In the Battle of Thermopylae, the Spartans, Thespians, Thebans, and likely the helots of the Spartans stayed and fought to cover the Greek retreat after they were outflanked by the Persians. Note that Spartan law forbade them to retreat.
"Go tell the Spartans, passer-by, that here, by Spartan law, we lie."
— Simonides, epitaph for the Spartan dead at the Battle of Thermopylae
At the Battle of Chaeronea, fought between Thebes and Macedonia, the Theban Sacred Band, a sort of homosexual warrior fraternity, did even better than the Spartans and Thespiae at Thermopylae. Not "just" guarding a mountain pass, they stood in the open field and thumbed their collective noses at Alexander the Great himself. Although they had little chance against the Macedonian phalanx and cavalry, they dug their heels on the ground and fought until being the last of them was killed or incapacitated, to the point that Alexander's father Philip actually cried upon finding their corpses. Unlike the Spartans, however, their cause diedwith them, as Thebes was crushed and accepted to join Philip's cause against the Persian Empire.
When Alexander the Great approached the Phoenician city of Tyre, he initially tried to persuade them to join his side, but they rejected it and even executed his envoys. Enraged, Alexander prepared to besiege the city, during which the Tyrians evacuated their civilians to their colony of Carthage and prepared to resist. The subsequent siege saw the Phoenicians put such an astonishing resistance that Alexander was forced to resort to the help of Tyre's rival Phoenician states, who sent their navies to blockade the city (along with the nearby Cypriots and other Greek states of Ionia, who also joined the party), and even then the Tyrians still managed to frustrate their next attempts to take the city before they necessarily lost the advantage. After finally capturing Tyre, Alexander was so fed up with their resistance that he only pardoned those who took refuge in their temple of Melqart, selling all the rest as slaves.
Speaking of Carthage, the Second Punic War started when Hannibal Barca crossed from the Carthaginian side of Hispania into Roman-aligned territory in order to besiege the Iberian city of Saguntum. The Saguntines defended with wild tenacity, forcing Hannibal to change his tactics multiple times and managing to wound the man himself with a javelin to the leg, and continued resisting even when it was made clear Roman reinforcements would either arrive late or never at all. Hannibal managed to breach the walls, only for the Saguntines to build an improvised second wall - though not to resist, but to give them time to die the best way possible. They destroyed their treasure by melting it and mixing it with lead, performed mass suicides among the civilians and launched a suicide sally with all the available fighters, with the consequence that when the Punics managed to force their way in and the dust settled, their own casualties surpassed the number of Saguntines captured.
By the Third Punic War, the Carthaginians knew it was now their own turn, as well as the last of all. Rome had backed them into a corner and forced them to war with impossible demands. Their response? An all-out defense of their city, holding the Romans at bay for three years (it also helped that Rome was busy with the Lusitanian Wars and the conquest of Greece) and eventually requiring Rome to send their best man, the rising star Scipio Aemilianus. When the Romans finally battered their way in, fighting house-to-house, the Punics sold their lives and city as dear as they could before being crushed. Rome won the war but paid a very high price, and Aemilianus himself was seen to weep over the destruction, as it made him reflect that the same that had happened to Carthage might happen some day to Rome (and he was right).
The Celtiberian Wars saw the Arevaci city of Numantia resisting and defeating their Roman besiegers over and over, to the point that Rome had to call in Aemilianus himself, the man who had destroyed Carthage, to solve it, even although Numantia was probably only 1/30 the size of Carthage. Aemilianus surrounded the city with fortified walls and waited for it to give up by hunger, but when food ran out inside of the city, the inhabitants hosted collective suicides and set Numantia in fire rather than surrendering. The conqueror could bring only a handful of alive prisoners to Rome, where the episode was never forgotten, and "Numantine resistance" became a Latin and Spanish idiom for "Last Stand".
