Old School Adventurer

​

John Malcolm Thorpe Fleming Churchill or just plain “Mad Jack” once paraded with his unit holding an umbrella, a mortal sin in the military. When asked by an officer why he had his umbrella, he replied, “Because it is raining.” Whether madcap or eccentric or both didn’t matter: Jack Churchill was a natural leader of men.

Born into an old Oxfordshire family, Churchill graduated from the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and served in Burma with the Manchester Regiment. While in Burma, he rode his motorcycle cross country, exploring, and learned to play the bagpipes. He left the army in 1936 and worked as a newspaper editor in Nairobi, Kenya. He also worked as a male model and movie extra, appearing in The Thief of Bagdad. His expertise with a bow got him the movie gig and also took him to Oslo, Norway, where he shot for Britain during the world championships in 1939.
As the war approached Europe, Churchill returned to the army because, as he said, the country had “gotten into a jam in my absence.” By May 1940, he served as second in command of an infantry company. He always marched into battle with a bow and arrows and his trusty basket-hilted claymore (or broadsword) by his side. Churchill defended the obsolete weapons, saying, “In my opinion…any officer who goes into action without his sword is improperly dressed.”
His weaponry may have been old fashioned, but it served his purposes. At the Battle of Dunkirk, where 300,000 beach-stranded troops had to be evacuated, Churchill hit a German soldier with an arrow. The German officer’s cap hung from the headlight of Churchill’s motorcycle as he later rode along with his bow strapped to the side.
The next year, Churchill volunteered for Operation Archery, an attack on a German garrison in Norway, where he led two companies in battle. He and his companies were tasked with taking out the German batteries on Maaloy Island. As the vessel bore him toward the island, Churchill’s rendition of “The March of the Cameron Men” blared from his bagpipes. When they landed, he charged, sword in hand, ahead of the rest of his men.
In 1943, Churchill served as a commanding officer in Salerno when his troops were forced into line fighting, for which they hadn’t been trained. Churchill forged ahead of his soldiers, wielding his sword. Blade held high, he leapt out at German sentries from the darkness. The frightened Germans surrendered. Churchill took 42 prisoners that night with the help of just one other man and his sword. At the time, he remarked, “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’ (yes sir) and get on with it enthusiastically and efficiently whatever the situation.”
Later on, Churchill was sent to Yugoslavia to lead raids against Germans from the island of Vis. In May 1944, his mission was part of an operation involving three attacks on separate hilltop positions. Churchill led one group up one hill, but only six of them reached the target, leaving Churchill in plain view to the enemy with only a few men to defend him. As the Germans advanced, a mortar shell killed or wounded all of Churchill’s men but not him. What did he do? He played “Will Ye No Come Back Again” on his bagpipes until knocked unconscious by German grenades and captured.
Churchill was sent to Berlin for interrogation and then to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. The Germans thought him related to Winston Churchill, which he wasn’t.
Churchill and a comrade escaped from the camp by sneaking through a drain under the barbed wire. They were recaptured later and sent to a camp in Austria.
In April 1945, Churchill fled from his work detail and kept walking. Eight days and 150 miles later, he ran into armored vehicles of the U.S. Army in Italy. He convinced them that he was a British colonel and was returned to safety.
Disappointed to hear that the war was winding down and he had missed a year of it, he got himself assigned to Burma, where the war against Japan was still in full swing. But by the time he got over there, the atomic bombs had been dropped on Japan. The war was over. “If it wasn’t for those damn Yanks, we could have kept the war going for another 10 years!” cried Churchill.
Despite this, he went on to train as a parachutist, and when he qualified, was sent into Palestine as the second-in-command of the 1st Battalion. He later worked as a land-air warfare instructor in Australia, where he learned to love surfing. He received two Distinguished Service Orders for his military service. He appeared in the 1952 version of Ivanhoe, shooting his arrows from the walls of Warwick Castle. Married in 1941, he and his wife had two sons. He retired from the army in 1959 and died in 1996 in Surrey at age 89.