Eight minutes isn't a long time. It may take you longer than that to read this thread. In the great scheme of things, you can hardly even notice such a short span of time. But sometimes those moments can leave a lasting impression. Such was the case on September 23, 1917.

He wanted to catch up to Manfred's score. Earlier in the day, he had downed an obsolete British craft, so he had inched closer. But to catch Richthofen he needed more. And he had just the plane to do it in. His experimental Triplane was a marvel. It could climb like a homesick angel, and its ability to twist and turn through the sky was unmatched. So, after a brief visit with his two younger brothers, Werner Voss set off in search of Allied aircraft.

He quickly left behind his two wingmen, and bumped into eight Allied aircraft. Eight to one is very long odds, but Voss charged into the fray. The eight minutes that followed are now etched into aviation history.

His opponents were skilled. They included the famous English ace James McCudden. Their aircraft were different in many ways from Voss' Triplane. The SE5a couldn't climb at the same rate as a Triplane, nor could it turn anywhere near as sharply. But while it had some weaknesses, it also had some advantages as well. The Triplane was relatively slow, while the SE5a was very fast. And if it couldn't turn very quickly, it made up for that fact by being very stable. It was one of the first aircraft known for being a 'stable gun platform,' meaning you could be very accurate with your fire while careening through the sky. Also, it was better in a dive than the Triplane.

At any moment, Voss could decide to simply climb away from the fight. But if he want to catch the Red Baron, he needed to down these British pilots. So the fight was on. With eight to one odds, the Brits swooped in to get what looked like an easy kill. But this was going to be anything but an easy day. Every time they attacked, the Triplane whirled to meet them. Voss knew every part of the Dicta Boelcke, the rules for aerial combat set up by one of his predecessors in the war. In this new facet of war, the instinctive reaction to someone attacking you was to turn away and try to avoid their fire. As it turns out, this is the worst possible thing you can do in that situation. Paradoxically, it is safest to turn into the attack. You are much more difficult to hit and the enemy has less time to fire at you.

So Voss turned into every attack, and he did so in a novel way. Due to the design of his plane, he was able to use his rudder to "slip turn." (This is also called a "flat turn" or an "uncoordinated turn") This technique requires a special type of aircraft design in which your rudder comprises almost all of your vertical stabilizer. The result is an ability to stomp on the rudder pedals and immediately reorient yourself in the horizontal plane. Normally, you would have to bank the aircraft in the direction you want to turn, or at least make a wide turn using your rudder alone. The Triplane was able to simply pivot mid-air. So, the Brits would do what they were trained to do--lead the target. Figure out where you think the enemy is going to be, and fire into that spot. But Voss wasn't there! Constantly scanning the sky for threats, he would see the Allied aircraft coming and turn into their attack. Now, the predator had turned into the prey. Instead of stitching the Fokker full of holes they were under the German's guns themselves.

The fight swirled through the skies. Nine aircraft--engines howling, machine guns stuttering--climbed and dove. Each pilot had moments where they were firing on the enemy, and moments where they were being fired upon. Every aircraft absorbed bullets fired into it. Voss was able to disable first one, then a second aircraft. A second German plane joined the fray for an instant, but was quickly damaged and forced to leave the fight. The pilots strained at the controls. In this era, it was the pilot's muscles that forced their craft to maneuver through the air via a system of cables and pulleys. What would later become known as "G-force" alternately slammed them into their seats and threatened to throw them out of it. They had no armor protection, and had no way to combat any fire that resulted from their fuel tank or engine becoming damaged. But still, each man had enough courage to deal with his fears and to take the fight to the enemy.

At one point, Voss was at the apex of at least five separate streams of machine gun fire and escaped apparently unscathed. His skill impressed the British pilots pitted against him. Voss never went in a particular direction for more than a couple seconds. He was always turning into the next attack. The Allies shot hundreds of bullets at him, but his plane seemed to be impossible to bring down. I cannot say what Voss's emotions were in those moments, but he was using every bit of talent and skill he possessed. During this fight, Voss embodied what it means to be a fighter pilot. For every attack, he had an answer.

But then, the eight minutes were up.

