As Mark Twain famously said, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”
As a kid, I always found history class incredibly boring. Why would I care about what happened way back then when I’m living now? But boy was I wrong. It turns out that there are hundreds of stories from the past that read just like scripts of films that you’d pay money to see in a theater.
Redditors have recently been recalling these wild events, so we’ve gathered the most fascinating ones below. From tales of war to historical events that sound completely made up, enjoy scrolling through these stories. Keep reading to also find conversations between Bored Panda and the person who started this thread, as well as Sebastian Major, host of the Our Fake History podcast. And be sure to upvote the stories you can’t believe are true!
#1
America selling out everybody to side with Russia.
Image source: anon, wirestock / freepik
#2
Reality TV star and failed businessman becomes US president.
Image source: Powerful_Artist, freepik
#3
Operation Mincemeat during WW2
British government takes the corpse of a homeless guy, fakes documents and dresses him up to look like a soldier, puts a fake letter in his pocket saying the British will invade Greece and Sardinia, fires him out of a submarine towards F*****t Spain.
The Spaniards find the body and tell the N**i party about the upcoming invasion, so they then move troops from Sicily to Greece. They’re totally caught off guard and the Allies successfully took Sicily, which they used to start the liberation of Italy.
Totally insane, can’t believe it worked.
Image source: TheIronMaiden13, St. John “Jock” Horsfall – The Times
#4
The life of Robert Smalls:
Robert Smalls was born into slavery on April 5, 1839, in Beaufort, South Carolina, to Lydia Polite, an enslaved woman, and possibly John McKee, her enslaver.The McKee family held Smalls and his mother in bondage. When Smalls was 12 years old, the McKees sent him to Charleston as a rented or “hired out” enslaved laborer. Smalls worked on ships in the Charleston Harbor.
During the Civil War, Smalls’ enslavers forced him to work as a pilot on the CSS Planter, a confederate steamboat that transported arms and ammunition.On May 13, 1862, Smalls and the rest of the Black crew commandeered the boat and sailed to Union lines.On the way, Small and the crew freed Smalls’ wife Hannah, daughter Elizabeth and son Robert Jr. They disguised themselves and, using the knowledge they had gained as maritime workers, sailed the boat past Forts Sumter and Moultrie. Smalls surrendered the Planter to the U.S. Military, thus securing the freedom of everyone on the vessel. Smalls became the first Black man to become a pilot in the United States Navy. As the captain of the USS Planter, Smalls fought in 17 battles during the Civil War.
During Reconstruction, South Carolinians in and around Beaufort elected Smalls to the United States House of Representatives. He served from 1874 to 1879 and 1881 to 1887.8 As “Southern Redemption,” a violent effort to usurp political power from Black Southerners and Republicans, swept South Carolina, Smalls maintained his congressional seat, though he briefly lost his seat in 1878. Smalls retired from congress in 1887, after William Elliott unseated him.
While serving as a Representative of South Carolina, Smalls helped secure funding to improve the Port Royal Harbor and secured appropriations from the government for its use of The Citadel.Smalls also fought to secure full citizenship and equality for Black Americans. He resisted Jim Crow, opposing s*********n of the United States Armed Forces, railroads and restaurants. After retiring from Congress, “Smalls was appointed the Collector of Customs in Beaufort.” He served in this position for two decades, despite dissent from local white people and the Jim Crow social, political, economic and legal regime.
During Reconstruction, Smalls purchased the McKee Home in Beaufort. He and his family lived in the home for almost a century after the purchase.In an act of graciousness, Smalls allowed his former enslaver, Mrs. McKee, to remain in his home after she fell ill. Robert Smalls died on February 23, 1915, and was laid to rest in Beaufort at Tabernacle Baptist Church.He died not only a hero to his Black crewmates on the USS Planter and his family but also to the Union and the people of South Carolina.
Image source: seaburno, Mathew Benjamin Brady
#5
Didn’t Australia go to war against emus? And didn’t the emus win?
Image source: simpledonutring2
#6
Sail of Endurance to Antarctica. Ship was stuck on ice, sank and crew stuck on ice field. It took them almost one and half year to walk over ice and sail with small boats to uninhabited “elephant island”.
After that part of crew sailed 1300 km with small lifeboat in roaring in southern storms to small island where there was whaling station. They could not reach side where there is harbour so they hiked over mountains to over 1000 metres of elevation.
In the end everyone from 28 men survived the trip.
