After being shot down and surviving 18 days in the wilderness, Alexey Petrovich Maresyev miraculously returned to the skies to take on the Nazis — despite losing both of his legs.

Throughout World War II, Vera Atkins recruited and trained hundreds of secret agents to fight the Nazis for Britain’s covert Special Operations Executive.

A Nepalese Gurkha soldier who fought for Britain, Lachhiman Gurung fended off 200 Japanese soldiers in May 1945 — after losing his right hand to a grenade blast.

Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz was a German attaché serving in Copenhagen who sprang into action in 1943 to warn the country's 7,800 Jews of the Nazis' imminent plans to ship them off to concentration camps.

After being captured by the Germans in 1940, Charles Coward spent the rest of World War II as a POW — but still saved hundreds of Jewish prisoners from Auschwitz.

On August 19, 1942, British and Canadian troops launched the Dieppe raid in hopes of taking a German-occupied port in northern France — but the results were calamitous.

The German battleship Bismarck was the most formidable warship in Europe. But on May 27, 1941, the combined effects of torpedo damage and scuttling left it at the bottom of the Atlantic.