A bullet is a small thing. Your thumb is almost surely bigger than one. But it moves at supersonic speed, and it is much harder than our vulnerable flesh. For just an instant too long, Voss stayed going in a particular direction. That was long enough for a bullet to enter his body. The plane that was dancing through the sky for minutes on end was now hardly maneuvering at all. With a second machine gun burst, the Triplane entered a steep dive. Finally, the plane impacted the ground. Werner Voss was dead at the age of 20.

With this dogfight, Voss sealed the fact that he would never catch Richthofen, but in this historian’s eyes he surpassed the Red Baron for eight minutes. But how do we know of this story? We know of how he died not from German sources, but instead from his opponents. As the adage goes, the victors wrote the history. But in this instance the meaning of the adage was turned on its head. The victors gave their accounts of a German pilot of unsurpassed skill. Their accounts differed in exactly what happened (easily explained by the adrenaline rush of combat combined with the length of the fight) but they all agreed that their opponent was gallant and talented. That night, they raised a glass in his honor.

And nearly a century later, maybe you would join me in doing the same.

To Werner Voss!

Historians are often really quite terrible at naming things - we tend to be an overly literal bunch. So, we have things like the First World War, which was (debatably) the first war which involved the whole world. These names are usually therefore quite boring.

There is, however, one time that this tendency towards literalism has paid off in a big way: the Defenestration of Prague.

If you are good with big words, you know exactly what happened - someone got pushed out of a window in Prague. Actually, two someones, 200 years apart. Is there something about Prague that makes defenestration the murder technique of choice?

In any case, the latter Defenestration of Prague was one of the precipitating events of the Thirty Years' War, which really should be renamed the Great Campaign for Window Safety.

The best death I've come across in my research is that of Keeve "Kip" Siegel, the CEO of KMS Industries. In the early 1970s, KMS attempted to take out patents on the basic technology of laser fusion (inertial confinement fusion using lasers), which had actually been developed at the Livermore laboratory a decade earlier, but the technology was classified so nobody knew.

The government thought that the KMS scientist working on it was taking classified information he'd had access to and was trying to profit off of it. Sorting out what-was-known and who-knew-it-first was a complicated affair, but Siegel was savvy about getting the press on his side as the "little guy" (he was actually quite corpulent) against the oppressive secrecy of the US government. This was at a time when the energy crisis was hitting and the idea of clean, cheap fusion energy seemed like a godsend. The government's scientists thought that was KMS was doing was neither original nor going to be successful — again, they had worked on the same subject for a decade already.

Anyway, by 1975, it had become clear that the KMS approach to laser fusion wasn't really going to work, and their financial backers (and scientists) had pulled out. Siegel, who had wanted to be independent and successful and rich, ended up going to the government and appealing for a bailout. He was a witness before the powerful Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, explaining why they should give him government funds and make him a government contractor.

He started explaining why his company was still a strong company to support:

We know our time scale is optimistic. On the other hand, we feel that these goals are achievable. We are asking our Government to help us—

The dash is in the original transcript... because it's where he stopped talking. He then slumped in his chair, mumbled the word "stroke," and died on the spot. The transcript ends there and says "a medical emergency stopped the hearing" or something like that. Thus ended the up-and-down career of Kip Siegel.

It's the only case I've heard of where someone testifying before Congress actually died while testifying. He got front page of the Washington Post with a terrible headline: "The Words Stuck in His Mouth; Stroke Kills Hill Energy Witness."

Separating fact from fiction in the life of Grigori Rasputin is quite possibly an impossible task. The so-called Mad Monk was rumored to be a member of the Khlysts, a sect that themselves were subject to rumors about bizarre sexual practices, and despite probably not being true (less than reputable sources still like to claim it to be so), it certainly didn't help his reputation. When it comes to his death, it reads just as fantastical as his life, and as the only first hand accounts are from those who plotted his death, much of it must be taken with a grain of salt, a story told by men who wished to describe just how inhuman their quarry was.

The close relationship he enjoyed with the Imperial Family of Russia along with his reputation causes all sorts of tongues to wag over the possibility he was sleeping with the Tzarina, and possibly her daughters as well. The apparent influence he held over the Tzarina earned him few friends, and an attempt on his life was made in 1914 presumably over these fears although the assassin was an insane peasant woman who couldn't be connected to any palace intrigue. Despite the deep stab wound to his gut, Rasputin survived that one.

