Victoria's Cross

by Gary Mead

  It had been for some time abundantly clear that our existing decorations were inadequate for a war of this magnitude, and that some decoration other than the V.C. and D.S.O. would be necessary for officers. There appeared to be some dissatisfaction at the front, and while, of course, the whole standard [for the VC] had been raised, there seemed no rewards for junior officers whose bravery did not entitle them to the V.C. The D.S.O. was originally designed for this purpose, but eventually it was restricted to senior officers; during the South African War, too, it had been prostituted, as several officers who had never left the base received it.54

  The logical course would have been to broaden the scope of the DSO to include junior officers, but that would have faced stiff resistance from senior officers – many of whom had the DSO – who wished to preserve the distinctive status of the decoration; it was an order, after all, no mere medal. This snobbery helped produce a confusing panoply of military decorations, only partially tidied up in the 1993 review of gallantry awards.

  In the discussions between George V and the military establishment on how best to solve the medal ‘gap’ at the end of 1914, the king suggested extending the Distinguished Service Cross, an award limited to the Royal Navy, to the army.55 Kitchener jumped at the idea, but the First Sea Lord, Winston Churchill – his bitter encounters with Kitchener in South Africa an enduring memory – strenuously defended the exclusivity of the DSC for the Royal Navy. The king was ‘very much opposed to the idea of the two Services having different decorations’, but Kitchener, thus rebuffed, furiously refused to have anything more to do with the DSC idea. Instead he opted for a new, army-only cross and formed a committee to work out the details, which was done in such haste that Ponsonby was surprised ‘that more mistakes were not made’. Ponsonby wanted the new army decoration to be for fighting officers only; staff officers, far from the front lines, would be excluded. Kitchener disagreed, reasoning that ‘a staff officer in charge of intricate operations during an offensive deserved greater recognition than a man who performed an individual act of gallantry. One man was merely responsible for his life, whereas the other might be responsible for thousands of lives . . .’56 Thus tension that had existed since the first days of the VC – between a desire to recognize individual acts of tactical gallantry and the need to reward strategically significant military planning – resurfaced once more. Kitchener chaired the small committee formed to produce the MC, on which Ponsonby, now Keeper of the Privy Purse after having served briefly with the 7th Division in France, also sat. The disorderly process by which the MC was created greatly contrasts with the deliberate planning that went into the VC. The MC was entirely Kitchener’s handiwork:

  The word ‘autocrat’ can only give a feeble idea of what Kitchener was at that time. The War Office blindly carried out his orders, and no one ever thought of questioning his proposals or of attempting to argue with him. The committee was therefore a farce . . . When we came to the design I suggested we should have something really good, but Kitchener said it would take too long and there was no necessity to have anything damned artistic . . . Kitchener seemed to fancy himself as an artist, and was constantly engaged in drawing pathetic designs on the blotting-paper.57

  Kitchener decreed that the MC should be silver, but only, Ponsonby believed, because he was presented with a rough sketch that had been coloured with silver paint. The choice of the MC ribbon was made in no less slapdash a fashion. Kitchener proposed various colour schemes, only for Ponsonby – with his encyclopedic knowledge of European decorations – to point out that Kitchener’s suggestions were either identical to or closely matched the ribbons of other countries:

  Kitchener became quite exasperated and said: ‘This damned fellow contradicts me whenever I say anything. We’ll have no nonsense; I’ve got it, plain black and white, simple and dignified’, to which I remarked that that happened to be the Iron Cross. That broke up the meeting, and Kitchener said he would choose the ribbon with the King.58

  Kitchener then consulted a book of Ponsonby’s containing examples of all British and foreign ribbons. Ponsonby also left lying around a basket with a selection of ribbons, collected by his wife:

  Eventually I was sent for and shown with triumph a ribbon they had selected which was not in any book; I found they had chosen the one my wife had made out, mauve on a white ground . . . It was decided to call the new medal the Military Cross, but there was no guarantee that it would not be given for services at the base or on the line of communication, which was a great pity. The King then proposed to start a Military Medal.59

