Victoria's Cross (23 page)

As women increasingly come to be seen as capable of fulfilling combat roles – if they want them – it will be a vital question whether or not the VC really is open to them. In the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts that dominated British military life during the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century, women were increasingly drawn into front-line combat roles. On 7 March 2008, Flight Lieutenant Michelle Goodman became the first woman to be awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC), equivalent to an MC. In 2007 she flew her Merlin helicopter, with a crew of three others, into the centre of Basra in Iraq to rescue a critically injured Rifleman, Stephen Vause, at night and under heavy mortar and small-arms fire. Vause survived. Certainly Goodman's exceptionally cool head and determination merited the DFC; but in the past, with a different gender, she might have been judged worthy of a VC. In the asymmetric wars that are now increasingly likely to set the pattern for future British military engagements, women will increasingly be drawn into ‘facing' the enemy. The traditional response to women who might wish to serve in a combat role in the British army is that they are physically too weak to successfully complete the infantry combat physical fitness test – as are many men. But as warfare becomes more hi-tech and equipment becomes lighter, women's physical capacity will become less significant. The twenty-first-century soldier is much more likely to be supervising drones, far from the battlefield, as rushing to bayonet the enemy in a trench.

British women certainly have it ‘in them', as Ethel Grimwood put it, to defy the enemy and show equal disregard for their own safety as any man, but the resistance to bestowing a VC, and the opportunity given by the GC to reduce pressure for granting the highest award to a courageous woman, is extremely deep-rooted. That no woman has ever gained a Victoria Cross is today an enormous psychological obstacle; who would dare to make the first female VC recommendation? The question of whether women will become more ‘acceptable' as VC candidates, the more they inexorably become drawn into combat or near-combat roles with the British armed forces, is frankly otiose. The barriers are informal, neither written into the VC warrant nor ever committed to paper, and exist – like the informal 90 per cent risk-of-death requirement – only in the minds of senior military officers and perhaps some quarters of Whitehall. Denying women the VC – the ‘gold' – will, however, steadily become more difficult – even with ‘silver' and ‘bronze' medals available in the form of the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross and the Military Cross – not least because greater numbers of women will either seek or be drawn into combat or quasi-combat roles. Gender equality in military affairs is increasingly being dictated by equal opportunities legislation, particularly in Western countries. In the US, legislation in 1975 mandated the right of women to enter the armed forces. As a result, the percentage of women serving in the US Army jumped from 1.6 per cent in 1973 to 8.5 per cent in 1980. From 2016 the US will permit women to serve in ground-combat roles in its armed forces; Britain cannot be far behind, although we are likely to see a female Medal of Honor earlier than a female VC. By January 2016 most branches of the US military will be forced by legislation to accept women in all roles. As Lieutenant-General (retired) Carol A. Mutter of the US Marines put it: ‘Twenty years from now we're going to say, “Why didn't we have women in combat?” It's the same thing with African-Americans in World War II: “They're
not smart enough to fly. They can't be pilots.” Well, they proved that they could be.'
⁷⁰

After the end of the Second World War the government formed a committee, chaired by Major General John McCandlish, the Director of Personnel Administration at the War Office, to consider the function of the Women's Royal Army Corps (WRAC) in the face of the enemy, now that the WRAC was a corps within the regular army. The committee's deliberations were highly reminiscent of the 1918–20 committee set up to revise the VC warrant. Some members, including McCandlish, wanted weapons training for women; others were deeply opposed. One male member of the committee asserted:

The fact that ‘little Olga' [a sarcastic reference to women in the Red Army] is trained to kill and prides herself on the number of notches on her revolver butt is no reason we, too, should cry ‘Annie get your gun'. It is still the soldier's duty to protect his womanfolk whatever they are wearing. Even in these days when war means total war let us at least retain that degree of chivalry.
⁷¹