With the Tzar having left to oversea the military during World War I however, the Tzarina's reliance on Rasputin became only more pronounced however, and in December of 1916 a new attempt on his life was made. Prince Felix Yusupov was married to the Tzar's niece, and, along with other plotters including army officers and politicians, invited Rasputin to his family palace. Rasputin was given cyanide laced food and drink, which appeared to have no ill effects on him. Determined to kill the man, Yusupov fetched a revolver and shot him twice in the abdomen, which seemed only to enrage Rasputin, who attacked him, and then fled up a flight of stairs from the basement room he had been being entertained in, and out the door into the Russian winter. Shot twice more outside by Vladimir Purishkevich, a member of the Duma, Yusupov then hit him over the head to ensure he was down. The body was trussed, weighted, and dumped through a hole cut in the ice of a river. his body would be found a few days later, and although the rumors were that he was still alive when disposed of, there was little to suggest he had drowned to death, and the real cause of death was probably a bullet to the head during his escape attempt.

Whether or not he was poisoned has also been called into question. Prince Yusupov claimed he had, but it wasn't found during the autopsy. As I said at the onset, only his killers know exactly how the murder was conducted, and it is clear that they wished to ensure that their actions were seen as the noble slaying of a monster who threatened the Romanov family, and what better way to do so than describe an inhuman fanatic who survived poison, shooting, and the cold, only to finally die by drowning under the ice.

Whatever happened to Oskar Dirlewanger ?

Oskar Dirlewanger had a long career as a soldier, fighting in World War One, fighting with the freikorps against communist insurrectionists in Weimar Germany, fighting with the Condor Legion during the Spanish Civil War. He also had a long 'career' as a sexual sadist and convicted child rapist. Undoubtedly this all made him very qualified to head the SS convict division, tasked with anti-partisan operations on the eastern front. The division went on to commit some of the most heinous crimes of the war (some of which are loosely depicted in the Russian movie Come and See. Sealing up hundreds of civilians in a barn, setting it on fire and spraying with machine guns was a trademark. Gang rape, mutilation and wholesale slaughter of civilians and enemy combatants was the modus operandi of these brave SS men. Redirected to Warsaw in time to fight in the uprising of 1944, the division took part in the Wola massacre of as many as 40,000 Polish civilians.

Fast forward to the end of the war, Dirlewanger wound up in Althausen prison in the French occupation zone. Official reports state that he died of natural causes while in prison. Later on, there were unsubstantiated rumours had it that he escaped and joined the French Foreign Legion to fight in Indochina, and then the Egyptian Army.

One report had it different. In an act worthy of a Tarantino revenge/vindication story arc, he was found by three Poles serving in the French military, who proceeded to mercilessly beat him to death in his cell.

The noble Romans, wrapped in virtue, have made a great impression throughout history due to their indomitable courage and iron will, and none so perfectly exemplify this as the Emperor Valentian I, who got so angry at the lack of deference from some German ambassadors that he died of a stroke.

The Napoleonic Wars is full of spectacular everythings: I mean, look at the uniforms. However, there are many deaths or near deaths that warrant a place here: suicidal Ney, Pointatowki's death at Leipzig, or the deaths of Lannes or Bessiers, some of Napoleon's best friends. Despite many noteworthy deaths, there is one that tops them all: Antoine Charles Louis de Lasalle, known as the Hussar General.

He's well known for taking the fort at Stettin as well as being one of Napoleon's best light cavalry commanders. However, his death is one of glory. The days before the major battle at Wagram, Lasalle went to his footlocker and found the worst thing in his life. In there was two broken tumblers that his wife had given him, something he always used to drink with (and he was well known for being a drinker); among the broken items was a broken liquor bottle, empty; and the worst thing, his favorite smoking pipe was broken (he was known for riding into battle with this pipe rather than a sabre, hitting enemy soldiers on the head and riding around them). When his aide entered his tent, Lasalle looked at his aide and said "I think I'm going to die soon.

