On D-Day Lord Lovat came ashore on Sword beach with his personal piper, Bill Millin who piped the boys ashore under fire.
Those two must have been totally out of their gourds to pull a stunt like that.
Mad Jack Churchill was another Brit that makes me wonder. He carried bagpipes, a longbow and a broadsword with him into combat and apparently used all three. While he was fighting his way to Dunkirk for evacuation he killed a German soldier with an arrow he shot with his long bow. He was also reported to have used his sword in hand to hand combat in Italy.
There have been numerous others. Major Allison Digby Tatham-Warter was another. He jumped with the Red Devils on Market Garden carrying an umbrella because he had a hard time remembering passwords. He later said people would say "Only a bloody fool of an Englishman would carry an umbrella into battle" He also taught his men bugle calls because he didn't have a lot of faith in the reliability of field radios. It proved to be wise. His paras used bugle calls a lot when the radios quit.
Known simply as 'Digby' he lad a bayonet charge across the Arnhem bridge while wearing a bowler hat.
The Brits have sure had their share of eccentrics.
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Major Allison Digby Tatham-Warter disabled a German armoured car with his umbrella, incapacitating the driver by shoving the umbrella through the car's observational slit and poking the driver in the eye! And he was one of the leaders of Operation Pegasus freeing 138 men from behind German lines. Later became "Mr Photo Safari" creating the now popular adventure of photographing rather than harvesting African game.
ReplyDeleteMad Jack appeared in the movie Ivanhoe!
Lord Lovat was actually the 15th/17th Lord Lovat (I'll leave you to figure that riddle out) and when he was told he couldn't have his piper play, he told his piper “Ah, but that’s the English War Office. You and I are both Scottish, and that doesn’t apply.”
He was also well landed, with some 250,000 acres in Scotland.
There are lots of these sorts of folks about in the history of WWII on most sides.