Victoria's Cross (2 page)

VICTORIA'S
CROSS

1

The Price of Courage

‘Courage is the stuff of good stories.'

WILLIAM MILLER
¹

‘The award of decorations, even Victoria Crosses, is an arbitrary business.'

SIR MAX HASTINGS
²

The Victoria Cross has gripped the public imagination in Britain and the Commonwealth unlike any other military or civil honour. It is an emotionally charged emblem, one that reverberates far beyond the ranks of the armed forces. In today's Britain, with public esteem for many institutions at an all-time low, Britain's armed forces are a pillar of national pride, the pinnacle of which is the Victoria Cross.
³
To be a ‘hero' today is not what it was, thanks to reckless overuse of the word in the mass media:

contemporary gender, sexual, and ethnic politics argues that all are entitled to their stories of courage . . . the modern movement has gone farther to ‘dephysicalize' courage . . . by using it loosely to congratulate anyone who by his own estimation undertakes some struggle for self-realization . . . Merely being all you can be need hardly
involve courage; more likely it is a less glorious matter of plain hard work.
⁴

Yet there remains one national symbol that is untarnished, one universally admired honour that has not been debauched by being lavished on all and sundry: the Victoria Cross. But the VC's survival beyond its current status as an almost impossible aspiration for a gallant person is under threat; the paradox is that, in the effort to preserve its status, the extremely high standard now required to win a VC threatens to turn it into an exclusive graveyard. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the civil servants responsible for the VC in the War Office occasionally worried that it had been distributed with a degree of abandon by senior military officers and was being given away too freely. Since the Second World War, Britain's senior military figures have consistently tried to prevent the VC from becoming devalued by giving it away too easily. That admirable desire, however, ignores a core principle of one of the VC's originators, Prince Albert, who specified that he wanted the Cross to be ‘unlimited in number'. This tension – give the VC away too freely and risk devaluing it, or restrict it too tightly and make it almost impossible to win – remains at the heart of the decoration. Prince Albert's thoroughly democratic view of the Cross, with a clear process of adjudication, has been lost; instead, the VC has become a remote symbol, entangled in bureaucracy and subject to all manner of political considerations, none of which are ever made explicit.

On the contemporary battlefield, where death is often by remote control, and hand-to-hand combat increasingly rare, the likelihood is that very few VCs will be won in the future, for the simple reason that individual combatants will have a diminishing chance of demonstrating astonishing gallantry. The understandable concern to preserve the status of Britain's most prestigious decoration has led to an inexorable rise in the human price of winning the Cross; for years there has been
an informal stipulation that, to be eligible for a VC, a candidate must have incurred a 90 per cent risk of death. This is the first of several puzzles that will crop up in this book. The 1856 royal warrant which established the VC made no reference to the level of risk that needed to be incurred; nor is there anything about the level of personal risk in the most recent revision to the warrant, that of 1961. Only custom and practice – both notoriously amorphous – dictates the 90 per cent risk-of-death requirement. Moreover, there is no objective means of assessing this percentage; nor could there be. It comes down to a subjective rule of thumb – did so-and-so
almost
die? How close to death is ‘almost'? If we place the VC within a broad historical context, it becomes clear that the pendulum has swung too far in one direction. Over more than 150 years, the VC has mutated from being available for a brave but relatively innocuous act, to a position where it is almost synonymous with death.

In 1856 the VC statutes were thought to have been set in stone, but the granite turned out to be jelly. A flurry of adjustments and amendments were made to those statutes in the years following 1856, making room for cases that were strictly ineligible. Some of the changes were not even formally embodied in statute until long after they were implemented, perhaps the most profound being in 1907, when Edward VII, under private, military and media pressure, abruptly changed his mind and ruled that the VC could, after all, be awarded posthumously. At the stroke of a pen he granted permission for the relatives of six dead soldiers to receive the Cross, even though he feared this would open the floodgates and encourage lobbying by families anxiously seeking a Cross for a dead relative. The entire First World War was fought in a state of uncertainty as to whether VCs could be bestowed posthumously; many were, but only because there was nothing precise in the statutes preventing it. In 1920 posthumous VCs were formally accepted in a thoroughgoing revision of the VC statutes.
⁵

