Victoria's Cross

by Gary Mead

  41.Marcus Binney, The Women Who Lived For Danger (Hodder &Stoughton, 2002), pp. 47–8.

  42.The women of SOE F Section who were captured were Yvonne Rudellat, Yvonne Baseden, Odette Sansom, Violette Szabo, Denise Bloch, Cecily Lefort, Lilian Rolfe, Vera Leigh, Diana Rowden, Andrée Borrell, Madeleine Dammerment, Yolande Beekman, Noor Inayat Khan, Elianne Plewman and Eileen Nearne. Yvonne Baseden, Eileen Nearne and Odette Sansom survived, the rest were executed or died at Natzweiler-Struthof, Ravensbrück, Bergen-Belsen and Dachau concentration camps.

  43.Foot, op. cit., p. 48. She was later given a military MBE by the Air Ministry.

  44.www.london-gazette.co.uk/issues/37181/supplements/3676.

  45.Hansard, 18 January 1944, vol. 396, c 3030. Viscountess Astor asked Churchill a supplementary question: ‘Would it be too much to ask my Right Hon. Friend to make a speech some day telling us what he really does think about women’s services in the war?’ To which Churchill replied: ‘I addressed a meeting at the Albert Hall on this subject and I gathered that there was some criticism.’

  46.Ward, op. cit., p. 218.

  47.Ibid., p. 219.

  48.According to Christine Hamilton in The Book of British Battleaxes (Robson Books, 1997, p. 169), Ward was part of a parliamentary delegation to Nazi Germany in 1936. During tea at Ribbentrop’s villa she could be heard informing Adolf Hitler in a loud voice that he was ‘talking absolute bosh’.

  49.Foot, op. cit., p. 431.

  50.Father of the poet Thom Gunn, Herbert Gunn is today best known for inventing in 1943 the headline ‘It’s That Man Again’, a satirical reference to Hitler which later became the title of a popular radio show.

  51.www.london-gazette.co.uk/issues/37468/supplements/961/page.pdf.

  52.www.london-gazette.co.uk/issues/38578/supplements/1703.

  53.Noor Inayat Khan was recommended for the GM, which was reduced to an MBE and then a Mention in Despatches. That she was finally granted a GC was thanks to the determination of Vera Atkins, Buckmaster’s head of intelligence, who in 1947 interrogated Hans Josef Keiffer, head of German counter-intelligence in Paris. His testimony of Noor’s bravery after capture and her refusal to give any information was the basis for her GC – yet another example of it not always being necessary for a senior (British) officer to have witnessed the courageous act.

  54.Delving into the history of SOE – about which conspiracy theories abound – is hampered by several facts: a fire in its Baker Street HQ in 1946 reportedly destroyed 85 per cent of its records; Buckmaster did not keep full records; and immediately after the war, when SOE was closed down in 1946, there was plentiful ‘weeding’.

  55.Jerrard Tickell, Odette: The Story of a British Agent (Chapman and Hall, 1949).

  56.NA WO 32/20708. Ward was indefatigable in her efforts to get SOE agents who had gained the GC retrospectively awarded the VC. On 30 July 1963 she asked the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, ‘whether he will consider the desirability of amending the conditions for the award of the Victoria Cross, in the light of modern circumstances, in such a way as to make it possible for a posthumous award to be made to those qualified for the award in the course of secret activities in enemy occupied territories during the war, for which they could not be decorated at the time. In an extremely unhelpful and somewhat strange written reply, the PM said: ‘No. This would not in my view be a suitable amendment to the conditions of award and the George Cross was instituted in 1940.’

  57.Although not related to the more famous Winston, Peter Churchill and Odette claimed to be married when they were captured, and used the surname to help ensure captors treated them with a degree of wary consideration. After the war, her marriage to Roy Sansom was dissolved; she married Churchill in 1947 and they divorced in 1956.

  58.In her Ph.D. thesis (‘The Women Agents of the Special Operations Executive F Section: Wartime Realities and Post-war Representations’, submitted to Leeds University in September 2011), Kate Vigurs quotes M. R. D. Foot in an interview given on 14 January 2003 as the source of her assertion that ‘Odette was frequently seen dining out in Marseilles and speaking English’ (p. 72).

  59.NA TS58/1160.

  60.Ibid.

  61.The War Office went to enormous lengths to corroborate Odette’s story in order to validate the recommendation for her George Cross – far more extreme than many inquiries into the grounds for awarding VCs – and elicited some peculiar supporting evidence. Her lover, Peter Churchill, wrote to Colonel Perkins at the War Office on 23 May 1946. Perkins had requested some witness reports and medical certificates to back up Odette’s story. In his reply, Churchill wrote that Odette’s toe nails grew back, but that while she was in Ravensbrück concentration camp ‘two or more of these fell off and she managed to keep them. If medical science can prove that these nails fell off because the original ones were pulled out then these can be seen at any time for that purpose.’

  62.Szabo’s SOE record is available at NA HS 9/1435.

  63.NA HS 9/1435

  64.Ibid.

  65.She was actually shot in the back of the head or neck, possibly after being raped, although this was not known at the time of the citation.

  66.One of his elder brothers was Lieutenant Colonel Derek Seagrim, who gained a VC in Tunisia on 20/21 March 1943. He died of his wounds fifteen days later.

  67.www.britishmilitaryhistory.co.uk/documents.php?aid=125&nid=16&start=15.

  68.www.london-gazette.co.uk/issues/37720/supplements/4573.

  69.Ward, op. cit., p. 217.

  70.GQ Magazine, May 2013.

  71.Noakes, op. cit., p. 150.

  72.Women in the Armed Forces: Summary (MoD, 2002), p. 6.

  73.Report on the Review of the Exclusion of Women from Ground Close-Combat Roles. www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/27403/Report_review_excl_woman_combat_pr.pdf.

  74.Noakes, op. cit., p. xii.

  75.Anthony King, ‘Women in Combat’, RUSI Journal, February/March 2013, vol. 158, no. 1, pp. 4–11.

  76.Ward, op. cit., p. 229.

  CHAPTER 6 Bigger War

  1.George S. Patton, War As I Knew It (Bantam Books, 1980), p. 322.

  2.NA Air 2/4890.

  3.This mark scheme was laid out by Winston Churchill in the House of Commons on 10 August 1920. See Hansard, vol. 133, cc 239–41.

  4.http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1940/aug/20/war-situation#S5CV0364P0_19400820_HOC_279.

  5.Daily Telegraph, obituary, 29 November 2001.

  6.Hansard, 8 October 1940, vol. 365, cc 247–8.

  7.Commonwealth War Graves Commission annual report, 2011–12; www.cwgc.org/learning-and-resources/publications/annual-report.aspx.

  8.Several ‘posthumous’ VCs were erroneously given in the Second World War, only for the recipient later to emerge from captivity. Temporary Major Herbert Wallace Le Patourel of the Hampshire Regiment had his Cross gazetted on 9 March 1943, for conspicuous gallantry in leading a party of four volunteers against machine-gun posts at Tebourba, in Tunisia, on 3 December 1942. His sister received a letter from the War Office two weeks before the London Gazette announcement, saying the Red Cross advised that he was a prisoner. ‘The announcement of the posthumous award of the V.C. is very confusing, but I have just been ringing the War Office to explain that my brother is a prisoner’ (The Times, 10 March 1943). Le Patourel later returned to active duties in Europe in 1944, achieving the rank of brigadier.

  9.The British soldiers killed were members of the 4th Battalion, Cheshire Regiment, the Royal Artillery, and the 2nd Battalion, Royal Warwickshire Regiment. The last was the regiment Bernard Montgomery had joined upon graduating from Sandhurst in 1908. The last survivor of the massacre at Wormhout, Bert Evans, died in November 2013, aged ninety-two.

  10.Broad Arrow, 23 August 1879.

  11.Stephen Brooks (ed.), Montgomery and the Battle of Normandy (Army Records Society, 2008), p. 103.

  12.Major R. Clark, ‘Medals, Decorations and Anomalies’, British Army Review, A
ugust 1969.

  13.Sir Martin Lindsay, ‘Gallantry Awards’, British Army Review, 59, August 1978, pp. 30–2.

  14.Ibid.

  15.Ibid.

  16.Annand was not, however, the first to appear in the London Gazette. That distinction goes to Lieutenant Harold Ervine-Andrews, East Lancashire Regiment, who escaped capture at Dunkirk, and Lance Corporal Harry Nicholls, who did not. Their VCs were gazetted on 31 July 1940. Both survived the war. Annand died on Christmas Eve 2004, aged ninety.

  17.Oddly enough, neither of the two VCs which went to members of the Royal Tank Regiment were for firing a tank gun. Lieutenant Colonel Henry Foote got his for actions between 27 May and 15 June 1942, including leading his battalion, the 7th Royal Tank Regiment, in action while seated on the outside of the tank. Captain Philip Gardner, of the 4th Royal Tank Regiment, got his for rescuing an armoured-car officer who had his legs blown off at Tobruk on 23 November 1941.

