Victoria's Cross (26 page)

In the case of the army, the British and colonial contingents of which took the lion's share of VCs during the Second World War – 137, almost 75 per cent of the total – there was a tendency early in the war to reward good service couched in terms of ‘conspicuous gallantry', such as the VC awarded to Second Lieutenant Premindra Singh Bhagat, of the Corps of Indian Engineers. Bhagat had been recommended for an MC in 1940 in East Africa, but that had been downgraded to a Mention in Despatches. He gained his VC while serving in Ethiopia in January and February 1941. Over four days and for a distance of fifty-five miles, while mounted in a Bren carrier, he detected and supervised the clearance of fifteen minefields, twice having his carrier blown up and once being ambushed. Brave man, but his deeds were probably not particularly unusual.

As the war drew on and the Simonds's directive became more widely inculcated, what was demanded for VC eligibility was not only to remain coolly determined when under fire – the Cheshire VC, for example – but to demonstrate extreme anger in the most impossible circumstances; aggression, not moderation. In May 1945 Lachhiman Gurung, who was less than five feet tall, was with the 8th Gurkha
Rifles in the Burma jungle. One night the Gurkhas' position came under ferocious attack, and grenades flew into Gurung's trench. He picked up and threw back the first and then a second, but a third exploded, ripping off fingers and injuring his face and side. With just his left arm working he managed to reload and fire his rifle, keeping the attackers at bay. At regular intervals, nearby fellow Gurkhas heard him shout: ‘Come and fight a Gurkha!' At the end of the battle thirty-one Japanese soldiers were found lying dead around his trench. He always spoke modestly about the night he gained his VC: ‘I felt I was going to die anyway, so I might as well die standing on my feet. I'm glad that helped the other soldiers in my platoon, but they'd have all done the same thing.'
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Little wonder, therefore, that VCs became as rare as hen's teeth, even in the army. Only one man gained a bar to his VC in the Second World War – Captain Charles Upham, who fought in the 20th Battalion of the 2nd New Zealand Expeditionary Force.
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The greater the hero, the bigger the modesty; Upham, a taciturn individual, simply said: ‘The military honours bestowed on me are the property of the men of my unit.'
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Upham won his first VC on Crete in May 1941 when in command of a platoon in the battle for Maleme airfield. During the course of an advance of 3,000 yards, his platoon was held up three times. Upham attacked a German machine-gun nest with grenades, killing eight paratroopers, destroyed another, and finally knocked out a Bofors anti-aircraft gun. The advance completed, he helped carry a wounded man to safety in full view of the enemy. Next day he was wounded in the shoulder by a mortar burst and hit in the foot by a bullet. He continued fighting, hobbling about in the open to draw enemy fire – the kind of reckless action that Simonds's directive tried to discourage – and lodging his rifle in the fork of a tree to kill approaching Germans. During the retreat from Crete, while still injured, he climbed a steep ravine and used a Bren gun on advancing Germans, killing
twenty-two out of fifty at a range of 500 yards. Upham's VC prompted
The Times
to reflect in an editorial:

In the Baghdad of the
Arabian Nights
it used to be ordered that the story of any notable achievement should be written down in letters of gold. Is gold good enough, we can but ask, for the achievements of the two New Zealanders who have been awarded the Victoria Cross for valour? . . . the men of Talavera and of Waterloo were heroically brave; but there may be some excuse for asking whether the nature of modern warfare has not raised the standard of courage to heights unknown before.
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Upham's second VC was awarded for his role during the defence of the Ruweisat Ridge at the Battle of El Alamein on 15 July 1942, when he ran through a position swept by machine-gun fire and lobbed grenades into a truck full of German soldiers. Later that day he took a Jeep on which a captured German machine gun had been mounted and drove it through the enemy position, at one point commandeering a bewildered group of Italian soldiers to push the Jeep out of the sand. By now wounded, Upham nevertheless led an attack on an enemy strong point, was shot in the elbow and captured, eventually being incarcerated in Colditz because he was such a difficult prisoner. His citation for the second VC read in part: ‘his complete indifference to danger and his personal bravery have become a byword in the whole of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force.'
³⁴
Upham fulfilled Simonds's strictures: not only incredibly brave, but an example for all time.

