Victoria's Cross (24 page)

Nothing in the VC statutes stipulated this: it all resulted from unstated and, it might be said, unjustified standards imposed by senior officers. This was not a case of senior officers interpreting the warrant; rather it was an unspoken and only occasionally written-down determination that only certain types of acts – ones that demonstrated absolute courage in the pressing home of an attack, for example – would be deemed VC-worthy. The VC was to be rationed, like all other gallantry awards. Conspicuous bravery became a necessary but not sufficient hoop to jump through; higher priority than ever before was to be given to actions that were demonstrably aggressive, rather
than simply noble. Killing – publicly displayed, able to be seen by others and perhaps giving them inspiration – was in; kindness – in the form of helping to rescue the fallen or injured – was marginalized. When the struggle was so extreme, this new emphasis was perhaps understandable. German SS units notoriously shot uniformed prisoners, and word began to arrive of massacres, such as that at Wormhout in May 1940, on the retreat to Dunkirk, when almost ninety British soldiers were captured and killed by the Waffen-SS Liebstandarte Adolf Hitler regiment.
⁹
There was precious little battlefield chivalry and any failure was without honour; national defeat would have meant not a repeat of the humiliation wrought on Germany through the Versailles Treaty, but a form of totalitarian slavery. Determined leadership was required, pressing home the attack no matter what the odds. Helping the wounded was all very well – but that did not inspire others to kill.

It is almost as if the military establishment began to pay attention to late nineteenth-century warnings that the Cross was being given out too freely. The
Broad Arrow
said in 1879 that ‘Beyond all question the Cross will be cheapened if it is to be conferred upon every man who puts his powers of physical endurance to their proper use, and carries through the particular service mainly by the natural conduct of a well-balanced act.'
¹⁰
By 1940 duty – even acts that moderately exceeded duty – was not enough; what was wanted was the unnatural pursuit of acts that would generally be described as unbalanced, even mad. In the build-up to D-Day, General Montgomery presented his plans for the Normandy invasion to George VI. Under the subheading ‘morale', Montgomery succinctly stated that aggressive heroism was what he looked for:

We shall have to send the soldiers in to this party ‘seeing red'. We must get them completely on their toes; having absolute faith in the plan;
and embued [sic] with infectious optimism and offensive eagerness. Nothing must stop them. If we send them in to battle this way – then we shall succeed.
¹¹

For obvious reasons, serving officers were not prepared publicly to speak out against the Second World War's quota system, and the anomalies it created, for gallantry awards. According to a Second War major, once the war was over, ‘many deserving acts have been unrewarded, and undeserving acts rewarded – to keep within the ration'.
¹²
Sir Martin Lindsay, an intrepid polar explorer in the years before the Second War, was a professional soldier who, after Sandhurst, joined the Royal Scots Fusiliers. He rejoined the army when war broke out and ended his military career commanding 1st Battalion, Gordon Highlanders in sixteen operations in north-west Europe during 1944–5. Lindsay was courageous; he was wounded in action, twice Mentioned in Despatches, and awarded the DSO. He retired from the army with the rank of lieutenant colonel and became a Conservative MP. In a 1978 article on gallantry awards, Lindsay considered the VC would always be fraught with difficulty, for two reasons:

The first is the impossibility of placing noble deeds in any satisfactory order of priority, bearing in mind the vastly differing standards of descriptive powers of those who wrote the citations and supporting statements. The second is the impossibility of reconciling two conflicting considerations: the desirability of keeping the VC a rare and coveted distinction on the one hand, and on the other the always larger number of recommendations than could be satisfied . . . every ‘failed VC' among officers was awarded the DSO, and in the same way a ‘failed DCM' normally got the MM.
¹³

Lindsay cited his own experience of a brigade commander massaging a recommendation to give a soldier what he thought was deserved; the
(unnamed) commander ‘deliberately falsified the dates in the citation' to ensure that an officer commanding a battalion in Normandy, and who was killed in action, received the DSO, despite the ban on posthumous DSOs. Lindsay pointed out that the ration system for gallantry awards led to absurdities:

For the [crossing of the] Rhine my Brigade (153) was in the lead and incurred 15% casualties. We were then informed that for the whole Brigade the awards would be limited to six, which worked out at 0.4% of those actively engaged . . . 21% of the aircrews in the Mohne Dam operation were decorated, and 7% of those who took part in the sinking of the Tirpitz . . . Having been told that only one award could be considered for a particular operation, the CO could hardly look beyond his leading Company or Squadron Commander if it had not been for whom his battle would not even have started.
¹⁴

On becoming MP for Solihull after the war, Lindsay waged a campaign against ‘the scandal of the difficulty we had experienced in obtaining decorations for our “rank and file”. The Secretary of State for War [the Labour MP Jack Lawson] . . . denied that there had ever been any system of “rationing” of decorations. In the aftermath of war there were in the House plenty of ex-officers who knew from their own experience that this was totally untrue.'
¹⁵

When individuals did something both outstanding
and
useful, then they were obvious candidates for the highest prize. On the ground, the European theatre was bookended by examples of classic VC-winning actions from the army. The British army's first VC went to Second Lieutenant Richard Annand of the 2nd Battalion, Durham Light Infantry,
¹⁶
who gained his for twice fighting off a German attack on a blown bridge across the Dyle River in Belgium on 15–16 May 1940. German troops tried to launch a bridging party across the river and, under mortar and machine-gun fire, Annand threw hand grenades
onto the enemy from the top of the wrecked bridge, driving them back. Although wounded, Annand continued in command of his platoon. A second crossing attempt by German soldiers was again driven back by Annand, single-handedly and effectively wielding grenades. When the platoon was ordered to withdraw, Annand left with his platoon but noticed that his batman was missing; he went back to find him and carried him off in a snatched wheelbarrow, eventually collapsing from loss of blood. He was rescued, evacuated, and spent the rest of the war in Britain training other soldiers; his fighting days were over as a result of permanent damage to his hearing.

The last European theatre VC was that of Guardsman Edward Charlton of the 2nd Battalion, Irish Guards, who was a driver in a tank troop.
¹⁷
In the early hours of 21 April 1945 his troop, together with a platoon of infantry, took Wistedt, a small town some sixty kilometres south-west of Hamburg. A German counterattack by a battalion of Panzer Grenadiers, supported by several self-propelled guns, blew up the British tanks and threatened to overrun the British platoon. As the superior German force advanced, Charlton took the Browning machine gun from his disabled tank and fired it from the hip, halting the lead German company; under this covering fire the Guards reorganized and retired. Charlton was hit several times and his left arm rendered useless, but he mounted the Browning on a fence and continued firing until he collapsed from his injuries. He was captured and died shortly afterwards.
¹⁸

The possibility that women or civilians might do something meriting a VC was put to rest by their
de facto
exclusion, the result of the creation of the George Cross and George Medal, which provided the military establishment with another means of slicing and dicing courage. The George Cross warrant, signed into being by Winston Churchill on 8 May 1940 at the behest of George VI, made no mention of whether the brave action was to be performed
not
in the presence of the enemy, but
that was how it often came to be interpreted, as it still is today. That the distinction between being in the presence or not of the enemy was often razor-thin seemed to perturb no one; the military establishment was only prepared to recognize a uniformed male as worthy of a VC, and even then the George Cross might be given. Thus, demarcating the grounds for giving the George as opposed to the Victoria Cross would test the expertise of a medieval philosopher trained in the arcane art of distinguishing between individual angels. Today the George Cross usually goes to a person in the armed forces who has done something unusually courageous, but not in the presence of the enemy. But, rather like common law, it is all very fluid, and precedents can be made, broken, reset, all according to how much personal influence a much more senior officer might bring to bear on a particular case. If we take one case, that of Petty Officer Tommy Gould and First Lieutenant Peter Roberts, both of whom gained a VC while on patrol off Suva Bay, on the northern coast of Crete, it is evident that they should have been a perfect fit for the George rather than the Victoria Cross.