A government study,
Women in the Armed Forces
, was published by the UK Ministry of Defence in 2002. In the intervening five decades, only the language had changed: comments that openly belittled women soldiers had become unacceptable. The essence, however, was unaltered: the 2002 review upheld the ban on women serving in front-line combat roles in the army, although they were allowed to serve on fighting vessels in the Royal Navy and to fly fighter aircraft in the RAF. In 2002 the official reason for keeping women from combat roles in the army was that to include them would ‘involve a risk with no gains in terms of combat effectiveness'.
⁷²
This was reiterated in 2010, when a further report stated that ‘there was no way of knowing whether mixed gender teams could function as well as all-male teams in a ground close-combat environment.
⁷³
Female scholars, however, certainly attribute
– with strong if anecdotal evidence – the resistance of the army to including women in combat roles to a deeply misogynist culture, one that is difficult to eradicate despite the Ministry of Defence and the armed forces identifying themselves as ‘equal opportunities employers'.
⁷⁴
Since 1992 there has been a steady rise in the number of women in the British armed forces, from around 6 per cent in 1997 to almost 10 per cent by 2013; but by barring female soldiers from activities that are specifically seen as combat roles, old attitudes endure:

British female officers are significantly disadvantaged in terms of promotion because of their exclusion from combat units and their under-representation in combat support units. Overwhelmingly, the senior ranks in the British Army are dominated by officers who are from these arms and it is very difficult to be promoted beyond one-star [General] rank from combat service support branches. This structural difficulty is compounded by the expectations of male officers, many of whom – particularly those born before the mid-1960s – operate with traditionalist assumptions of the feminine role.
⁷⁵

In other words: the British army is generally run on informally sexist lines.

Yet good soldiering is as much about mental as physical capability; the ability of women to fight in combat roles was proved long ago by women who served in the Soviet army, fighting against Nazi Germany. More than 800,000 women served in the Soviet Union's armed forces during the Second World War, and eighty-nine achieved the Hero of the Soviet Union, the USSR's highest decoration. In the Red Army, women served as snipers, tank drivers, machine-gunners, pilots, transport drivers, communications personnel, medics and political officers; Soviet women could be men's equals in the most testing of conditions. But perhaps the most insuperable barrier to a woman VC is the existence of the George Cross and the false belief that the GC is
the equal of the VC. That equality exists only in the minds of those who wish to perpetuate an artificial distinction between male soldiers and female, and between the military and civilians – a distinction that was blown apart when the first bombs were dropped on London in 1940. In twenty-first-century warfare, where technological competence is at least as important as sheer brute force, the lines of gender separation in combat will increasingly dissolve. For the time being, in Britain, Admiral Everett's views still hold sway: let sleeping dogs lie.

Dame Irene Ward's campaign for belated justice on behalf of Violette Szabo deserves a fresh hearing. Bestowing a single retrospective VC on all women who served SOE behind enemy lines – the clever, the strong, the indomitable, as well as the fallible, the foolish and the feeble, for all suffered – would be an act of laudable humanity, analogous to the VC granted to America's Unknown Soldier in 1921. It would also be politically useful: if a posthumous VC was granted to all female SOE agents, the psychological barrier against future individual women gaining the VC would be less insurmountable. Dame Irene lost a campaign but lit a fuse that still burns; the final word should perhaps go to her:

women themselves are often more far-sighted in appreciating what is fundamental in a struggle for life itself. Women would suffer equally with men in defeat – perhaps even more – and if they can contribute to victory they will accept any liability irrespective of its implications. This is the truth which called out so much spiritual strength from so many remarkable women.
⁷⁶

6

Bigger War

‘I have never seen a brave man. All men are frightened. The more intelligent they are, the more they are frightened. The courageous man is the man who forces himself, in spite of his fear, to carry on.'

GENERAL GEORGE S. PATTON
¹

‘The classic VC case would be that of Samson who in immolating himself destroyed the enemy – the Philistines.'

