by Gary Mead
There is, in any case, a good precedent for the retrospective recognition of military courage: the belated granting of battle honours to British regiments that can be displayed on their colours, drums and other regimental regalia. Such honours, which have considerable symbolic significance, are proudly displayed by regiments. Yet, like the VC, their distribution has always had a somewhat random quality, depending largely on the persuasive powers of the regimental commanding officer. Some battle honours commemorate ignoble defeats while others record memorable victories. By 1880 some regiments with more than a century of good and loyal service still lacked a battle honour, an indignity that offended their regimental colonels. In 1882 the government set up a committee, chaired by Major General Sir Archibald Alison, to investigate anomalies in the distribution of battle honours. As a result of its recommendations, battle honours were retrospectively awarded to regiments that had fought as far back as the Battles of Dettingen in 1743 and Quebec in 1759. A subsequent committee of 1909 looked into the same matter and went back to the seventeenth century, exhuming battles thought worth commemorating on regimental colours.7 The Alison committee and its successor are today largely forgotten, but it’s clear that the authorities were once prepared to make retrospective judgements regarding courage and honour – and in 1882 saw no problem in setting a precedent.
The clearest deserving cases for retrospective posthumous VC awards concern the men and women of Special Operations Executive (SOE) who fought and died, often in hideous circumstances while displaying the utmost courage, during the Second World War. It is often argued that female SOE agents were ineligible for VC recommendations as they were not ‘really’ soldiers: their military commissions were only temporary or honorary. It is surprising that this canard has gained such wide currency as, under the terms of the 1920 VC warrant, women and civilians, if under military command at the time of their deed, were (and remain) entitled to be considered for the VC. Moreover, five civilians were awarded the VC in the nineteenth century – against the wishes of some War Office civil servants, establishing a precedent that ought not to have been neglected. No civilian – or woman – has been considered for a VC in the twentieth century, or in the twenty-first, as yet. The VC’s statutes were last adjusted in 1961; they need revisiting in the twenty-first century. If to win a VC marks a person as being truly exceptional, how bitter is it be to be denied one, how long a struggle can be waged by families, friends or communities angry at an alleged Victoria Cross injustice. For as many tales as there are of remarkable courage that actually succeeded in winning a Victoria Cross, there are just as many concerning equally deserving candidates, which were overlooked at the time and remain blocked today.
Ordinary Seaman Teddy Sheean enlisted in the Royal Australian Naval Reserve in April 1941. In November 1942 Sheean was with HMAS Armidale, a corvette on active duty, steaming close to Timor, north of Australia. On 1 December 1942 Armidale was attacked by Japanese aircraft and hit by two torpedoes and a bomb. As Armidale started listing, the order to abandon ship was sounded. Panicking men clambered into lifeboats or jumped into the water, while Japanese aircraft returned to machine-gun them. Several eyewitnesses saw Sheean try to free a lifeboat from its fixings, as the planes swooped down yet again, injuring Sheean. Despite his wounds, he was observed scrambling across the tilted deck and strapping himself into the seat of an anti-aircraft gun, which he began firing at the attacking Japanese aircraft, shooting one down. Sheean remained at his post, firing his gun as the ship and he slipped beneath the waves; a more inspirational example of supreme self-sacrifice is difficult to imagine. Sheean was Mentioned in Despatches (MiD), then the lowliest of all military honours in the British and Commonwealth forces. Apart from the VC, MiD was at that time the only available posthumous decoration. The pressure to obtain a retrospective posthumous VC for Sheean has, over the years since his death, been fairly consistent, but has always run into strong resistance from the authorities. His case is not helped by the fact that on 15 January 1991 Australia gained the right to award its own VC; in 1942 Sheean would technically have been eligible for an ‘Imperial’ VC, i.e. a VC handed out from London, as Australia was at that time a dominion. An opportunity to show magnanimity towards Sheean was declined in February 2013, when a two-year, taxpayer-funded public tribunal in Australia rejected his claim (along with twelve others) for a retrospective VC.8 The tribunal refused to grant retrospective VCs, not because the claims were suspect, but because that would undermine the ‘integrity of the system’. In its summary, the tribunal resorted to legal technicalities to avoid granting retrospective VCs:
The VC for Australia, created by letters Patent, replaces the Imperial VC in the Australian system and has the same eligibility requirements. The VC for Australia is intended to be held in the same standing and value as the Imperial VC. It is no longer possible for the Australian government to recommend honours and awards in the Imperial honours and awards system. Specifically, the government cannot recommend to the Queen the award of an Imperial VC.9
The report quoted Professor Bill Gammage, historian at the Australian National University, who made the following comment on all disputed cases, not just Sheean’s: ‘The award of the VC has always been imperfect. The requirement to have officers or more than one independent witness makes chance a factor, as does reliance on written recommendations.’
The correction of possible past injustice is always fraught, and usually there are good arguments on both sides. Yet retrospective posthumous pardons for wrongly convicted murderers, exonerations for those convicted of criminal acts that society no longer regards as crimes, or apologies for things that were not previously regarded as unjust but which are today, such as slavery, are now a regular occurrence. The VC should be no different. Arguments based on floodgates, integrity of the system and so forth are weak; individual cases could be assessed by a standing committee of retired military officers, military historians and experts in military honours. Formally denying the VC to individuals such as Sheean will continue to court controversy. That it was difficult to create rules covering all possible cases that might be considered or recommended for the VC naturally did not trouble Queen Victoria or Prince Albert, the creators of the Cross. As it transpired, civilian administrators of the VC’s statutes in its early days did their best to interpret the wording of the original 1856 warrant and to apply strict rulings, but senior field officers flouted those rules with scant regard for what the VC warrant actually said.
Teddy Sheean probably merited a VC; but the overall action, the context in which he displayed his courage, was relatively insignificant and no one in authority took a special interest. Had a senior officer written-up Sheean’s case with greater flair, or pushed for the Cross, he may well have joined the illustrious ranks of VC holders. Medal citations are official accounts, as Spencer Fitz-Gibbon correctly puts it: ‘If the army tells a story in a citation, that story is what we are intended to believe happened during that part of the battle.’10 A polished and scrupulously worded VC citation, as it finally appears in the London Gazette, often conceals months of agonizing in the upper echelons of the armed forces and Whitehall; it is carefully authored by committee and designed to tell a good ‘story’. The original recommendation that so-and-so ought to be considered for a VC may be very rough and is just the starting point, stemming as it usually does from a field officer who may lack the kind of eloquence looked for in a VC citation. By the time the initial recommendation has gone up through several layers of officialdom, the original rough edges will have been smoothed. With luck, the caterpillar recommendation might metamorphose into a butterfly citation.
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:
