John Malcolm Thorpe Fleming Churchill — nicknamed "Fighting Jack" and "Mad Jack" — fought through the entire Second World War armed with a Scottish broadsword, a longbow, and a set of bagpipes. He graduated from Sandhurst in 1926, left the army a decade later to work as a newspaper editor and film extra, then re-enlisted when Germany invaded Poland in 1939.
In the 1941 raid on Vågsøy, Norway, Churchill leapt from the landing craft playing "March of the Cameron Men" on his pipes as his commandos stormed the German garrison. In Sicily two years later, he and a single corporal infiltrated the town of Molina and captured 42 prisoners at sword point, marching them back down a mountain pass with wounded soldiers loaded onto carts pushed by their German captors. He later walked back to retrieve his sword, which he'd lost in hand-to-hand combat.
Captured in Yugoslavia in 1944 after a mortar shell killed everyone around him — he'd been playing "Will Ye No Come Back Again?" on his pipes — Churchill was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. He escaped. Recaptured, he escaped again. In retirement, he took up sailing coal-fired ships on the Thames and building radio-controlled model warships.