Medieval to early modern
The Battle of Stamford Bridge, Harold Godwinson's 1066 battle against Harald Hardrada, had one of these, as the Norwegian forces retreated across the eponymous bridge in order to regroup and prepare for battle after a devastating English attack. As they retreated across the bridge, a lone viking volunteered to stay behind and hold off the English. He took down around forty men on his own, before a Saxon soldier got the better of him by floating under the bridge and hitting him from below with a spear.
Musashibo Benkei deserves special mention, despite being listed in the first Cracked article, as he codified the Died Standing Up trope while engaged in this one. After fighting to buy time for his lord to commitSeppuku, none of the enemy wanted to test his wrath, believing him to be a demon from hell, as he'd killed 300 soldiers that had tried to cross. It was only after a long while that they realized he had died, due to their fear to approach. Medically speaking, it's believed that the lactic acid his muscles produced from the fighting caused a sudden onset of rigor mortis, causing his body to "lock up" while still standing and holding his halberd. He has a small shrine today where this happened.
As the capital of the Khwarazmian Empire was finally breached by the Mongols in 1219, the Shah Inalchuq responded by taking roughly 1/10 of the cities garrison (~1000 people) with him and barricading himself inside the citadel. What followed was a brutal, room to room assault that saw ten Mongols die for every Khwarazmian and which lasted for over a month. Eventually, Inalchuq and his two remaining bodyguards was cornered in the attic of the citadel and was at that point out of anything resembling ammunition, so the trio proceeded to dislodge bricks from the walls and throw them down the staircase at the attackers. History doesn't tell how long this final act lasted, but its said that several mongol soldiers actually died from the rock barrage before Inalchuq was finally captured and reportedly executed by having molten silver poured over his head.
The Fall of Constantinople in AD 1453 marked the end of the Roman Empire, which had been by far the most ancient country in the Western world, 2,206 years old. The last emperor, Constantine XI, chose to go out with a fight, rather than have the empire dismantled by submitting to the Ottoman sultan. With the Roman army barely being a city garrison by this point, he managed to get 7,000 defenders inside the city, both Greek and foreign. The night before the final battle, native Orthodox and foreign Catholic defenders held a joint service in the Hagia Sophia. The emperor's final address to his troops was as fitting as one could be for such an occasion, thanking them for their service and calling them "worthy heirs of the heroes of Ancient Greece and Rome." During the final assault, when the Ottomans finally breached the defenses, the emperor said, "The city is fallen, yet I am alive," and led his remaining troops in one last charge. His body was never found, and he became the Greek people's King in the Mountain.
A battle in Puerto Rico in 1514 could serve as a proof of how crazy the Spanish Conquest of America was. During Juan Ponce de León's rule of the island, a warlike Caribe tribe attacked their settlements, so reinforcements were sent in headed by Capitán Sancho de Arango and nothing less than Ponce de León's attack dog Becerrillo, who was known for being fearsome and amazingly intelligent. The defenders were forced to retreat to the house of Pedro Mexía, a mulatto conquistador (yeah, that was a thing) who was married to Luisa, a baptized chieftainess of an allied native tribe (that was a thing too), and there they faced the Caribes, with Pedro and Luisa fighting side by side until the defenders were all killed or captured. Becerrillo managed to escape, but seeing Sancho was being carried away alive, the dog attacked the Caribes and killed many of them until freeing the Spaniard, at the cost of being killed himself by a poisoned arrow.
When Hernán Cortés and his Spanish-Tlaxcaltec army was trying to exit the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan to escape and return with reinforcements, they were caught in the way and absolutely mauled, as the narrow bridges of the city made them sitting ducks for the Aztec canoes. Cortés and most VIP managed to escape, but the rest died, and around 70 Spaniards (along with some Tlaxcaltecs) were forced to return of the city and entrench themselves in a temple. They resisted for days, but were finally overwhelmed, captured and sacrificed. Among those there might have been Francisco de Eguía, a black slave ill with smallpox who inadvertently caused a regional pandemic due to the natives not having natural defenses against it.
