Everyone's heard about any number of WWII badasses, but I was reminded of one in particular that made me think to myself, "this is the kind of person Johnny "Soap" MacTavish would absolutely know about and try to model himself after."
So I figured I'd give a little history lesson and tell other people about this guy too. Please meet:
Colonel Sir Ronald Thomas Stewart Macpherson, aka Tommy Macpherson, aka The Kilted Killer
So, first of all, this dude was Scottish, born in Edinburgh. He was commissioned in the Territorial Army in 1939 and served as a commando from 1940 until being taken prisoner in Libya by Italians after a failed exfil attempt on a recon mission in late 1941. He actually managed to escape (by holding up his 10-man arresting party with the gun they gave back to him!) but was recaptured and placed in solitary confinement. He attempted to escape again anyway before they moved him to a camp in Spain, where he tried again to escape (and made it pretty far but couldn't breach the outer wall). By mid 1942, they had moved him to a camp in Italy.
Mid 1943, the Germans took over the Italian camps and the prisoners were to be moved to Austria. Macpherson escaped again, but didn't get far before being recaptured. He was taken to a camp in Austria where he managed yet another escape, this time with two other men. They got recaptured in Italy on their way to Yugoslavia only because their rations gave them away as not being the Italian officers Macpherson had almost convinced the arresting patrol they were. Instead of being sent back to Austria, they were sent to a camp in Poland, where they escaped again (with two others this time), and made it into Sweden, from where they could fly home to Scotland.
So, let's count that up: In his first three years of being in the army, he was a prisoner of war for two of them and attempted escape five times from four different camps (well, three camps and once en-route to a camp) before finally making a sixth - successful! - escape.
During all of that, Macpherson held the rank of only a Second Lieutenant, though by the time he escaped the final time, he was considered an Acting Captain.
Despite his ordeal, or probably because of it and his general badassery, Macpherson was selected to Spec Ops within days of returning to Scotland. They trained until early 1944, after which he was promoted to Major (after only four years!!), and then parachuted into France in full battle dress which included a kilt.
The night after arriving, he blew up a bridge with the help of the local resistance. The night after that, they set mines in the road and surrounding forests leading towards Normandy and significantly hindered a Panzer Division attempting to reinforce German forces during the Allied Operation Overlord.
He and his two-man team, along with the resistance, then proceeded to spend the next three months blowing up bridges and disrupting road and rail traffic all throughout southwestern France. The Germans got so mad they put out a 300,000 franc bounty on his head.
He modified his machine guns to sound as though they were larger caliber than they were, causing the Germans to believe they were coming up against superior forces.
He booby-trapped a rail crossing guard to decapitate a German officer and his driver.
He cemented the surrender of 23,000 German troops at once - including a Major General! - by being driven unarmed (in his full battle dress with kilt!) and under fire into the village the Major General was commanding from and bluffing about being able to call down heavy artillery and a massive RAF strike.
He also did a lot more during the war, mostly in small-man teams and with local resistance fighters, including negotiating more axis-force surrenders and capturing or killing significant numbers of German troops.
Now, post-war, he had his rank reverted to Lieutenant (which is a thing that can happen, but not often out of wartime unless you're naughty). This wasn't a slight on his fighting or tactical prowess, but holding the rank of Major after only five years of service is insane and, frankly, he probably didn't have the education or experience to support such a rank. Especially as much of his fighting prowess came in what was, essentially, guerilla warfare, he likely had little to no practical ability to lead conventional troops and needed to learn that.
Additionally, the version of Spec Ops he had been recruited into in 1943 was not the SAS, but something called the SOE. Post-WWII, the SOE got disbanded and a number of operatives returned to their pre-war jobs while a good chunk was folded into MI6. Macpherson returned to the regular army, though he did do work with a regiment from the SAS while he was a Captain. Eventually he rose through the ranks to retire (into the Reserves) as a Colonel in 1967 and got knighted by the Queen in 1992.
Macpherson's autobiography came out in 2010, and I suspect it was of great interest to a number of Scottish soldiers enlisted at the time. I also suspect that Soap would take a particular interest in his demolitions work and the sheer infrastructure damage he managed to accomplish on his deployment. If Soap were to want to switch to Officer track (which, as I pointed out before, is unlikely), he could certainly find worse role models than Macpherson in that manner as well.
