The story of José Antonio Aguirre could easily be adapted into a movie. I'd say a novel, but he wrote his own account in Escape Via Berlin. So, Aguirre was the President of the Basque region in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. He went into exile when the Nationalists conquered his territory. He went to France, then to Belgium. That's where he was when Germany invaded in 1940. If found by the Germans, he would be arrested and sent back to Spain. He fled westward with his family and other refugees, and nearly made it to a port. That port? Dunkirk. Where the British evacuated their army, but the port was ringed with German soldiers. No way out that way.

So, how do you escape the Gestapo? The idea eventually decided upon was to head to the city where they have their headquarters--Berlin. He assumed a false identity, got the Panamanian ambassador to issue him a passport, hopped a boat to Sweden, then another ship to Brazil. Later, he lived in Uruguay, the U.S., and France.

But the escape from Spain, then from Europe via Berlin of all places could easily be a good 90 minutes of a thriller, with the invasion of France as a backdrop.

All my favorite movies are really slow-paced and seem to involve hostile landscapes and cultural misunderstandings, so...

Mogami Tokunai was born in 1754 as the son of a farmer. He came to Edo, like many young men of the time, and came to be the disciple of Honda Toshiaki, a political economist and major intellectual figure, among other things. Honda had recently been able to secure a position on a shogunate expedition led by Yamaguchi and Aoshima to the island of Hokkaido and smaller archipelagoes to the north (known collectively as Ezo), and, for reasons that are unclear, sent Mogami in his stead in 1785.

Though ostensibly just a porter, Mogami seems to have distinguished himself in some way or another, because he was sent out alone to make survey charts of the Kuril islands. Not only did learn enough Ainu (the Ainu are the indigenous inhabitants of Ezo) in a month to dispense with his interpreter, but he picked up an Ainu companion along the way and taught him to read, thus defying the edicts of the Matsumae clan, who had held dominion over Ezo since 1600.

Mogami was the first Japanese person to travel north along the Kuril island chain, where he met Simeon Dorofeivitch Ishuyo, a Russian explorer, and his companions. After a feast with the Ainu and Russians during which drink and songs are exchanged—Mogami rendering a mule-driver's chant—he invites Ishuyo to his own tent for dinner the next day. The Russians greatly appreciate a meal of rice, and the two men talk extensively about the Kurils and about Europe, apparently forming a bond of sorts. He will later describe Ishuyo as "a man of noble, heroic character, far beyond my limited capacities to appreciate."

Mogami sails towards Kamchatka, but has to turn back amid storms, while meanwhile the main expedition under Yamaguchi and Aoshima reaches Ishuyo's camp, and order him to leave what they consider to be under Japanese dominion. Mogami, newly arrived, tries to keep out of sight, ashamed of the scene playing out and powerless to stop it, but when Ishuyo cries out, in broken Ainu, that "I want to see Tokunai— I want to talk to him forever!" he emerges for a final, tearful parting.

In 1787, he returns to Edo, but—with a letter of passage given to him by Ishuyo—he plans a trip not only to Ezo, but beyond that to Russia, and then onward to Europe, Africa, and back through Asia to Japan. Upon reaching Hokkaido, however, he finds a hostile reception from the Matsumae clan, who turn him away. Undaunted, he shaves his head and tries to become a Zen acolyte in the hopes of staying on the island, but this too fails. To make things worse, he is robbed of all his belongings as he prepares to return. Thanks to a friendly ship's captain, he is able to return to his home village in northern Honshu, but dressed in rags and without any money. For several years, he teaches arithmetic.

In 1789, as word reaches him of Ainu revolts in Ezo, his luck gets even worse, as he is jailed for being on Aoshima's expedition—who, as it turns out, was getting too friendly with the Matsumae clan he was supposed to be spying on. In a crowded jail, he catches a fever, falling into a coma for several days, and almost commits suicide in despair. When the shogunate realizes, however, that the Matsumae actually hate Mogami, he is released, and slowly recovers in Honda's house.

At this point, he becomes a retainer of the shogunate, and not only that, but as Matsudaira Sadanobu, a high-ranking advisor, has decided to permit trade with the Ainu, he is allowed to return to Ezo, this time leading five men, in 1791.

Aware that the Matsumae won't harm him openly but still wary of poisoning, he quickly heads to the Kurils and Iturup, the island where he had encounter Ishuyo. In a tragic turn of events, however, the Russian explorer—fearful of a rumored shogunate delegation without any way of knowing that his old friend leads it—has left a day before Mogami's arrival. The latter follows him north, but is unable to catch up, and the two men never see each other again.

Around this point, the shogunate removed the Matsumae clan from power and issued directives regarding their plans for Ezo and its inhabitants. Mogami agreed with the shogunate policy of the time that the Ainu should be gradually "civilized," but showed notable care in this, opposing the rapid change being forced by others: prohibitions on Japanese speaking Ainu, and the outlawing of the ritual bear sacrifice. Ainu chiefs confided in him their displeasure, and a pillar at Iturup left by his party includes ten Ainu names alongside the Japanese ones. Before setting out for the north, he had asked his mentor Honda for advice, to which the latter had replied: "if you are truly humane, you will enjoy the blessings of Heaven."

