Well, if you won’t let these guys get in there and start busting heads, then we will,” and they decided to see whether or not “Harlem Hellfighters” was more than just a clever name. The 369th and Johnson were transferred to the French military command and were immediately pressed into service in the Argonne Forest.

  The Hellfighters didn’t disappoint. They saw 191 consecutive days of combat across the Western Front—more than any other American unit in the war—and were the first Allied regiment to cross the Rhine River into Germany. Despite being underequipped and woefully undersupplied (they usually only had one wool blanket available for every four men in the unit), the two thousand officers and men of the 369th won over a hundred medals for bravery from the French government, and came to be fearfully known by the German soldiers as “the bloodthirsty black men.” Despite all of their battlefield successes, perhaps the greatest and most notable display of Harlem Hellfighter badassitude came on the night of May 14, 1918, in a thermonuclear bloodbath that would come to be known only as the Battle of Henry Johnson.

  Sergeant Johnson and his buddy Needham Roberts were put on the graveyard shift of guard duty, and while on watch an entire platoon of about thirty G
erman infantrymen rushed their position. Johnson fought bravely, but was hit with a grenade, stabbed, and shot in the chest twice with a revolver, while Roberts was drilled with a shotgun and knocked to the floor like a sack of potatoes that had just been blasted at close range with a well-packed charge of double-aught buckshot. The Germans rushed in, grabbed Roberts, and started to haul him away as a prisoner.

  Well, Henry Lincoln Johnson wasn’t about to let that fly. This card-carrying Hellfighter managed to somehow stagger to his feet and charge after the Germans, firing his rifle and chucking grenades like a madman. When he finally caught the poor bastards, his gun jammed, so he beat the snot out of them with the rifle butt. When he broke his rifle over some jerk’s head, he then whipped out the ferocious twelve-inch Jason Voorhees–style bolo knife he always kept strapped to his belt.

  Now try to picture this for a minute. You’ve got a dude who’s already been wounded twenty-one damn times with everything from rifles to hand grenades, armed only with a bloody machete, in the midst of about twenty German soldiers, and he’s going off like a crazy-ass samurai hacking these bastards to pieces while they stand around like the evil black-clad ninjas from a bad 1970s kung fu flick. Despite massive injuries, Johnson slashed, stabbed, bobbed, weaved, and hacked at anything that moved. Every time he was knocked down he got back up, and at one point a dude jumped on his back and tried to choke him out, so Johnson judo-flipped the guy over his shoulder and stuck him in the ribs with his blade. In his intense battle rage Johnson killed four men, including the German platoon commander, critically wounded an additional twelve, and drove the remainder of the enemy back into the woods. When the coast was clear, Johnson strode over the huge steaming pile of dismembered corpses and dragged Needham Roberts back to his foxhole. The next morning, when reinforcements arrived, they found the two seriously wounded men sitting together singing jazz songs around a blazing campfire.