The most appreciated and feted Second War VC winners were the determined killers in the Upham mould and, unlike the nineteenth century, rogues were permitted so long as they fulfilled the brief of setting an outstanding example. John Kenneally would have had his VC stripped from him in the nineteenth century, for he was a deserter. In April 1943 Kenneally was with the 1st Battalion, Irish Guards, when
he gained the VC for his part in the final assault on Tunis. Kenneally's VC citation stated that he had ‘influenced the whole course of the battle' – a key wording – by twice in the course of a few days picking up his Bren gun and, from the ridge where his unit was situated, charging single-handed down the bare hillside towards German troops who were gathering to attack. On the second occasion, he was wounded but refused medical treatment, and remained in the front line until the end of the day. Prior to this, on his eighteenth birthday, Kenneally had joined the Territorial Reserve of the Royal Artillery. When war broke out, he was posted to an anti-aircraft battery in north London, which he found enormously dull. In 1941 some Irish labourers persuaded him to desert and he went with them to Glasgow, where they gave him the identity card of John Patrick Kenneally, a labourer who had returned to Ireland. He adopted this new identity and enlisted with the Irish Guards in Manchester. When he got his VC, Kenneally later recalled: ‘It was the worst thing that could have happened to me. I thought I was bound to be rumbled.'
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‘Rumbled' he was; but progress had been made, and petty wrongdoing was no bar against a useful, inspirational hero legitimately gaining the VC in 1943. Courage-and-inspiration examples were useful propaganda; courage-but-failure had no wider use and would be overlooked.

Many VCs were recommended but few passed Simonds's stringent tests; those who failed to get a VC were usually downgraded to the next decoration in the hierarchy. One illustrative case suggests that, even with a remarkable level of official support, a well-deserved VC could get turned down.
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On the morning of 2 March 1945, C Company of the Lake Superior Regiment (Motor), part of Canada's 1st Army, was ordered to pass through positions held by A and B Companies in a gap to the south of the Hochwald Forest in Germany and to occupy a group of buildings. Acting Sergeant Charles Henry Byce, a twenty-four-year-old Métis, was part of C Company. The dawn attack was successful, but
by early morning C Company was being shelled and mortared, and its three supporting tanks were knocked out; the company commander and all the other officers became casualties. Byce assumed command of his platoon. His task was to consolidate the left flank. The enemy were entrenched not more than seventy-five yards away and Byce's platoon came under continuous machine-gun fire. Byce organized and led an assault on the enemy dugouts to quell resistance, moving from post to post, directing the fire of his men and maintaining contact with the other platoons.

As the day went on, enemy tanks manoeuvred into position for a counterattack. Byce took up the only remaining PIAT and stalked the German tanks.
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His first and second shots at the leading tank missed, thus giving away his position; the tanks then directed gunfire at him. He took aim again and knocked out the tank. A second German tank then appeared at a railway underpass; Byce realized that if he could destroy it in the underpass, it would block other tanks from attacking his position. He went forward with another soldier to a house which was a point of vantage, but found it occupied by the enemy. Sergeant Byce and his companion cleared the building with hand grenades, but by this time the tank was through and moving on to his position. He ordered his platoon to let the four enemy tanks go through them and then to open fire on the infantry following behind. This they did and the attack was broken up, the enemy infantry withdrawing. The tanks, however, remained and, with no further anti-tank weapons available, Byce realized that his platoon was no longer effective. He then extricated what remained of C Company. The Germans then called on Byce to surrender but he refused, instead ordering his men back across the bullet-swept ground to A Company lines. By now he had been in combat for almost twelve hours. For the rest of the afternoon he sniped at approaching enemy infantry on the railway embankment, killing seven and wounding eleven, before being relieved.

Byce's VC citation was signed up the chain of command by the commanding officer of the Lake Superior Regiment, Lieutenant Colonel Bob Keane; approved by the acting brigade commander, Lieutenant Colonel G. D. Wotherspoon; endorsed by the acting 4th Division commander, Brigadier R. E. Moncel; approved by the corps commander, Lieutenant General Guy Simonds and by the commander of the 1st Canadian Army, General Harry Crerar; last but not least it was approved by Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. Yet Byce's award was downgraded to a Distinguished Conduct Medal, although the citation clearly suggests a VC:

The magnificent courage and fighting spirit displayed by this Non-Commissioned Officer when faced with almost insuperable odds are beyond all praise. His gallant stand, without adequate weapons and with a bare handful of men against hopeless odds will remain, for all time, an outstanding example to all ranks of the regiment.
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Byce's courageous action was obviously well written up, but lacked the almost unbelievable quality of, for example, that of Sergeant Thomas Derrick, an Australian who had already gained a DCM at El Alamein for destroying three machine-gun posts and two tanks and taking around 100 enemy prisoners. On 24 November 1943, the 26th Australian Brigade, in which Derrick was serving, was ordered to capture Sattelberg, a township in New Guinea sitting on a densely wooded and heavily defended hill that rose 1,000 metres. On 22 November, two of the Australian battalions had been pinned down some 600 metres from the top of the slope, and as night fell they were instructed to withdraw. Derrick refused, saying: ‘Bugger the CO. Just give me 20 more minutes and we'll have this place. Tell him I'm pinned down and can't get out.'
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What happened that night was truly remarkable. Derrick used one hand to clamber up the cliff and the other to lob grenades into machine-gun nests, clearing seven before returning to his
platoon, gathering it up, and then personally assaulting and destroying three more, all at no more than eight metres' range. As
The Times
reported: ‘Undoubtedly Sergeant Derrick's fine leadership and refusal to admit defeat in the face of a seemingly impossible situation resulted in the capture of Sattelberg. His outstanding gallantry, thoroughness and devotion to duty were an inspiration not only to his platoon and company but to the whole battalion.'
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Winston Churchill, who as a dashing youth had proved his gallantry on numerous occasions and probably deserved the VC, ended the Second World War with nothing more than campaign medals. It was wrong, felt General Douglas MacArthur, commander of the US forces in the Philippines. MacArthur reflected on the mammoth flights Churchill had taken in 1942, criss-crossing the Atlantic for a second meeting with Roosevelt, then flying to Cairo on a morale-boosting visit to the troops, then to Teheran to meet Stalin, and then back to London:

If disposal of all the Allied decorations were today placed by Providence in my hands, my first act would be to award the Victoria Cross to Winston Churchill. Not one of who wears it deserves it more than he. A flight of 10,000 miles through hostile and foreign skies may be the duty of young pilots, but for a Statesman burdened with the world's cares it is an act of inspiring gallantry and valour.
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Buckingham Palace announced in December 1945 that King George VI, who had personally presented more than 44,000 decorations since the start of the war (and there were about 55,000 still to go), would henceforth send most decorations by post:

[T]he King does not propose to delegate to others the authority to present these medals on his behalf, as he regards each award as his own personal gift . . . the King will, however, continue to hand to their
next-of-kin all decorations and medals, of whatever degree, awarded to those who fell in action before they could receive them at his hands.

On the select list of honours the king still intended to personally present, the VC was at the top.
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7

The Integrity of the System

‘Sometimes one may feel that the utmost rot may be written about the British army, as long as it is complimentary rot, but that serious criticism
. . .
is somehow indecent.'

SPENCER FITZ-GIBBON
¹

‘If courage were common there would be no purpose in this book.'

LORD MORAN
²

‘The system knows what to expect, and no one wants to upset the integrity of the system.'

MINISTRY OF DEFENCE COLONEL

Total VC s distributed as of December 2014
1,357 to 1,354 individuals (three bars)

In 1956, the centenary year of the VC, there were 385 living holders of the Victoria Cross; by 2013 there were just five.
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The oldest, John Cruickshank, was ninety-four by the time this book was completed. In the Second World War Cruickshank was a flight lieutenant with 210 Squadron, which operated Catalina flying boats. On 17 July 1944 his aircraft was on patrol across the Atlantic when a German U-boat was spotted on the surface. The submarine may already have been in difficulties, or perhaps its commander felt confident to take on this lumbering aircraft; in any case it did not dive but prepared to fight. On the Catalina's first run, its depth charges did not release; Cruickshank went round for a second run and this time the depth charges fell and sank the U-boat. But the submarine's anti-aircraft guns were also on target and Cruickshank was severely injured, hit in seventy-two places, while Flight Sergeant Jack Garnett, the second pilot, was also wounded. The flight back to Sullum Voe, the Catalina's Shetland base, took five-and-a-half hours through the night, but Cruickshank, drifting in and out of consciousness, refused morphine as it would cloud his judgement. When Sullum Voe was in sight, Cruickshank took over the controls from Garnett; he considered the sea conditions too risky for a water landing, so he kept the plane aloft for an hour until the weather improved. The Catalina landed safely and Cruickshank was given an immediate blood transfusion, as the medical officer thought he was too close to death to be moved to hospital immediately. Garnett got the DFC. Cruickshank was so badly wounded that he never returned to flying but instead went back to his pre-war job as a banker. Of four VCs to Coastal Command during the war, Cruickshank's was the only one not to be awarded posthumously.

Cruickshank narrowly avoided death in 1944; VC winners of today and tomorrow are expected to run no less a risk than he did. This certainly keeps the VC exclusive, but by definition it condemns the ranks of the Cross to be filled largely with dead men. The 1961 VC warrant,
like the preceding one of 1920, is silent, or at least not explicit, about the level of risk required in order to be considered for the VC; the imposition of a strong likelihood of death is entirely a construction of the military establishment, enthusiasts for keeping this decoration extremely exclusive. It is a very wide deviation from what Victoria and Albert originally proposed. The key, third clause of the 1961 warrant states that the VC shall ‘only be awarded for most 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'.