Alongside diminished fears of Russian aggression, the civilizing program was put to a halt, in 1802, and in 1821, jurisdiction was returned to the Matsumae family.

Mogami reportedly enjoyed good health in later years, and spoke at length to the German physician Siebold on his visit to Edo in 1826—once again defying official policy in the interest of knowledge by giving him Ainu vocabulary lists and maps of the Kurils and Kamchatka. He died in 1836.

[Source: Keene, Donald. The Japanese Discovery of Europe.]

Xenophon's Anabasis is one of those stories that is so dramatic it is hard to believe. When I first read it, I was convinced it was very good fiction until I flipped through some other works referencing it.

A band of Greek mercenaries from every area of Greece, most of them veterans of the Peloponnesian War, join the Spartan leader Clearchus in Asia Minor, who is fighting for the Persian prince Cyrus the Younger. After gathering his force, Cyrus marches his army seemingly against a neighboring satrap in one of the constant minor conflicts that afflicted the Persian Empire outside of its heartland. Soon, however, the army realizes that they are going far deeper into the Empire than expected, and they learn the true purpose of the mission: a march in force into the heart of the Persian Empire, the most powerful in the world, to depose the emperor Artaxerxes and place Cyrus on the throne. According to Xenophon, Cyrus had 100,000 soldiers but had realized the capabilities of Greek soldiers and was putting his trust in the 10,000 Greek mercenaries under Clearchus. Although at first they protested, the Greeks were eventually won over and agreed to join the expedition.

Cyrus and Artaxerxes met on the fields of Cunaxa. The Greeks were victorious on their side, and Cyrus personally led a cavalry charge at Artaxerxes himself, nearly coming close enough to kill him personally, but was struck down by one of the royal guard, causing his army to scatter. The Greeks thought the battle had been won until they heard a messenger, but by that time the fighting was long over and Cyrus' Persians were already beginning to desert. One unbelievably tense night and a negotiation later, the Persians allow the Greeks to march directly out of the empire unmolested, and so they begin to leave. After they had marched some distance, the Persian satrap Tissapharnes, who was shadowing the Greek army, invited the Greek generals over for further negotiation, and after they had come, captured and executed them. The Greek army, composed of people who only a few years earlier had been warring with each other, and now having lost the leaders who were holding them together, were expected to scatter. Instead, they elected three new leaders and decides they were getting back to Greece whether the satrap wanted them to or not.

The march to the Black Sea is filled with incident and adventure, including marches over snowing mountains, hunger, assaults on mountain fortresses, courage, night marches, treachery and a rather remarkable ingenuity. It is quite possibly the most heroic retreat in human history, and when the Greeks see the Black Sea and say "thalassa, thalassa!" (the sea! the sea!) it is pretty unforgettable.

I like the story of Leon Degrelle, a Walloon politician who's party had just suffered a major defeat in the Belgian elections. Now it looked as if Degrelle would fall into obscurity until the Nazis invaded. Degrelle volunteered as a private in the Walloon SS unit. He quickly showed his combat prowess. He fought bravely and managed to rise to become commander of the unit. He was given huge amounts of medals and praise and according to Degrelle, Hitler once said to him "If I had a son I'd want him to be like you". As the war was coming to an end he commandeered a plane and flew it single handily to into Spain where he lived out the rest of his days.

Or if you're into novels with a good anti-hero, how about the story of Joseph "Sepp" Dietrich. He was once known as Hitler's butcher because of his loyalty and brutality, but was mocked for his seemingly low military skill. He soon became an expert at small unit tactics, and steadily rose to become one of Hitler's more trusted SS commanders.

In Jalisco during the 1540s the Caxcan and other groups rose up against the Spanish. The resulting ppunishment from the Spanish was so severe they killed enough of the natives over a few years to effectively wipe out Caxcan culture within a few generations. We know they spoke a dialect of Nahuatl, but that is pretty much it.

In the aftermath of Culloden, when so many survivors were brutally killed under the orders "no quarter given," General Hawley's young aide-de-camp Major James Wolfe spared the life of one Captain Donald MacDonald. Years later, Wolfe became a general and MacDonald served under him at Quebec. MacDonald spoke fluent French and answered the "qui vive" of the defenders, who had been expecting reinforcements, thereby allowing the English to scale the cliffs and access the Plains of Abraham, leading to the capture of Quebec and leaving an indelable mark on the history of Canada.

Only trouble with this story is that I can't be 100% certain that the Donald MacDonald Wolfe spared was the same who played the key role at Quebec. There's just too many Donald MacDonalds. (As an aside, the other person who may have played that role was Simon Fraser. But not that Simon Fraser the Canadians are thinking of, nor the Master of Lovat the Scots are thinking of. Not Lord Lovat either.)

This is already a novel, but The Last Battle by Stephen Harding tells the tale of when Wehrmacht and US infantry forces teamed up against Waffen SS to rescue French VIPs that were being held in Schloss Itter in Bavaria.