  Having hastily created the MC for junior officers – thereby allowing the informal raising of the VC bar for those ranks – there inevitably arose pressure to do something for the enlisted men, although a perfectly respectable, indeed coveted award already existed in the form of the Distinguished Conduct Medal, awarded ‘for distinguished conduct in the field’. On 4 April 1916, sixteen months after the MC was established, the London Gazette revealed that the king had got his way: the Military Medal (MM) was invented specifically for other ranks and initially only for men. The MM was a medal that really did not need inventing; for NCOs and other ranks the DCM had hitherto ranked just behind the VC. But the sheer numbers of men in the army evoked from the military establishment a desire to try to grade courage ever more finely, artificially inventing distinctions between acts, where such discrimination was hardly credible. In the first great round of savagery in the twentieth century, the military establishment almost forgot the DCM, awarding just 25,000 of them (including bars); and in the 1939–45 replay that number dropped to some 1,900.

  Fifty-one VCs were won during the Battle of the Somme, twenty going to junior officers, twelve to NCOs and nineteen to privates; a third were posthumous. Some of the Somme VCs ought to have raised a few eyebrows, as they clearly fitted poorly within the extant VC statutes. Although one writer has suggested that ‘surely the most heroic figure was Billy McFadzean’,60 a twenty-one-year-old private in the 14th Royal Irish Rifles, his act of ‘most conspicuous bravery’ involved only his own, particularly pointless death, at Thiepval Wood, where on 1 July he was in a densely packed trench. McFadzean, a specialist bomber, was ordered to unpack grenades ready for troops about to go over the top. He picked up a box and cut the cord surrounding it; but the box slipped from his hands, dropping two grenades on the ground and knocking out their pins. With only seconds to react before the grenades exploded, McFadzean threw himself on them; he died and a soldier nearby lost a leg. His citation read, in part: ‘He well knew his danger . . . but without a moment’s hesitation he gave his life for his comrades.’61 It was an impossible, horrible moment, in which McFadzean can only have reacted instinctively. Yet however we look at it, McFadzean was responsible for mishandling the box, admittedly under dreadfully stressful circumstances – the Germans were shelling heavily the Royal Irish Rifles’ position – and he brought about his own end. Given the circumstances, why did he not receive the Albert Medal? The answer is likely to have been nothing to do with the act itself, but the wider signals sent by the VC – signals that would have been entirely absent from the barely known Albert Medal.

  McFadzean’s VC-winning act, along with other VCs in 1916, served a much broader purpose: the public acclamation of a hero who died in battle. Six months before the Somme started, the government had, to mixed response, imposed universal conscription (except in Ireland), as the army’s appetite for men seemed insatiable; yet victory was a more distant prospect than ever. The uncomfortable fact is that the dead McFadzean may have contributed far more to the war effort than if he had lived. It was newsworthy that his father was given a ticket (third class) to travel from Belfast to receive his son’s Cross personally from the king.

  Such royal gestures were, as in the nineteenth century, eagerly written up by the press; in November 1916 the Illustrated London News, under the heading ‘The King Presenting the Victoria Cross to the Mother of a Fallen Hero’, carried a full-page graphic
of George V handing to his mother the posthumous VC awarded to Private Edward Warner of the Bedfordshire Regiment, sixteen months after Warner had entered a gassed trench alone at Hill 60, near Ypres. Warner went to find reinforcements and the deserted trench was held, but he died from ingested gas the next day. That same investiture also saw the VC handed to Alice Cornwell.62 Such gestures not only celebrated heroes; they demonstrated that the king was ‘with’ the people and honoured the dead, who – the public was reminded – had not been forgotten. By late 1917, in the final days of the futile Battle of Passchendaele, Haig’s paper-thin distinction between uncivilized and civilized war had become a bitter joke for those in the trenches: what was civilized about gas, flame-throwers, aerial bombing, or a sharpened spade in the back?