That senior officers who swear an oath of allegiance to ‘the monarch and their heirs and successors' should manipulate what the sovereign has signed into being is very odd indeed. It might be thought that Christopher McDonald and Andrew Badsell merited at least consideration for the VC, when they were ambushed in Mosul in 2004 during the conflict in Iraq. Badsell was a Canadian civilian; McDonald was working for a private security firm during his final leave period from the Royal Irish Regiment. They were escorting a private contractor, heading for the city's power plant, when they were ambushed by hostile vehicles. They drove their car into the line of fire, protecting the one carrying the contractor, returned fire and died, enabling the contractor to escape. According to the coroner at McDonald's inquest, ‘they died in their efforts in the most heroic manner'.
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It is irrelevant what the VC warrant may say; allocation of the VC is entirely dependent on standards applied by the military, intent on safeguarding what it likes to call the ‘integrity of the system' – a system that seems to resemble no more than an informal set of guidelines established by erratically applied custom and practice and implemented by a small group of senior officers according to opaque guidelines.

There is, however, a system – the statutes of the VC warrant – whose integrity ought to reside in their strict application. For the military,
however, ‘integrity' is interpreted very differently, and involves applying what are considered to be the highest possible standards, not permitting dubious awards to creep in (as in the past they certainly have) and thus devaluing the decoration. Saddled with an unnecessarily complicated scale of operational gallantry awards, with extremely difficult distinctions to be made between each award, senior officers of the armed forces have surreptitiously inserted, or at least tolerated the development of, the 90 per cent risk-of-death requirement, which today is used as a means of winnowing out VC claims and keeps the number of possible VC awards to an artificially low level.

That this has made the Victoria Cross a decoration synonymous not with heroism but with death, and completely contradicts the declared intention of the Cross's founders, appears not to bother the military establishment. It puts the cart (protecting the esteem of the VC) before the horse (recognizing conspicuous bravery). In any situation where the award of a VC is at issue, two questions are posed by the VC committee. The overt question is ‘does this constitute a VC act?'; the covert one is ‘what signals might we send to the wider world by giving a VC in this instance?' It is not the case that McDonald was considered for a VC and ruled out; no one even recommended him. Generations of generals, admirals and air marshals – never mind MoD civil servants – have become accustomed to the unwritten rules of the Cross. No women; no civilians.

Awarding sufficient numbers of VCs that the medal does not become impossibly remote, without distributing so many that it becomes devalued, calls for fine judgement. Unfortunately, human judgement is fallible. Since 1856 the process involved in making a recommendation for a VC has not altered, but ‘the assumptions of the various people along the chain . . . have changed'.
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In the almost seven decades since the Second World War, only fourteen VCs have been awarded – nine to members of the British army and five to the
Australian army – eight of them posthumous. Over the course of the twentieth century, those adjudicating VC awards have gradually narrowed the gateway through which recommendations must squeeze. Billy Bishop's and John Cornwell's VCs were prompted as much by political requirements as by anything to do with personal courage; they were propaganda Crosses. To call them that in no way undermines Bishop's or Cornwell's actions (after all, it was not them who judged they were worthy of a VC); but in the absence of a stable, shared definition of what supreme courage might be – beyond calling it a supererogatory act, which does not really help, as what is exceptional for a Cornwell might be perfectly normal for a Pollard – we are all floundering in the dark, expecting that senior officers handed the difficult task of deciding grades of courage will do so objectively and consistently, paying attention to what the VC warrant actually says, rather than relying on custom and practice.

What is inappropriate is to maintain the pretence that the VC is purely for exceptional personal courage, when plainly it is not. It would be much simpler if General Patton's instruction, that ‘decorations are for the purpose of raising the fighting value of troops', was all there was to it.
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Patton wanted to professionalize the medal-awarding process:

