Thread by @HistoryVille

John "Mad Jack" Churchill was the last British soldier to go to war with a bow and arrows, and a sword. And he did it during the Second World War!

His motto was: "Any officer who goes into action without his sword is improperly dressed."

Over the course of the war, Mad Jack killed German soldiers with his arrows and captured 42 of them as prisoners at sword-point during the Allied Invasion of Sicily in July 1943.

However, in May 1944, the Germans captured him and flew him to Berlin thinking he was related to the famous British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. After much interrogation which yielded no result, Hitler sent him to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

In April 1945, the camp’s lighting system failed and Mad Jack took advantage of the opportunity and melted into the darkness until he ran into the armoured vehicles of the United States Army in Verona, Italy.

He managed to convince them that he was a British colonel despite his scruffy appearance, and he was returned to safety.

Safety wasn’t exactly something Mad Jack was after, though. He was disappointed to learn that the war was winding down and that he had missed a year of it.

Rather than return home, he got himself assigned to Burma where the war against Japan was still in full swing.

By the time he got over there, though, the bombs had been dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, meaning that the war was basically over.

An unhappy Churchill vented, “If it wasn’t for those damn Yanks, we could have kept the war going for another 10 years!”

14 years later, Mad Jack retired from the army as a Lieutenant-Colonel in 1959 with two awards of the Distinguished Service Order and died in 1996 in Surrey, England. He was 89. #HistoryVille