AIR FORCE MINISTRY OFFICIAL, SEPTEMBER 1942
²

When war broke out in September 1939, the broad definition of what constituted a VC-winning action – ‘conspicuous bravery or some daring or pre-eminent act of valour or self-sacrifice or extreme devotion to duty in the presence of the enemy' – left ample room for the armed forces to make their own interpretation of the new 1920 warrant. And, left to their own devices and with no public oversight, they tightened considerably the definition of ‘conspicuous bravery'. In the Second World War there were to be no VCs for the kind of futile ineffective action, the dash forward for a ‘glorious' death, as displayed by Lieutenant Freddy Roberts at Colenso during the Boer War.

The 1920 warrant was ushered forth in a context of cuts in Britain's military budget – from £766 million at the end of the First War to £102 million by 1932 – and the belief that the recently ended conflict had indeed been, as the US president Woodrow Wilson said, ‘the war to end all wars'. The UK's armed forces had shrunk from more than 4.5 million in 1918 to less than half a million by 1921. In the army, conscripted officers and men were the first to go; regular officers who had risen to lieutenant colonels during the war considered themselves lucky to be captains once it was over. It became not just an honour to have the VC, but useful too. An equitable way had to be found to distribute 300 regular commissions in the infantry and cavalry after the end of the war. Age limits were imposed: under twenty-five for second lieutenants, under thirty for lieutenants, and under thirty-five for captains. A ‘mark' scheme was created to allocate the scarce commissions, with five marks allotted per month of service overseas, fifteen per wound stripe, 250 for each six-month period in command of a battalion or similar-sized unit in a theatre of war, and 125 for the same period in command of the same-sized unit at home. Those with the highest marks were invited to accept regular commissions.
³
It was a brutal shake-out; but conspicuous courage had another value, beyond its £10 annuity – a VC holder automatically qualified for 250 marks.

The biggest change in the 1920 VC warrant was the inclusion of women and civilians, the smallest the standardization of the ribbon's colour to crimson for all services. The formalization of posthumous VCs was a significant step, the implications of which quickly became clear: half of the ten VCs awarded during the inter-war period were posthumous, and the first VC of the Second World War, awarded to Captain Bernard Warburton-Lee, was also posthumous. Captain of HMS
Hardy
, Warburton-Lee led a flotilla of five destroyers up a fjord towards Narvik, an ice-free harbour in German-occupied northern Norway. He took a German squadron of five destroyers by surprise
and successfully attacked them, sinking two and damaging three others before withdrawing. A shell hit
Hardy
's bridge and Warburton-Lee was fatally injured. His last signal was: ‘Continue to engage the enemy.' Engaging the enemy, even though mortally wounded, had always been a mark of a worthy VC winner; it now became the benchmark by which all were judged.

In the whole Second World War, just 182 VCs were awarded: 30 per cent less than during the 1914–18 war. The level of expected courage was raised to incredible heights, far beyond the mild-sounding sentences of the warrant. The increased emphasis placed on leadership and example, not just bravery, was partly a response to the perceived degree of threat; as Churchill said in the House of Commons on 20 August 1940, ‘The whole of the warring nations are engaged, not only soldiers, but the entire population, men, women and children. The fronts are everywhere.'
⁴
In the same debate, John Profumo – who in 1961, in his capacity as Secretary of State for War, would sign a revised VC warrant – made his maiden speech, depicting Nazi Germany as a ‘Satanic power . . . menacing the whole of civilisation . . . day after day and hour after hour indescribable acts of gallantry and valour are being performed'. A comparison between the 182 Indian Mutiny VCs and the 182 of the Second World War reveals that, in the former, 101 went to privates and non-commissioned officers, seventy-seven to officers (and four to civilians), including one colonel, two lieutenant colonels, four majors, thirteen captains and the other fifty-seven to lieutenants. In the Second World War, eighty-six VCs went to privates and non-commissioned officers, ninety-six to officers; fifty-one to junior officers, and forty-five to senior officers – majors and above in the army, lieutenant commanders and higher in the Royal Navy, and squadron leaders and higher in the RAF. ‘Leadership' – at least, as expressed by rank – had become more highly prized.

