Victoria's Cross (3 page)

Many VC holders performed astonishingly courageous actions, beyond not just the call of duty but far beyond what most of us believe possible of ourselves, or others. A VC winner joins a relatively small, select band of brothers, all linked by an intangible romantic aura as they are dubbed an unquestionable ‘hero'. Almost immediately on its first appearance, the Cross and those who won it were endowed with chivalric qualities, for the snatching of lost regimental colours or the rescue of fallen comrades from certain death, interwoven into a tapestry of unalloyed endeavour. While the rest of us look on VC holders as rare creatures, they usually see themselves as quite
ordinary – people who just did their duty. The heraldic landscape that flourished around the VC is populated with tales of inspirational men who did astonishing things against the enemy, be they the stereotypes of nineteenth-century ‘Fuzzy-Wuzzies' or twentieth-century Nazis. A staple of the stirring tales told in the Religious Tract Society's
Boy's Own Paper
, the VC frames our sense of what it means to be superlatively courageous in battle. This genre of hero worship made it perfectly reasonable for an 1878 book about the VC to state, without any irony:

This book is written for Boys . . . Boys – worthy to be called boys – are naturally brave . . . a man who has done battle, who has been thrown in the lists, who has been ready to mount and splinter lance again, who in the gaining of experience hast lost nothing of the Boy's boldness – such a man is
brave
.

This book's avowed purpose was to encourage boys-become-men to risk their lives in battle:

‘The young fellows,' said an old soldier to the writer, ‘are always pushing forward in a battle charge – they are in a mighty hurry to smell powder –
the veterans fall into the rear!
' . . . But is it better than the Boy's eagerness to be foremost? – is it not – answer, brave hearts – better to die planting the colours on the wall, than to share the spoil which others have won?

This is the leading thought in this book about Soldiers – it is meant to keep alive the bravery of youth in the experience of manhood.
¹¹

Hero-worshipping of courageous individuals endured well into the twentieth century. In 1959 Macdonald Hastings, father of military historian Sir Max Hastings, told Second World War VC yarns in his book
Men of Glory
.
¹²
The only difference between the
Boy's Own Paper
and Hastings senior's pulp fiction was that khaki had been substituted for
red coats; otherwise the texts are indistinguishable. Neither text speaks of war's underlying reality of brutal, bloody, individual despair.

Early reception of the VC was almost entirely adulatory, as the Victorian press unquestioningly adopted it as a contemporary version of medieval heraldry; a symbol without monetary value, but nevertheless priceless:

Its intrinsic value! But who can tell the price a soldier puts upon it? He had rather have that piece of bronze on his breast than be made a Knight of the Garter . . . The Victoria Cross is as much to a soldier as the
gage d'amour
the knight errant in days of chivalry received from his lady love, and swore never to part with . . . When our soldiers come to value their crosses at threepence each, the price they will fetch at a marine store, we shall not long survive as a nation. There are things – God be thanked – which we
do
love and value more than life itself – things which gold can
not
purchase. The Victoria Cross is one of them.
¹³

Patriotism, the encouragement of self-sacrifice and the reinforcement of morale: all were and indeed are served by the VC. As with all mythologies, however, there are realities that sit uneasily alongside the myth. That the VC was born out of a military shambles – one so embarrassing to the civilian and military authorities that old rigidities could no longer be sustained – tends to be overlooked. One of the most remarkable aspects of the VC is how it symbolized a revolution in attitudes towards the British soldier and sailor; the idea that
only
officers could demonstrate gallantry died under the Russian cannons at Sevastopol in the Crimean War. The hitherto undifferentiated other ranks became individualized, personalized, recognized and feted as national heroes in the British press.

