Let me introduce Mad Jack Churchill
Or to give his full title Lieutenant Colonel john Malcolm Thorpe Fleming “Mad Jack” Churchill, DSO & Bar, MC & Bar.
He was a British soldier who fought throughout the Second World War, who went into battle playing bagpipes and armed with a Scottish broadsword.
He is also famous for being the last soldier to kill an enemy with a longbow – when he shot a German officer in 1940.
During the 1943 campaign in Italy, he snuck out of camp one night with a corporal, creeping from one German post to the next and surprising the guards with his claymore sword. By the end night he’d captured 42 prisoners and soon after earned the Distinguished Service Order.
In 1944, Churchill was sent to assist Josip Broz Tito’s forces in Yugoslavia, leading a full frontal assault on a well-defended tower on the island of Brac. Leading a charge through strafing fire and mortars, he was one of only seven men to reach the target and, after firing off every bullet he had, found himself the last man standing. So he stood playing “Will Ye No Come Back Again?” on his pipes until the advancing Germans knocked him out with a grenade blast.
He was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp where he promptly escaped, shimmying under a wire fence, and attempted to walk about 125 miles through Nazi territory to the Baltic sea. He was captured just miles from the shore and transferred to another camp, this time in Italy. As should have been expected by then, he escaped in 1945, sneaking away during a power outage and walking about 100 miles using a stolen rusted can to cook what he considered liberated vegetables looted from Nazi-held fields until he found an American regiment in Verona.
After victory in Europe, Churchill was sent to Burma, where some of the largest land battles against Japan were being fought. By the time Churchill reached India, Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been bombed and the war ended.
Churchill was said to be unhappy with the sudden end of the war, saying: “If it wasnt for those damn Yanks, we could have kept the war going another 10 years.”