On 16 February 1942 Gould and Roberts were serving on the submarine
Thrasher
, which torpedoed and sank a 3,500-ton Axis supply ship. Five enemy anti-submarine escorts dropped some very accurately placed depth charges, but
Thrasher
miraculously survived.
¹⁹
The following evening, when the anti-submarine escorts had given up the hunt,
Thrasher
surfaced and an inspection for damage to its hull was conducted. An unexploded depth charge was found in the casing – the metal structure on top of the sub's main hull – in front of
Thrasher's
four-inch-gun mounting. Roberts and Gould volunteered to go on deck and remove the explosive, which might have blown not just them but the entire crew to smithereens. In darkness, they crawled along the narrow gap between the casing and the hull, located the bomb, and then hauled it twenty feet to the bow, where they gently eased it overboard. They then discovered lying on the hull another depth charge,
which had penetrated the casing and was stuck firm. It was impossible to pull the depth charge back up through the hole in the casing, so the two men lowered themselves through a metal grille and wriggled on their stomachs towards it. Lying on his back, Gould gripped the depth charge while Roberts dragged him by his shoulders back towards the metal grille. They pulled the depth charge through the grille, wrapped it in a sack, and pushed this second bomb, weighing about 300 kilos, over the bow. The whole nail-biting exercise lasted around an hour. The two sailors had voluntarily put their lives at risk: from the depth charges, which might have exploded, and from possible drowning –
Thrasher's
commanding officer, Lieutenant Hugh Mackenzie, was constantly on watch for enemy surface vessels and aircraft, and would have dived had any been spotted. Gould and Roberts modestly dismissed what they had done, both at the time and subsequently, and Mackenzie's patrol report limited itself to praising their ‘excellent conduct'.

That they deserved something was obvious; but what? A George Cross perhaps, as
Thrasher
was far from ‘the presence of the enemy' when Roberts and Gould did their brave deed? On the other hand, they were uniformed, and the George Cross was widely (if mistakenly) regarded then as the civilian's VC. Perhaps an (officers only) Distinguished Service Cross to Roberts, and a Distinguished Service Medal (for naval ratings) to Gould? In the new era, when determined killing and/or inspirational leadership was required to gain the VC, surely not that? Yet on 9 June 1942 they were both gazetted with the VC, the citation helpfully quashing any lingering doubts about the enemy's proximity by stating that ‘
Thrasher
's presence was known to the enemy; she was close to the enemy coast, and in waters where his patrols were known to be active day and night'.
²⁰
Thrasher
's presence might have been suspected by the enemy; her precise whereabouts were obviously a mystery. This was playing fast and loose and made a nonsense of the terms of the VC's statutes.

Immediately after Roberts' and Gould's VC citation in the
London Gazette
appeared a citation for George Patrick McDowell, acting yeoman of signals, and Leading Seaman Cyril Hambly, both of HMS
Kandahar
, a destroyer that hit a mine and was scuttled as it was sailing to Tripoli to intercept an Italian convoy. McDowell and Hambly swam across to a destroyer that came to the rescue. Unfortunately the rough seas prevented it closing right up next to
Kandahar
; Hambly and McDowell could have been rescued but chose to stay in the water to help others who were either drowning or in danger of it. According to their citation, they ‘saved many men, until they lost all their strength and were drowned'. Hambly and McDowell received posthumous Albert Medals, a rarer but less acclaimed decoration than either the VC or the GC.

McDowell and Hambly lacked something that Gould and Roberts, unbeknown to them, possessed, the extra ingredient necessary for many VCs: a champion – in Gould and Roberts's case Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean Fleet. In 1942 Cunningham was fifty-nine, had seen action as part of the Naval Brigade in the Second Anglo-Boer War, and gained the DSO and two bars during the First World War. He had a deserved reputation as an aggressive and successful senior naval officer. The Admiralty Board thought very highly of Cunningham, as did Churchill. Thus when Cunningham read Lieutenant Mackenzie's report of events on board
Thrasher
and digested the cool nerve shown by Roberts and Gould – as they moved the second depth charge, it kept making a disconcerting twanging sound – he did not hesitate to recommend both for the VC; he was confident that opposition, if raised, would be overcome. Removing two large enemy bombs from a submarine adjacent to the enemy's coastline in his view constituted more than enough enemy presence.
²¹
Cunningham got his way. Brave though they were, Gould and Roberts did no more than many bomb-disposal experts daily faced
in Britain, for which some – if they were blown up and died – received a GC. In one respect Cunningham simply interpreted the VC and GC warrants more strictly than anyone else; after all, the third clause of the George Cross warrant simply said that it was ‘intended primarily for civilians'.
²²
Gould and Roberts were not civilians; they displayed considerable courage;
ergo
they deserved the VC.