Statistics cannot tell a complete story but they provide some objectivity; they reveal that the distribution of the VC has been extraordinarily erratic. Between 1856 and 1913, the period in which Britain's
armed forces were largely engaged in punitive policing expeditions to preserve the empire, 533 VCs were distributed – more than 39 per cent of all VCs. Around 20 per cent of those – 111 – went to actions during the Crimean War, when some 83,000 men formed the British contingent and fought for seventeen months; approximately one Cross per 747 men. In 1857, during the Indian Mutiny, when some 40,000 British regular troops and East India Company soldiers fought rebellious Indian sepoys for around fourteen months, 182 VCs were given out; one Cross for every 219 men. In the First World War around 9 million British and Commonwealth troops were in combat for almost fifty-two months, during which 634 VCs were awarded, or around one Cross per 14,000 men. During the Second World War, when some 8 million British and Commonwealth military personnel served for seventy-two months, 182 VCs were distributed; one Cross for approximately every 44,000 men. Had the same ratio of men to VC been applied in the First and Second World Wars as was seen during the Indian Mutiny, each conflict would have resulted in around 36,500 VCs. This seems a huge number, especially when it is compared to the 1,357 VCs that have been handed out so far; but it is a very small number if compared to the medal distribution of other similarly sized countries. Since 1945, when British armed forces have been involved in several lengthy and large-scale actions, from Korea to Afghanistan, there have been just fourteen VCs; the stream has dried up almost totally. Obviously, it was considerably easier to win a VC in the nineteenth century than in the twentieth. Why?

One explanation is that more medals of a lesser status were created early on in the First World War, giving the military hierarchy more options when it came to recognizing gallantry. But that merely begs the question: why was it thought necessary to invent the Military Cross (1914) and the Military Medal (1916), when perfectly good gallantry decorations already existed in the form of the VC, the Distinguished
Service Order (for officers) and, for other ranks, the Distinguished Conduct Medal? The invention of new awards was justified by a supposed desire to avoid cheapening the VC, as the mechanized mass slaughter of the First World War overwhelmed the authorities with thousands of examples of VC-style heroism. But no one at the time decried the quantities of VCs given for service in the Crimea, or indeed during the Indian Mutiny.

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert tried to adopt an Olympian approach, accepting that senior officers would pluck out examples of individual courage that merited the new Cross wherever they might be, only to have that initial, generous impulse steadily distorted by later monarchs, military officers and politicians, who in varying ways and from different motives sought to bend the rules of the original VC warrant, or more finely grade the definition of courage. The consequence of these subsequent tinkerings with the VC is that for much of its existence the process of adjudicating who does and does not merit the Cross has been extremely muddled; there are numerous examples not just of people such as Sheean being overlooked, but of string-pulling, of Crosses going to individuals who scarcely merited it, and of Crosses being denied to those who obviously deserved them. For General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, a fine professional officer who probably should have been in command of the BEF in 1914, having performed a courageous action was not sufficient to gain the Cross; as he wrote in his memoirs, ‘Friends at Court' – influential people who could pull strings – were necessary.

The haphazard way in which a VC may or may not be granted has been remarked on many times, and most armed forces personnel understand and accept that the luck of the draw plays a huge part in any VC; but from another perspective – that of protecting the status of one of the few nationally esteemed honours that has not been debauched (such as the Order of the British Empire) or tainted by scandal – such
as the Peerage – it leaves a sour taste. The fluctuations in the VC's distribution obviously do not reflect a rise or fall in the courage of the armed forces, but are directly related to an evolving social and political view of what the VC is for and how its distribution should be
managed
. Victoria's desire was that men should be rewarded for exceptional courage; she did not, could not, contemplate a situation in which this process required ‘managing'. The current situation is alarming, as the Cross has increasingly been managed almost to death. The more prized the VC has become, the more difficult it has become to win one – and in turn, the more prized it becomes. In 2002 the military historian Sir John Keegan drew the inescapable conclusion from this unfortunate yet avoidable spiral:

there is concern that Britain's highest award for bravery, the Victoria Cross, will die out. Some of those who wish to see the Victoria Cross survive believe that the medal is becoming ever harder to win, and that to do so requires exposure to almost certain death. Although no such criterion is laid down it is generally believed that a winner must have undergone a 90 per cent risk of death. It is also generally held that the man . . . must by his action have materially affected the outcome of the engagement.
¹⁴