  On the battlefields of the First War the VC performed its historic function, that of honouring the dead and knitting together humbled national morale. On the home front, where the ripples of war soon touched civilian life, there was, at the start of the war, no means of honouring those out of uniform. Civilian casualties during the war were minimal – 1,414 killed and 3,416 wounded, from fifty-one Zeppelin and fifty-two aircraft raids63 – but the outrage was nevertheless considerable. The government came under pressure to create a new honour to award to those thought to have provided invaluable contributions to the war effort. Zeppelins first dropped bombs on British soil in December 1914, and airship raids continued throughout 1915 and 1916, but the real damage was caused by Gotha aircraft; the deadliest daylight air raid on London happened on 5 June 1917, which left 162 dead and 432 wounded. The timing was fortuitous; the previous day the government had unveiled a new decoration specifically for civilians. Unlike the VC and other military gallantry awards, the British Empire Order immediately reintroduced class-based stratification, with different grades – KBE, CBE, OBE, MBE – used to reward civilians according to their status.64

  By August 1918, when the tide had turned in favour of an eventual allied victory, it was clear that the current VC warrant no longer covered all eventualities. Various technical and uncontroversial changes to the warrant – such as including the newly created Royal Air Force – were obviously necessary. In July 1918 Sir Reginald Brade, Permanent Under-Secretary of State for War between 1914 and 1920, raised with senior figures of the armed services the question of a new wording for the VC warrant. Rear Admiral Norman Craig Palmer seized the opportunity provided by Brade to suggest that the merchant navy should be included in any new warrant:65 ‘It would appear to me to be highly desirable that Officers and men of the Mercantile Marine should be eligible for this very highly valued Decoration, in view of the unprecedented conditions which prevail.’ As well as the merchant navy, there was the anomaly of (commonplace but prohibited) posthumous VC decorations; there was the clear possibility that a civilian might deserve a VC; and there was the thorny issue of women in uniform, if not in action.

  On 7 August 1918 the War Office published a press release, notifying the establishment of an interdepartmental committee ‘to consider and advise His Majesty’ on amending the VC warrant, to make the VC more ‘in keeping with the requirements of modern warfare’, to draw up a ‘new clause to support posthumous award of the VC as the existing Warrant does not legislate for such awards’, and, most sensitive of all, to consider ‘the advisability or otherwise of extending, in certain circumstances the award to women and to civilians’. The Military Secretary at the War Office, Lieutenant General Sir Francis Davies, solicited opinions from various ministries and the armed services.66 The air force, the Colonial Office and the army raised no objection to including women, so long as the prevailing high (albeit ill-defined) standards were maintained. However, the Naval Secretary, Admiral Sir Allen Frederic Everett, was opposed. He privately wrote to Lieutenant General Davies on 7 August 1918:

  My Dear General,

  At first blush, it seems logically indefensible to debar the fair sex from being awarded the V.C. provided of course they ‘have performed some signal act of valour or devotion to their country’ . . . It must be fully realized that the standard of ‘valour and devotion to duty’ for the Victoria Cross is now very much higher than it was in the earlier years of its introduction. In fact, it may be said that the standard now required for the award of a V.C. is far, far higher than the actual words express . . . if women are to be eligible, will not the ordinary gallantry of man render his judgment lenient; will he not be soft-hearted towards the woman (marriage proves this) and give her the benefit of the loosest interpretation of a female act of valour or devotion to duty; will he not be inclined to say ‘By Jove (Mars or Venus), for a woman that was a splendid deed’, and assess her award by virtue of being influenced by her sex? . . . let us hypothecate a retreat where some bloody-minded virago W.A.A.C is overtaken by a Hun, might she not be the more induced to take up a bundook [old British army slang for a rifle] and battle with a Hun, might she not be all the more tempted to take some very unladylike action or conduct herself in such an unseemly manner from the universal standard expected of the fair sex that the enemy would proclaim all women combatants and shoot them at sight? . . . There are enough bickerings in the masculine line as to whether this man or that should or should not have been awarded a VC, but if the hysterical female world is to be allowed in, God help the poor devils who have to make decisions . . .67

  Everett next day delivered to Lieutenant General Davies a memo, ‘Eligibility of women for the Victoria Cross’, which used less emotive language but maintained the same opposition.

