Roy Benavidez was a U.S. Army Special Forces medic who, in May 1968, fought for six hours while grievously wounded to rescue surrounded comrades in Vietnam.
His actions redefined battlefield courage, turning sheer willpower and self-sacrifice into living legend.
Rank - 127
Albert Jacka was an Australian soldier and the first from his nation to receive the Victoria Cross in World War I for recapturing a trench at Gallipoli in 1915. He survived extraordinary frontline violence only to die young in peacetime, his legend growing larger as his body finally gave out.
Rank - 128
A founding member of the SAS and one of World War II’s most feared raiders, leading audacious nighttime attacks that destroyed enemy airfields and shattered the myth of rear-area safety. Brilliant, violent, and deeply unstable, he embodied the brutal effectiveness of irregular warfare and became a lasting archetype of special forces legend.
Rank - 131
A British Army officer in World War II who went into combat armed with a broadsword, longbow, and bagpipes, turning audacity and spectacle into battlefield weapons. He became legendary for leading commando raids and capturing enemy soldiers through sheer nerve in an age dominated by guns, tanks, and artillery.
Rank - 132
William Marshal (c.1147–1219) was an English knight and statesman who served four kings and became the most celebrated tournament fighter and battlefield commander of the High Middle Ages. Renowned for his unwavering loyalty and mastery of mounted combat, he helped preserve the English crown during civil war and was later mythologized as the living ideal of chivalry.
Rank - 137
U.S. Army officer whose calm, uncompromising leadership at the Battle of Ia Drang defined modern airmobile warfare and the brutal reality of command under fire.
Rank - 139
Smedley D. Butler was a two-time Medal of Honor–winning U.S. Marine who spent decades fighting America’s overseas wars during the age of imperial expansion. After retiring, he became one of the nation’s fiercest critics of war profiteering, condemning the very system that had made him famous.
Rank - 148
John III Sobieski was the Polish king who thundered downhill at Vienna and changed Europe’s fate in a single charge.
Rank - 152
Mountain warlord, double-crossing survivor, and nightmare of the Russian Empire. He fought for faith, power, and family in that order—then died doing all three at once, proving the Caucasus never belonged to anyone who wanted it neatly.
Rank - 153
Leonidas I, the third son who was never meant to be king, died in a narrow pass at Thermopylae turning a doomed delay into a legend sharp enough to outlive the empire that killed him.
Rank - 169
A walking catalogue of injuries, Adrian Carton de Wiart charged through the twentieth century’s worst battles with the attitude of a man personally offended by mortality.
Rank - 175
Otto Skorzeny (1908–1975) was an Austrian SS commando famed for his audacious World War II special operations.
Rank - 179
Ariel Sharon’s life reads like a battlefield map—bold advances, scorched retreats, and a legacy carved in dust, defiance, and the fine print of history’s moral gray zone.
Rank - 187
Bloated, brilliant, and half-dying, Maurice de Saxe turned Fontenoy into a masterpiece of smoke, steel, and spite—the last waltz of France’s hungover genius.
Rank - 188
The Seljuk ghulams were elite slave-soldiers forged into a professional cavalry core, bound by pay, training, and proximity to power rather than blood or tribe. As a disciplined hinge of the Seljuk war machine, they delivered controlled violence that reshaped battlefields from Iran to Anatolia and left a template later empires would copy without apology.
Group Rank - 174
The Escadrille Lafayette was a World War I fighter squadron formed in 1916 by American volunteer pilots flying for France before the United States formally entered the war. Celebrated as both a combat unit and a propaganda symbol, it helped shape early air combat doctrine while cementing the myth of the fighter pilot as a modern warrior.
Group Rank - 175
The elite strike force of the Haganah, formed in 1941 to wage guerrilla war through sabotage, night raids, and rapid assaults during the final years of the British Mandate in Palestine. Hardened by scarcity and constant movement, its fighters helped shape the outcome of the 1948 war and left a lasting imprint on Israel’s military culture.
Group Rank - 178
They were a brotherhood sealed inside steel, waging a silent war of endurance and arithmetic against the Atlantic until the ocean and industry finally broke them.
Group Rank - 179
A professional cavalry brotherhood forged from enslaved youths, the Fatimid and Ayyubid Mamluk horsemen mastered discipline, mobility, and shock warfare to become the decisive military force of medieval Egypt and Syria.
Group Rank - 180
The French Fusiliers Marins are naval infantry trained to fight ashore with the discipline of sailors, the endurance of infantry, and a collective refusal to break once committed.
Group Rank - 181
The Teutonic Knights were a medieval military order that fused monastic discipline with state-building warfare, conquering and ruling large parts of the Baltic through crusade, colonization, and fortified power.
Group Rank - 182
The New Kingdom chariot corps turned speed into a weapon, using disciplined coordination and relentless mobility to carry Egyptian power far beyond the Nile.
Group Rank - 183
A disciplined wall of armored horsemen advances with relentless precision, embodying the Byzantine Empire’s doctrine of patience, weight, and inevitable force on the battlefield.
Group Rank - 184
Russian Grenadiers advanced like a moving wall of frostbitten resolve, breaking armies through sheer inevitability long after the grenades themselves stopped mattering.
Group Rank - 187
The Tagmata rode like a disciplined storm loosed from the palace gates, a brotherhood of armored precision that broke rebellions, crushed invasions, and outlived the emperors they served.
Group Rank - 188
The Tang Imperial Guards lived and died as the empire’s steel conscience—glorious in its youth, decadent in its age, and always one heartbeat away from violence.
Group Rank - 189
The Burgundian Ordonnance Companies marched like a machine built from pride and gunpowder, only to shatter spectacularly when the future came at them with Swiss pikes and winter steel.
Group Rank - 191
They moved as if the cold had carved secret truths into their bones, two brotherhoods built to appear where no one should exist and to leave before anyone realized they were there.
Group Rank - 194
The Marinejegerkommandoen move through the world like a cold-water omen, leaving only the hush of their passing behind.
Group Rank - 196
Dropped into a doomed battle they didn’t start, the Polish 1st Parachute Brigade fought through smoke, chaos, and betrayal to become the fiercest ghosts of Arnhem.
Group Rank - 197
The Solomonic Knights fought for seven centuries with blades, faith, and terrifying resolve, carving Ethiopia’s destiny into the highlands one battlefield at a time.
Group Rank - 199
In the end, they were the men who made the darkness blink first. Not knights, not villains—just professionals in a dirty century, paid to make silence possible again.
Group Rank - 200
Francis Pegahmagabow was a quiet Ojibwe sniper who turned World War I’s chaos into a disciplined ledger of survival and fear. He came home decorated, unheard, and spent the rest of his life fighting a country that loved his kills more than his voice.
Rank - 126