Victoria's Cross

by Gary Mead

  In 1956, the centenary year of the VC, there were 385 living holders of the Victoria Cross; by 2013 there were just five.3 The oldest, John Cruickshank, was ninety-four by the time this book was completed. In the Second World War Cruickshank was a flight lieutenant with 210 Squadron, which operated Catalina flying boats. On 17 July 1944 his aircraft was on patrol across the Atlantic when a German U-boat was spotted on the surface. The submarine may already have been in difficulties, or perhaps its commander felt confident to take on this lumbering aircraft; in any case it did not dive but prepared to fight. On the Catalina’s first run, its depth charges did not release; Cruickshank went round for a second run and this time the depth charges fell and sank the U-boat. But the submarine’s anti-aircraft guns were also on target and Cruickshank was severely injured, hit in seventy-two places, while Flight Sergeant Jack Garnett, the second pilot, was also wounded. The flight back to Sullum Voe, the Catalina’s Shetland base, took five-and-a-half hours through the night, but Cruickshank, drifting in and out of consciousness, refused morphine as it would cloud his judgement. When Sullum Voe was in sight, Cruickshank took over the controls from Garnett; he considered the sea conditions too risky for a water landing, so he kept the plane aloft for an hour until the weather improved. The Catalina landed safely and Cruickshank was given an immediate blood transfusion, as the medical officer thought he was too close to death to be moved to hospital immediately. Garnett got the DFC. Cruickshank was so badly wounded that he never returned to flying but instead went back to his pre-war job as a banker. Of four VCs to Coastal Command during the war, Cruickshank’s was the only one not to be awarded posthumously.

  Cruickshank narrowly avoided death in 1944; VC winners of today and tomorrow are expected to run no less a risk than he did. This certainly keeps the VC exclusive, but by definition it condemns the ranks of the Cross to be filled largely with dead men. The 1961 VC warrant, like the preceding one of 1920, is silent, or at least not explicit, about the level of risk required in order to be considered for the VC; the imposition of a strong likelihood of death is entirely a construction of the military establishment, enthusiasts for keeping this decoration extremely exclusive. It is a very wide deviation from what Victoria and Albert originally proposed. The key, third clause of the 1961 warrant states that the VC shall ‘only be awarded 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’.

  That senior officers who swear an oath of allegiance to ‘the monarch and their heirs and successors’ should manipulate what the sovereign has signed into being is very odd indeed. It might be thought that Christopher McDonald and Andrew Badsell merited at least consideration for the VC, when they were ambushed in Mosul in 2004 during the conflict in Iraq. Badsell was a Canadian civilian; McDonald was working for a private security firm during his final leave period from the Royal Irish Regiment. They were escorting a private contractor, heading for the city’s power plant, when they were ambushed by hostile vehicles. They drove their car into the line of fire, protecting the one carrying the contractor, returned fire and died, enabling the contractor to escape. According to the coroner at McDonald’s inquest, ‘they died in their efforts in the most heroic manner’.4 It is irrelevant what the VC warrant may say; allocation of the VC is entirely dependent on standards applied by the military, intent on safeguarding what it likes to call the ‘integrity of the system’ – a system that seems to resemble no more than an informal set of guidelines established by erratically applied custom and practice and implemented by a small group of senior officers according to opaque guidelines.

  There is, however, a system – the statutes of the VC warrant – whose integrity ought to reside in their strict application. For the military, however, ‘integrity’ is interpreted very differently, and involves applying what are considered to be the highest possible standards, not permitting dubious awards to creep in (as in the past they certainly have) and thus devaluing the decoration. Saddled with an unnecessarily complicated scale of operational gallantry awards, with extremely difficult distinctions to be made between each award, senior officers of the armed forces have surreptitiously inserted, or at least tolerated the development of, the 90 per cent risk-of-death requirement, which today is used as a means of winnowing out VC claims and keeps the number of possible VC awards to an artificially low level.

  That this has made the Victoria Cross a decoration synonymous not with heroism but with death, and completely contradicts the declared intention of the Cross’s founders, appears not to bother the military establishment. It puts the cart (protecting the esteem of the VC) before the horse (recognizing conspicuous bravery). In any situation where the award of a VC is at issue, two questions are posed by the VC committee. The overt question is ‘does this constitute a VC act?’; the covert one is ‘what signals might we send to the wider world by giving a VC in this instance?’ It is not the case that McDonald was considered for a VC and ruled out; no one even recommended him. Generations of generals, admirals and air marshals – never mind MoD civil servants – have become accustomed to the unwritten rules of the Cross. No women; no civilians.

  Awarding sufficient numbers of VCs that the medal does not become impossibly remote, without distributing so many that it becomes devalued, calls for fine judgement. Unfortunately, human judgement is fallible. Since 1856 the process involved in making a recommendation for a VC has not altered, but ‘the assumptions of the various people along the chain . . . have changed’.5 In the almost seven decades since the Second World War, only fourteen VCs have been awarded – nine to members of the British army and five to the Australian army – eight of them posthumous. Over the course of the twentieth century, those adjudicating VC awards have gradually narrowed the gateway through which recommendations must squeeze. Billy Bishop’s and John Cornwell’s VCs were prompted as much by political requirements as by anything to do with personal courage; they were propaganda Crosses. To call them that in no way undermines Bishop’s or Cornwell’s actions (after all, it was not them who judged they were worthy of a VC); but in the absence of a stable, shared definition of what supreme courage might be – beyond calling it a supererogatory act, which does not really help, as what is exceptional for a Cornwell might be perfectly normal for a Pollard – we are all floundering in the dark, expecting that senior officers handed the difficult task of deciding grades of courage will do so objectively and consistently, paying attention to what the VC warrant actually says, rather than relying on custom and practice.

  What is inappropriate is to maintain the pretence that the VC is purely for exceptional personal courage, when plainly it is not. It would be much simpler if General Patton’s instruction, that ‘decorations are for the purpose of raising the fighting value of troops’, was all there was to it.6 Patton wanted to professionalize the medal-awarding process:

  It is vital to good morale that decorations get out promptly and on an equitable basis. There should be in every Army and Corps Staff one member of G-1 Section [dealing with personnel matters] whose duty it is to prod divisions and attached lower units to get citations out. He should further see that they are properly written.7

  The Victoria Cross, however, has never simply been that kind of utilitarian vehicle. From its inception it has fulfilled a much greater, if unhelpfully intangible, function: the recognition of nobility. No one bothered to construct a compelling philosophical foundation for the VC. Yet, if asked the question ‘what is the VC for?’, the answer must surely involve an ideal of selfless dedication to others under the most severe conditions, in broadly defined military contexts. Because it is so precious, the VC needs to work effectively, and that means distributing it with as much integrity as possible. Not that the VC is irretrievably flawed. Just as there are numerous cases of VCs having been awarded on spurious grounds, serving either political or personal interests (and sometimes both), there are many outstanding examples of ‘noble’ VC winners, such as t
he Reverend John Weir Foote, a chaplain with the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry, part of the Canadian contingent that conducted the Dieppe Raid on 19 August 1942. Foote landed on the Dieppe beach under heavy fire. He immediately joined a first-aid post on the beach and for the next eight hours calmly went about the beach – which was under continual fire – helping the medical officer, ministering to the wounded, and carrying men back to receive medical attention. When landing craft arrived to ferry back the wounded, he carried injured soldiers and saw them off the beach. Foote refused the chance of evacuation, preferring to stick by the wounded men, and became a prisoner of war.8 From Foote’s nobility to Pollard’s semi-sane killer drive; two extremes, both of which could be seen as justifying the VC, although the common ground between them is only that someone up the chain of command was impressed sufficiently to promote their cases.

  The VC, as with all military and civilian honours, lives in two worlds: the official, with grandiloquently worded warrants and florid citations published in the London Gazette; and the closeted, where committees adjudicate recommendations behind closed doors. From its inception the monarchy has valued the VC so highly that it anxiously guarded it against disgrace. Bigamy, theft, drunkenness . . . all brought personal disgrace in Victorian society; if a VC holder behaved immorally, then by extension he tainted this new order of the über-hero and defiled the monarchy itself. After King George V’s declared wish that a man might wear the Cross on the scaffold, moral oversight of the VC dissolved. Yet clearly it would not do to have someone of dubious personal standing receive the most prestigious decoration. From being governed by an overt moral code, the VC has steadily been enveloped by more subtle considerations, in the final stages of which – the decision to give the Cross or not – the process is remarkably opaque. This may be necessary in order to avoid public controversy, but lack of clarity in how the judgements of the VC committee are reached inevitably gives rise to suspicion.

  John Keegan’s anxiety that the Cross is approaching unattainable levels was prompted by the list of gallantry awards for the Iraq War covering 2003 to 2010, in which Private Johnson Beharry’s was the only VC; prior to Beharry, the previous VC awarded to a surviving British serviceman was in 1966, to Rambahadur Limbu, a Gurkha who fought in Borneo. In the Iraq list alongside Beharry’s Cross were fifteen Conspicuous Gallantry Crosses (CGCs) – all non-commissioned officers – and eighty-four MCs. A posthumous CGC was awarded to Sergeant Jon Hollingsworth of the Parachute Regiment, who was serving with the SAS. He died during a raid in Basra, where he single-handedly faced a group of insurgents, killing six. Another Iraq CGC went to Lance-Corporal Justin Thomas, who was awarded the medal for his actions when his unit was pinned down by intense fire. Thomas clambered aboard an open-top vehicle and for the next fifteen minutes or so fired a machine gun, enabling his twenty colleagues to move to better cover. A rocket-propelled grenade passed between him and another Para, Gary Lancaster, who had come to Thomas’s assistance by feeding ammunition belts, and exploded behind them.9

  The wording of the current MoD instructions for gallantry awards says the VC goes for ‘gallantry of the highest order during active operations’, while the CGC is for ‘conspicuous gallantry during active operations’; ‘conspicuous gallantry’ is the phrase that opened VC citations during the First World War. This subtle – and difficult to define – move from ‘conspicuous’ to ‘of the highest order’ imposes doubt on all commanding officers when considering VC nominations. Is this act really gallantry of the ‘highest’ conceivable order? The person who performed it survived; so perhaps not. Such doubt helps preserve the VC’s exclusivity and thus the esteem in which it is held, but there are degrees of exclusivity; the creation of the CGC has spelled the death not just of most VC candidates, but possibly of the decoration itself. The CGC is a medal that has little or no grip on the public imagination. While the awarding of a CGC is, of course, of considerable public interest and will gain media attention, the massive media fuss following the bestowal of a VC utterly overshadows the kind of attention a CGC would get. The VC quite simply is seen to be a public, even national, property, unlike any other award, either military or civil. That a VC went to a soldier who fought in Iraq was both justified and fits with the overall history of the decoration. Moreover, it was an intensely ‘political’ war which Prime Minister Tony Blair was determined to prosecute against considerable domestic opposition. The Prime Minister needed a very public hero, preferably from a humble background, someone who could be presented as ‘of the people’. But it is remarkable that Private Beharry gained a VC while the lesser CGC went to Hollingsworth and Thomas, to pluck only two examples from the fifteen CGCs.

  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’.10 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.11

  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’.12 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: o
nce 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?’13

  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.’14 That is clearly untrue; or ‘merit’ is being defined here in a very peculiar fashion.