The 90 per cent death risk has been an informal criterion since at least the 1970s.
¹⁵
A Ministry of Defence paper,
Examination of the Standards of Australian Citations for the Award of the Victoria Cross
, considered in the 1970s whether the VC eligibility standard had ‘been lowered in recent years' following the award of four VCs – two posthumous – to members of the Australian Army Training Team in Vietnam. The onerous eligibility conditions for a VC were made explicit:

(1) For the most conspicuous gallantry of the highest order in the presence of the enemy. (A guide as to the standard required may be
taken as a 90 per cent possibility of being killed in performing the deed.)

(2) Each recommendation should be accompanied by signed statements of three independent witnesses. A joint signed statement is not permitted.

(3) Posthumous awards may be made.
¹⁶

Keegan was right about the threat to the VC's survival. Since he wrote, just three British VCs have been awarded: two posthumously, to Corporal Bryan Budd in 2006 and Lance Corporal James Ashworth in 2013; the third to Private Johnson Beharry in 2005. Beharry was so badly injured that he was not expected to survive.

Other nations do things differently, although exact comparisons are difficult and invidious and clearly reveal the risks in widely distributing gallantry awards. Germany handed out more than 6 million Iron Crosses during the First World War, and France millions of Médailles Militaires and Croix de Guerre.
¹⁷
Arguably, these decorations were highly prized only by the individual who gained them – and sometimes not even then. The USSR exercised much more restraint; between 1934 and 1991 various categories of the Hero of the Soviet Union, the highest military medal of the USSR, were awarded more than 12,700 times. A fairly tight grip has been exercised by the US over the distribution of its foremost military decoration, the Medal of Honor, established in 1862, six years after the VC. Even here, however, more than twice as many Medals of Honor have been distributed than VCs, almost half of those during the American Civil War. Germany and France certainly cheapened their military decorations, while the VC has retained its prestige by being so exceptionally difficult to win. Yet there must be a balance between flinging medals around like confetti and withholding them so tightly that to win them it is necessary to sacrifice life itself.

At the heart of the VC is the paradox that it is both worthless and priceless. Since the 1960s the monetary value of a VC on the secondary market has soared: we have moved a long way from impoverished First War soldiers returning from Flanders, unable to find a job and selling their Crosses to pawnbrokers for almost nothing.
¹⁸
In 1856 no one could have anticipated that the VC would become so scarce that it had resale value; it was assumed that the winner, or his family, would keep it as a treasured heirloom. Even in the handful of cases where it was forfeited following a criminal conviction, the main punishment – apart from losing the £10 pension attached to it
¹⁹
– was to lose the honour of being included in the VC Register, the roll-call of names of VC winners. What once was heinous is no longer; the names erased from the VC Register to prevent sullying the royalty were restored.
²⁰

As the potential fatal cost of VC eligibility has risen, so too has the VC's other price, its monetary value, drawing the attention of thieves and counterfeiters, the latter's task made slightly easier by the fact that a sprinkling of duplicate VCs have officially been issued to replace lost or stolen original Crosses. VCs have disappeared in fires and burglaries, they have been left on trains and, on occasion, buried with their owner; at least twenty-five original VCs are thought to have been destroyed, or are missing. The record price (as of July 2013) is 1 million Australian dollars – approximately £410,000 at the prevailing exchange rate – in Sydney on 24 July 2006, paid for medals formerly belonging to Captain Alfred John Shout, including one of nine VCs awarded to Australians who fought at Gallipoli in 1915.
²¹
Shout was awarded a posthumous VC for hand-to-hand combat at the Lone Pine trenches.
²²
His was the last Lone Pike VC still in private hands, and the purchaser, the Australian billionaire Kerry Stokes, donated Shout's VC to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, where it joined the other eight.