Image source: Federal_Cobbler6647, Frank Hurley
#7
The St. Nazaire Raid in the Second World War. In short, a bunch of British commandos with balls of tungsten rammed a ship full of explosives into a N**i dry dock and it blew up the next day while a whole pile of German officers were inspecting the wreckage
From an account of the raid – “Just before the Campbeltown exploded, Sam Beattie was being interrogated by a German naval officer who was saying that it wouldn’t take very long to repair the damage the Campbeltown has caused. Just at that moment, she went up. Beattie smiled at the officer and said, ‘We’re not quite as foolish as you think!'”
S**t sounds made up for a big budget action movie, such a crazy read.
Image source: SopranosBluRayBoxSet, Royal Navy official photographer
#8
In June 1667, Dutch Admiral Michiel de Ruyter led a raid right up the River Medway, near the Thames, and pretty much knocked out the entire English fleet while they were still moored. They even captured the English flagship, the Royal Charles, and sailed it back to the Netherlands. It was such an unbelievable humiliation for the Royal Navy that, if you saw it in a movie, you’d think it was too over-the-top to be real—but it actually happened.
Image source: LockStockNL, Ferdinand Bol
#9
When the Irish film Michael Collins included a scene of the British army opening fire on civilians at a GAA match, k**ling spectators and players alike, some people were up in arms about the director being inflammatory and including needless scenes to demonise the British.
So we had to open a history book and say: no, no, it happened. There was more than one Bloody Sunday.
Image source: Murky_Translator2295
#10
Operation Cowboy where a mixed group of Americans and Germans saved part of the Lipizzaner stallion herd from the advancing Soviets *who would have eaten them*. Mark Felton wrote a great book on it called *Ghost Riders*. It’s a fun read.
Image source: rubikscanopener
#11
Press conference at the Four Seasons Landscaping Supply store in Philadelphia. It’s right next to a d***o shop. This would’ve been the moment _Veep_ “jumped the shark” if they had tried it.
Image source: Seahearn4, Dough4872
#12
Mad Jack Churchill
A man who fought WW2 with a bow, arrows and a broad sword. Also he played the bag pipes.
Image source: Dante1529, Ukjend
#13
That one [tough] soldier, Adrian Carton de Wiart. Literally an action movie protagonist irl. Survived 2 bullets in his left eye in the same charge, amputated a few fingers himself when the doctor refused to do so, survived several plane crashes and castaways, survived the Boer war, ww1 and ww2 and a few more, personally told Mao Zedong that communism is bs, etc.
Image source: mistiroustranger, William Orpen
#14
Major Digby Warter of the First Battalion, fought in WW2, always carrying an umbrella and a bowler hat. Never wore an helmet because lol, helmets. He once used said umbrella to shove it inside the eye of a German, disabling him and the armoured car he was driving. Saved a priest who was under heavy fire, saying “come with me, I’ve got an umbrella”. Captured, escaped, known for his courage, even helped a German truck out of a ditch while disguised as a Dutch citizen. He once fought a**e naked because shrapnel had cut the rear of his pants.
Image source: anasui1, British Army
#15
Napoleon returning from exile. Seems like something that was badly written into history so the writers would have an excuse to continue the plotline.
Image source: xslvtx, Franz Josef Sandmann
#16
The leadup to the first world war. So many specific coincidences and every attempt to prevent the war failing in one way or another.
From Archduke Ferdinand’s driver taking a wrong turn onto the street where Ferdinand’s assassin was having a consolation sandwich, sulking over having failed the previous assassination attempt earlier in the day. To a diplomat having a heart attack and dying moments before signing a document.
It’s as if the forces of the universe made sure the war would be inevitable.
What I mean is, not the fact the war broke out, but rather how it wasn’t as straightforward as one might think.
—
Or maybe even the christmas truce. We all know it happened, but the fact that enemies who previously shot at eachother met and even played soccer..
Image source: Derolyon, Underwood
#17
Hong Xiuquan and the Taiping Rebellion.
Some Chinese dude failed the civil service exams too many times and had a nervous breakdown. He then had a hallucination telling him he was Jesus’s brother and started one of the deadliest civil wars in Chinese history.
Image source: VictorSierra09, Ford & West Lith
#18
There was a famous navy battle just off the coast of the Netherlands where Dutch warships were fought by men on horseback. The French cavalry won, capturing all 14 warships with no losses.
Even if you factor in the detail that this took place during a record cold-snap that froze the freshwater bay over completely, it’s still a pretty outlandish tale.
Case in point: the details of its authenticity are still being debated by historians, though all records indicate that a total surrender on the part of the Dutch navy *did* happen – the issue is whether the cavalry actually charged them head-on, or simply went out as a formality to negotiate their surrender while they were stuck in frozen-over waters.
