A Little Romance and WWII Badass heroes

When the British Army went ashore at Normandy, private Bill Millin was wearing a Cameron tartan kilt and playing "Hielan' Laddie" and "The Road to the Isles" as his comrades fell around him on Sword Beachon his bagpipes.

Unarmed except for a ceremonial dagger, he marched up and down the water’s edge, blasting out tunes, and miraculously was not hit. Millin states that he later talked to captured German snipers who claimed they did not shoot at him because they thought he was crazy

Millin was personal piper to Lord Lovat, commander of 1st Special Service Brigade.

The War Office had banned pipers from leading soldiers into battle after many were lost in World War I. “But that’s the English War Office,” Lovat told him. “You and I are both Scottish, and that doesn’t apply.”

 

Millin was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada on 14 July 1922 to a father of Scottish origin who returned to Glasgow as a policeman when William was three. He grew up and went to school in the Shettleston area of the city. He joined the Territorial Army in Fort William, where his family had moved, and played in the pipe bands of the Highland Light Infantry and the Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders before volunteering as a commando and training with Lovat at Achnacarry along with French, Dutch, Belgian, Polish, Norwegian, and Czechoslovakian troops.

Millin saw further action with 1 SSB in the Netherlands and Germany before being demobbed (demobilised) in 1946 and going to work on Lord Lovat's highland estate. In the 1950s he became a registered psychiatric nurse in Glasgow, moving south to a hospital in Devon in the late '60s until he retired in the Devon town of Dawlish in 1988.

 Piper Bill Millin Statue at Sword beach

Lieutenant Colonel John Malcolm Thorpe Fleming "Jack" Churchill, (mad jack)

enjoyed danger so much that he fought World War II with arrows and a broadsword (longbow, and a Scottish sword - a basket-hilted claymore called by others a claybeg) —

that’s him on the far right below, leading a training exercise in Scotland.

 

“Any officer who goes into action without his sword,” he said, “is improperly dressed.”
Churchill charged through the whole war this way — he’s the only British soldier to fell an enemy with a longbow — and yet he lived to be 90. He died peacefully in Surrey in 1996.

Jack Malcolm Thorpe Fleming Churchill graduated from Sandhurst Military Academy in 1926 and joined the storied Manchester Regiment of the British Army.  He spent his first few years in the army riding his motorcycle across the entire Indian subcontinent (both the paved and the unpaved paths) just for the hell of it and learning to play the bagpipes despite the fact that he was about as Scottish as Shaka Zulu.  After about ten years of doing crazy shit in the army, Jack Churchill retired.  In his time off he worked as a newspaper editor, a professional male model and a movie extra, all the while honing his skill at archery and bagpiping on the side.  He even represented England in the Archery World Championships in 1939.  

But guys like Jack Churchill aren't satisfied just by being a bizarre mesh of Robin Hood and Derek Zoolander, so he re-enlisted.  And in the early months of 1940, he had his opportunity to prove himself as a distinguished, if not slightly eccentric, officer of the British Army

He had been shipped to France to assist the rest of the British Expeditionary Force in their mission to reinforce the Maginot Line, but not long after Churchill arrived Hitler decided to send his legions to seriously fuck up France and the Brits found themselves right in the middle of a raging shitstorm.  The British troops were being pushed back towards the sea by the unstoppable Blitzkrieg, doing whatever they could to stall the Germans' relentless advance. 

Well Jack Churchill had some ideas.  He not only refused to give ground, but he launched small-scale guerrilla raids and surprise attacks on German positions and supply depots.  

Riding his trusty motorcycle and armed only with a motherfucking bow and arrow and a Scottish broadsword, he would assault the Germans, catch them completely off-guard, and fuck their shit up medieval-style.  When asked by a fellow officer why Churchill insisted on carrying the broadsword into battle with him, he responded, "In my opinion, sir, any officer who goes into action without his sword is improperly dress. 

After Dunkirk, Jack returned to England and promptly signed up to be a member of a new organization known as the Commandos.  He wasn't sure what a Commando was, but he was excited about the prospect of kicking German asses, so he couldn't resist.  He was promptly put through the grueling training regimen of the British Special Forces, and he loved every minute of it.

When his training was completed, he took part in the daring amphibious assault on the German base in Vaagso, Norway.  As the leader of Number 2 Commando, Churchill was responsible for taking out the artillery batteries on Maaloy Island. 

As the landing craft raced towards their LZ, he belted out "The March of the Cameron Men" on the bagpipes to pump up his men and prove to everyone how awesome he was. 

When the assault ramp swung open, he fearlessly waded through knee-deep water out at the head of his men, with his trusty blade lofted high in the air, screaming "COOMMAAAAAAANNNNDOOOO!!!!!" at the top of his lungs.  Two hours later, British High Command received a telegram from the front:

Maaloy battery and island captured.  Casualties slight.  Demolitions in progress.  Churchill."

 

During the British landing at Salerno, he won another award for bravery.  His squad was charged with taking out an artillery battery that was pinning down a nearby British force, despite the fact that the town of Piegoletti (where the guns were based) was garrisoned by a force much larger than his own Number 2 Commando. 

Well Churchill was like, "fuck that".  In the middle of the night, he had his men charge the town from all sides, screaming "COOMMAAANNNNDOOO!!!" as loud as possible. 

The Germans were confused and surprised, and mounted a futile resistance.  The 50 men of Number 2 Commando took 136 prisoners and inflicted an unknown number of casualties.

