Here are five groups of soldiers that prove that no matter how implausible the plot, some group of soldiers, somewhere, have topped it.

One reason we love war stories here at Cracked is because so often, what actually happens on the battlefield is way stranger than anything we got in cheesy 80s action movies. The real battlefield is chock full of heroics so badass that if you put them in respected war films like Saving Private Ryan or Universal Soldier, we'd all collectively groan, "Yeah, right."

5 Pavlov's Platoon Holds Off the Nazis. All of Them.

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The Half-Assed Hollywood Effort:

Here's a story implausible enough it could only have come from the fantasy genre, specifically the Battle of Helm's Deep from Lord of the Rings. A bunch of under-equipped warriors find themselves holed up in a fortress, outnumbered 30 to one. Knowing that death is all but inevitable, they decide to fend off the vastly superior army for a miraculous stretch of time as a pure exercise in ball-flexing manliness, before being rescued by a wizard.



Also, the fat elf dies.

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Topped by Real Life When:

Imagine if Helm's Deep had only been defended by two dozen guys and the enemy crossed the sheer overwhelming math of a zombie horde with the Empire's propensity for terrifying marshal efficiency.

That's what one Sergeant Yakov Pavlov's platoon found themselves facing down in September of 1942. The Nazis were pushing into Russia as part of the biggest military operation in the history of the human race, and everything was about to come to a head in the city of Stalingrad with a battle over a single bombed-out apartment building.



They called it the "Battle of Stalingrad" because "The Battle of That Building Where Sergei's Mom Used to Live" didn't sound quite as impressive.

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Pavlov and his platoon was tasked with the thankless job of retaking the building after the Nazis had seized it. To get a snapshot of what their mindset was like heading in, it's helpful to know that the assignment was considered an extremely dangerous one by the Soviet Army, and that the Soviet Army's slogan at the time was "die for Russia."