Victoria's Cross (27 page)

The decisions in this case sit oddly with the third clause of the still extant 1961 VC warrant, which stipulates that the Cross is ‘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'.
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Beharry, Thomas, Hollingsworth – all performed a supererogatory act, an undemanded ideal, the willingness to sacrifice self for others; it is confusing, to put it no more critically, that the MoD
operates with one standard, while the VC warrant operates with a different one. Logic dictates that it is time for an updated VC warrant; or a revision and cleansing of the MoD's medals ‘league table'.

Courage is a virtue, the demonstration of which can inspire others and encourage resilience in adversity; courage needs to be encouraged. Part of the current confusion surrounding the apparent need to defend the VC against possible dilution is that the establishment is anxious that creeping debasement of the decoration's national importance is a real threat – when it is no such thing. It is, of course, right to be afraid; language debasement has suffused contemporary society – more or less anything today can be deemed courageous. As the American thinker and professor of law, William I. Miller, puts it:

Contemporary gender, sexual, and ethnic politics argues that all are entitled to their stories of courage, that no one is to be denied the virtue simply for having been relegated to powerlessness . . . Merely being all you can be need hardly involve courage; more likely it is a less glorious matter of plain hard work.
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For the military, the degree of courage displayed remains an ultimate test; the hero must remain an exclusive item. According to the philosopher J. O. Urmson, the heroic person ‘does more than his superior officers would ever ask him to do'; he is ‘the man to whom, often posthumously, the Victoria Cross is awarded'.
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In 1856 it was enough to show simple courage while in danger to gain a VC. Today an act that far exceeds duty is required; and even that may not be enough. The definition of what it takes to win the VC has thus been shunted higher, without anyone in authority over the VC warrant specifying this, but where it lies today is far from clear; a settled, universally shared definition of military courage is no easier than it has ever been. The early years of the VC saw the authorities struggle to define the kind of act that qualified for the Cross, but many cases – which today seem
aberrations – either crept in or were forced through by powerful senior officers. But because acts of courage stem from extreme situations in which an individual's subjective mental state is crucially relevant, any objective recognition of that act – by giving a medal, for example – enters the public domain, with inevitable questions. In what way is the courage of an Alfred Pollard ‘equivalent' to that of a Jack Cornwell, or a Johnson Beharry? It is absurd to seek an answer; yet, once embarked on the path of giving decorations for individual courage, it was inevitable that stratification and the creation of subdivisions, together with the inevitable dissatisfaction, would follow. Saddled with the practice – for good or ill – of recognizing and rewarding individual courage, the authorities have understandably tried to impose a more systematic approach, creating a hierarchy of military decorations with the VC at the peak.

This ‘scaling' of courage is our inheritance and perhaps very little can be done about it. Lieutenant General Stannus was unfortunately right: once started, the process of individualizing courage inevitably demands adjudication by authorities who are only human; the scope for error expands, particularly when those same authorities try to prevent the peak from becoming too easily accessible by imposing unbelievably high standards. The military gatekeepers of all gallantry awards have an invidious task, that of trying to maintain the integrity of the system they have been handed, and which they have expanded. Adjudicating between the different standards of courage in order to bestow the ‘right' gallantry decoration is a thankless task; a seat on the VC committee is perhaps one of the most unwelcome positions a senior officer can occupy – there will always be someone to say they got it wrong in a particular case. We could, however, turn this situation on its head; from that different perspective we might conclude that maintaining the rigidities of the system – trying to follow as exactly as possible the grading of courage, even when it leads to
absurdities – has imperceptibly become more important than guarding its integrity, which is all about justice, and being seen to be dealing with individuals justly.

