Awesome / Sturmtruppen

• Every time Musolesi finds himself in deadly danger... And his indomitable will to survive and utter lack of shame come to the forefront, showing there's a reason if the soldiers often utter "Musolesi, what a devil!":
  • The very first one: early on he had tripped while carrying hot coffee for his fellow officers and started claiming that he had fallen heroically while carrying out his duty, and was declared legally dead due the bureaucracy taking him at his word. Suddenly he lost all his influence and privileges as a Federale, and to top it off the Cook refused to feed him due him not being enrolled anymore... Then, somehow, he convinced Mussolini to re-enroll him as the Soul of a Heroic Fallen, restoring some of his old power... And his right to eat, that he promptly abused just to stick it up to the Cook.
  • Due him painting himself as a tactical and strategic genius he's assigned to lead an assault against the enemy stronghold on the Cursed Hill. He's appalled, the soldiers assigned to the attack are even more to the point one shot himself upon receiving the news... Then Musolesi suddenly becomes eager and the soldiers realize they'll get out of this alive thanks to one of his dirty tricks. His plan? An outrageously false training course into mountain warfare... That serves to hide from the soldiers his real plan: train them into exhaustion (with some getting a heart attack) so the attack will have to be called off.
  • After getting stuck with a suicide mission, Musolesi obtained to make one last phone call to Mussolini... To remind him that if he died the evidence about some bribes from the armament industry would come out. Mussolini promptly orders his mission canceled and makes sure he won't get stuck with suicide missions again while Musolesi shamelessly protests being barred from giving his life for the country.
  • After one of his schemes gets him heavily indebted with a quartermaster that will murder him if he doesn't pay his debt he's shown increasingly scared, as nobody will lend him any money after he ran a Ponzi scheme on them... Then on the day he has to pay or die he calmly walks to the quartermaster, pays him in cash, and demands his change. The soldiers wonder how did he do that... Then it comes out "someone" found Mussolini's journals and sold them to a paper for an outrageous sum of money.
    • A later strip shows that Musolesi didn't actually find those journals... He falsified them. And then started selling other fake Mussolini writings.
  • He had once voluntereed for a "simple task" in the rear that turned out moving a package of nitroglycerine to the front. After he started showing off with an empty "exercise" package he was informed the soldiers of the rear had switched it with the real deal... And he managed to hold it for over fifteen hours before slipping... At which point he caught it with his foot, tiptoed (with one foot) to the latrines, and dropped it there. Cue awed applause.
  • Sometimes he does awesome things without being in mortal danger. Such as when the battalion's professional poker player challenged him expecting an easy win, even if he had to cheat to do so... And Musolesi, knowing he was dealing with a professional cheater, just stuck the gigantic private Preminger behind him with instructions to tell him what cards his opponent had, with the poor professional player being unable to protest under threat of a beating.
    • For the record, Musolesi is a poker cheater himself... And once got every officer in the entire regiment so indebted he could casually pick their medals to take and resell. He only did it once because the other officers figured out they could get rid of the debt by assigning the winner of that poker tournament a suicide mission, at which point he engaged the other officers in another poker tournament and cheated to lose... And sticking the suicide mission to someone else.
• The utterly nonchalant way the two guys from the 27th Armored Battalion (of Discipline) treat everything:
  • Their arrival, in the middle of a shelling on the first line... And them expressing pleasure at being finally moved in the rear for light duty.
  • Someone was doubting of their badass credentials... Then an enemy shell passed by and they used it to scratch a match and lit their cigarettes.
  • Their first encounter with the Sergeant:
    Sergeant: "What are you doing there, you lazy asses?! I'm a sergeant!"
    *one of the two rises from where they were slacking, takes a close look, and lies down again*
    Soldier 1: "He's right, he's actually a sergeant."
    Soldier 2: "Who'd have expected it? A sergeant!"
  • To try and tame them, the Sergeant ordered them to defuse some unexploded shells. They simply grab bottle openers and start detaching the fuses without a care in the world, also throwing any dangerous-looking fuse at the Sergeant for a check.
    • At the Legreis Correction Center they had a year taken from their sentences for every fifteen bombs they defused. One had been sentenced to 125 years, and the other for life.
