the utterly balls-out life of mad jack churchill; or, i guess if you’re going to fight a modern world war with bagpipes and a longbow, i’d better write a blog post about you
Let’s talk about the maddest bastard in the entire Second World War (aside from, you know, the Nazis, who were obviously batshit insane but in a far less cool, fun way).
Lieutenant-Colonel John Malcolm Thorpe Fleming Churchill was born in Hong Kong to English parents and way too many names. Posh people love giving their kids a thousand names.
Our boy Jack (he went by Jack) was sadly born too late to fight in WWI, which started when he was eight, but luckily this was England in the early 20th century so there was plenty of imperialism and senseless killing to go around. After graduating from Sandhurst, he travelled to Burma to do some war, and spent his time battering around the country on a motorbike. This was only the beginning of the balls-out, aesthetic-first mad fuckery that would define his life.
Mad Jack Churchill, a man who lived his life as an insane cartoon.
A few years later, Jack left the army and pursued several perfectly normal careers as the following: a championship bagpiper, a world-class archer, and a male model. All of this made complete sense, because it was the 1930s and he was a middle-class white man who therefore never had to get a real job.
Then WWII started, and our boy Jack ditched the modelling career and returned to Army with a screeching vengeance. God, he loved him some motherfucking war.
For some reason, Jack fought all his battles with a set of bagpipes, a longbow and a broadsword, because he was a mad Scotland fanboy and because apparently nobody had told him that they had guns now. While leading troops in France, he signalled the beginning of one particular attack by shooting the German sergeant in the chest with an arrow, which provided a suitable element of surprise because he SHOT HIM WITH A FUCKING ARROW in a war where everybody else had GUNS. While being decorated for some victory or another, the general awarding him his medal brought up the whole sword business, and Jack replied “any officer who goes into action without his sword is improperly dressed”. To which the general, presumably, replied “well yes, Jack, but we have guns now”.
“Anyway, here’s Wonderwall”.
The fact that everyone else had guns later dawned on Jack when he was SHOT IN THE FUCKING NECK with a MACHINE GUN and just went about his merry business with a hole in his neck until someone spotted the blood and made him go to the fucking hospital.
After briefly battering around France on a motorbike with his longbow on his back, and then returning to England, Jack signed up to join a new regiment called the Commandos, which were a group of complete insane bastards who loved to war. He was a great Commando, being the absolute most insane bastard ever to war.
Jack went on to lead a siege of some Norwegian island that the Nazis were holding, in an attack called Operation Archery (which could only have confused Jack further re the longbow/guns thing). He flung himself from the boats playing his bagpipes, threw a grenade while screaming like a maniac and began a successful attack where they took back the island and captured a bunch of prisoners. This is all very confusing logistically because bagpipes are a bit of a faff of an instrument, and require, at minimum, two hands, a mouth, an armpit, and no ears to play, so I’m not sure how he threw the grenade, and where he put the pipes once he’d started fighting in earnest. Did he have some kind of bagpipe holster? Did he have seven hands? Maybe he just flung the pipes aside and picked them up later. Who knows? The man was an enigma.
At one point Jack got casually blown up, but it was so incidental to the rest of his batshit fucking life that it’s not even mentioned in the Wikipedia article.
One night, while battering around France once again, this time apparently not on a motorbike, he came across a German regiment. Using one German as a human shield, he happily sauntered around the camp with his sword insisting everyone surrender. They did, presumably because they were so taken aback by this sword-wielding, moustachioed maniac asking them politely if they would possibly mind dropping their weapons please. He took 42 prisoners. By himself. He later referred to this as “a bit Errol Flynn-ish”, proving that he was CLEARLY doing all of this for the aesthetic. JUST ADMIT IT, JACK. ADMIT IT’S ALL FOR THE AESTHETIC.
In fairness, this was a very strong aesthetic.
Of course, with all this balls-to-the-wall madness, it was only a matter of time before our boy Jack got captured. When he did, it was only because his entire regiment was exploded apart from him. Our boy Jack was dragged away while passive-aggressively playing sad songs on the bagpipes until someone knocked him out with a grenade and HOPEFULLY took his fucking pipes away.
Jack was sent to a concentration camp and promptly slipped under the fence and fucked off, only to be captured again while wandering towards the Baltic coast, and promptly returned to another concentration camp. He hung around here for a bit, carrying a rusty can and some onions around with him “just in case” (IN CASE OF WHAT, JACK), and then one day the lights at the camp failed and he literally just fucked off into the darkness and across the Alps. Eventually, he found a US regiment who picked him up and gave him back to the Brits, I imagine rolling their eyes as they did so.
Having missed the majority of the rest of the European war, but still keen to continue being fucking mental, Jack went back to Burma with the aim of fighting the Japanese. On arrival, he was gutted to discover that the Americans had nuked Japan and the war was over. He was known for saying “if it weren’t for those damn Yanks we could have kept the war going for another ten years”. Oh my, it’s a tough life, isn’t it, Jack? Bet all those Japanese civilians who were vaporised felt really bad about that one.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki: 200,000 civilians fully liquefied and one (1) posh man’s sword-wielding lunacy cut short.
Post-war, he fought in Palestine for a bit, presumably just because there was a convenient war going on there, before eventually retiring. Even in retirement he was a mad bastard, and was known for chucking his briefcase out of train windows, claiming he was “throwing it into his back garden so he wouldn’t have to carry it back home from the station”. This was, once again, clearly just for the aesthetic, and Jack was obviously going through dozens of briefcases a month as he hurled them into a hedge every day.
He died in the 90s, aged 88, probably while swinging a sword at a passing train or some ridiculous shit.