Some of the services during the Second War saw a remarkable
preponderance of officers over other ranks gain the VC – for example, fifteen of the nineteen VCs gained by Bomber Command went to officers. No rear-gunner ever received a VC, despite the terribly exposed and important position they occupied in the aircraft. Bomber Command pilots were rewarded for initiative and determination – for pressing home an attack – as much as for courage; on bombers all crew members ran the same risk but only the pilot could choose to increase the risk by, for example, continuing to fly a damaged aircraft rather than ordering the crew to bale out. It was exceptional for crew other than pilots to win a VC. One such exception was Flight Sergeant Norman Jackson, a flight engineer on a Lancaster bomber.

On 26–27 April 1943, Jackson was flying his thirty-first mission with 106 Squadron, a Lancaster squadron, to attack the ball-bearing factories at Schweinfurt. On the return journey Jackson's Lancaster was attacked by a night fighter and an engine caught fire. Jackson was already wounded by shell splinters, but he put on a parachute, grabbed a fire-extinguisher, and then climbed out onto the wing while the Lancaster's speed was around 140 miles per hour. He clung on by gripping the air-intake on the leading edge of the wing with one hand while using the extinguisher with the other, but he was badly burned on hands and face. The fighter returned for a fresh strafe of the crippled Lancaster and Jackson was shot in the legs and fell from the wing with his parachute smouldering, but it worked well enough to save his life. The Lancaster's pilot ordered the crew to abandon the plane; four of the crew survived but the pilot and rear-gunner were presumed to have died in the wreck. Jackson was captured and spent ten months recovering in hospital before being transferred to the Stalag IX-C prisoner-of-war camp. He made two escape attempts, the second successful, when he bumped into a unit of the US Third Army. Jackson's astonishing exploit only became known when the surviving crewmen of his bomber were released from German
captivity at the end of the war; his Victoria Cross was gazetted on 26 October 1945.

Flight Lieutenant William Reid, a Lancaster pilot who gained his VC on the night of 3 November 1943, later shrugged off any suggestions of heroism: ‘I don't think I was a hero. I don't think of myself as a brave man. We were young. All we wanted was to get our tour over and done with.'
⁵
Reid, serving with the 61st Squadron, was headed for Düsseldorf when his aircraft was attacked by a Messerschmitt 110 night fighter as it crossed the Dutch coast. The windscreen was shattered; the cockpit and steering mechanism were badly shot up; Reid sustained serious injuries to his head, hands and shoulders. His aircraft dropped 200 feet before he managed to bring it back under control. Reid said nothing of his injuries to his crew but asked for a damage report, following which he proposed to continue the mission. His plane was attacked again; a Focke-Wulf 190 raked it from stem to stern, killing the navigator, fatally wounding the wireless operator, and injuring Reid's right arm. He pressed on with the mission, having memorized the course to his target, sustained by bottled oxygen from a portable supply administered by his flight engineer, Sergeant J. W. Norris. The plane reached the target and released its bombs. Reid then turned his aircraft for home, and – semi-conscious at times, freezing cold because of the smashed windscreen, and half-blinded by blood streaming from his head wound – he and Norris, also wounded, kept the plane in the air. As it crossed the North Sea, the four engines cut out and the plane went into a spin: Norris had forgotten to change over the petrol tanks to their reserve supply but he remembered in the nick of time. As they touched down at RAF Shipdham in Norfolk, the Lancaster's undercarriage collapsed and the bomber skidded along the runway before juddering to a halt.

Reid had another narrow escape. He joined 617 Squadron (the ‘Dambuster' squadron) in January 1944. In July 1944 he was over a
target in France and released his bombs at 12,000 feet. He then felt his aircraft shudder under the impact of being hit by a bomb dropped from 6,000 feet above, which plunged through the Lancaster's fuselage and severed the plane's controls. Reid ordered the crew to bail out, and as they did so, the aircraft nosedived, pinning him to his seat. He managed to release the overhead escape-hatch panel and parachute free, just as the Lancaster broke in two. He was captured and ended the war a prisoner.