This kind of muddle recurs throughout the VC's history. Confusion concerning the rules and regulations of the VC is one thing, injustice another. Families who believe that justice has not been done for courageous but long-dead relatives have in some cases pursued the VC for many years. This kind of pressure usually meets with stiff resistance from government and military. There is great institutional reluctance to reopen cases where a VC might have been justified, but was not awarded; the VC's statutes are silent on retrospective posthumous VC awards. The authorities understandably fear opening up old cases, as incontrovertibly convincing evidence of exceptional courage may be lacking after the passage of time, and setting a precedent is always a concern. Yet the number of obvious cases of exceptional gallantry that, for whatever reason, were not considered for a VC at the time are very few, and to reconsider them today would not usher in a rush of similar claims. There are very few outstanding cases where a retrospective VC might be considered not only reasonable, but an instance of justice delayed.
⁶

There is, in any case, a good precedent for the retrospective recognition of military courage: the belated granting of battle honours to British regiments that can be displayed on their colours, drums and other regimental regalia. Such honours, which have considerable symbolic significance, are proudly displayed by regiments. Yet, like the VC, their distribution has always had a somewhat random quality, depending largely on the persuasive powers of the regimental commanding officer. Some battle honours commemorate ignoble defeats while others record memorable victories. By 1880 some regiments with more than a century of good and loyal service still lacked a battle honour, an indignity that offended their regimental colonels. In 1882 the government set up a committee, chaired by Major General Sir Archibald Alison, to investigate anomalies in the distribution of battle honours. As a result of its recommendations, battle honours
were retrospectively awarded to regiments that had fought as far back as the Battles of Dettingen in 1743 and Quebec in 1759. A subsequent committee of 1909 looked into the same matter and went back to the seventeenth century, exhuming battles thought worth commemorating on regimental colours.
⁷
The Alison committee and its successor are today largely forgotten, but it's clear that the authorities were once prepared to make retrospective judgements regarding courage and honour – and in 1882 saw no problem in setting a precedent.

The clearest deserving cases for retrospective posthumous VC awards concern the men and women of Special Operations Executive (SOE) who fought and died, often in hideous circumstances while displaying the utmost courage, during the Second World War. It is often argued that female SOE agents were ineligible for VC recommendations as they were not ‘really' soldiers: their military commissions were only temporary or honorary. It is surprising that this canard has gained such wide currency as, under the terms of the 1920 VC warrant, women and civilians, if under military command at the time of their deed, were (and remain) entitled to be considered for the VC. Moreover, five civilians were awarded the VC in the nineteenth century – against the wishes of some War Office civil servants, establishing a precedent that ought not to have been neglected. No civilian – or woman – has been considered for a VC in the twentieth century, or in the twenty-first, as yet. The VC's statutes were last adjusted in 1961; they need revisiting in the twenty-first century. If to win a VC marks a person as being truly exceptional, how bitter is it be to be denied one, how long a struggle can be waged by families, friends or communities angry at an alleged Victoria Cross injustice. For as many tales as there are of remarkable courage that actually succeeded in winning a Victoria Cross, there are just as many concerning equally deserving candidates, which were overlooked at the time and remain blocked today.

