They Declared Him Finished 9 Times — He Escaped POW Camp at 61 and Fought in 5 Wars

Описание: Why Adrian Carton de Wiart bit off his own mangled fingers in a frontline trench rather than evacuate for surgery in 1916 — and kept fighting with one eye and one hand for three more decades. This World War 2 story reveals how the most indestructible human in military history survived 9 combat wounds, 2 bullets through his skull, and 5 POW escape attempts to live until age 83.

April 2, 1916. A German bullet shattered two fingers on Lieutenant Colonel Adrian Carton de Wiart's left hand in a Somme trench. The battalion surgeon said six weeks evacuation for surgery. De Wiart said that meant missing the July offensive. When doctors refused to amputate without anesthesia in the trench, de Wiart bit off his own mangled fingers and continued commanding his battalion. This was his seventh combat wound in two years — he'd already lost his left eye to a bullet through the face in 1914, been shot in the skull, ankle, leg, hip, and ear. Medical boards declared him "unfit for combat" seven times. He ignored every single declaration. His philosophy was simple: anything short of death was recoverable.

They were all wrong.

What de Wiart proved across forty years wasn't about superhuman physique. It was about refusing to accept that physical damage should stop you in a way that violated every medical principle about human limitations. He lost his eye in 1914 and fought three more decades. He was shot through the skull twice and survived both wounds with no brain damage. He survived two plane crashes, the second at age sixty. What happened between 1900 and 1963 when he fought in five wars across three continents, escaped POW camp five times at age sixty-one, and finally died peacefully at eighty-three would make him a medical case study that science still cannot explain. His autobiography's opening line — "Frankly, I had enjoyed the war" — became the most famous first sentence in military memoir history.

This refusal to quit resulted in the Victoria Cross, mentioned in dispatches nine times, and a combat career spanning the Boer War through World War II. Shot nine times, blown up repeatedly, crashed twice, captured and escaped five times — medical boards declared him finished nine times and he proved them wrong every time. He died in his sleep at age eighty-three, the only thing that finally stopped him was running out of wars to fight.

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