Churchill continued to lead his men in action against the German forces in Yugoslavia, but was eventually captured by the enemy while fighting for Point 622 on the island of Brac in the Adriatic Sea, when every man in his Commando team was killed or wounded and all of his revolver ammunition ran out. 

Knowing that he was not going to escape, and having no further means of killing Nazis, Jack started playing sad songs on his bagpipes until he was finally knocked unconscious by a frag grenade and taken off to the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. 

But it would take more than some fucking concentration camp to hold Jack Churchill.  One night in September of 1944, he escaped the camp by crawling under barbed wire and through and abandoned drain.  He was later recaptured while walking towards the Baltic coast and shipped off to a prison camp in Austria. 

This too would prove to be insufficient to hold Jack, however.  When the camp lighting failed one night in April 1945, he dropped his shovel and walked away from work detail.  He marched 150 miles through the treacherous terrain of the Alps, "liberating" vegetables he found along the way, until finally he met up with a U.S. Armored column and was sent back to England. 

Simo Hayha

Who Was He?

Simo Hayha had a fairly boring life in Finland. He served his one mandatory year in the military, and then became a farmer. But when the Soviet Union invaded his homeland in 1939, he decided he wanted to help his country.

Since the majority of fighting took place in the forest, he figured the best way to stop the invasion was to grab his trusty rifle, a couple of cans of food and hide in a tree all day shooting Russians. In six feet of snow. And 20-40 degrees below zero.

Can you spot Hayha? Neither could the Russians.

Of course when the Russians heard that dozens of their men were going down and that it was all one dude with a rifle, they got fucking scared. He became known as "The White Death" because of his white camouflage outfit, and they actually mounted whole missions just to kill that one guy.

They started by sending out a task force to find Hayha and take him out. He killed them all.

Then they tried getting together a team of counter-snipers (which are basically snipers that kill snipers) and sent them in to eliminate Hayha. He killed all of them, too.

Over the course of 100 days, Hayha killed 542 people with his rifle. He took out another 150 or so with his SMG, sending his credited kill-count up to 705.

Since everyone they had was either too dead or too scared to go anywhere near him, the Russians just carpet-bombed everywhere they thought he might be. Supposedly, they had the location right, and he actually got hit by a cloud of shrapnel that tore his coat up, but didn't actually hurt him, because he's the fucking White Death, damn it.

Finally on March 6th, 1940, some lucky bastard shot Hayha in the head with an exploding bullet. When some other soldiers found him and brought him back to base, he "had half his head missing." The White Death had finally been stopped...

...for about a week. In spite of having come down with a nasty case of shot-in-the-face syndrome, he was still very much alive, and regained consciousness on March 13, the very day the war ended.

Audie Murphy

Who Was He?

When Audie Murphy applied to the Marines in 1942 at the tender age of 16, he was 5'5" and weighed 110 pounds. They laughed in his face. So he applied to the Air Force, and they also laughed in his face. Then he applied for the Army, and they figured they could always use another grunt to absorb gunfire, so they let him in. He wasn't particularly good at it, and they actually tried to get him transferred to be a cook after he passed out halfway through training. He insisted that he wanted to fight though, so they sent him into the maelstrom.

During the invasion of Italy he was promoted to corporal for his awesome shooting skills, and at the same time contracted malaria, which he had for almost the entire war. Try to remember that. He was sent into southern France in 1944. He encountered a German machine gun crew who pretended they were surrendering, then shot his best buddy. Murphy completely hulked out, killed everyone in the gun nest, then used their weaponry to kill every baddie in a 100-yard radius, including two more machine gun nests and a bunch of snipers. They gave him a Distiguished Service Cross, and made him platoon commander while everyone apologized profusely for calling him "Shorty."

He is a seriously tiny man.

He is a seriously tiny man.

About half a year later, his company was given the job of defending the Colmar Pocket, a critical region in France, even though all they had left was 19 guys (out of the original 128) and a couple of M-10 Tank Destroyers.

The Germans showed up with a shitload of guys and half a dozen tanks. Since reinforcements weren't coming for a while, Murphy and his men hid in a trench and sent the M-10s to go do the heavy lifting. They got ripped to shreds.

Then, this five-and-a-half-foot-tall kid with malaria ran up to one of the crippled M-10s, hopped in behind the .50 cal machine gun, and started killing everything in sight. Understand that the M-10 was on fire, had a full tank of gas and was basically a death-trap.

He kept going for almost an hour until he was out of bullets, then walked back to his bewildered men as the M-10 exploded in the background Mad Max style. They gave him literally every medal they could (33 in all, although he had doubles of a few, plus five from France and one from Belgium), including the Medal of Honor.

After the war, he came down with Shell-Shock, and was prescribed the antidepressant placidyl. When he became addicted to the drug, rather than enter a program like some kind of sissy, he went cold-turkey, locked himself in a motel room for a week and got over it. He wrote an autobiography entitled To Hell and Back, and later became an actor.

The Best Hollywood Could Come Up With:

Audie Murphy (Audie Murphy) from To Hell and Back:

In To Hell and Back, Audie Murphy plays Audie Murphy, a badass war hero who proves his worth on the battlefield with his awesome badassery. The movie was the highest-grossing film Universal made, a record it held for 20 years until the making of Jaws. That's right, they actually needed a movie about a giant, man-eating, shark to top Audie Murphy's awesomeness.