10 Badass War Heroes You've Never Heard Of
2. Simo Häyhä
Mr Häyhä was but a simple man. Growing up in Finland, he did his one year of mandatory military service, and then went back to working as a farmer and hunter in the snow-strewn wilderness. It's what happened after all that that makes him interesting, as he notched up the highest recorded number of confirmed sniper kills - 505 in any major war, earned the nickname "The White Death" from the Red Army as well as a place at number two on our list of badass war heroes you've never heard of. We don't think you'll forget about Simo Häyhä any time soon.
At the outbreak of the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union in 1939, with the Russian invading his homeland, Häyhä decided to pick up his rifle once again, military service be damned. Re-enlisting in the Finnish Army, he climbed up a tree near his home in temperatures between 40 and 20 °C, dressed completely in white camouflage, with a few tins off food to keep him nourished whilst he gunned down every single member of the Red Army he saw on the horizon.
When the Russians realised they were losing a dozen guys a day to just one sniper, they got a little worried. Over 500 members of the Soviet forces were gunned down by the White Death over a period of a hundred days, meaning that he averaged about five kills a day. And this was at a time of year with very few daylight hours, the way that those far north countries often get, and did we mention it was cold as balls as well? He even managed to take down all of their counter-snipers, and killed another fifty or so with his SMG.
The Russians tried carpet bombing the area they suspected Häyhä to be holed up in, to no avail. Finally a Soviet soldier shot him in the head with an exploding bullet, with the Finnish soldiers who found him claiming he "had half his head missing". Which doctors promptly reconstructed, and he woke up the day the war ended as its official badass.