Jack Churchill was a British soldier in World War II. He carried a Scottish broadsword into battle. Not as a backup. As his main weapon. He played bagpipes while landing under fire. He captured 42 Germans at swordpoint with one corporal helping. He escaped from a concentration camp by digging a tunnel. Then he walked 150 miles through the Alps to freedom. The army recommended him for the Victoria Cross. They gave him a DSO instead. After the war he learned to surf in Australia. He was the first person to surf a tidal wave in England. He said the war ending was a disappointment. He died on his 55th wedding anniversary. He was 89.
In September 1943, a British lieutenant colonel walked into a German-held village in southern Italy carrying a Scottish broadsword. He had one other soldier with him. Over the next several hours they captured 42 prisoners, including a mortar squad, and marched them back to Allied lines. The German soldiers had surrendered to a man with a sword in an age of machine guns and tanks.
His name was Jack Churchill. The men who served under him called him Mad Jack.
The making of a legend
John Malcolm Thorpe Fleming Churchill was born in Colombo, Ceylon, in September 1906. His father was a District Engineer in the colonial civil service. His grandfather had done the same job before him. The Churchills were an empire family: three generations of British officials scattered across the colonies, doing the quiet administrative work that kept the whole thing running.
Jack went to the Dragon School in Oxford, then King William’s College on the Isle of Man, then Sandhurst. Commissioned into the Manchester Regiment in 1926. Posted to Burma. Served ten years patrolling the Irrawaddy River delta by boat. Suppressed the Saya San rebellion in the early 1930s. Learned to play the bagpipes from a Pipe Major of the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders while stationed at Maymyo, a hill station above Mandalay.
Then he quit. Left the army in 1936. He and his commanding officer had, as one account puts it, “agreed that they disagreed.” Churchill was bored. Peacetime soldiering at a depot in Ashton-under-Lyne was not what he had signed up for.
What followed was a strange interlude. He edited a newspaper in Nairobi. He worked as a male model. He took second place in a military piping competition at the Aldershot Tattoo. He represented Great Britain at the 1939 World Archery Championships in Oslo, placing 26th. He got a small part in the 1940 film “The Thief of Bagdad,” shooting arrows from the walls of a studio backlot.
Then Germany invaded Poland.
The sword, the pipes, the war
Churchill was recalled to the Manchester Regiment and sent to France with the British Expeditionary Force. He landed at Cherbourg in September 1939 carrying his broadsword. A basket-hilted claybeg, the traditional full-dress sword of Highland regiment officers. He would carry it for the rest of the war.
His first action came in May 1940 near the village of l’Epinette, during the retreat to Dunkirk. His company was surrounded. Churchill held the position with two machine guns until the ammunition ran out, then destroyed the guns and led his men through enemy lines in the dark. He was awarded the Military Cross. The official citation reads: “He fought his two M.G.’s until all ammunition was finished when he destroyed his guns and extricated his command after dark passing through the enemy lines.”
There is a widely circulated story that Churchill killed a German sergeant with a longbow during this action, making it the last confirmed longbow kill in warfare. Multiple sources repeat it. The problem is that Churchill himself later said his bows had been crushed by a lorry earlier in the campaign. Bob Bishop, a veteran who served with Churchill in every single No. 2 Commando operation, never once saw him carry a bow in combat. He carried a sword, bagpipes, an American M-1 carbine, a .45 automatic, and a map case. No bow.
The longbow kill is the most famous thing about Mad Jack Churchill, and it probably never happened. The truth is more interesting. He did not need a gimmick. He had a sword and a set of bagpipes and a complete disregard for the statistical probabilities of modern warfare. That was enough.
”If it hadn’t been for those damned Yanks, we could have kept the war going for another ten years.” - Churchill, on learning the war in Europe was ending while he was still a prisoner
Norway. Italy. The bagpipes worked.
In December 1941, Churchill volunteered for the Commandos. He was posted as second-in-command of No. 3 Commando and sent to Norway for Operation Archery, a raid on the German garrison at Vaagso.
As the landing craft approached the shore, Churchill stood at the front playing “The March of the Cameron Men” on his bagpipes. When the ramp dropped, he leapt off, threw a grenade, drew his sword, and charged. The garrison was overrun in under ten minutes. Churchill was wounded during the raid. He was awarded a Bar to his Military Cross. There is film footage of him from this operation.
By July 1942 he was commanding No. 2 Commando. He led them ashore at Sicily in July 1943, broadsword at his waist, bagpipes under his arm. Then came Salerno.
The Salerno landing in September 1943 was where Churchill did the thing that should not have worked but did. He and a corporal named Ruffell walked into the German-held village of Pigoletti in bright moonlight. Churchill approached each German sentry post and weapons pit one by one, sword drawn, and took the occupants prisoner. Group by group, he delivered them to Ruffell. He made the German mortar crews carry their own mortars. Forty-two prisoners. Two men.
The DSO citation, written by a civil servant in London reading after-action reports, could not contain itself: “The magnetic power of his personal leadership frequently rallied his exhausted troops when they could scarcely stagger forward.”
He was recommended for the Victoria Cross. The recommendation was downgraded to a Distinguished Service Order. The Commando Veterans Archive, which records this, asks one word: “WHY?”
