The Peculiar Truth about the Bagpiper at Dunkirk

• December 1941: Operation Archery was underway. British commandos came ashore at Vaagso, Norway to battle German troops. An experienced and indefatigable soldier led the way. While he played the bagpipes. The siege was over in ten minutes.

• By that time, Mad Jack Churchill already had a well-earned reputation for bravery and eccentricity on the battlefield. He became famous for entering combat against machine guns and hand grenades with nothing more than a sword, a bow and arrow, and his bagpipes.

• Churchill - no relation to the famous Prime Minister - was born in Hong Kong, then a British territory, in 1906. When he reached age 11, his family relocated to England. He attended a military college and was then stationed in Burma for ten years.

• It was there that Churchill developed a life-long love for motorcycles and for playing the bagpipes. He also finished in second place at a world championship in archery.

• After ten years in the military, he sought new careers, first as a newspaper editor in Nigeria and then as a male model. Neither lasted long. He also got a taste of the film business when he showed off his sword fighting prowess in the movies The Thief of Baghdad and A Yank at Oxford (1938).

• 1939: With Britain’s entry into World War II, Churchill returned to service. Civilian life had been unfulfilling; he belonged in battle.

• He joined the British Expeditionary Force into France where he killed a German soldier with a longbow and arrow. According to legend, he did the same at the battle of Dunkirk.

• During raids, he charged forward while playing the bagpipes and hurled grenades at enemy bunkers.

• In Italy, he went into battle with his sword and bagpipes. Then he and a corporal took 42 soldiers prisoner using nothing more than cunning and his broadsword.

• Someone asked Churchill why he took the blade into battle. He said that “any officer who goes into action without his sword is improperly dressed.”

• Churchill had nine lives on the battlefield. Time after time, while his comrades perished or were severely wounded all around him, he often came away unscathed or with minor wounds that he summarily ignored.

• 1944: In a mission in Yugoslavia, Churchill led his men into a battle while playing bagpipes. All of his men died except him. Having run out of ammunition and sensing his life was about to end from the fighting, he grabbed his instrument and played. Shrapnel knocked him unconscious. German troops wondered what had caused that horrible racket.

• Churchill was taken captive and sent to a concentration camp. He escaped via an unused drainage system. The Germans caught him again, and he was sent to another camp. A high-ranking German officer spared Churchill from execution.

• He escaped from the second concentration camp, too, and hiked across the Alps to Verona where he was rescued by American troops.

• Churchill still wasn’t done fighting. He shipped off to Burma to battle the Japanese. But before he could arrive the war ended. He found that profoundly disappointing.

• When the movie business came calling again after the war he accepted the challenge. He appeared in the 1952 movie Ivanhoe, appropriately as an archer.

• After other daring escapades, including freeing 700 hostages from terrorists in Jerusalem, Jack Churchill retired in 1959.

• The World War II bagpiper and champion archer died in 1996 just shy of age 90.