Either way it’s an exceptionally rare occurrance, and one that’s been commemorated in paintings and poorly-cited Wikipedia articles.
Image source: sck8000, fr:Charles Mozin
#19
Battle of Castle Itter. American, French POWs and German Wehrmacht solders fought against the SS. Gross over simplification, the SS had a handful of high value French prisoners in Castle Itter. A small American unit went to liberate them before they could be executed. The came across a handful of German solders. They ended up joining up with them to protect the POWs. The 3 groups fought off the SS until more Americans showed up. .
Image source: Mountianman1991, Steve J. Morgan
#20
Audie Murphy. There was a movie made about him and his exploits in the military. They had to *tone down* things because audiences would have found it unbelievable that someone actually did some of the things he did.
Image source: FlusteredCustard13, U.S. Army
#21
Great Boston Molasses flood of 1919.
Image source: wanderingstorm, BPL
#22
The cadaver synod. A pope exhumed his predecessor and put the corpse on trial.
Image source: ohdearitsrichardiii, Jean-Paul Laurens
#23
The battle of Remagen.
As the Americans closed in on Germany and reached the Rhine in the closing months of WW2, the Germans had successfully blown up every last bridge except for one that was already wired up and hours from demolition.
When Brig. General William M. Hoge was sent to liberate Remagen, he was shocked to discover the Ludendorff bridge still intact.
It was generally accepted that there would be no bridges left, but Eisenhower believed that in the off chance there was a bridge left, it should be captured.
Hoge then decided to defy a direct order to link up with Patton further south and sent his men on a s******l charge to capture the bridge.
At the very same time, N**i troops that had fled across the bridge to escape the allied advance were frantically trying to set off the detonation charges and drop it into the Rhine.
While some of the charges actually went off and badly damaged the structure, the bridge still stood because a lucky hit from an allied artillery shell severed the wires to the detonation charges before they could be triggered.
After a valiant effort the bridge was captured, opening an Allied beachhead into Germany.
The first man across, Alexander A. Drabik, spoke about it.
*”While we were running across the bridge – and, man, it may have been only 250 yards, but it seemed like 250 miles to us – I spotted this lieutenant, standing out there completely exposed to the machine gun fire that was pretty heavy by this time…He was cutting wires and kicking the German demolition charges off the bridge with his feet! Boy that took plenty of guts. He’s the one who saved the bridge and made the whole thing possible – the kinda guy I’d like to know.”*
Incidentally, Sgt. Drabik became the first man to successfully cross the Rhine and capture German territory since the time of Napoleon.
With the tireless work of the Army Corp. of Engineers, the bridge survived German mortar attacks, artillery barrages, and hundreds of air raids (Defended by the single largest AA battery arranged in the entire war)
It was almost obliterated by a near miss from a railroad gun, SS Frogmen who tried to float downstream during the night and sabotage the bridge were spotted by special spotlights mounted on tanks, naval mines sent downstream were caught by nets, and the Nazis even tried to blow it up with V2 rockets (But missed).
After 10 days the Ludendorff bridge collapsed on its own (K**ling several engineers trying to keep it standing), but its capture allowed six divisions to cross and establish a beachhead in German territory, and likely shortened the entire war by weeks or even months.
Image source: UhohSantahasdiarrhea, Unknown author
#24
The Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
The failed first attempt, the car taking the route that it did, the car stalling right in front of Gavrilo Princip then the aftermath of that event being so catastrophic.
It sounds like sensational Hollywood writing.
Image source: FatRascal_, Ferdinand Schmutzer
#25
The Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference. It would have been rejected for an episode of Veep because it was so ridiculous.
Image source: DuckyKittyFluffy
#26
The St Scholastica day riot. Two students go to a pub and complain about the quality of the wine – a fight starts and escalates out of control, lasting three days with over 90 people k**led.
Image source: GypsumF18, Howard Davie
#27
The battle off Samar. A tiny US task force driving off the entire Japanese Center force(which included the Yamato) by fighting so hard the IJN thinks each ship is one class above its actual class(IJN thought the destroyers were cruisers, the destroyer escorts were destroyers, and the light carriers were fleet carriers). The Yamato alone weighed more than the entire US force that entered battle against them. It involves one of the smallest oceangoing US warships getting into a gun duel with an IJN Heavy Cruiser and damaging it so heavily that the IJN scuttled it after the battle.
Image source: bigloser42, U.S. Navy photo 80-G-288144
#28
Alexander the Great approaching the island city of Tyre and deciding “S**ew it, rather than attack an island, I’ll just make the island part of the mainland” and building a land bridge to link Tyre to the mainland so that he could attack and take it.