  • The way they reduce the Sergeant into a paranoid wreck by pointing out they'd never "accidentally" shoot him in presence of witnesses.
  • Their two Big Damn Heroes moments:
    • When the Sergeant was screwing Private Otto's "girlfriend" - actually the battalion's whore - and, given Otto had paid to spend the whole night with her, forced him to hold his pants, the 27th stumbled on the scene, slapped silly the one trooper that was finding the situation hilarious, and gave the Sergeant the lesson of his life, hinting that if he ever came there again they'd slit his throat.
    • The Drunken Captain had been succeeded by a Glory Hound that would have got the battalion decimated in a suicide attack to have a promotion to major when the 27th showed up to pay respect to their old commander... And as they were there tricked his successor to go into a minefield.
• The Drunken Captain was completely drunk all the time... And would do awesome things because of that:
  • During an inspection from a superior the enemy started to shoot him with a machine gun. He was so drunk to hallucinate... And so he swatted all the bullets from air mistaking them for wasps.
  • At one point the battalion was targeted by a massive enemy attack that would have wiped it out... And the old drunkard single-handedly saved them, even using his cocktail as a Molotov Cocktail. Too bad he was hit by a stray bullet right as the enemy retreated...
    • The Molotov cocktail was contained in a single cocktail glass, and yet it was powerful enough to blow up a tank... And he drinks it all the time.
  • This man had the respect of the 27th Armored Battalion (of Discipline), and was once a colonel before being demoted because "He had been a bit naughty". That is all.
• Forewarned of a coming inspection and being ordered to assign a second lieutenant as attendant to the inspecting officer, the captain found they don't have one ever since theirs was promoted to full lieutenant in spite of his idiocy. He can't just point out they don't have a second lieutenant and thus make the high command look like fools, and he can't order the lieutenant to have a second surname and act as the second lieutenant nor bust him back due how the lieutenant's father, a feldmarshall, would react. His solution? He adds the fictional officer to the rooster... And makes the lieutenant responsible for anything he does, forcing him to run himself ragged to do both jobs and finally punishing him for his antics.
  • After the inspection, the inspecting officer orders the fake second lieutenant promoted for the exceptional job he did without even appearing to be around. The captain thus has to assign him a lodging proper for his rank... And gives him the tent of the lieutenant, throwing him out until corporal Helga offers to share her tent.
  • And to dispel all ideas this was by accident... When they had to hide from a coming inspection that many supplies they were supposed to have were missing from the depot he had it burned down by the sergeant, even referring to it as "standard procedure". He could have had the fictional lieutenant "killed in action", but instead he threw the actual one out.
• Every time a sergeant is seen in combat he turns into the finest Sergeant Rock
  • In one occasion the battalion had to attack and the sergeant, leading personally the offensive, came back with exactly one loss... That was actually a soldier who pretended to have been killed early, so he actually didn't lose any men. This in spite of multiple layers of barbed wire and at least one machine gun nest.
  • Another example of how formidable the sergeants are comes from when the troop decided to murder one. They couldn't just shoot him or they'd be executed so they tried such things as hiding a rattlesnake in his lunch... Rattlesnake that was promptly mistaken for an eel and eaten, much to the puzzlement of the Cook who had no idea why the sergeant was asking him for another of those delicious eels.
    • The conclusion of the arc where the soldiers try and murder the sergeant has them resort to a solution they thought wouldn't fail but was extremely expensive: hire Musolesi for the job. This promptly turns in another awesome moment for the sergeant when Musolesi announces he'll kill him by old age, showing that not even he fancies his chances with the sergeant.
• While the troops aren't happy about being at war, any attempt at rebellion fails in the face of the captain's smarts and the sergeant's experience... So when they do get one over them it's just that satisfying.
  • The most infamous example had a soldier going around naked except for his helmet... And the sergeant and the captain could do nothing because the regulations said nothing about that. Eventually the two desperate authority figures found a rule prescribing to maintain the uniform perfectly in order... And the soldier produced his clean and pressed uniform, as the rule didn't say he actually had to wear it. The entire battalion promtly ditched the uniforms and started going around naked, to the immense consternation of the authorities. An attack is even canceled at the last moment because the sergeant is too embarrassed by the idea of leading a battalion of naked people into battle...