Ordinary Seaman Teddy Sheean enlisted in the Royal Australian Naval Reserve in April 1941. In November 1942 Sheean was with HMAS
Armidale
, a corvette on active duty, steaming close to Timor, north of Australia. On 1 December 1942
Armidale
was attacked by Japanese aircraft and hit by two torpedoes and a bomb. As
Armidale
started listing, the order to abandon ship was sounded. Panicking men clambered into lifeboats or jumped into the water, while Japanese aircraft returned to machine-gun them. Several eyewitnesses saw Sheean try to free a lifeboat from its fixings, as the planes swooped down yet again, injuring Sheean. Despite his wounds, he was observed scrambling across the tilted deck and strapping himself into the seat of an anti-aircraft gun, which he began firing at the attacking Japanese aircraft, shooting one down. Sheean remained at his post, firing his gun as the ship and he slipped beneath the waves; a more inspirational example of supreme self-sacrifice is difficult to imagine. Sheean was Mentioned in Despatches (MiD), then the lowliest of all military honours in the British and Commonwealth forces. Apart from the VC, MiD was at that time the only available posthumous decoration. The pressure to obtain a retrospective posthumous VC for Sheean has, over the years since his death, been fairly consistent, but has always run into strong resistance from the authorities. His case is not helped by the fact that on 15 January 1991 Australia gained the right to award its own VC; in 1942 Sheean would technically have been eligible for an ‘Imperial' VC, i.e. a VC handed out from London, as Australia was at that time a dominion. An opportunity to show magnanimity towards Sheean was declined in February 2013, when a two-year, taxpayer-funded public tribunal in Australia rejected his claim (along with twelve others) for a retrospective VC.
⁸
The tribunal refused to grant retrospective VCs, not because the claims were suspect, but because that would undermine the ‘integrity of the system'. In its summary, the tribunal resorted to legal technicalities to avoid granting retrospective VCs:

The VC for Australia, created by letters Patent, replaces the Imperial VC in the Australian system and has the same eligibility requirements. The VC for Australia is intended to be held in the same standing and value as the Imperial VC. It is no longer possible for the Australian government to recommend honours and awards in the Imperial honours and awards system. Specifically, the government cannot recommend to the Queen the award of an Imperial VC.
⁹

The report quoted Professor Bill Gammage, historian at the Australian National University, who made the following comment on all disputed cases, not just Sheean's: ‘The award of the VC has always been imperfect. The requirement to have officers or more than one independent witness makes chance a factor, as does reliance on written recommendations.'

The correction of possible past injustice is always fraught, and usually there are good arguments on both sides. Yet retrospective posthumous pardons for wrongly convicted murderers, exonerations for those convicted of criminal acts that society no longer regards as crimes, or apologies for things that were not previously regarded as unjust but which are today, such as slavery, are now a regular occurrence. The VC should be no different. Arguments based on floodgates, integrity of the system and so forth are weak; individual cases could be assessed by a standing committee of retired military officers, military historians and experts in military honours. Formally denying the VC to individuals such as Sheean will continue to court controversy. That it was difficult to create rules covering all possible cases that might be considered or recommended for the VC naturally did not trouble Queen Victoria or Prince Albert, the creators of the Cross. As it transpired, civilian administrators of the VC's statutes in its early days did their best to interpret the wording of the original 1856 warrant and to apply strict rulings, but senior field
officers flouted those rules with scant regard for what the VC warrant actually said.

Teddy Sheean probably merited a VC; but the overall action, the context in which he displayed his courage, was relatively insignificant and no one in authority took a special interest. Had a senior officer written-up Sheean's case with greater flair, or pushed for the Cross, he may well have joined the illustrious ranks of VC holders. Medal citations are official accounts, as Spencer Fitz-Gibbon correctly puts it: ‘If the army tells a story in a citation, that story is what we are intended to believe happened during that part of the battle.'
¹⁰
A polished and scrupulously worded VC citation, as it finally appears in the
London Gazette
, often conceals months of agonizing in the upper echelons of the armed forces and Whitehall; it is carefully authored by committee and designed to tell a good ‘story'. The original recommendation that so-and-so ought to be considered for a VC may be very rough and is just the starting point, stemming as it usually does from a field officer who may lack the kind of eloquence looked for in a VC citation. By the time the initial recommendation has gone up through several layers of officialdom, the original rough edges will have been smoothed. With luck, the caterpillar recommendation might metamorphose into a butterfly citation.