Adrian Carton de Wiart: The Unkillable Soldier Who Enjoyed War
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In November 1914, a bullet went through Adrian Carton de Wiart's left eye while he was storming a fort in Somaliland. He kept going, swearing as he went. Within a year he'd also lost his left hand, pulled off two of his own mangled fingers when a doctor wouldn't and talked a medical board into sending him back to the trenches. Then he won the Victoria Cross.
That's only the first third of the life of Lieutenant-General Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart, the man now known as the unkillable soldier. Still to come were a gunfight with Cossacks, two plane crashes, the best part of twenty years in Poland, a tunnel out of an Italian castle at the age of 62 and a job as Churchill's man in China. He needed just six words to sum up the First World War in his memoir: "Frankly, I had enjoyed the war."
About the only things that rivalled him for soaking up bullets were the emus of Western Australia, who shrugged off machine-gun fire in 1932.
Quick Answers
Who was he? A Belgian-born British Army officer (1880 to 1963) who fought in the Boer War, the First World War and the Second World War.
What did he lose? His left eye in Somaliland in 1914 and his left hand near Ypres in 1915.
How many times was he wounded? It depends who's counting. You'll see eight, nine and eleven, all from decent sources.
Why did he get the Victoria Cross? For holding the line at La Boisselle on the Somme on 2 and 3 July 1916, after three other battalion commanders had been knocked out.
Was he really a prisoner of war in his sixties? Yes. The Italians captured him in April 1941. He tunnelled out of Vincigliata Castle in March 1943 and stayed free for eight days.
Did he really say he enjoyed the war? Yes. The exact line in his memoir is "Frankly, I had enjoyed the war." The versions with "quite" in them are misquotes.
Why is he called the unkillable soldier? It's a modern nickname for a man who was shot in the face, head, stomach, groin, hip, leg and ear and still died in his own bed.
How did he die? At home in County Cork on 5 June 1963, aged 83.
A Belgian Boy Who Wanted a War
Adrian Paul Ghislain Carton de Wiart was born in Brussels on 5 May 1880. His father, Léon, was a lawyer who moved the family to Egypt, where Adrian was taught by private tutors in Cairo and grew up speaking English, French and Arabic. His mother died while he was small and in 1888 Léon married an Englishwoman, Mary James. Three years later the boy was packed off to the Oratory School in Birmingham, where he captained both the cricket and football teams, as the Victoria Cross Online record of his life sets out.
He went up to Balliol College, Oxford, in January 1899 to read law and failed his first-year exams. Then the Boer War arrived and saved him from the library. On 25 January 1900 he enlisted in the Middlesex Yeomanry as "Trooper Carton". He was under age, he wasn't a British subject and his father had no idea. He later wrote that if the British hadn't wanted him, he'd have offered himself to the Boers instead.
It was the same war that had just made a celebrity of a young reporter called Winston Churchill, fresh from his escape out of a Boer prison camp. Carton de Wiart's version was shorter. He went down with fever, then got shot in the stomach and groin while crossing a river under fire. His real name came out in hospital, his parents were told and he was invalided home in October 1900.
He was back in South Africa by December. A regular commission in the 4th Dragoon Guards followed in September 1901, then India, polo and a lot of shooting. He became a British subject in 1907 and in 1908 married an Austrian countess, Friederike Fugger von Babenhausen, in Vienna. They had two daughters. Readers of his memoir wouldn't know it, because neither his wife nor his children get a mention.
One Eye Down in Somaliland
When Europe went to war in August 1914, Carton de Wiart was on his way to a different one. He'd been seconded to the Somaliland Camel Corps to fight the forces of Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, the leader the British press called the "Mad Mullah".
On 19 November 1914 the Camel Corps attacked a Dervish fort at Shimber Berris. Carton de Wiart was hit in the elbow, the ear and the left eye. A fellow officer that day was Hastings Ismay, who went on to be Churchill's chief of staff and the first Secretary General of NATO. Ismay remembered that his friend didn't break stride, adding: "I think the bullet stung him up as his language was awful." That line comes via Julian Humphrys' profile for Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine, which also has Ismay's theory that Carton de Wiart saw the lost eye as a blessing. It got him out of Somaliland and nearer to the real war.
He was sent to Egypt, where doctors wanted to take the eye out. He said no and held on to it until 3 January 1915, when surgeons in London finally removed it. A medical board then declared him unfit but said they'd think again if he wore a glass eye. So he got one, passed the board, walked out, climbed into a taxi and threw the thing out of the window. He wore a black patch for the rest of his life. He also collected a Distinguished Service Order for Shimber Berris.
The Fingers He Pulled Off Himself
By the spring of 1915 he was in Flanders. Near Zonnebeke, during the Second Battle of Ypres, a German shell wrecked his left hand. Two fingers were mangled beyond saving. When the doctor treating him refused to cut them off, Carton de Wiart pulled them off himself. The rest of the hand was amputated in London later that year.