Image source: lastdiadochos, Unknown author
#29
-That far right Norwegian man who pretended to be a police and attacked those teenagers in that island. Sounds like a plot to some very mediocre Nordic Noir book.
-The eccentric rich Danish man who invited a reporter to his submarine and ended up m*******g and cutting her body into pieces. Like wtf who does that? Would probably get rejected as a movie script for being too weird.
-9/11.
Image source: foxmachine, shyachlo
#30
Charles VI of France and his grandson Henry VI of England both became mentally ill in their twenties.
Their relatives then responded by deciding to fight each other over the regency. Much of the animosity was provoked by already existing tensions between two members of the royal family. In Charles’ case, it was his brother, Louis, Duke of Orléans and his cousin, Jean the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy. In Henry’s, it was two of his cousins, Richard Plantagenet, 3rd Duke of York and Edmund Beaufort, 2nd Duke of Somerset.
Charles and Henry’s respective wives, Isabeau of Bavaria and Marguerite of Anjou, were both slandered as evil and greedy foreign harlots who were cheating on their mad husbands with other men, who just so happened to be their main political supporters.
Louis of Orléans and Edmund Beaufort were both basically m******d by the rivals and their sons’ swore vengeance. Then the respective commissioners of those m*****s, Jean the Fearless and Richard Plantagenet also got k**led violently by their enemies and their sons were also like, “VENGEANCE IS MINE!!!”
Charles and Henry’s immediate family members eventually took sides in the rivalry between the two members of the extended royal family. Charles’ only surviving son surrounded himself with members of the Armagnac-Orléans faction and Henry’s wife and only son surrounded themselves with Beauforts.
Charles and Henry both died insane and it’s not certain how much they knew was going on. One kind of hopes that they didn’t actually know that much about the state of their family and kingdom, because talk about depressing. However, the methods of their deaths were different: Charles died of natural causes while Henry was secretly m******d.
There’s so many parallels it feels like this was a TV show where the writers got bored and decided to just recycle old plots.
Image source: jezreelite, Mazarine Master
#31
I do a lot of short tornado documentaries and honestly so many moments I have had talked about sound like they were ripped right out of an over the top tornado action/horror movie. Natchez is probably the most striking to me off the top of my head. The second deadliest tornado in US history, it got so dark out people had to light candles to see, it straddled the Mississippi River, sank essentially a fleet’s worth of ships on the river and caused so much destruction people were thrown into full religious crises by the end of it.
Xenia is another one like that, there was a moment in that storm where students fled their school seconds before a bus smashed through the wall behind them. Very scary stuff. I’ve been honestly floored at how many true tornado moments sound like something people would say are over the top and unrealistic if you included in a movie about said tornado.
Image source: lowercaseenderman
#32
Battle of Saragarhi where 21 soldiers fought against 10 or 12,000 soldiers.
The numbers would put any crazy Indian movie to shame 😂. So they decided to make a movie out of it as well.
Image source: imik4991
#33
That giant Tsunami wave that happened in Alaska – Lituya Bay in 1958. That one was supposedly 1,700 feet in height.
Image source: myhamsterisajerk
#34
Hands down 9-11. Not even a debate. Seriously, a bunch of terrorists steal 4 jet planes, fly one of them into the g*****n Pentagon and fly two of them into The World Trade Center towers? AND THEY F*****G BOTH COLLAPSE? Get the f**k outta’ here with that b******t.
Image source: PunchBeard
#35
Jurassic period.
Image source: Other_Cantaloupe_879
#36
1. American WW2 Veteran, Desmond Doss helped a wounded Japanese soldier during the war.
2. I don’t remember this quite often but some say that while Desmond Doss was running (or rescuing I’m not sure), the Japanese Soldiers’ guns malfunctioned while trying to fire at him. This did not make it to the movie “Hacksaw Ridge” however, because of how many people or watchers will find this unbelievable.
Needless to say Desmond Doss is a believer of God.
Image source: Sdrete
#37
One of my favourites is that once, the winter was so bad around Paris, that packs of wolves gathered into a large group, crossed the frozen Seine and beginning hunting people in the streets of Paris. It’s allegedly supposed to have ended after pitched fighting in the streets led to people and wolves battling it out on the steps of Notre Dame where the pack leader ( Because alpha triggered weird responses to this) was k**led. The remaining wolves fled and for the better part of the year, allegedly, nearly all wolves were wiped out in the north of France
Of course Paris and Norte Dame looked very different at the time. Barely a small city and a half-built church BUT HOW IS THIS NOT A MOVIE ALREADY?!
Image source: ValBravora048
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