Does it matter? For individuals, obviously it does, although most VC winners are, almost by definition, exceptionally modest when it comes to their VC-winning act, as Kipling said:

I have met perhaps a dozen or so of V.C.'s, and in every case they explained that they did the first thing that came to their hand without worrying about alternatives. One man headed a charge into a mass of Afghans . . . and cut down five of them. All he said was: ‘Well, they were there, and they couldn't go away. What was a man to do? Write 'em a note and, ask 'em to shift?'
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The Victoria Cross is much bigger than the individuals who win it, because for our society it represents courageous selflessness, and the highest possible devotion to the defence of our nation. Raising or lowering the price of heroism are equally risky, because that threatens to unsettle the overall moral quality of society. The paradox today is that, while everyone can be a hero for performing what once might have seemed relatively trivial acts of stoicism or endurance, the British military hero now normally needs to die in battle to obtain the VC. The critical problem threatening the clarity of what the VC once stood for is the military's determination to sustain rationing, a decision that paradoxically is rational yet results in irrational judgements. Imposing a quota (itself ill- or undefined) avoids the risk of devaluing the Cross; yet this can lead to excluding clearly meritorious cases. According to Lord Ashcroft, writing in the
Spectator
, ‘The beauty of the V.C. is . . . the fact that it is awarded entirely on merit.'
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That is clearly untrue; or ‘merit' is being defined here in a very peculiar fashion.

The military prefer a (rarely acknowledged) quota system rather than a (difficult-to-administer) avowedly merit system of operational
gallantry decorations, because rationing is seen as a bulwark against the VC, and other gallantry awards, becoming commonplace. Lieutenant Colonel ‘X' (speaking on condition of anonymity), then Secretary of the Armed Forces Operations Awards Committee, explained this supply-and-demand defence against cheapening the VC. This committee is chaired by the Defence Services Secretary and includes the Secretaries for the Royal Navy, the Royal Air Force and the Army, and the Deputy Chief of Joint Operations.
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‘X' described his role

[as auditing] the system to keep it credible. The number of overall awards [including VCs] that will be distributed depends on various factors, partly on the number of troops engaged in an operation; the length of the conflict; the level of overall risk involved; the number of casualties . . . Our work must be guided to some extent by custom and practice.
The system knows what to expect, and no one wants to upset the integrity of the system
[my emphasis].

Step outside the military world for a moment and it is obvious that the moral ‘system' in which the VC exists is far wider than the purely military, and that its ‘integrity' depends as much on how well our society defends itself against surreptitious language debasement as on any perpetuation of artificially elevated requirements for VC eligibility. If anyone can be a ‘hero', what price the ‘heroism' of the VC?

During the Second World War the ‘integrity of the system' began to be privileged above the recognition of individual supererogatory acts of military valour. The nineteenth century saw a lengthy tussle over the VC between War Office civil servants who tried (and sometimes failed) to implement strictly the terms of the VC warrant and senior officers who would do their best to ride roughshod over those scruples. Some nineteenth-century senior officers – Lord Roberts being a notable example – chose to distribute the VC generously, while their twentieth-century counterparts believed that the Cross
should be handed out on a much more restricted, but equally informal, basis. Today, we are living through a period in which control over the VC has been vested almost entirely in the hands of the military, and the policy they implement is one of extremely tight control over the numbers of VCs handed out – yet still with scant regard to the strict terms of the existing, 1961, VC warrant. Crudely speaking, throughout the VC's history the military has loosened or tightened the strings around the VC ‘bag' as it sees fit, no matter what the warrant says. Currently, the military establishment gets extremely agitated whenever it believes the Cross may be given too easily. That may be right or wrong, but it is a matter of (possibly wayward) judgement, for which there would be no need if the VC Warrant were actually referred to, rather than ignored, in making recommendations. The establishment has painted itself unnecessarily into a corner; very few VCs are given because no one dare suggest giving more; the VC has become untouchable, and is placed on such an elevated pedestal that it is almost beyond reach. This is not how it started, and is not how it should be today.

