"Fighting Jack Churchill", born on this day in Hong Kong, September 16, 1906, was a British Army officer who fought in the Second World War equipped with bagpipes and armed with a longbow and a basket-hilted Scottish broadsword. (Churchill, leading troops with his broadsword drawn, is identifiable on the far right in the photograph above of a military training exercise.)
Churchill is the last British soldier known to have killed an enemy combatant with a bow and arrow, which he did during the British Expeditionary Force's retreat to Dunkirk, France, in May 1940.
For his actions at Dunkirk and later at Vågsøy, Norway, Churchill received the Military Cross and Bar. He also won the Distinguished Service Order and Bar.
He also fought with distinction in Italy (1943) and Yugoslavia (1944), being captured by Germans in the later. After Germany's surrender, he fought in Burma (1945), and supposedly remarked relative to the war's sudden end, "If it hadn't been for those damn Yanks, we could've kept the war going for another ten years!"
He later served in British Palestine and Australia, and upon returning to England, before he retired, became the first man to ride a surfboard—which he designed himself—on the River Severn's five-foot tidal bore.
His motto: "Any officer who goes into action without his sword is improperly dressed."
In January 2018, with his two sons in the audience as special guests, Jack was added to the Museum of Curiosity during a live broadcast of BBC Radio 4's panel show The Museum of of Curiosity. (The museum is imaginary, in case you're wondering.) The show's host related this tale:
Churchill eventually settled for a desk job. On his daily journey home to Surrey his fellow commuters were often alarmed when just before his stop he would suddenly hurl his briefcase out of the train window. What they didn't know was that he was tossing it into his back garden so he wouldn't have to carry it home.
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