They LaughedThen He Killed Nazis With a Longbow- Mad Jack Churchill

World War II had many warriors who became famous or even infamous for doing what was considered the most insane things. For example, the Germans had Luftwaffe Captain Hans-Joachim Marseille, see our video on him, who tried to save the enemy pilots he shot down. The Americans had Navy Commander Eugene B. Fluckey commanding the submarine USS Barb, who destroyed a train. The Japanese had Fighter Ace Saburo Sakai, who refused to shoot down a civilian transport aircraft with women and children on board. But the British had their own man, a commando, who showed up with a long bow, a Scottish broadsword and a set of bagpipes. And the craziest part? He survived. This is the story of Mad Jack Churchill, the most eccentric warrior of the modern age. Who was Jack Churchill? What was his background? What drove him to be such a colorful warrior? How did he become a legend? Hello, I'm Colin Heaton, former history professor, Army and Marine Corps veteran, and welcome to this episode of Forgotten History. John Malcolm Thorpe Fleming Churchill was born on September 16, 1906 in Colombo, British Ceylon, modern-day Sri Lanka, and was descendant from a long military tradition, and his father was a middle-class British civil servant. Jack attended King William's College on the Isle of Man and graduated from the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, in 1926 and was commissioned into the 2nd Battalion Manchester Regiment posted in Burma. While in Burma, he learned to ride a motorcycle and began his lifelong fascination with the bow, swordsmanship and bagpipes, mastering all three. Bored with peacetime service, he finished his duties and left the army in 1936 and moved to Nairobi, Kenya, working as a newspaper editor. Later, he found work as a male model in London for a fashion designer and even had extra roles in films, including The Drum, A Yank at Oxford, and The Thief of Baghdad. His fame as an archer saw him added to the British team at the 1939 World Archery Championships in Oslo, Norway. When the war broke out, Jack Churchill wanted back in the service and he got his wish. He was bold, headstrong, and obsessed with history and adventure. He once said, any officer who goes into action without his sword is improperly dressed. He would define what mad courage looked like, so he dusted off his bagpipes, longbow, and basket-hilted clay bank broadsword and re-enlisted. At this time, he wasn't messing around. Jack joined the British Expeditionary Force for the Battle of France in 1940 in anticipation of a German attack and, when it came, his legend started. Armed with his longbow, Scottish broadsword, and bagpipes, Captain Mad Jack became the only soldier in World War II to kill an enemy with a longbow, shooting a German NCO in the chest during an ambush near Bathune, France. He often played the bagpipes as bullets flew, carrying his broadsword and charged into combat with wild abandon. He earned his first military cross during the retreat to the Channel, when he hitched six trucks together to salvage a disabled British tank, although in the end he could not save the tank, but he did rescue a wounded British officer. Mad Jack arrived at Dunkirk on a bicycle, his bow and arrows hanging from the frame. After returning to England, he later led a commando raid in Norway, again bringing his pipes, bow, and sword, where he earned the second military cross for actions during a fierce firefight in Molde. His men attacked the German garrison at Växjö on Nordfjord. Churchill commanded two companies in the attack, charged with taking out the German shore batteries on Malloy Island, which lay in the fjord opposite Växjö town. In vintage Mad Jack fashion, he stood in the lead landing craft as it forged and tore the shore, playing the March of the Cameron Men on his bagpipes. His men succeeded and captured 100 Germans, sank 15,000 tons of shipping and destroyed the docks and warehouses, which contained the vital fish oil plants. When Prime Minister Winston Churchill created his Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, which included the Special Operations Executive and Special Air Service, men trained to go where others could not go and do what others could not do, Mad Jack was there. His selection for commando training in Scotland produced an unexpected dividend for Churchill. It was there where he met Rosamund Denny, the daughter of a Scottish shipbuilding baronet. They were married in Dumbarton in the spring of 1941, a happy marriage that would produce two children, Malcolm John Leslie Churchill and Rodney Alastair Gladstone Churchill, and the marriage would last until Churchill's death 55 years later. Following his training as a commando, he led a raid on Salerno and Vietri-Solmere, Italy, in 1943. As second-in-command of No. 2 Commando, he led six men in a night raid, capturing 42 German soldiers and a mortar crew, armed only with his sword. His attack on Pigoletti bagged 136 prisoners, where he earned the Distinguished Service Order. Assigned