This was the conflict that pushed surgeons like Harold Gillies into inventing modern plastic surgery, and plenty of men with half his injuries were sent home for good. Carton de Wiart went before another medical board, with one eye and one hand, and somehow came out passed fit for the front.
La Boisselle and the Victoria Cross
In 1916 he was given command of the 8th Battalion, Gloucestershire Regiment. On 2 and 3 July, the second and third days of the Somme, the battalion was thrown into the fight for the fortified village of La Boisselle. The attack started to come apart as officers went down. Three other battalion commanders became casualties, so he took over their units as well as his own and kept the whole lot in the ground they'd won.
His citation, printed in the London Gazette on 9 September 1916, credits his "dauntless courage and inspiring example" with stopping a serious reverse. You can read it on the National Army Museum's record for the medal itself. King George V handed it over at Buckingham Palace on 29 November. That put him in thin company, alongside men like Henry Tandey, the most decorated British private of the war.
It's from the Somme that the best-known picture of him comes: pulling grenade pins out with his teeth and lobbing them with his one good hand. It's repeated in almost every account of him, though it's worth knowing it rests on later retellings and doesn't appear in the citation.
The wounds kept coming. Later that July he was shot through the back of the head. He was hit again that autumn, took shrapnel in the hip in November 1917 while commanding 12th Brigade and was wounded in the leg at Martinsart in April 1918. He ended the war as a brigadier-general. His memoir doesn't mention the Victoria Cross at all.
Did He Really Say "Frankly, I Enjoyed the War"?
Nearly. It's the line he's best known for and it's usually quoted slightly wrong. You'll see "Frankly, I enjoyed the war", "I quite enjoyed the war" and "Frankly, I quite enjoyed the war" all over the internet. None of them is what he wrote.
The real sentence is in Happy Odyssey, where he looks back on the First World War after the Armistice, and it has no "quite" in it: Frankly, I had enjoyed the war. He wasn't being flippant about the dead. His point was that the war had handed him bad moments and good ones, plenty of excitement and a job he was suited to, which is more than most people get from peacetime. It's also worth remembering who's talking. By the time he wrote it he'd been wounded in every year of the war from 1914 to 1918.
Cossacks, a Plane Crash and Fifteen Years of Duck Shooting
Peace didn't suit him, so he found another war. In 1919 he went to Poland with the British Military Mission, first as second-in-command and then as its head, just as the new Polish state was fighting the Bolsheviks. During those two years he survived a plane crash and a shootout with Red Army Cossacks.
He retired in December 1923 with the honorary rank of major-general and simply didn't go home. A Polish friend, Prince Karol Radziwiłł, lent him a house at Prostyń in the Pripet Marshes, close to the Soviet border. He stayed for about fifteen years and spent a good chunk of them shooting duck.
In the summer of 1939 the army called him back to lead the military mission to Poland again. He was there when Germany invaded on 1 September and got his staff and their families out through Romania, the same collapse that sent Krystyna Skarbek into British intelligence and scattered a Polish army across the world, eventually with a beer-drinking bear called Wojtek in tow. The Soviets took the estate and everything in it. He wrote afterwards that they hadn't managed to take his memories.
Norway, a Ditched Bomber and an Italian Castle
In April 1940 he was handed Mauriceforce, the British half of an Allied landing at Namsos in central Norway that was supposed to help retake Trondheim. He had no air cover worth the name and German bombers flattened the town. He recommended pulling out and, as this WarHistory.org profile notes, got the force away with very few casualties. One of the officers on his staff was the travel writer Peter Fleming, older brother of the man who'd later write James Bond in Jamaica. Carton de Wiart landed back in Britain on 5 May 1940. It was his 60th birthday.
A year later he was sent to head a mission to Yugoslavia. The Wellington bomber carrying him came down in the Mediterranean off Italian-held Libya. He swam ashore, aged 60 and with one arm, and the Italians took him prisoner.
After four months at a villa in Sulmona, the Italians moved their most senior British prisoners to Castello di Vincigliata, a mock-medieval castle in the hills above Florence. There were about a dozen of them, including Generals Richard O'Connor and Philip Neame. Lady Ranfurly, whose husband was held there too, recorded that Carton de Wiart was a delightful man who "must hold the world record for bad language".
The Tunnel at Vincigliata
Most accounts say he made several escape attempts and leave it there. The details of the one that worked are better than that, and they survive in the papers of a fellow prisoner, Air Vice Marshal Owen Boyd, held by the Monte San Martino Trust.
The prisoners found a blocked-up doorway near the castle chapel and started digging behind it in September 1942. Neame, a sapper, was chief engineer. They worked two shifts a day with kitchen knives, iron bars and spikes pulled out of croquet hoops. Their spirit levels were made from aspirin tubes and the spoil came out in buckets sewn from deck-chair canvas. Carton de Wiart's job was running the lookouts. Boyd's account calls him "quite imperturbable".