It is vital to good morale that decorations get out promptly and on an equitable basis. There should be in every Army and Corps Staff one member of G-1 Section [dealing with personnel matters] whose duty it is to prod divisions and attached lower units to get citations out. He should further see that they are properly written.
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The Victoria Cross, however, has never simply been that kind of utilitarian vehicle. From its inception it has fulfilled a much greater, if unhelpfully intangible, function: the recognition of nobility. No one bothered to construct a compelling philosophical foundation for the VC. Yet, if asked the question ‘what is the VC for?', the answer must
surely involve an ideal of selfless dedication to others under the most severe conditions, in broadly defined military contexts. Because it is so precious, the VC needs to work effectively, and that means distributing it with as much integrity as possible. Not that the VC is irretrievably flawed. Just as there are numerous cases of VCs having been awarded on spurious grounds, serving either political or personal interests (and sometimes both), there are many outstanding examples of ‘noble' VC winners, such as the Reverend John Weir Foote, a chaplain with the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry, part of the Canadian contingent that conducted the Dieppe Raid on 19 August 1942. Foote landed on the Dieppe beach under heavy fire. He immediately joined a first-aid post on the beach and for the next eight hours calmly went about the beach – which was under continual fire – helping the medical officer, ministering to the wounded, and carrying men back to receive medical attention. When landing craft arrived to ferry back the wounded, he carried injured soldiers and saw them off the beach. Foote refused the chance of evacuation, preferring to stick by the wounded men, and became a prisoner of war.
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From Foote's nobility to Pollard's semi-sane killer drive; two extremes, both of which could be seen as justifying the VC, although the common ground between them is only that someone up the chain of command was impressed sufficiently to promote their cases.

The VC, as with all military and civilian honours, lives in two worlds: the official, with grandiloquently worded warrants and florid citations published in the
London Gazette
; and the closeted, where committees adjudicate recommendations behind closed doors. From its inception the monarchy has valued the VC so highly that it anxiously guarded it against disgrace. Bigamy, theft, drunkenness . . . all brought personal disgrace in Victorian society; if a VC holder behaved immorally, then by extension he tainted this new order of the über-hero and defiled the monarchy itself. After King George V's
declared wish that a man might wear the Cross on the scaffold, moral oversight of the VC dissolved. Yet clearly it would not do to have someone of dubious personal standing receive the most prestigious decoration. From being governed by an overt moral code, the VC has steadily been enveloped by more subtle considerations, in the final stages of which – the decision to give the Cross or not – the process is remarkably opaque. This may be necessary in order to avoid public controversy, but lack of clarity in how the judgements of the VC committee are reached inevitably gives rise to suspicion.

John Keegan's anxiety that the Cross is approaching unattainable levels was prompted by the list of gallantry awards for the Iraq War covering 2003 to 2010, in which Private Johnson Beharry's was the only VC; prior to Beharry, the previous VC awarded to a surviving British serviceman was in 1966, to Rambahadur Limbu, a Gurkha who fought in Borneo. In the Iraq list alongside Beharry's Cross were fifteen Conspicuous Gallantry Crosses (CGCs) – all non-commissioned officers – and eighty-four MCs. A posthumous CGC was awarded to Sergeant Jon Hollingsworth of the Parachute Regiment, who was serving with the SAS. He died during a raid in Basra, where he single-handedly faced a group of insurgents, killing six. Another Iraq CGC went to Lance-Corporal Justin Thomas, who was awarded the medal for his actions when his unit was pinned down by intense fire. Thomas clambered aboard an open-top vehicle and for the next fifteen minutes or so fired a machine gun, enabling his twenty colleagues to move to better cover. A rocket-propelled grenade passed between him and another Para, Gary Lancaster, who had come to Thomas's assistance by feeding ammunition belts, and exploded behind them.
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The wording of the current MoD instructions for gallantry awards says the VC goes for ‘gallantry of the highest order during active operations', while the CGC is for ‘conspicuous gallantry during active
operations'; ‘conspicuous gallantry' is the phrase that opened VC citations during the First World War. This subtle – and difficult to define – move from ‘conspicuous' to ‘of the highest order' imposes doubt on all commanding officers when considering VC nominations. Is this act really gallantry of the ‘highest' conceivable order? The person who performed it survived; so perhaps not. Such doubt helps preserve the VC's exclusivity and thus the esteem in which it is held, but there are degrees of exclusivity; the creation of the CGC has spelled the death not just of most VC candidates, but possibly of the decoration itself. The CGC is a medal that has little or no grip on the public imagination. While the awarding of a CGC is, of course, of considerable public interest and will gain media attention, the massive media fuss following the bestowal of a VC utterly overshadows the kind of attention a CGC would get. The VC quite simply is seen to be a public, even national, property, unlike any other award, either military or civil. That
a
VC went to a soldier who fought in Iraq was both justified and fits with the overall history of the decoration. Moreover, it was an intensely ‘political' war which Prime Minister Tony Blair was determined to prosecute against considerable domestic opposition. The Prime Minister needed a very public hero, preferably from a humble background, someone who could be presented as ‘of the people'. But it is remarkable that Private Beharry gained a VC while the lesser CGC went to Hollingsworth and Thomas, to pluck only two examples from the fifteen CGCs.