to SOE, Jack Churchill found himself deployed into Yugoslavia in 1944 to assist the Communist resistance leader, Josef Broz Tito, in his fight against the occupying Germans, but also their Bosnian-Muslim allies. Tito was also fighting to establish a communist Yugoslavia simultaneously against the nationalist Chetniks under General Dragoljub Joze Mihailović, supporting the Karadjordjević monarchy exiled in London. Churchill led a raid with 1,500 of Tito's men in Yugoslavia, both as a reconnaissance force and interdiction force, to kill and capture enemy troops and destroy anything of military value. However, the Germans ambushed them with many of his men killed, scattered, and hunted down. As his men were being cut down and their perimeter was shrinking, Mad Jack played Will You No Come Back Again on his bagpipes until a grenade knocked him out. He was captured and not immediately executed due to the Germans believing that he was related to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, which Mad Jack did not deny, although it was not true. Mad Jack was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg, Germany, near Berlin, which was a death sentence for SOE operatives and commandos following Hitler's October 18, 1942, commando order, where such men were to be executed after interrogation. At Sachsenhausen, over 30,000 prisoners would die in the camp, including British commandos. The commandant, SS-Standartenfuhrer Anton Keindl, contacted Berlin upon receiving Churchill. According to SS-Obergruppenfuhrer Karl Wolff, he said, when Keindl contacted Himmler, there was an excitement in the room. I remember. Himmler stayed his execution, believing that he may prove valuable as a hostage. Sachsenhausen was also the site of Operation Bernhard, one of the largest currency counterfeiting operations ever recorded as part of a plan to undermine the British and American economies, and Churchill, being spared execution, was tasked with reviewing British notes for accuracy. He refused. Well, Mad Jack did not take to captivity very well, and he was uncooperative with the counterfeiting operation, and he must have realized that if the Germans found out that he was not a nephew or any relation of the prime minister, his life was worthless. Also concerning, at the end of 1944, Himmler ordered the execution of every prisoner. Sick inmates were executed in the industrial yard, including at least 2,000 outright by firing squad or transferred to death camps. In February 1945, more than 1,300 prisoners were executed during the evacuation of the Liberosa forced labor camp, a subsidiary of Sachsenhausen. Most of them were gassed. So, in September 1944, Mad Jack escaped when he dug under the wire with a fellow RAF officer. They made good their escape, but both were recaptured near the Baltic coast after being challenged as another man spoke German. Transferred to Tirol, Austria, he escaped again when German guards panicked and abandoned the prisoners as the Allies closed in. He was found by American troops after he crossed the Brenner Pass into Italy some 150 miles away. The war in Europe was over. Mad Jack was now out of work, but he wanted to go fight the Japanese, so he requested a transfer to Burma. He arrived just in time to hear that Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been bombed, ending the war. Upset that he could not kill Japanese soldiers, he said, quote, if it wasn't for those damned Yanks, we could have kept the war going another 10 years. The next year, he finally became a paratrooper. Mad Jack was also hired to play an archer in the Not to be chained to a desk, he requested and was deployed to British Palestine, helping suppress the Jewish insurgency that erupted after World War II. Once, when on a patrol, he was leading, he was attacked. He ordered a charge on foot, sword in hand, and scattered the insurgents. He was successful in evacuating 700 Jews under threat from Arabs, and his public demeanor and brash flamboyant disposition earned him the respect from the Arabs as well. He helped prevent even more bloodshed. Mad Jack's fame saw him recruited as an instructor at the Land Air Warfare School in Australia. He retired in 1959 as a lieutenant colonel, but never stopped being eccentric. Looking for new challenges, he took up surfing and enjoyed it until he was nearly 70 years old. His ways would often convince people that he was genuinely insane, such as the times that he would throw his briefcase from a moving train, claiming to fellow passengers that it would land in his backyard. He often roamed the countryside hunting deer with his longbow, occasionally playing his bagpipes. Mad Jack Churchill wasn't just a soldier. He was a symbol of unbreakable will, creative defiance, and a deeply personal brand of courage. When interviewed about his eccentric methods during the war, he replied, people are less likely to shoot at you if you're playing the bagpipes. Lieutenant Colonel Mad Jack Churchill died on March 8, 1996, aged 89, and is buried in Surrey, England. He was one of a kind, to be sure.