The military's obsession with ‘the system', which entails comparing and contrasting current and past VC recommendations, rather than ‘integrity' – the judgement of individual cases on their merits – can be seen in the case of the four VCs that went to Australian troops during the Vietnam War. Australian regular soldiers joined a purpose-built unit created in 1962, the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam (AATTV), Australia's contribution to America's war against the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese regular army. The AATTV initially consisted of thirty officers and warrant officers, although by the time it was disbanded in 1972 around 1,000 men – mostly Australians but also a few New Zealanders – had served in its ranks. The ‘advisory' role of the AATTV was a mask that rapidly slipped, and the unit was soon fighting alongside the South Vietnamese regular army. All
the AATTV VCs were written up by senior Australian officers attached to the unit. Two of the VCs were posthumous, one of them witnessed by no senior officer. A complicating factor was that, between 1975 and October 1992, Australia ran two parallel systems for awarding medals, its own and the Imperial (British and Commonwealth) system. Any recommendations for the Imperial VC were channelled via the Foreign Office to the Ministry of Defence (MoD) in London. Curiously, the VC committee in London lacked the authority either to judge Australian VC standards or to reject recommendations.

The MoD regarded four VCs as excessive, and there was suspicion that the Australians were cheapening the decoration. The MoD diplomatically waited four years before commissioning an internal study to consider – actually, to undermine – the four AATTV VCs.
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That four VCs went to such a small contingent was only remarkable, however, if the analysis compared – as it did – what happened in Vietnam with the Korean War of 1950–3, when the same number of VCs (including two posthumous) was distributed among some 20,000 British and Commonwealth armed forces personnel, more than 1,000 of whom were killed in action. Thirty-three AATTV members were killed in action and 122 wounded during its ten-year existence. In Korea, the chance of winning a VC was one in 5,000; for members of the AATTV it was one in 250. Four VCs for the AATTV was only remarkable if the blinkers of a quota system were donned; if each action was judged purely on its own merit, then why not four, or five, or more?

The report took a dim view of the posthumous VC awarded to AATTV Warrant Officer Kevin Wheatley, although it tactfully added that ‘it would be completely improper to make comment today on a standard that was not criticised at the time'. On 13 November 1965, Wheatley's platoon was surrounded while in action in Tra Bong Valley, in Quang Ngai province. Wheatley refused to leave his comrade,
Warrant Officer Swanton, who had been grievously injured, even though Wheatley knew Swanton was dying from a chest wound.
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According to the original VC recommendation, Wheatley ‘discarded his rifle and radio to enable him to half drag, half carry Warrant Officer Swanton, under heavy machine-gun fire and automatic rifle fire, out of the open rice paddies into the comparative safety of a wooded area some 200 metres away'. Wheatley was then seen to pull the pins from two hand grenades; shortly afterwards an explosion and gunfire were heard. The MoD report observed that Wheatley's VC recommendation had been massaged before it became a citation: ‘the words “rifle and” [were removed] on the grounds that a soldier should never discard his weapons . . . The two bodies were found at first light the next morning after the fighting had ceased, with Warrant Officer Wheatley lying beside Warrant Officer Swanton. Both had died of gunshot wounds.' The report noted that this paragraph had drawn ‘comment from the Palace . . . As the citation [actually, recommendation] stood it could have been a suicide pact.
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In conjunction with the Australian Army Liaison Officer the words “Both died of gunshot wounds” were added.' It then concluded: ‘It is questionable if this act is really to VC standard.'

An authoritative history of the Australian involvement in the Vietnam War provides an altogether more subtle context for Wheatley's tragic end:

AATTV was an extraordinary unit, elite and unique . . . The normal role for team members was advising or leading forces of Vietnamese or Montagnards in combat or calling in artillery and air power for their support, with only one other Australian or American close at hand. Under these circumstances advisers developed a code of mateship . . . It was a kind of pact. Each looked after the other, and neither left the field of battle alone. Sometimes they died together.
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