You see that handsome son of a gun in the center of the photo? Yeah, that one with the medal and the mustache. That is Anibal Augusto Milhais (July 9, 1895 - June 3, 1970), also known as “Soldado Milhões”, which means “A soldier as good as a million others”. Already, we can tell that this man is a bad ass.
Milhais was the most decorated Portuguese soldier of WWI and the only Portuguese soldier to be awarded the Ordem de Torre e Espada do Valor, Lealdade e Mérito (Military order of the Tower and of the Sword, of Valour, Loyalty, and Merit) on the battlefield (they were awarded in the capital of Lisbon). Why did he get these awards? Keep reading.
Milhais was a farmer until he got drafted in 1915. He was mobilized in 1917 and sent off to France to fight on the front lines that same year. It was in the Battle of La Lys on April 9, 1918 (First day of Ludendorff’s Lys Offensive, “Operation Georgette”, and/or “Battle of Estaires”) that Milhais was put in charge of one of the Lewis machine guns and covered the withdrawal of Portuguese and Scottish soldiers by himself. He tricked the attacking Germans that they were up against a well defended unit instead of one armed Portuguese soldier with a machine gun.
The Germans went around him and Milhais was stuck behind them for three days with nothing but a bag of sweetened almonds for food. On his third day, he rescued a Scottish major from drowning in a swamp and they both made it back to Allied lines. Milhais didn’t tell anyone what he did, but the Scottish major included it in his reports, as did other soldiers. A few months later, Milhais, again with his Lewis machine gun, held off a German attack and allowed a Belgium unit retreat to the safety of a secondary trench. On July 15, 1918, a praise given by Major Ferreira do Amaral to Milhais was published by the Order of Service of the Battalion, saying that his (Milhais’s) action as having been worth a million men.
He’s a bad-ass Portuguese WWI hero with a bitchin’ mustache. I haven’t see him here before and thought that he needed a mention.