Bob Bishop, who was there, had a theory. Churchill lacked rapport with brother officers. He did not play the political game. He was not the Victoria Cross “type,” which apparently required a particular kind of quiet, self-effacing heroism that did not involve broadswords and bagpipes. The same institutional politics that denied Paddy Mayne a VC. You could be brave. You could be astonishing. But you had to be astonishing in the approved manner.
The island. The pipes. The capture.
In May 1944, Churchill led No. 2 Commando in a raid on the German-held island of Brac off the Dalmatian coast of Yugoslavia. The objective was Hill 622, the highest point in the Adriatic islands.
The assault went wrong. A mortar barrage hit the advancing Commandos. Churchill was the only officer left standing. He played “Will Ye No Come Back Again?” on his bagpipes as the Germans advanced up the hill toward him.
A grenade knocked him unconscious. The Germans captured him. They flew him to Berlin for interrogation because they thought he might be related to Winston Churchill. He was not.
“If it hadn’t been for those damned Yanks, we could have kept the war going for another ten years.”
- Churchill, on learning the war in Europe was ending while he was still a prisoner
Sachsenhausen. The tunnel. The walk.
The Germans sent Churchill to Sachsenhausen concentration camp north of Berlin. Not a regular POW camp. The special section for prominent prisoners, the Sonderhaftlinge. He was held with other high-value hostages.
In September 1944, Churchill helped dig a tunnel out of Sachsenhausen with RAF Flight Lieutenant Jimmy James, one of the legendary “Great Escapers” from Stalag Luft III. They crawled out through the tunnel at night. Churchill sprained his ankle during the breakout. He walked toward the Baltic coast anyway. He was recaptured near Rostock, miles from the sea.
He was transferred to a camp in the Tyrol. In April 1945, as the Third Reich collapsed, Churchill and roughly 140 other prominent prisoners were guarded by SS troops who were expected to execute them before the Allies arrived. A regular German army officer, Hauptmann Wichard von Alvensleben, moved his unit in to protect the prisoners. The SS withdrew.
Churchill walked out. More than a hundred miles through the Alps, down through the Brenner Pass, into Italy. He reached an American armored column near Verona. The war in Europe ended weeks later. He volunteered for the Pacific theatre. The atomic bombs ended that before he could get there.
What happened next
The British Army sent Churchill to Palestine in 1948 as second-in-command of the Highland Light Infantry. On April 13 that year, a medical convoy from Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem was ambushed. Seventy-nine people were killed. Churchill offered to lead a rescue. The Haganah refused British help, distrustful of the colonial power whose Mandate policies had contributed to the crisis. He then organized the evacuation of roughly 500 patients and staff from the besieged hospital on Mount Scopus. He walked toward the ambush site alone, carrying a blackthorn stick, smiling, on the theory that people are less likely to shoot you if you smile at them.
After Palestine, the Army posted him to Australia as an instructor at the Land/Air Warfare School in Queensland. He learned to surf around Newcastle, New South Wales. He designed and built his own surfboards.
On July 21, 1955, Churchill became the first person to surf the Severn Bore, a tidal wave that rolls up the River Severn in Gloucestershire. He rode a homemade 14-foot board a mile and a half upriver. He was 48 years old.
He had made his first parachute jump on his 40th birthday. He was the only officer to command both a Commando unit and a Parachute battalion. He retired from the Army in 1959.
In civilian life he sailed coal-fired steamboats on the Thames. He made radio-controlled model warships. He threw his briefcase out of the train window on his commute from London to Surrey so it would land in his own back garden and he would not have to carry it from the station.
Jack Churchill died on March 8, 1996, in Surrey. He was 89. It was his 55th wedding anniversary. He had married Rosamund Margaret Denny on March 8, 1941. They had two sons.
His friend and biographer Rex King-Clark wrote a book about him called “Unlimited Boldness.” Bob Bishop, the veteran who served under him throughout the war, said this: “Jack certainly had a personal story of unexcelled heroism to tell, but was too darn modest to cash in on it.”
By the numbers
- Germans captured at swordpoint (Pigoletti): 42
- Germans captured at Solta: 34
- Escape attempts from POW camps: 2
- Miles walked through the Alps to freedom: 150+
- Major amphibious assaults: 4 (Norway, Sicily, Salerno, Brac)
- Decorations: DSO and Bar, MC and Bar, Mentioned in Dispatches, Parachute Wings
- Years of military service: 30 (1926-1936, 1939-1959)
- Age when he first jumped out of a plane: 40
- Age when he first surfed a tidal bore: 48
- Brother who became Major General: 1 (Thomas)
- Brother killed in action: 1 (Robert, Royal Navy, 1942)
- Relation to Winston Churchill: 0
- Books Churchill wrote about himself: 0
Sources
- Commando Veterans Archive - Jack Churchill
- TracesOfWar - Lt Col Jack Churchill
- Historic UK - Fighting Jack Churchill
- Warfare History Network - Mad Jack Churchill
- Deddington History - Colonel Jack and Major General Tom Churchill
- Dragon School - Eminent Dragons
- Biographics - Mad Jack Churchill
- The Independent - Surfing the Severn Bore
- King-Clark, Rex. Jack Churchill: Unlimited Boldness. Knutsford: Fleur-de-Lys Publishing, 1997.
- Owen, James. Commando - Winning World War II Behind Enemy Lines. Ballantine Books, 2012.
- Kirchner, Paul. More of the Deadliest Men Who Ever Lived. Boulder: Paladin Press, 2010.
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