The shaft went down ten feet and the tunnel ran out under the wall. They broke through in mid-March 1943 and six men went out on the night of 29 March. Brigadiers James Hargest and Reginald Miles reached Switzerland. Carton de Wiart paired up with O'Connor and set off on foot. A 62-year-old with an eyepatch and an empty sleeve isn't easy to disguise, but the two of them stayed loose for eight days before they were picked up. The tunnel, incidentally, was finished off by a dog the prisoners had befriended, which dug up the exit.
His way out came that August, and it was the Italians who opened the door. With Mussolini gone, Rome wanted to talk terms with the Allies and needed a go-between the British would trust. Carton de Wiart was taken out of the castle and sent to Lisbon with an Italian general. He was back in Britain on 28 August 1943. Italy's surrender was announced eleven days later.
Churchill's Man in China
Churchill didn't let him rest. Within a couple of months he'd been promoted to lieutenant-general and sent east as the Prime Minister's personal representative to the Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. He'd never been to China. He was at the Cairo Conference in November 1943 and later witnessed the Japanese surrender at Singapore.
He wasn't a natural diplomat. He clashed with Lord Mountbatten, then running South East Asia Command, and when he was called home to brief the Cabinet in January 1945 his entire report took six and a half minutes.
He retired for the second time in 1947. On the way home he slipped on some stairs in Rangoon, broke his back and spent seven months in hospital. At that point it was just one more thing.
Cork, the Lost Medals and a Plaque in a Cellar
Friederike died in Vienna in 1949. Happy Odyssey came out the following year with a foreword by Churchill, and in 1951 he married Joan Sutherland. The pair settled at Aghinagh House in Killinardrish, County Cork, where he went back to fishing and shooting duck. He died there on 5 June 1963 and is buried in Killinardrish churchyard, on the edge of the grounds.
His medals have a story of their own. The originals were thought to have been destroyed when his London home was bombed in the Second World War, and official replacements were issued. After he died, the originals turned up. His widow passed them to a military trust and they're now with the National Army Museum in Chelsea, where the Victoria Cross is on display. The replacement set went to his old regiment and was later stolen from a museum in Halifax. That last detail comes from the Victoria Cross Online record alone, so treat it as one source's account.
Belgium took a while to catch up. In 2014 the British government cast bronze plaques for every country with an overseas-born VC winner of the First World War. Belgium's has one name on it. The plaque then spent a decade in storage at a military institute in Brussels until relatives arranged an unveiling at the city's Prince Albert Club, set for 22 May 2025. Baron Christian Houtart, related to the family by marriage, told The Brussels Times: "It wasn't even a wine cellar!"
Why Is He Called the Unkillable Soldier?
Because the list of things that failed to kill him is absurd. "The unkillable soldier" is a modern label, sometimes shortened to "the unkillable man", and it got a big push in 2022 when the Swedish metal band Sabaton released a song about him under that title. Here's what earned it, in order, pieced together from the Victoria Cross Online record and Humphrys' profile.
1900, South Africa: shot in the stomach and groin crossing a river.
November 1914, Somaliland: shot in the face at Shimber Berris, losing his left eye, with further hits to the elbow and ear.
Spring 1915, Ypres: left hand shattered by a shell and later amputated.
July 1916, the Somme: shot through the back of the head.
Autumn 1916, the Somme: wounded again, this time in the ankle.
1917, Arras: shot through the ear.
November 1917, Western Front: shrapnel in the hip.
April 1918, Martinsart: wounded in the leg.
Then come the things that weren't wounds but could easily have finished him: a plane crash in Poland, a bomber ditching in the Mediterranean when he was 60 and a broken back in Rangoon in his late sixties. He died in bed at 83. As the National Army Museum's note on his Somme service shows, the official record needs no exaggerating.
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Sources
Adrian Carton de Wiart, Happy Odyssey (Jonathan Cape, 1950), Internet Archive
National Army Museum: Victoria Cross, Lieutenant-Colonel Adrian Carton de Wiart, 1916
National Army Museum: Lieutenant-Colonel Carton de Wiart on the Somme
Julian Humphrys, Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine: The amazing story of the 'unkillable soldier'
Victoria Cross Online: Sir Adrian Paul Ghislain Carton de Wiart VC KBE CB CMG DSO
Imperial War Museums: Lieutenant Colonel Adrian Carton de Wiart (Q 68300)
Monte San Martino Trust archive: Boyd, O T (Vincigliata escape papers)
WarHistory.org: Lieutenant General Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart
The Brussels Times: Britain's Brussels-born war hero to be finally honoured in Belgium
GOV.UK: Britain honours Belgian Victoria Cross recipient from the First World War
Evelyn Waugh Society: Ritchie-Hook Model Appears in New Book
Soldiers of Gloucestershire Museum: Lieutenant Colonel Adrian Carton de Wiart VC