So he spends the night writing up a letter to Napoleon, begging him to take care of his wife and children if he were to die. The next morning, Napoleon came to inspect the troops but Lasalle pushed his way to the Emperor and shoved the letter in his hands, begging him to read it.

Then the Battle of Wagram happened. Normally, Lasalle would be at the front, chasing fleeing Austrians (as they are wont to do), but due to the battle, he sat back most of the battle. Then Marshal MacDonald did his famous "Monstrous Column" that broke the Austrians. The column was being threatened by flanking Austrians moving in on the column, so Lasalle ordered his hussars forward to stop the Austrians for just a bit. He charges, engages a Landwher battalion that was flanking but suddenly falls from his saddle, shot in the head by an unknown soldier (it was reported that it was by a Grenadier that was supporting the militiamen). For an hour, his comrades fought over the general's body until it was brought back at the end of the day.

From there, everything changed; David Johnson, author of Napoleon's Cavalry and It's Leaders stated that the cavalry was different after Wagram. The Hussars became rowdy drunks and fought frequently with anyone who said the wrong thing. Afterward, he states that a dark specter hung over the cavalry, as if restraining it because of the death of one of it's own.

So one of the more depressing parts of the Jewish liturgy is Eleh Ezkarah "This I Remember", often called the Ten Martyrs or the Martyrology in English. It's read on Yom Kippur, and is a narrative of several Rabbis who are executed in various horrifying ways, This narrative is definitely not historical--the Rabbis listed weren't contemporaries. It's a poem. But other Jewish texts mention some of these, too, and it's an old text, even if it's not a historical one.

Anyway, they were all killed in gruesome ways. One was burned alive, with a Torah scroll and wet wood to slow the death. The narrative says that the executioner, inspired by his piety on his deathbed, removed the stuff slowing the flames and fanned the fire to give him a speedy death, and jumped into the fire, killing himself. Another was flayed. Rabbi Akiva had has skin ripped with iron combs.

There's also a particularly gruesome narrative from the 17th century during a particularly bloody string of massacres. It may well not be historical, but it is horrifying. I'm putting it in spoiler-text because it's so awful that it will ruin your day. I recommend not reading it, unless you want nightmares.

For those of you who ignored my warning, here it is.  During the Khmielnicky Massacres of the mid-17th century, there's an account of a pregnant woman who had her fetus cut out of her, then had a live cat sewn back inside her, where it would claw at the inside of the woman until she died.  They also cut off her hands to keep her from killing herself or removing the cat

It's from an account of the massacre, but it (hopefully) is a rumor that was recorded, not an actual event. shiver

Anyway, on to a somewhat lighter topic (well, relatively). In terms of battle deaths, the fighters at Massada died pretty interestingly, if Josephus is to be believed. At the end of the Great Jewish Revolt in the First Century, a group of rebels had their last stand in a mountain fortress in the desert. With huge stores of food, an enormous cistern, and only one path of access that was easily blocked, they held out for years. Eventually the Romans built a massive ramp to lift a seige tower up.

But just before the Romans could storm the fortress, the rebels killed themselves. Or more properly, they killed each other. Because they believed suicide was a sin, they all killed each other instead. The Romans rolled in to a fortress full of dead people, after years of beseiging.

While there definitely was a seige at Massada, the mass suicide bit is unverified. Josephus may've been re-using his own experience at Yodfat, where he survived a similar mutual suicide pact.

edit: Apparently spoiler text doesn't work with the CSS, so you'll have to scroll now.

Oh my. This is definitely one of my favorite things to read about. Due to my incredibly extensive knowledge of this topic I shall focus on one region, Imperial China as I grew up studying Chinese History and Culture under some of the best history teachers I know.

There are five punishments for males during Dynastic China. Starting with the Xia Dynasty, these were organized into a system of physical penalties based on crime, although they were definitely not the only physical punishments used. There was tattooing, amputating the nose, amputating one or both feet, castration and capital punishment. Later in the Han Dynasty some were dropped and during the Sui and Tang these were changed to two forms of beating, either with a light bamboo cane or a big stick (my teacher said iron rods were used as well), penal servitude along with a beating, exile and death again. The female capital punishment was permission to commit suicide, although more often than not they just committed suicide without permission.

