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'Mad Jack'
The man who fought with a longbow and a sword in
World War II.
John Malcolm Thorpe Fleming Churchill was born
in Hong Kong and graduated from the Royal Military Academy
at Sandhurst in 1926.
He would later earn the nickname, "Mad Jack" or
"Fighting Jack" for fighting with a longbow, bagpipes
and a sword in World War II.
Stationed at Burma with a Manchester Regiment in the
British Army during peacetime made
Mad Jack restless. It was during the interwar years
in the 30's that he would master the bagpipes and ride
his motorcycle across the entire Indian subcontinent.
In 1936, after moving to England, Mad
Jack left the army and became a model at a movie
extra. He would also practice a new skill,
archery, and became so good that he represented
Great Britain at the World Archery Championships in 1939.
When war arrived, Mad Jack returned to the British Army
and the Manchester regiment as an officer and was
shipped off to France.
During the Battle of France in 1940, Mad Jack
led small raids on the enemy as the British Expeditionary
Force was on the retreat from the Germans, relentless advance.
Using a longbow and a Scottish broadsword as
his weapon of choice, he became the only soldier known to
have felled an enemy with a longbow in the war when he landed
a shot on the enemy Feldwebel with a barbed arrow.
When asked why he did this, he replied: "Any officer
who goes into action without his sword is improperly dressed."
During the retreat to Dunkirk, Mad Jack was shot in the
neck. When asked how it happened, he replied: "German
machine gun", casually.
He would also win the Military Cross for bravery after
rescuing the wounded British officer from a German ambush.
After Dunkirk, Mad Jack signed up for the
commandos and when his training is complete, he was sent
to Vågsøy, Norway in 1941 as
second-in-command of No. 3 Commando in Operation
Archery.
As he left the landing craft,
Mad Jack played "March of the Cameramen" on his bagpipes and
then led his men ashore with his broadsword waving in the air.
The German garrison in Vågsøy was quickly defeated.
Prisoners were taken and the artillery batteries captured along
with shipping destroyed on Måløy Island.
For this action, Mad Jack received his second
Military Cross.
In 1943, in Italy, Mad Jack led
2 Commando with the objective to destroy German artillery
and observation posts in the town of (???).
Even though the town was well defended and outnumbered,
Mad Jack organized his men into six parallel columns who
instead of using stealth tactics, all shouted "Commando!"
The German defenders, as a result, were confused into thinking the shouting,
which was coming from all directions in the darkness, was a much bigger force.
In this skirmish, the fifty men of No. 2 Commando
took 136 prisoners.
Mad Jack, who was assisted by a corporal Rafael,
took 42 German prisoners and captured a mortar crew
using his broadsword. After marching the
prisoners down to British lines, he said:
"I maintain, that as long as you tell a German loudly and
clearly what to do, if you are senior to him he will cry
'Jawohl' and get on with it enthusiastically
and efficiently, whatever the situation."
After losing the broadsword in hand-to-hand
combat earlier, he later went to the town on his own to
retrieve it. On the way, he met an American
patrol going towards the enemy lines when they
should have been going the other way, so he told them that he wouldn't
"come back for a bloody third time".
In 1944, Mad Jack was in Yugoslavia
leading British commandos and now Yugoslav partisans,
attacking the vital hill called
Point 622 on the island of Brač in the Adriatic Sea
against the Germans.
Heavy casualties were caused and soon Jack was alone and out of
ammo. With no hope left, Jack started playing
songs on his bagpipes until he was knocked unconscious by a
frag grenade and captured by the German defenders.
He was first sent to Berlin and interrogated as
it was thought that because of his real name, he was a relative of
Prime Minister Winston Churchill and afterwards sent to
Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
But in September 1944, Mad Jack and an
RAF officer escaped the camp by crawling under barbed wire
through an abandoned drain and set out to walk
to the Baltic coast but were then captured.
Now sent to a new camp in Niederdorf, Austria, Mad Jack
escaped again on April 1945 taking
the opportunity to get away when the lighting system failed
in the darkness of night.
He walked a hundred and fifty miles through the treacherous
terrain of the Alps, surviving on vegetables that he
had liberated from gardens. Eight days later and
with a sprained ankle, he found a US armored column
and was sent back to England.
Jack was frustrated that the war in Europe was all but over,
so he made his way to the Pacific Campaign to join the
battle against the Japanese at Burma.
But by the time he arrived, the atomic bombs had been dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Mad Jack was so unhappy, he said: "If it wasn't
for those damn Yanks, we could have kept the war going another ten
years!"
After the war, Mad Jack continued to seek danger,
qualifying as a parachutist and transferring to the Seaforth
Highlanders and later, ending up in Palestine in 1948
as second-in-command of 1st Battalion,
the Highland Light Infantry.
During an ambush on a Jewish medical convoy by Arab
forces, Mad Jack, with only 12 men and in
full military dress, marched under fire to the convoy
to offer its evacuation.
"I grinned like mad from side to side," he said afterwards.
"...as people are less likely to shoot at you if you smile at them."
He would later coordinate the evacuation of
700 Jewish doctors, students and patients from
the hospital atop Jerusalem's Mount Scopus.
Mad Jack would retire from the Army in 1959
with two awards of the Distinguished Service Order.