  When the eight members, all men, of the ‘Committee on Co-ordination etc. of Warrants Relating to the V.C’ first met on 30 August 1918,68 Ponsonby, acting as chairman and representing the king,69 opened by saying that there was ‘a lot of very simple work in front of us, and a certain amount of rather intricate work. I do not think, however, there is anything that requires any acrimonious discussion.’ It was a forlorn hope. Everett was adamant about not allowing women in:

  we think that the words ‘some signal act of valour or devotion to their country’ as a matter of fact should be very severely interpreted. It is only artificially that the V.C. has reached the very high standard it has reached at present and if you are going to bring women in that particular definition would cover all sorts of petty things.

  Ponsonby asked: ‘Your suggestion is that we should stiffen up that definition.’ To which Everett simply replied: ‘Yes.’ Colonel Graham said: ‘You cannot compare the V.C. in this war with any previous war because people are getting the Military Medal now for what would have won the V.C. in the South African War.’ This recognition by Everett and the army’s Deputy Military Secretary that the VC standard had been surreptitiously elevated could have been a pivotal moment; but there was no interest from those assembled in even considering a lowering of standards to bring the VC back into line with its earliest history. By August 1918 Billy McFadzean’s self-sacrifice would probably not have gained him a VC: at the meeting, Colonel Graham commented on ‘cases where a man gets an arm or a leg blown off in picking up a bomb, or loses his life by throwing himself upon a bomb. That is pure self-sacrifice, and not really valour, I mean.’ The debate was confused and confusing; might self-sacrifice not also be valorous?

  Quite remarkably, it emerges at this point of the proceedings that there existed ‘local rules’ regarding the distribution of the VC, demarcating the Royal Navy from the army; while the army required ‘first-hand evidence of two witnesses’, the navy had no such requirement. Colonel Graham pointed out that the ‘two witnesses [requirement] is merely a domestic arrangement on the part of the Field Marshal [Douglas Haig] in France’ [emphasis added]. The meeting agreed that the phrase ‘conclusive proof’ should be included, and Everett wanted to see ‘conclusive’ italicized for emphasis, adding that ‘one might almost, after “conclusive” put in “backed by two witnesses” or words to that effect’. Colonel More raised an obvious point: ‘Might not there possibly be a case in which it would be difficult or impos
sible to get two witnesses, and is it not better to leave it rather open.’ He was ignored; Ponsonby merely said: ‘I think the word “conclusive” covers all that is necessary.’

  Everett and Graham’s acknowledgement that the VC standard implemented in the war had been ‘artificially’ raised was only partly right; it was rather that the VC Committee began to reward aggression much more than selflessness. In 1915, 117 VCs were awarded, 35 per cent of them for rescuing or tending to comrades; in 1917 such acts gained 13 per cent of the 174 VCs for that year; in 1918, 203 Crosses were gained, 6.5 per cent for rescuing the wounded.70 But Everett was isolated regarding his bête noir: none of the rest of the committee objected to including women or civilians, so long as high standards were maintained. Ponsonby read out submissions which supported the inclusion of women and civilians, including this from Major General Sir Godfrey Paine, of the Air Ministry: ‘it is only logical that they [women] should be included subject to precise definitions as to eligibility.’ General Ruggles-Brise, meanwhile, who as Haig’s Military Secretary at GHQ in France can be assumed to have spoken for Haig, said: