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The amazing and true story of Charles Fawcett, who died in London on February 3 at the age of 92. His unlikely — some would say unbelievable — life seems to have been a healthy mix of careless lunacy and incredible luck, balanced with a love of the underdog and the never-ending adventure.

Some snippets from the Telegraph obituary:

Gifted with an artistic talent and a musical ear, he received tips on playing jazz trumpet from Louis Armstrong, and on grappling from a professional wrestler, with the result that Fawcett, still restless, spent a year in eastern Europe earning a living by fighting in back-street theatres.

In Paris Fawcett also took part in the rescue of a group of British prisoners-of-war who had been placed under French guard in a hospital ward by the Germans. By impersonating a German ambulance crew, Fawcett and a comrade marched in at 4am and ordered the French nurses to usher the PoWs out into the yard. “Gentlemen,” he announced as he drove them away, “consider yourself liberated.”

“You’re a Yank,” said a British voice.

“Never,” came Fawcett’s lilting southern burr, “confuse a Virginian with a Yankee.”

In three months at the end of the war, Fawcett married six Jewish women who had been trapped in concentration camps, a procedure that entitled them to leave France with an automatic American visa.

In 1956 he spent three months helping to rescue refugees from the Hungarian uprising and, following riots in the Belgian Congo in 1959, joined a friend with a private plane in missions to rescue people who had become trapped and unable to escape the fighting.

In June 1979, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, he announced that he was leaving for that country to pass on to the Afghan resistance fighters tactics he had learned in the Foreign Legion.

Naturally there’s a good bit more.

Visit Site: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/...