The Aztecs themselves may have been bloodthirsty conquerors, but nobody, not even the Spaniards, ever called them cowards. Even with most of their empire now filing up the enemy ranks and out for revenge, racked with a disease they couldn't fight, and up against vastly superior technology, they fought like maniacs to defend their capital of Tenochtitlan against Cortés and his Multi National Team. Hugh Thomas said: "For a time, (Cortés) and his friends seem to have been looked upon by some Mexica at least as being reincarnations of deities. But in the end, to be honest, it had been the Mexica who fought like gods."
During the 1527 Sack of Rome by the mutinied troops of Charles V, the Swiss Guards, who numbered only one hundred and eighty-nine, stood up to an invading force of more than 20,000 soldiers from Spain and the Holy Roman Empire (many of them Protestant mercenaries and more than eager to wreack the city), fighting on the steps of St. Peter's Basilica. Their final stand was fruitful and allowed the Pope to escape to the Castel Sant'Angelo, and once the occupation of Rome ended, the Swiss Guards were reconstituted and remained the Holy See's guards into the modern day. This event is considered so central to the ethos of the Guard that all new recruits to the Guard are sworn in on the anniversary of this event, May 6.
The 1539 Siege of Castelnuovo earned the popular nickname of the "Spanish Thermopylae" on its sheer insanity. A Spanish contingent of 4,000 from the Tercio de Nápoles captured the Ottoman coast stronghold of Castelnuovo (modern day Herceg Novi, Montenegro), but when the Ottomans sent in a relief army, the Spaniards found themselves surrounded by 50,000 Ottomans headed by the famous Turk admiral Hayreddin Barbarossa. The defenders were offered to surrender honourably the place, but despite knowing nobody would help them because the allied fleets were in a ravaged state and the nearest Christian states wouldn't collaborate, they answered with the unanimous Badass Boastque vengan cuando quieran ("let them come whenever they want"). A two-week siege took place, in whose course the defenders inflicted utterly massive casualties in the Ottomans, including almost all of their elite Janissaries, before being killed themselves almost to the last man.
Another instance was the Battle of Rocroi in 1643, traditionally considered the point where the aura of invincibility of the Spanish tercios was shattered, although it could also considered an excellent showcase of discipline in the face of terrible circumstances. The battle saw French general Condé capitalizing on his superior cavalry to break the Spanish lines in two with a frontal charge Crazy Enough to Work, after which his Spanish counterpart Francisco de Melo essentially lost control of his army, saw the non-Spaniards elements routing, and opted to entrench himself with the remnants to wait for promised reinforcements. Despite being virtually encircled and bombarded by enemy cavalry, infantry and artillery, the Spaniards' resistance was so strong that Condé, still not wanting to be enveloped by the arriving army, offered the survivors generous terms of surrender and let them withdraw with their weapons. Ironically, the reinforcements never came — because their general had left Melo for dead.
Edward Teach, A.K.A Blackbeard and his crew made their (unexpected, since they were about to retire) last stand against Lieutenant Robert Maynard, who laid an ambush on his crew. Before the battle began, Blackbeard reportedly said "Damnation seize my soul if I give you quarters, or take any from you.". A fierce battle ensued between the two crews, Blackbeard proceeded to slaughter the greatest number of people he could, and managed to survive five shots and twenty stabs. Ultimately, Blackbeard and Maynard ended up locked in a fierce duel amidst the battle, when Blackbeard was about to kill Maynard once and for all, a British sailor attacked him from behind, sliced his neck and chopped off his head, finally killing Blackbeard. The rest of his crew put up a fight even after the fact, but were outnumbered by the Sailors and ultimately surrendered.
Modern
France has its own last stand from the Zulu War, in the form of Louis-Napoléon, only son and heir to then-Emperor Napoleon III. Louis-Napoléon, eager for action, tagged along with the British army and was ambushed while out on patrol by some 40 Zulus. After his horse ran off (trampling his right arm in the process), Louis-Napoléon was cornered and went down fighting with first his pistol, and then with a spear he pulled from his own leg.
In the months following the end of the Civil War, the US government resumed its focus on westward expansion, ordering the Army to establish forts along the Bozeman Trail. Fearing encroachment, Sioux Chief Red Cloud formed a tenuous alliance with the Arapaho and Northern Cheyenne to resist this move, kicking off Red Cloud's War. On December 21st, 1866 a large war party led by Oglala war chief Man Afraid of His Horses (who was actually a serious badass) and his young protege Crazy Horse attacked a woodcutting party to draw out the defenders of Fort Phil Kearny. Captain William Fetterman took the bait and led 81 cavalry and mounted infantry (most of whom were brand-new recruits with only the most rudimentary training; some hadn’t even fired their weapons yet) to respond. One of the only experienced Soldiers was Private Adolf Metzger, a German immigrant and Civil War combat veteran who was assigned as bugler. A notorious Glory Hound, Fetterman ignored orders not to cross Lodge Trail Ridge and led his force out of range of the fort’s artillery, and straight into an ambush by over 1,000 warriors. The Curb-Stomp Battle was over in less than twenty minutes, and a patrol from the fort that evening found all 81 men dead (in exchange for about a dozen Indian casualties). 80 of them had been stripped naked, scalped, gruesomely mutilated, and left face-down, but Adolf Metzger’s body was untouched apart from the wounds that killed him, and was not only still in his uniform, but left face-up and covered in a buffalo skin, with his bent and blood-covered bugle placed on his chest. According to Lakota accounts of the battle, the untrained US soldiers quickly panicked and lost all unit cohesion. Fetterman failed to direct his men to any effect and is said by some to have killed himself. Metzger tried in vain to rally the new recruits into something resembling a cohesive defense but was soon the last white man left alive. He fired his pistol until it ran dry, and then fought several warriors in close combat, swinging his bugle as a bludgeon, killing at least one of his attackers with it before being fatally wounded himself. Man Afraid of His Horses witnessed Metzger's bravery and ordered that he be honored in death, exempting his body from mutilation and, according to Lakota custom, sending him to the afterlife as a hero. When the Oglala warriors celebrated their victory the following night, Crazy Horse himself sang a death song in honor of Private Metzger.
German commander Jürgen Stroop: When we invaded the Ghetto for the first time, the Jews and the Polish bandits succeeded in repelling the participating units, including tanks and armored cars.
Resistance leader Marek Edelman: We were beaten by the flames, not the Germans.
Not to mention the later Warsaw Uprising. Even handicapped by bad planning, bad intel, and severe weapons shortages, the Armia Krajowa (Home Army) of occupied Poland held off the Waffen-SS for 63 days...and forced the Germans to treat them as POWs, not "bandits" according to the Geneva Conventions. As they marched out to surrender, many Germans saluted.
Then there's the Battle of Wizna. Outnumbered over 58:1, with no tanks or air support, in only half-completed fortifications and horribly outgunned, the Polish commander "swore that he would not leave his post alive". And the Polish forces proceeded to inflict remarkably severe casualties upon the Nazis - before, of course, ultimately being annihilated.
The Battle of Camerone in which 65 officers and men of the French Foreign Legion held off a Mexican force of approximately 2,000 for ten hours. When first asked to surrender, Capitaine Jean Danjou replied simply with, "We have munitions. We will not surrender." The battle ended with a five-man, zero-ammo bayonet charge against the Mexicans, after which the last two men on their feet were finally persuaded to surrender on terms. The nineteen surviving legionaires had their wounds tended and were repatriated along with their arms and the bodies of their fallen comrades. Camerone is commemorated annually by the Foreign Legion to this day.
"The Legion Dies, it does not Surrender!" — Battle cry of Capitaine Jean Danjou, commander of the Legionnaires.
Battle of the Bulge, early days of the battle. As related by Hugh M. Cole in "The Ardennes: The Battle of the Bulge": "A small group of [American] stragglers suddenly become tired of what seems to be eternally retreating. Miles back they ceased to be part of an organized combat formation, and recorded history, at that point, lost them. The sound of firing is heard for fifteen minutes, an hour, coming from a patch of woods, a tiny village, the opposite side of a hill. The enemy has been delayed; the enemy resumes the march westward. Weeks later a graves registration team uncovers mute evidence of a last-ditch stand at woods, village, or hill."