  18.Charlton’s VC was not gazetted until 2 May 1946, almost a year after his act. Why the delay? Some sources suggest his recommendation and eventual citation depended largely on evidence given by the German attackers, as there were no senior British officers present. The difficulty of getting at the truth of individual cases is revealed by Charlton’s VC: his citation states that his tank was blown up during the counterattack, whereas some sources suggest it had already stopped because of an electrical failure, which would have been embarrassing in a citation. The citation makes no mention of Charlton being ordered to remove the Browning and help defend the infantry; it states that he performed his courageous act ‘entirely on his own initiative’. It all depends on the write-up and the political usefulness of making the award. www.london-gazette.co.uk/issues/37551/supplements/2119.

  19.Seamen can be very superstitious; some worried that Thrasher might be an unlucky submarine. She was commissioned on the thirteenth day of May 1941; sank two ships on a thirteenth day of 1942; and by the time she was depth-charged off Crete had completed thirteen patrols. She survived the war and was scrapped in 1947. The Listener, 14 January 1943, p. 41.

  20.www.london-gazette.co.uk/issues/35591/supplements/2548.

  21.In later life Gould reflected that the VC was an albatross around his neck. Made redundant from his job as a personnel manager in May 1965, he said: ‘people in top management seem to shy away from me. I think it might be because they are afraid that a man with such a record could show too much embarrassing initiative. If it is the VC which is frightening people away from me, I wish they would forget it. Those days are over.’ Daily Telegraph, 7 December 2001.

  22.Although some make every effort to elevate the George Cross to the status of the VC, the fact remains that it is second in precedence and widely regarded as the civilian ‘equivalent’. Brigadier Sir John Smyth won his own VC in June 1915 for leading a party of ten Indian troops under fire to ferry ninety-six bombs to a forward position (eight of the Indian soldiers were killed, none was awarded a decoration). When he was asked to form a VC association in 1956, he gladly did so. The first meeting was held on 27 June 1956. But including GC holders in the (renamed) Victoria Cross and George Cross Association was clearly an afterthought; GC holders were not formally admitted to full membership until May 1961. See Brigadier Sir John Smyth, The Story of the George Cross (Frederick Muller, 1963), pp. 181–2.

  23.Brooks (ed.), op. cit., pp. 192, 206. Harry Crerar was GOC (General Officer Commanding), First Canadian Army in north-west Europe in 1944.

  24.Quoted in Hugh Halliday, Valour Reconsidered (Robin Brass Studio, Toronto, 2006), pp. 208–9.

  25.www.london-gazette.co.uk/issues/36030/supplements/2361.

  26.Nettleton was later killed in action, on 13 July 1943.

  27.Leo McKinstry, Lancaster: The Second World War’s Greatest Bomber (John Murray, 2009), pp. 87–9.

  28.www.london-gazette.co.uk/issues/35539/supplements/1851.

  29.www.london-gazette.co.uk/issues/36693/supplements/4175.

  30.Lachhiman Gurung survived the war and died in 2010, aged ninety-two.

  31.Upham died at the age of eighty-six in November 1994.

  32.Daily Telegraph, obituary, 23 November 1994.

  33.The Times, 15 October 1941, p. 5. The other VC mentioned was that of Sergeant Alfred Hulme of the 23rd Battalion, New Zealand Army. He survived the war.

  34.Upham’s three daughters sold his medals in November 2006 to the Imperial War Museum for an undisclosed sum. As New Zealand legislation bans the export of historic items, the museum agreed to their permanent loan to the QEII Army Memorial Museum at Waiouru in New Zealand, where they were on display until a well-planned theft of a total of ninety-six medals, including nine VCs, on 2 December 2007. On 17 December 2007, the Commissioner of Police offered a reward of up to NZ$300,000 for information leading to recovery of the medals and Lord Ashcroft and Tom Sturgess, a New Zealand businessman, funded the reward. In January 2008 Christopher Comeskey, an Auckland lawyer, approached the police offering a deal under which the medals would be returned in exchange for the reward. The Commissioner and Mr Comeskey struck a deal and the medals were returned in February 2008. The police paid in excess of NZ$200,000 under the agreement. The police eventually arrested James Kapa and Ronald Van Wakeren and charged them with burglary. They both pleaded guilty. Upham was a tough no-nonsense man who frankly loathed Germans. He denounced Britain’s membership of the Common Market and said in 1971 that ‘your politicians have made money their god, but what they are buying is disaster’, adding, ‘they’ll cheat you yet, those Germans’. He took up farming back in New Zealand after the war, but declined £10,000 raised by public donation to help him buy a farm, instead using the money to establish the Charles Upham Scholarship Fund to send the sons of ex-servicemen to university.

  35.Daily Telegraph, 28 September 2000.

  36.See Courage and Service for the following, a CD available from Service Publications, www.servicepub.com.

