Top 10 Most Daring Rescues in History

In the summer of 2000, eleven British soldiers and an interpreter were overwhelmed and captured by the "West Side Boys," a vicious rebel group involved in Sierra Leone’s civil war. While British authorities managed to negotiate the release of six captives, “Operation Barras” was put into effect after the rebels threatened to kill the remaining hostages. With time at a premium, the Special Air Service and Parachute Regiment assaulted the West Side Boys’ main camp and the base holding the soldiers; rescuing the hostages, including other civilians, killing 25 of the rebels, and capturing many others.

During World War II, many prisons were built in Nazi-occupied France to forcibly elicit information from captured French Resistance fighters. In 1944, the British Royal Air Force tried to raise the nation's morale by launching an air raid on Amiens Prison, which held over 700 prisoners. A relatively small-scale mission, “Operation Jericho” saw a handful of Mosquito bombers destroy the prison's walls, allowing around 250 prisoners to escape. Unfortunately, the mission was far from a complete success, as many prisoners were killed during the air strike and only a fraction of the escapees avoided re-capture.

Fueled by the conflict between Israel and Palestine, four members of the "Black September" terrorist group hijacked a Belgian passenger plane and forced its captain to land outside Tel Aviv and demanding the release of over 300 Palestinian prisoners. Israeli officials pretended to negotiate with the hijackers while planning a rescue op. Disguised as technicians sent to fix the plane to prepare for take-off, 16 commandos stormed the craft, killed two of the terrorists, and freed the hostages. Also, of great historical interest, two of the rescuers would later become Israeli Prime Ministers.

With the government on the brink of a violent dissolution in 1991, Ethiopia was poised to enter a period of major political and social turbulence. Fearing the worst for Ethiopian Jews residing in the area, Israel and American Jewish philanthropies launched a complex, emergency evacuation that lasted 36 hours. Tirelessly traveling back and forth between Ethiopia and Israel, 35 aircrafts managed to extract over 14,000 Ethiopians in less than two days. In order to facilitate the airlift, American diplomats met with Ethiopia's weakening government and its acting President, who eventually greenlit the operation.

During the brutal ongoing war in Chechnya at the turn of the Millennium, dozens of Chechen fighters set their sights on Moscow's Dubrovka Theater and took more than 800 people hostage. The layout of the building meant that any potential rescue unit would be vulnerable to counter-attack by the heavily-armed hostage-takers. But nonetheless, Russian special forces stormed the theater after releasing a still-undisclosed gas that knocked everyone in the building out. Sadly, while many people were rescued after the assault, the effects of the gas led to the death of well over a hundred hostages.

After Pearl Harbor, during the years of battles in the Pacific Theater in World War II, Japan's Imperial Army took numerous Allied soldiers prisoner. As America advanced in 1944, turning the tide, the retreating Japanese starting killing some of these POWs. Fearing for the roughly 500 soldiers being held prisoner at Cabanatuan prison camp in the Philippines, a platoon of Army Rangers was dispatched to pull off a fearless rescue. Despite the long odds and supremely dangerous conditions, the raid went off successfully and hundreds of captives were freed.

In 1980, militants supporting national sovereignty in Iran’s Khuzestan Province, attacked the Iranian embassy in London, and successfully captured over two dozen hostages. Over six days, British authorities attempted to reach a peaceful resolution, but that all changed when one of the hostages was killed and thrown out onto the street. The Counter-Terrorism team of the Special Air Service invaded the Embassy, including rappelling down the side of the building, and rescued all but one of the hostages. The media actually aired the operation live, which might have backfired spectacularly if the hostage-takers had been watching on television.

1972's tragic Munich Massacre led the German government to create Grenzschutzgruppe 9, the Police Tactical Unit of the German Federal Police, which was called into action in 1977 when Palestinian gunmen demanding the release of Baader-Meinhof Group prisoners seized a Lufthansa 737 with almost a hundred passengers and crew members. Soon after the murder of the plane’s pilot, the commandos stormed the plane while it was temporarily stationed in Somalia. Lasting less than 10 minutes, “Operation Magic Fire” saw the GSG 9 overcome the terrorists and rescue all the remaining hostages.

In Peru, in 1996, the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (or, MRTA) invaded the Japanese Ambassador’s residence during a function and captured many Peruvian diplomats, army officers, and government officials. This hostage-taking lasted for months. As a direct attack would have been been suicidal, partly due to the captors booby-trapping and mining the courtyard and building, the Peruvian military built a full-scale replica of the residence on a military base to plan their assault, and then dug tunnels underneath the actual ambassadorial residence to prepare for a massive raid. Eventually commandos rushed through the tunnels and blasted up through the residence's floor, killing all 14 hostage-takers.

While many high-risk rescues after plane hijackings have been conducted since 1976, “Operation Thunderbolt,” also known as “Operation Entebbe,” is probably the most famous. Seeking to negotiate the release of Palestinian militants and later supported by dictator Idi Amin’s government, members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine captured and redirected an Air France plane to Uganda’s Entebbe Airport. With over a hundred lives still on the line, the Israeli government shipped 100 IDF commandos to Uganda and began a daring operation. After storming the terminal holding the hostages, the airport turned into a small war zone for 90 minutes, with the commandos eventually overwhelming the hijackers and rescuing nearly all of the captives.