John Malcolm Thorpe Fleming Churchill — nicknamed “Preventing Jack” and “Mad Jack” — fought by means of the complete Second World Warfare armed with a Scottish broadsword, a longbow, and a set of bagpipes. He graduated from Sandhurst in 1926, left the military a decade later to work as a newspaper editor and movie further, then re-enlisted when Germany invaded Poland in 1939.
Within the 1941 raid on Vågsøy, Norway, Churchill leapt from the touchdown craft enjoying “March of the Cameron Males” on his pipes as his commandos stormed the German garrison. In Sicily two years later, he and a single corporal infiltrated the city of Molina and captured 42 prisoners at sword level, marching them again down a mountain move with wounded troopers loaded onto carts pushed by their German captors. He later walked again to retrieve his sword, which he’d misplaced in hand-to-hand fight.
Captured in Yugoslavia in 1944 after a mortar shell killed everybody round him — he’d been enjoying “Will Ye No Come Again Once more?” on his pipes — Churchill was despatched to Sachsenhausen focus camp. He escaped. Recaptured, he escaped once more. In retirement, he took up crusing coal-fired ships on the Thames and constructing radio-controlled mannequin warships.