The Brest Fortress. On June 22, 1941, Brest Fortress was one of the first Soviet defenses to be attacked by German troops. Surrounded, a few defenders continued fighting for more than a month, facing overwhelming German troops and heavy artillery. The last defender of the Brest Fortress, Major Pyotr Gavrilov was taken prisoner on July 23, unable to fight any longer due to starvation and exhaustion. Apocryphal stories extend the resistance well into August and claim it only ended when Germans were forced to flood the fort's basements using the local river in view of an impending visit by Hitler and Mussolini to the city.
The nine-month defense of the 'Hero City' of Sevastopol and the fortress which overlooked the city. Besieged from the aftermath of the September 1941 Kiev Offensive until it fell in June 1942, more than 100,000 men died and 200,000 were wounded in its defense. The Soviets used secret underwater submarine pens built into the hill overlooking the city to supply, equip, and reinforce the defenders and evacuate the wounded. After several unsuccessful assaults, the Germans under General Erich von Manstein had to use four super heavy railway guns (based on the main guns of battleships), several batteries of heavy artillery, flamethrowers, and poison gas to take the fortress.
A One-Man example occured during the Battle of Saipan of the Pacific War, with the US Army Soldier Thomas Baker. During the battle, the Japanese launched a massive Banzai Charge against the American forces. For several hours, Baker & his men desperately tried to fight off waves of Japanese forces attacking their position, even fighting when seriously wounded and when forced to resort to hand-to-hand combat. Eventually running out of ammunition, the Squad was forced to withdraw. Baker, mortally wounded, was carried by a fellow infantryman; but when that soldier was injured, he ordered his men to fall back to save themselves and leave him behind. The men then placed Baker against a tree and left him with a pistol (with only 8 rounds of ammunition). Later, when the soldiers recaptured the position, they found Baker dead at the same tree still holding the pistol, with all 8 bullets fired, and 8 dead Japanese soldiers lying before him. For his actions, Thomas Baker was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.
The Battle of Berlin was this for Nazi Germany. The Soviets blew the absolute shit out of the city, making the most of their total superiority in artillery and airpower. The last bastions of the Third Reich held out for two weeks but were ultimately fighting a battle every sane man among them knew they weren't going to win. As it drew to a close Adolf Hitler decided that it was Better to Die than Be Killed, and shot himself in the head (after taking a cyanide pill) when even he realized there was no way out.
The 21 Sikhs at the Battle of Saragarhi. Twenty-one Sikh soldiers defending a small but vital outpost on the Indian border were faced with twenty thousand Pashtun tribesmen armed with rifles and heavy cannons, and all of them volunteered to stay. They staved off the enemy army for most of a day before being overwhelmed, killing an estimate of eight hundred enemy troops and warning the British army of the attack, giving them time to prepare a defense and counterattack. When the British Parliament heard of the battle, it resulted in a standing ovation, and September 12 is now considered an official holiday in India.
The Battle of Shiroyama was the last stand of Samurai rebel Saigō Takamori and his followers against the Imperial Japanese Army during the Satsuma Rebellion. Despite being outnumbered by about several dozen to one and considerably outgunned, Saigō and his followers still held on for nearly an entire day. They even repulsed several government assaults. The battle finally culminated in Saigō rallying what little was left of his men for one last suicide charge into government lines. Once the last remnants of Saigō and his army were annihilated, the Satsuma Rebellion came to an end, and the Samurai as an elite class were disbanded.
The Battle of Vukovar featured a force of around 2,200 Croatian infantry (with next to no armor, air support, or artillery) fighting against a much larger Serbian force that had significant armor and air support. Despite being horribly outmatched and surrounded, the Croats held out for 87 days and inflicted heavy casualties on their enemies in brutal street-to-street fighting.
The Pony Express Rider Billy Tate was fourteen when he would become the only Pony Express rider to have been killed by assailants in the line of duty. The Paiute War led the Paiutes to attack Pony Express stations and twelve of them hounded Billy and forced him to take cover in some rocks after his horse was struck by arrows. He killed seven of his attackers (and there were signs that more of them may have left the area injured) before dying riddled with arrows, especially impressive since he would have had just twelve shots with his revolver on his person. His corpse and horse being left alone were considered signs of respect when it would have been expected that his corpse would be scalped and his horse stolen. His horse being left alone also allowed Billy Tate the honor of being such an Unstoppable Mailman that his package was delivered even in his death, as the horse reached the station without him and alerted the Pony Express something happened to him.
The Shangani Patrol during the First Matabele War. British Major Allan Wilson let a group of 37 hastily assembled scouts, including two Americans (the well-known American adventurer Frederick Burnham was one of them) and an Australian. The small group came upon 3,000 strong Matabele warriors. Going into badass mode, the 37 men killed several hundred warriors before running low on ammo, Major Wilson ordered Burnham to break out with two other troopers and bring back help. Burnham and the two others broke through the lines but reinforcements did not arrive in time as Wilson fought to his very last bullet, at which point, the few remaining British stood, sang "God Save the Queen", and shook hands with one another preparing for death. Wilson and his second in command Henry Borrow were the last killed.
The siege of the Church of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Nazi-occupied Prague. The church was the hiding place of Jan Kubiš, Jozef Gabčík, and a handful of other Czechoslovak resistance fighters who had participated in the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich (who was the highest-ranking Nazi official ever assassinated). The Nazis, enraged, sent a unit of 750 soldiers to the church. Armed with no more than small handguns, the resistance group held off the soldiers' attempts to storm the church for more than two hours, despite the Nazis being armed with machine guns, grenades, and tear gas (there was also an attempt to flood the church which the resistance fighters thwarted). When the Nazis finally broke through, all of the resistance fighters either went down shooting or committed suicide rather than be captured.
The battle of Raseiniai in World War II was an utter catastrophe for the Soviet Union—it lost the vast majority of its 750 tanks, while German losses were fairly light. However, when dawn rose on June 24th, 1941, a lone KV-2 heavy tank was seen parked in front of the crossroads in front of the city of Raseiniai...where it proceeded to hold off the entire 6th Panzer Division by itself for an entire day. The KV-2 No Selled German fire for hours, destroyed a half-dozen anti-tank guns, burned supply convoys, and sent Pz35s scuttling for cover. The Germans didn't actually kill the tank directly; the KV-2 inevitably ran out of ammunition for its 152mm howitzer and took hits that put holes on its armor without damaging components or injuring the crew. The tank itself simply could not be destroyed with the material the Germans could throw at it—the only way that the Germans managed to knock it out was throwing a grenade through one of the previously made holes into the crew compartment. The Germans so admired the incredible tenacity of the KV-2's unknown crew that they respectfully buried the fallen Soviet tank crew rather than abandoning their bodies in the tank.
When Augusto Pinochet and the rest of Chile's armed forcs enacted the 1973 Chilean coup, members of Salvador Allende's personal bodyguard, the Group Of Personal Friends, stood in Allende's defense, and after the coup was over, the surviving members of the organization were rounded up and put in the same torture camps as other political dissidents.
The defense of the Arnhem bridge by the 2nd Battalion/The Parachute Regiment, divisional engineers, and a scattering of other British paratroops in 1944. They held out twice as long as the entire division was planned to hold out without relief. The survivors did not surrender until they had run out of food, ammunition, and medical supplies, and were mostly wounded. The Germans still were unable to use the bridge until they cleared it of the many (German) vehicles the paras had destroyed during the battle. One of the last radio messages sent from the bridge, according to a German officer who intercepted it, was: "Out of ammunition. God save the King."
The last battle of the Wehrmacht's 9th and 12th armies during the fall of Nazi Germany in early 1945. Well aware of what the fate would probably be for civilians stranded in Soviet-occupied territory rather than American territory, the surviving soldiers of these two forces formed a literal corridor and fought to the last man to evacuate as many civilians to American lines as they could. They ended up saving some 250,000 people. Immortalized by Sabaton's song "Hearts of Iron", particularly the line in German: "It's not a battle, it is a rescue mission". Oh, and, they disobeyed Hitler's relentless attack orders doing so.
Italian forces had two during World War I in the aftermath of the annihilation of the Second Army at Caporetto and the consequent retreat of the Italian armies:
After Caporetto it was pretty much expected that the Austro-Hungarian forces, temporarily supported by the Germans, would overrun the Veneto region, and the Fourth Army was deployed on the Grappa Massif and the Piave river with orders to resist to the last so to allow the retreat of the remaining forces to the Mincio river, where British and French reinforcements were being deployed. In the First Battle of the Piave, the Fourth Army, supported by the remnants of the Second Army and the spontaneous decision of the soldiers from the other armies to fight on that river, held until the enemy forces had to stop to regroup and resupply, at which point the decimated German Alpenkorps was redeployed to France.
The Third Battle of the Piave, also known as Battle of Vittorio Veneto from the site of the decisive breakthrough, was the last stand of the entire Austro-Hungarian Empire, as they offered a formidable resistance even as the nation they were fighting for collapsed under the weight of the battle.
During the Fort Vaux siege of World War I, the German army outnumbered the French defenders by more than 8 to 1. Yet the French managed to hold out by attacking the German invaders from inside the fort's underground tunnels and managed to inflict a 50% casualty rate on the Germans. Although the French were forced to surrender due to dwindling supplies, their defense became a landmark moment on the Western front with the Crown Prince Wilhelm, the commander of the German forces himself, presenting a French officer's sword to the captured Major Raynal as a sign of respect.
During the Battle of Leyte Gulf, two such actions happened, one for each side:
When the Southern Force ran into a battleship ambush in the Battle of Surigao Strait, the old battleship Yamashiro charged the American battleships in an attempt to allow her escorts to get away. Only one destroyer, Shigure, did... albeit because Mogami collided with the Nachi and was too badly damaged to escape American aircraft the next day.
The next morning, it was the Americans' turn for a small force to encounter surprise battleships; in this case, the Center Force found Taffy 3, a small escort group, in their way. Given that the Center Force included Yamato, which outweighed Taffy 3 in its entirety, along with 3 other battleships (Nagato, Kongo, and Haruna), 8 cruisers (6 heavy, 2 light), and 11 destroyers, Taffy 3 couldn't possibly defeat it or flee (escort carriers aren't exactly known for high speed)... so instead, they attacked, hoping to at least buy time for Halsey to listen to their signals and come defend the land-based troops after they were sunk. In the process, they lost Johnston, Hoel, Samuel B. Roberts, Gambier Bay, and St. Lo (5 out of their 13 ships) but managed to confuse Admiral Kurita into thinking that he was attacking a major American fleet (the one that was actually off on a wild goose chase) and that reinforcements were inbound (they were, but they'd only just been detached from the main fleet and would take some time to arrive), leading him to order a retreat when he was actually on the cusp of victory.
On November 14th, 2010, 77-year old Mexican rancher Alejo Tamez barricaded himself in his ranch house and got into a shootout with members of the Los Zetas cartel, who had invaded his property because they wanted to use his ranch for their drug-running activities. After a prolonged shootout, the cartel members fled, leaving behind four dead and 2 critically wounded. Tamez was mortally wounded in the gunfight as well.
by the mutinied troops of Charles V, the Swiss Guards, who numbered only one hundred and eighty-nine, stood up to an invading force of more than 20,000 soldiers from Spain and the Holy Roman Empire (many of them Protestant mercenaries and more than eager to wreack the city), fighting on the steps of St. Peter's Basilica. Their final stand was fruitful and allowed the Pope to escape to the Castel Sant'Angelo, and once the occupation of Rome ended, the Swiss Guards were reconstituted and remained the Holy See's guards into the modern day. This event is considered so central to the ethos of the Guard that all new recruits to the Guard are sworn in on the anniversary of this event, May 6.