by Glyn Harper
Charles sailed to Greece with the rest of the 2nd New Zealand Division in March 1941. His platoon didn’t see much fighting on the mainland but he caught a bad bout of dysentery that would affect him for months. Sometimes he was so weak he could hardly walk. The only thing he could eat for several weeks was condensed milk. His physical condition got much worse and by the time of the Battle of Crete he was very thin. But even in poor health, Charles Upham could still fight with tremendous courage.
On the day of the invasion, his platoon was sent to clear out some paratroops who had landed between the 20th and the 19th Battalions. They managed this without much trouble. When Maleme airfield was captured, the 20th Battalion was ordered to try and win it back.
Charles Upham was leading 15 Platoon of C Company towards the airfield across an open field when they came under fire from a German heavy machine-gun hidden behind a tree about 60 metres in front. Four of the platoon were hit. The platoon went into action drill, diving to the ground. The sections crawled forward until they were only 25 metres from the machine-gun, where they kept up a steady fire. An eyewitness said:
We edged forward on our stomachs until we were within 20 yards of the Nazis, who were tucked away behind a large tree, and then opened fire with our one Tommy gun, one Bren gun and eight rifles. As we kept up the fire the platoon officer [Lt Upham] cautiously crawled round to the side and slightly to the rear of the tree. Although it was still dark, we could tell by the way the Jerries were shouting to each other that they didn’t like the look of the situation. When he got round behind the tree the platoon officer jumped to his feet and hurled three Mills bombs, one right after another, into the nest and then jumped forward with his revolver blazing. Single-handed he wiped out seven Jerries with their Tommy guns and another with a machine-gun . . . Two machine-gunners managed to hobble away in the darkness, but we got them later.
After attending to their wounded the platoon moved on and soon came under fire again, this time from two more machine-gun positions. One was in a house, the other in a shed. While the platoon’s Bren gun gave him covering fire, Charles Upham, bending as low as he could, dashed ahead and reached the shed. He pulled the pin from a grenade, placed it in a dead German’s hand and pushed the German into the shed. When he heard the explosion he ordered his men forward and the half-dozen unwounded Germans in the shed surrendered and eight more wounded Germans were captured. Then the second machine-gun, positioned at a window in the house, opened up and hit one of his men in the stomach. Charles ran towards the house carrying a grenade which he threw through the window. The platoon moved on.
When they reached the village of Pirgos, still a kilometre from the airfield, they ran into 200 Germans from the 2nd Parachute Brigade and the platoon had to clear the village house by house. Private Hill-Rennie remembered:
Jerry had taken up vantage points in the houses. We slowly blasted our way from house to house, wiping out one nest after another, while the snipers kept up a constant, deadly fire.
At Pirgos village, near the airfield, the platoon could hear a captured Bofors gun firing. The platoon moved towards the gun until they could fire at the gunner. While his men kept the gunner’s head down, Charles crawled on his stomach until he was only 10 metres away from the gun and threw a grenade that killed the gunner and damaged the gun. After the war he wrote:
Went on meeting resistance in depth — in ditches, behind hedges, in the top and bottom stories of village buildings, fields and gardens on road beside drome. The wire of 5 Bde hindered our advance. There were also mines and booby traps which got a few of us. We did not know that they were there.
There was T.G. [Tommy gun] and pistol fire and plenty of grenades and a lot of bayonet work which you don’t often get in war. The amount of M.G. [machine-gun] fire was never equalled. Fortunately a lot of it was high and the tracers enabled us to pick our way up and throw in grenades. We had heavy casualties but the Germans had much heavier. They were unprepared. Some were without trousers, some had no boots on. The Germans were hopeless in the dark. With another hour we could have reached the far side of the drome. We captured, as it was, a lot of MGs, 2 Bofors were overrun and the guns destroyed. The POWs went back to 5 Bde.
The village was finally cleared and the airfield lay ahead but it was now broad daylight. The New Zealand battalion survivors reached the edge of the airfield but couldn’t get any further. The counter-attack had failed.
At the airfield that morning Charles Upham could see ‘planes were landing (some leaving drome too) and the parachutists were jumping out and getting straight into the battle for the Germans were counter-attacking on the right flank’. The New Zealand attackers couldn’t stay where they were in the open and further progress was impossible. The New Zealanders were ordered to withdraw.
During the attack on Maleme, D Company had become isolated from the rest of the 20th Battalion. Charles Upham was ordered to send ‘two very good men’ to warn them it was time to leave. He set out on this dangerous mission himself with his platoon sergeant, David Kirk. To reach D Company Upham and Kirk had to cross 500 metres of enemy territory. The ground was open and exposed with pockets of Germans everywhere. Charles killed two more Germans along the way and found D Company had already withdrawn. On the way back he located some isolated men from B Company and brought them back to the battalion’s new position. But he wasn’t finished. With Kirk and others from his platoon he went into Pirgos village again to retrieve their wounded. They carried several badly wounded men back on wooden doors and other improvised stretchers. Charles Upham and his team went into Pirgos village twice that morning to do this work.
That afternoon, at about four o’clock, during the withdrawal from Maleme, Charles was wounded in the left shoulder by mortar shrapnel. He refused to let it stop him and asked Dave Kirk to cut the shrapnel from his shoulder:
Upham handed me his pocket knife and insisted that I extract the offending shrapnel. After carrying out what I thought was rather a neat bit of surgery, though it must have been rather painful for the patient, I tried to persuade him to go and have it dressed at the RAP [regimental aid post]. As he refused to go I went and reported it to Captain Den Fountaine who then came down to us and ordered Charlie to the RAP for treatment.
On the sixth day of fighting on Crete, Charles Upham’s platoon was involved in the attack on Galatas where he was wounded again, this time in the leg. During the attack he was hit by a spent machine-gun bullet. The bullet lodged in his ankle where he left it, to stop any bleeding. He squeezed the bullet out from his ankle a fortnight later in Egypt.
When the New Zealanders were ordered to retreat from Maleme to a new defensive position, Upham placed his platoon under the command of his sergeant and went forward to warn the other troops. Along the way he faced death again when two Germans fired on him. After his battlefield surgery Charles had the use of only one arm, and he needed to be accurate and fast in drawing the rifle bolt back and reloading the second round if he was going to deal with both of them. He crawled to a position where he could rest his rifle in the fork of a tree, using it to support his weapon, and shot both Germans, the second so close he fell onto the muzzle of his rifle.
After the fighting at Galatas, the long retreat to the fishing village of Sphakia began, a 60-kilometre trek over the mountains. When he arrived, Charles Upham helped to overcome a serious threat to the Allied evacuation. On 30 May 50 heavily armed Germans managed to outflank the New Zealanders and travel down a ravine towards the beach. When they were close to the beach they began shooting at everything they could see, hoping to throw the New Zealanders into a panic.
Brigadier Inglis and Colonel Kippenberger moved into action. The 18th Battalion was ordered to send men along the eastern slope of the ravine, while A Company of the 20th Battalion blocked the ravine’s mouth. Charles Upham was to lead C Company onto its western slope and attack the enemy party from the side.
Charles’ exhausted company was the one forced to do most of the climbing o
nto the ravine’s west shoulder. