Victoria's Cross

by Gary Mead

  The Gestapo tortured her brutally to try to make her give away this information [the whereabouts of other operatives inside France]. They seared her back with a red hot iron and, when that failed, they pulled out all her toe-nails; but Ensign Sansom continually refused to speak and by her courage, determination and self-sacrifice, she not only saved the lives of these two officers but also enabled them to carry on their most valuable work.60

  Many male soldiers had received the VC for much less. Yet even with this recommendation it was a struggle to get a GC for Odette. A letter from Gubbins dated 6 June 1946 revealed that he feared that Odette might be denied the GC unless ‘we were able to produce concrete evidence that she refused to speak under torture. I am afraid that such evidence is impossible to obtain, for, as this torture was carried out in solitary confinement, the only witnesses would be the torturers themselves or the Gestapo interrogators. I hope and pray that these men have long since been shot.’ The authorities had to make do with circumstantial evidence in the form of supporting statements from those with whom Odette worked in France, and the fact that the operatives for whose names she was tortured remained free from arrest.61

  Ward realized that, with Odette having gained a grudging GC, her argument for a posthumous VC for Violette Szabo was always going to be a struggle.62 The tall, dark-haired, striking Violette Reine Elizabeth Szabo was a highly professional, popular and courageous SOE agent. The daughter of a British father and a French mother, and the widow of a French legionnaire, Szabo joined SOE on 1 July 1943, even though she had a one-year-old daughter, Tania. Her first SOE interviewer, on 27 August 1943, recommended her for training:

  A quiet physically tough, self-willed girl of average intelligence. Out for excitement and adventure but not entirely frivolous. Has plenty of confidence in herself and gets on well with others. Plucky and persistent in her endeavours. Not easily rattled. In a limited capacity not calling for too much intelligence and responsibility and not too boring she could probably do a useful job, possibly as courier.63

  Later reports were ambivalent, that of 7 September 1943 stating: ‘I seriously wonder whether this student is suitable for our purpose. She seems lacking in a sense of responsibility and although she works well in the company of others, does not appear to have any initiative or ideals. She speaks French with an English accent.’ By 8 October the instructors seemed to have decided that Szabo was unsuitable:

  I have come to the conclusion that this student is temperamentally unsuitable for this work . . . when operating in the field she might endanger the lives of others working with her. It is very regrettable to have to come to such a decision when dealing with a student of this type, who during the whole course, has set an example to the whole party by her cheerfulness and eagerness to please.64

  Yet despite such negative comments Szabo left for France on 7 June 1944, where her courage was questioned by none. The final paragraph of her GC recommendation, dated 10 July 1946, read:

  Although Szabo was continuously and atrociously tortured she never by word or deed gave away any of her acquaintances or told the enemy anything of any value. She showed great courage in exhorting other women prisoners to be of good cheer and walked proudly to the gas chamber,65 knowing full well the fate that was in store for her. She gave a magnificent example of courage and steadfastness to all that had the honour of knowing her. She is very strongly recommended for the George Cross.

  Prior to news of her death, Szabo had been recommended for a Civil Division MBE. It may seem incredible to modern readers, but as far as the army was concerned, Szabo was a civilian and she therefore merited a civil award. Szabo’s file in the National Archive contains various reports from French sources who worked with her up to her arrest: one, dated 27 June 1945, described her:

  Jeune femme d’un courage extraordinaire. Elle a donne un très bel example de cran, et elle a été trés débrouillarde. Nous avons énormément d’admiration pour elle. [Young woman of extraordinary courage. She showed lots of guts, and was very resourceful. We have enormous admiration for her.]

  And under the section proposing a citation: ‘Proposée pour la M.C. et pour une décoration française.’

  Szabo’s GC was gazetted on 17 December 1946, although inevitably her citation was largely fictitious: few of those who might have verified it were around to be consulted. Stories about her capture, including that she used a Sten gun to fend off her attackers, are now widely regarded as inventions or embellishments. But she was unquestionably valiant under extreme torture and abuse before she was wretchedly murdered: if the requirement of the VC, unspoken during the war itself, was that one had to perform some supererogatory act and also run the risk of almost certain death, Yeo-Thomas deserved the VC – and Szabo, who did die, even more so.

  The award of the George, rather than the Victoria, Cross to Major Hugh Paul Seagrim is also difficult to explain. Seagrim was one of five brothers who joined the British, or British Indian, armies prior to the Second World War.66 He had wanted to train as a doctor but the death of his father meant the family was too poor to send him to university. He tried to join the Royal Navy but was turned down on the grounds of colour blindness. Instead he went to Sandhurst, and because the pay was better in the British Indian army, he joined the 19th Hyderabad Regiment but was attached to the 1st Battalion, the Burma Rifles. In the 1930s he took three months’ leave to travel in Japan. Clever, eccentric and popular, Seagrim frequently said he would sooner be a postman in Norfolk than a general in India.

  When war against Japan broke out, the by now Major Hugh Seagrim was ordered to organize the Karen levies in Burma. Force 136, an organization established by SOE, dropped parachutists into the Karen Hills in 1942, and they joined up with Seagrim’s force, which regularly passed on valuable intelligence by wireless. In January 1944 he was awarded the DSO for his ‘determination, courage and devotion . . . of the highest order’. In March 1944 Japanese forces closed in on Seagrim, torturing and murdering Karen villagers to persuade them to betray Seagrim. He was finally tracked down to the village of Mewado, where the Japanese threatened to arrest all the inhabitants and burn down the village unless the headman pinpointed Seagrim’s exact location. Seagrim, who by now had enormous affection for the Karen people, chose to surrender to the Japanese rather than permit this to happen. He was imprisoned close to Rangoon, along with several Karens; all were sentenced to death. Among his last words were: ‘I do not mind what you do to me. But, I do ask you, if you are going to punish anyone, punish me. Do not punish these Karens. It is only because of me that all these Karens have got into trouble.’67 Seagrim, along with seven Karens, was executed by firing squad on 14 September 1944 and, almost two years later, he was gazetted on 12 September 1946 with the George Cross.68

  A decade after the end of the Second World War, Irene Ward published a history of the FANYs in which she tried to rationalize – perhaps to herself as much as for the reader – the unjust manner in which military decorations had been adjudicated during the war:

  The bestowal of Honours is always a matter for criticism – sometimes unjust criticism . . . to give the minimum decoration for the maximum effort is a deplorable way of acknowledging outstanding service. I can only assume – and this can be said about other awards also – that secrecy was so well maintained that those who recommended individuals for relatively minor recognition were unaware of the distinguished services rendered, or perhaps those who sifted the names had never heard of SOE.69

  A hierarchy of committees must be navigated to gain the VC and unhelpfully their deliberation is kept well away from public scrutiny; secrecy inevitably fosters distrust and suspicion. The VC’s history is one of amorphous definitions of what constitutes conspicuous courage, sometimes stretched to accommodate fairly ordinary acts of military duty, occasionally shrunk to absurdly narrow limits, ruling out all acts save those that defy human imagination. For some individual women, who so clearly performed heroically under unimaginable pressure in occupied France
during 1943–4, the pity is that they were not even considered for this prestigious honour.

  As women increasingly come to be seen as capable of fulfilling combat roles – if they want them – it will be a vital question whether or not the VC really is open to them. In the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts that dominated British military life during the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century, women were increasingly drawn into front-line combat roles. On 7 March 2008, Flight Lieutenant Michelle Goodman became the first woman to be awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC), equivalent to an MC. In 2007 she flew her Merlin helicopter, with a crew of three others, into the centre of Basra in Iraq to rescue a critically injured Rifleman, Stephen Vause, at night and under heavy mortar and small-arms fire. Vause survived. Certainly Goodman’s exceptionally cool head and determination merited the DFC; but in the past, with a different gender, she might have been judged worthy of a VC. In the asymmetric wars that are now increasingly likely to set the pattern for future British military engagements, women will increasingly be drawn into ‘facing’ the enemy. The traditional response to women who might wish to serve in a combat role in the British army is that they are physically too weak to successfully complete the infantry combat physical fitness test – as are many men. But as warfare becomes more hi-tech and equipment becomes lighter, women’s physical capacity will become less significant. The twenty-first-century soldier is much more likely to be supervising drones, far from the battlefield, as rushing to bayonet the enemy in a trench.

  British women certainly have it ‘in them’, as Ethel Grimwood put it, to defy the enemy and show equal disregard for their own safety as any man, but the resistance to bestowing a VC, and the opportunity given by the GC to reduce pressure for granting the highest award to a courageous woman, is extremely deep-rooted. That no woman has ever gained a Victoria Cross is today an enormous psychological obstacle; who would dare to make the first female VC recommendation? The question of whether women will become more ‘acceptable’ as VC candidates, the more they inexorably become drawn into combat or near-combat roles with the British armed forces, is frankly otiose. The barriers are informal, neither written into the VC warrant nor ever committed to paper, and exist – like the informal 90 per cent risk-of-death requirement – only in the minds of senior military officers and perhaps some quarters of Whitehall. Denying women the VC – the ‘gold’ – will, however, steadily become more difficult – even with ‘silver’ and ‘bronze’ medals available in the form of the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross and the Military Cross – not least because greater numbers of women will either seek or be drawn into combat or quasi-combat roles. Gender equality in military affairs is increasingly being dictated by equal opportunities legislation, particularly in Western countries. In the US, legislation in 1975 mandated the right of women to enter the armed forces. As a result, the percentage of women serving in the US Army jumped from 1.6 per cent in 1973 to 8.5 per cent in 1980. From 2016 the US will permit women to serve in ground-combat roles in its armed forces; Britain cannot be far behind, although we are likely to see a female Medal of Honor earlier than a female VC. By January 2016 most branches of the US military will be forced by legislation to accept women in all roles. As Lieutenant-General (retired) Carol A. Mutter of the US Marines put it: ‘Twenty years from now we’re going to say, “Why didn’t we have women in combat?” It’s the same thing with African-Americans in World War II: “They’re not smart enough to fly. They can’t be pilots.” Well, they proved that they could be.’70

  After the end of the Second World War the government formed a committee, chaired by Major General John McCandlish, the Director of Personnel Administration at the War Office, to consider the function of the Women’s Royal Army Corps (WRAC) in the face of the enemy, now that the WRAC was a corps within the regular army. The committee’s deliberations were highly reminiscent of the 1918–20 committee set up to revise the VC warrant. Some members, including McCandlish, wanted weapons training for women; others were deeply opposed. One male member of the committee asserted:

  The fact that ‘little Olga’ [a sarcastic reference to women in the Red Army] is trained to kill and prides herself on the number of notches on her revolver butt is no reason we, too, should cry ‘Annie get your gun’. It is still the soldier’s duty to protect his womanfolk whatever they are wearing. Even in these days when war means total war let us at least retain that degree of chivalry.71

  A government study, Women in the Armed Forces, was published by the UK Ministry of Defence in 2002. In the intervening five decades, only the language had changed: comments that openly belittled women soldiers had become unacceptable. The essence, however, was unaltered: the 2002 review upheld the ban on women serving in front-line combat roles in the army, although they were allowed to serve on fighting vessels in the Royal Navy and to fly fighter aircraft in the RAF. In 2002 the official reason for keeping women from combat roles in the army was that to include them would ‘involve a risk with no gains in terms of combat effectiveness’.72 This was reiterated in 2010, when a further report stated that ‘there was no way of knowing whether mixed gender teams could function as well as all-male teams in a ground close-combat environment.73 Female scholars, however, certainly attribute – with strong if anecdotal evidence – the resistance of the army to including women in combat roles to a deeply misogynist culture, one that is difficult to eradicate despite the Ministry of Defence and the armed forces identifying themselves as ‘equal opportunities employers’.74 Since 1992 there has been a steady rise in the number of women in the British armed forces, from around 6 per cent in 1997 to almost 10 per cent by 2013; but by barring female soldiers from activities that are specifically seen as combat roles, old attitudes endure:

  British female officers are significantly disadvantaged in terms of promotion because of their exclusion from combat units and their under-representation in combat support units. Overwhelmingly, the senior ranks in the British Army are dominated by officers who are from these arms and it is very difficult to be promoted beyond one-star [General] rank from combat service support branches. This structural difficulty is compounded by the expectations of male officers, many of whom – particularly those born before the mid-1960s – operate with traditionalist assumptions of the feminine role.75

  In other words: the British army is generally run on informally sexist lines.

  Yet good soldiering is as much about mental as physical capability; the ability of women to fight in combat roles was proved long ago by women who served in the Soviet army, fighting against Nazi Germany. More than 800,000 women served in the Soviet Union’s armed forces during the Second World War, and eighty-nine achieved the Hero of the Soviet Union, the USSR’s highest decoration. In the Red Army, women served as snipers, tank drivers, machine-gunners, pilots, transport drivers, communications personnel, medics and political officers; Soviet women could be men’s equals in the most testing of conditions. But perhaps the most insuperable barrier to a woman VC is the existence of the George Cross and the false belief that the GC is the equal of the VC. That equality exists only in the minds of those who wish to perpetuate an artificial distinction between male soldiers and female, and between the military and civilians – a distinction that was blown apart when the first bombs were dropped on London in 1940. In twenty-first-century warfare, where technological competence is at least as important as sheer brute force, the lines of gender separation in combat will increasingly dissolve. For the time being, in Britain, Admiral Everett’s views still hold sway: let sleeping dogs lie.

  Dame Irene Ward’s campaign for belated justice on behalf of Violette Szabo deserves a fresh hearing. Bestowing a single retrospective VC on all women who served SOE behind enemy lines – the clever, the strong, the indomitable, as well as the fallible, the foolish and the feeble, for all suffered – would be an act of laudable humanity, analogous to the VC granted to America’s Unknown Soldier in 1921. It would also be politically useful: if a posthumous VC was granted to
all female SOE agents, the psychological barrier against future individual women gaining the VC would be less insurmountable. Dame Irene lost a campaign but lit a fuse that still burns; the final word should perhaps go to her:

  women themselves are often more far-sighted in appreciating what is fundamental in a struggle for life itself. Women would suffer equally with men in defeat – perhaps even more – and if they can contribute to victory they will accept any liability irrespective of its implications. This is the truth which called out so much spiritual strength from so many remarkable women.76

  6

  Bigger War

  ‘I have never seen a brave man. All men are frightened. The more intelligent they are, the more they are frightened. The courageous man is the man who forces himself, in spite of his fear, to carry on.’

  GENERAL GEORGE S. PATTON1

  ‘The classic VC case would be that of Samson who in immolating himself destroyed the enemy – the Philistines.’

  AIR FORCE MINISTRY OFFICIAL, SEPTEMBER 19422