  37.Projector, Infantry, Anti Tank; an unreliable weapon that was effective against tanks only over a very short distance of around 100 yards.

  38.Earlier in the war Byce had won the Military Medal. His father, also named Charlie, had won the DCM in the First World War, along with the Médaille Militaire.

  39.Richard Reid, For Valour: Australians and the Victoria Cross (Australia Post, 2000), p. 29.

  40.The Times, 24 March 1944. Derrick was killed in action during the landing at Tarakan, an island off the coast of Borneo, on 23 May 1945. Once again, note the ‘inspirational’ element in his citation.

  41.Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life (William Heinemann, 1991), p. 730.

  42.The Times, 18 December 1945, p. 4. The others that he would personally bestow were: GC, Knights Grand Cross, Knights Commanders, Knights Bachelor, Companions and Commanders of Orders, DSO, DCM, Conspicuous Gallantry Medal (Naval and Air), Albert Medal, George Medal, Police and Fire Services Medal for Gallantry, and Edward Medal.

  CHAPTER 7 The Integrity of the System

  1.Spencer Fitz-Gibbon, Not Mentioned in Despatches (Lutterworth Press, 2001 edn), p. xiii.

  2.C. W. McMoran [Lord Moran], The Anatomy of Courage (Constable & Robinson, 2007 edn), p. xxv.

  3.There were also three living holders of the VC for Australia and one for the New Zealand VC.

  4.http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/4625376.stm.

  5.Richard Vinen, ‘The Victoria Cross’, History Today, vol. 56, issue 12, 2006.

  6.General George S. Patton, War As I Knew It (Bantam Books, 1980), p. 376.

  7.Ibid., pp. 341–2.

  8.Foote’s VC was not gazetted until 14 February 1946, when he was liberated. www.london-gazette.co.uk/issues/37466/supplements/941.

  9.www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/6201670/Royal-Marine-to-sell-Conspicuous-Gallantry-Cross-won-in-Iraq.html. Thomas’s CGC was sold at auction for £88,000 on 18 September 2009.

  10.And the existence of the George Cross renders absurd attempts to finely grade courage; the case of Corporal Mark Wil
liam Wright, 3rd Battalion, Parachute Regiment, killed in action in Helmand province, Afghanistan, in September 2009, highlights the problem. Wright was awarded a posthumous GC after needlessly dying of wounds after he entered a minefield trying to save the life of another injured soldier. A subsequent military inquiry judged that Wright could have survived if the Chinook helicopter sent to his rescue had possessed a lifting winch; all such winches were back in the UK at the time, having a fault checked.

  11.William I. Miller, The Mystery of Courage (Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 12.

  12.J. O. Urmson, ‘Saints and Heroes’, in Moral Concepts, ed. Joel Feinberg (Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 60–73.

  13.Rudyard Kipling, ‘Winning the Victoria Cross’, www.telelib.com/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/prose/LandandSea/victoriacross.html – originally published in the Windsor Magazine, June 1897.

  14.Michael Ashcroft, ‘A Century and a Half of Conspicuous Bravery’, The Spectator, 22 April 2006.

  15.This committee relates to, but is distinct from, the Committee on the Grant of Honours, Decorations and Medals, which is a permanent standing committee that considers general questions relating to honours and decorations, reviews the scale of awards (civil and military), and considers new awards and changes in conditions of existing awards.

  16.NA WO 98/10. ‘Examination of the Standards of Australian Citations for the Award of the Victoria Cross’: no date but probably 1970, written by an unnamed lieutenant colonel.

  17.www.london-gazette.co.uk/issues/44198/supplements/13567. Wheatley’s citation states that he was told Swanton was dying by a medical assistant.

  18.Can suicide be courageous? It’s a grey area for the VC. The history of the Cross is of course littered with acts that turned out, loosely, to be ‘suicidal’ and for which a VC was awarded. Wheatley’s act made ‘the Palace’ – and senior officers – uncomfortable about giving him a VC. But at least one overt suicide gained the Cross. Corporal Sefanaia Sukanaivalu of the 3rd Battalion, Fijian Infantry, gained his on 23 June 1944 at Mawaraka in the Solomon Islands. Under fire, he crawled forward to rescue wounded men of his platoon. He then returned to get another man and on the way back to his own lines he was seriously wounded. Several attempts were made to try to rescue him; each failed. He called out to his would-be rescuers not to try to fetch him. His citation reads: ‘Realising that his men would not withdraw as long as they could see that he was still alive . . . Corporal Sukanaivalu, well aware of the consequences, raised himself up in front of the Japanese machine gun and was riddled with bullets.’ www.london-gazette.co.uk/issues/36774/supplements/5016.