There were many methods of capital punishment used, from che lie (being pulled apart by horses) to ling chi (slow slicing) to jiao (strangulation). Che lie was my favorite as a child to read about, just because it was so odd. One of the most famous examples of che lie was Shang Yang, a Legalist statesman who would help Duke Xiao of QIn institute reforms that would shape the Qin kingdom into a centralized military state and would help pave the way for the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang. These reforms were very unpopular and once Duke Xiao passed away, the next ruler ordered the nine familial exterminations against Yang, causing him to go into hiding. Yang was ironically denied entrance to an inn for not having proper identification, a law that he helped institute. Yang was captured and executed by having five chariots each pulled by horses running in all directions attached to his limbs and head. That is the most prevailing theory although some say it was merely his body or his ashes that were pulled apart. My teacher told me that Yang Guifei, concubine to Tang Emperor Xuanzong, and cause of the An Lushan Rebellion was also executed in such a manner but English sources say she was strangled. Cattle were also used to further humiliate the victim and prolong the death so they walked much slower.

Ling chi, or slow slicing seems to be the method of execution that most foreigners were aware of and associated with China. It could be used as torture, execution or dishonorment after death or sometimes all three. This was the application of slow but deliberate cuts to the body and limbs usually over a long period of time. If the emperor felt merciful, the executioner would stab your heart first before dismembering your body. If not, the procedure could last up to three days and three thousand cuts but most died or passed out within the first twenty minutes. There are pictures of slow slicing during the Ming Dynasty which are grisly yet fascinating. I think it pops up quite often in Chinese historical dramas for some reason.

The other methods are quite normal from strangulations to quartering to beheading. I do recall that in the later dynasties if you were wealthy enough and gave yourself along with all your properties in service to the emperor, you could avoid capital punishment and perhaps become an eunuch.

There were also many famous vicious deaths among the consorts and concubines of the Emperor. I think my personal favorite story is that of Empress Dowager Lu. She was married to Emperor Gaozu, founder of the Han Dynasty but hated his concubine Qi since Qi's son Liu Ruyi was favored by Emperor Gaozu to become his heir. After her son Liu Ying (Emperor Hui) became emperor, he shielded them due to his brotherly love for his younger half-brother who was 12. Emperor Hui even intercepted Liu Ruyi when Liu was summoned to the capital and took in his little brother, going so far as to keep his brother at his side for many months. One day the emperor was to leave on a hunting trip but Liu, being only 12 did not want to leave his bed. Emperor Hui figured it was safe and so left his brother at his palace. Hearing this, his mother sent assassins to force poison down Liu's throat and mutilate Concubine Qi. Qi's limbs were cut off, eyes gorged out, ears and tongue sliced off and her body was thrown into a pool of human waste or pig pen. When the emperor returned and saw the "human swine", he was shocked when he realized that it was Concubine Qi. He fell sick for a year and never again participated in government affairs, instead living an indulgent lifestyle. He told his mother "If I, as the emperor of China, cannot protect my late father's beloved concubine and son, there is no use in attempting to govern China." Emperor Hui did however manage to protect his elder brother Liu Fei by grabbing a cup poisoned wine intended for Liu which caused the shocked Dowager Empress to knock the cup out of his hands. Another Dowager Empress, Cixi of the Manchu Dynasty, supposedly poisoned her nephew Emperor Guangxu with arsenic just before her death to ensure he would not re-institute reforms after her death. Sadly, such going-ons among the imperial consorts were common and it was not unusual to attempt to kill all the other potential heirs and concubines both during the reign of the Emperor and after his death.

Most of my references and such are in Chinese but there are some translations. And there are decent overviews in Wikipedia which don't over sensationalize as many English sources are wont to do. Dynastic Chinese history absolutely one of my favorite topics for the utterly outrageous and fascinating. Also, don't show Chinese historical dramas to little kids. You will either traumatize them or fascinate them. I was definitely the latter.