The dividing line between Jackson's and Reid's VCs is paper-thin. The first seems more like an attempt at a rescue; the second might be said to represent the kind of spirited determination to press on regardless that, nominally at least, was preferred as good VC ‘material'. Notes in archive files dismissing individual VC recommendations as ‘not up to standard' often seem random; the truth is that many VCs went to those who demonstrably led and inspired, rather than for heroic rescue efforts – and that generally meant officers. Within that ‘leadership' aspect of the VC, the class segmentation between officers and other ranks broke down into the more considered or thoughtful courage – determination against the odds – shown by officers and the more instinctive variety shown by a man who, perhaps in a blind rage, charged a machine-gun nest.

Neither blind rage nor thoughtful determination would get a VC for a woman or a civilian; they were ruled out partly by entrenched military opposition, while ignorance of the facts did not help either. In a House of Commons debate on 8 October 1940, some MPs, who might have been expected to be more
au fait
with the VC warrant, revealed a total lack of knowledge of what it actually said. Captain George Sampson Elliston, MP, who had served with the Royal Army Corps in the First War and gained an MC, asked Churchill whether ‘in view of recent developments of modern warfare, he will advise revision of the Royal Warrant so that the Victoria Cross may be awarded to any subject of His
Majesty who displays supreme courage in countering enemy action?' Henry Morris-Jones, MP, bluntly asked: ‘Why should not civilians get the Victoria Cross for heroism in the face of the enemy, just as did soldiers in the Army in the last war? The whole standard ought to be changed.' Rather than point out to Elliston and Morris-Jones that the VC's terms
had
changed, Churchill gave a disingenuous reply, omitting the fact that civilians had been eligible for the VC since 1920. Instead he suggested that civilians now had their ‘own' VC:

For this honour, men and women in all walks of civil life will be eligible . . . There is no difference in merit between the Victoria Cross and the George Cross; the George Cross ranks equal with the Victoria Cross, and after it in priority only. The whole question has been most carefully reconsidered, and the very far-reaching scheme which has been announced and the new decorations [GC, GM] are the fruits of that reconsideration.
⁶

Churchill's formulation, that the George Cross ‘ranks equal' with the VC, but comes after it ‘in priority only', has given rise to no end of confusion: what does it mean to be equal in ranking but second in priority? There is no sensible answer, and many have been the efforts to square this particular circle. In truth, the creation of the George Cross was an unnecessary step at a moment of crisis, in an attempt to whip up publicity and boost national morale. There were just too many senior military figures that would have bristled at the thought of a VC going to a woman or someone not in uniform. There was no official announcement that, in this war, only astonishing acts of courage would be sufficient to be even considered for a VC; and indeed, certain VCs were granted when a lesser award would have been more plausible, but for the intervention of that old, all-important influence – ‘friends at Court'. An unwritten rule generally prevailed: only the very bravest need apply, and even then they needed to have been in uniform; and
their case would be considerably more persuasive if they happened to have died in the performance of their deed.

Although the British empire officially fought many more battles in 1939–45 than in 1914–18 – the official compilation, published in January 1956, listed 970 operations, compared to 167 for the First World War – there were far fewer casualties; almost 600,000 British empire armed forces personnel died in the Second World War, against some 1.05 million in the First.
⁷
This lower casualty rate ought to have had little or no bearing on the number of VCs distributed, if merit alone was to be the judge; in fact the ‘pool' of acts of outstanding bravery was artificially limited by the imposition of a quota system. It is difficult to prove a negative; trying to assess the number of those who might have merited, but did not get, a VC is futile. But some overall numbers are suggestive. Bluntly, the chance of gaining a VC in the Second War was nearly twice as remote as in the First; the number of uniformed dead per VC in the Second War was almost 3,300, against 1,658 per VC in the First. Three-and-a-half times more VCs were distributed in the First World War than the Second; and posthumous VCs were more than 45 per cent of the total in the Second World War, against almost 30 per cent during the First.
⁸
The VC became more difficult to win, and more deadly.