I wonder which battles which happened in our history would rival the epic splendor of the Space Marines. Here are some candidates for soldiers which could have been considered for Astartes training in real life.

1/ Spartans at Thermopolae. The story of how 300 Spartans and a few thousand greek hoplites held back a huge army of Persians. That is pretty much a real live version of a small group of armored warriors holding back a horde. Despite the fantasy feel of the movie 300, the history does say that a smaller force of Greek hoplites held back an army of Persians which could have numbered about quarter of a million Persians.

2/ The Army of Alexander the Greek. Alexander, and his armored legions were able to conquer the Persian empire despite having about 100 times the size and over 20 times the population.

3/ The Conquistadores, my personal favorite. Cortez and a force of probaby 150 conqistadores manage to conquer the Aztec empire which had armies numbering into the tens of thousands.

4/ The defenders of the Kibbutz. I read about a battle in Israel in 1948 where a bunch of isrelis, numbering no more than 15 or 30, managed to hold back an entire brigade of Egyptian soldiers. I am not sure if that is due to the exceptional fighting skills of the Israeli army or the lousy fighting skills of the Egyptians.

Any other suggestions?

Here is a funny website I found which actually talks about 5 real life soldiers who would probably be worthy of wearing the black Carapace of the Astartes

http://www.cracked.com/article_17019_5-real-life-soldiers-who-make-rambo-look-like-*****.html

Thats Fing awesome.

And that is why I don't use the extremes of human ability to then ramp up my Marines. Real life is awesome and I don't need my fiction to caricature it with Mary Sue.

Kage

The Simo Häyhä article in the linky actually has two factual mistakes:

1) It says he had only a basic military training, which is just not true. He was in army for one year in 1925 but after that was an active member of national guard and had won "a room full of shooting competition prizes" with the same rifle he brought with him to the war... which started 1939. So it was more like 14 years of training as far as shooting ability is concerned.

2) It says he killed 150 people with SMG. Well... may be, may be not. They didn't do bodycounts outside sniper activity and the number 150 was what his company commander told when he was forced to give a number when Häyhä was given some medal. By his own words on the SMG kills "we didn't count them, maybe about as many as with rifle". Nobody really knows now as he passed away in 2002.

Apparently at Thermopylae the Spartans only reduced themselves to 300 on the final day and they still had over 1100 Allied Greek troops. Still, apparently It's true that Leonidas stayed to lead them. Depending on which accounts (and the problem with ancient accounts) the Battle of Marathon might have been as bad.

My nomination is the Battle of Rourkes drift, of course that was only 8 to one odds.

Those guys weren't bad either : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cameron