I'm partial myself to the story of how the great Athenian tragedian Aeschylus was killed by a tortoise being dropped on his head. Here are the most important sources that tell the story: Valerius Maximus 9.12, ext.2:

The end of the poet Aeschylus was not self-inflicted, but it is worth recording because of its strange circumstances. He was staying in a city in Italy [viz. Gela], and he went outside its walls and sat down in a warm spot. An eagle flew carrying a tortoise above him, and it was deceived by the sheen of his head -- for he had no hair left -- and thinking it was a rock, the eagle dashed the tortoise onto it, so that it could eat the meat once the shell was broken. That blow wiped out the founder and beginner of a more powerful type of tragedy.

The Life of Aeschylus (printed in the prefatory material to the Prometheus Bound scholia), 10:

...after living his third year there [in Gela, Sicily] he died in this manner: an eagle had caught a tortoise, and since eagles are not strong enough to get at the tortoise by the tail, they drop them on rocks, crushing the shell; but this one carried it over the poet and so killed him. And there was an oracle that had been given to him, which went: "a missile from the sky will kill you."

Pliny, Natural History 10.3.8:

[The eagle] has a clever device for breaking tortoise-shells that it has carried off, by dropping them from a height; this accident caused the death of the poet Aeschylus, who was trying to avoid a disaster of this nature that had been foretold by the fates, as the story goes, by trustfully relying on the open sky.

(Edit: I should add that there's no reason to put any faith in this story. It's a trope that appears in various contexts, and as a folktale type it's known as the tortoise and the birds; it also appears in a couple of fables in the Aesopic collection, as well as popping up in various other cultures. And, perhaps more familiar for a reddit audience, Terry Pratchett draws on the trope in his novel Small Gods.)

But wait, it gets better. We have a fragment from a lost play by Aeschylus, the Psychagogoi ("soul-summoners"), which told the story of Odysseus going to consult the ghost of the prophet Teiresias on his way home. Four lines of the play survive, in which Teiresias makes the following prophecy to Odysseus (Aeschylus fr. 275 Radt):

For a heron flying on high
will strike you with dung, the excrement of its bowels;
out of this, a sea beast's spine
will corrupt your skin, ancient and shedding hair

The exact interpretation of this fragment has always been debated, but the bit about a poisonous "sea-beast's spine" killing Odysseus in old age is very, very probably a reference to the story of Odysseus' death at the hands of his son Telegonos, who wielded a spear tipped with the sting of a poisonous ray. This story appeared in the 6th-century-BCE epic the Telegony, and was also later used in Sophocles' Odysseus akanthoplex, or Odysseus struck by the ray, another lost play. (The interpretation of the first two lines is more doubtful, but I can go into that if you want.)

The upshot is that I'm very strongly inclined to conclude that the Aeschylean passage, which is after all very obscure and mentions a bird, was transferred to the poet himself, with a bit of re-shaping and some contamination from the Aesopic story. It's very reasonable to suppose that the story's original context was forgotten, since the play had very likely been lost long before the biographical material on Aeschylus was collected. I suspect, in fact, that the oracle reported in the Life ("a missile from the sky will kill you") may be a quotation from one of the subsequent plays in the Psychagogoi trilogy, the Penelope or the Bone-collectors.

James the II of Scotland. A lover of artillery, which is a match for his "explosive temper", he decided to besiege Roxburgh castle in 1460. The English had occupied the castle since the Wars for Independence and James II wanted to reclaim it. So what better way than to shoot cannons at it. As the siege went on he decided to fire some cannons that he imported from Flanders, particularly one called The Lion.

When he fired the cannon, it exploded and killed him.

The fact that this legend is not known to be true or if it did happen, I still think it is the funniest story of a last stand.

In the battle of agincourt , in the 100 year war; there is this story of the final battle where the French out numbered the English five to 1 if not more. The story goes that when the French would catch a Welch Longbow man, they would cut off their middle finger, because that was the finger they steadied their arrow with. Without the finger, they could not shoot their bows. So the night before, the French celebrated the final battle would be the next day, and they drank wine, ate cheese and had a royal time. The English on the other hand, spent the night planning their defense, and readied for the next morning. The next morning, as the French start their move toward the English, the Bowmen stood up and shouted to the French; "Hey Frenchie, I still got me bow finger!" while raising their middle finger at the French, then opened up with their bows. According to the Story, they french became so outraged by the act and threat, that the French charged without thought, and the English won.