Well. I aren’t preferable to making a last stand. But as for my favorites (favorites?
)
1. Cameron, Mexico. Yep it’s the French Foreign Legion. It shows that you don’t have to have quantity to make a larger force suffer to the max. Although this one had survivors...it was a slug match to the end.
2. Strong Point Isabelle, Fortress of Dien Bien Phu, Viet Nam. This was the last of the fortified points to fall to the Vietnamese during this epic siege. Once again, this strong point fell after the Foreign Legion made one, last bayonet backed attack.
3. Islandwanda, Africa: yep, those British fought to the last man against the Zulus...1400 British against 30,000 Zulus. When they ran out of ammunition it was bayonets and hand to hand. And they died in those little neat squares.
4. And one little ship...the Jervis Bay. In 1940 this was a
liner given a few artillery guns and sent to escort freighters in the Atlantic. She was assigned as the only escort for a convoy of 37 ships when the convoy ran into a German battleship Admiral Scheer. Rather than running for their lives and allowing her convoy charges to be sunk by the German, the Jervis Bay put herself in between the convoy and the other, and repeatedly attacked the larger German. After an aborted attempt at ramming her larger opponent, and quite ventilated by shellfire, she finally slipped under the sea. Of her crew of 255, only 65 were rescued. Her sacrifice wasn’t in vain: the convey only lost five ships to this Germans pursuit.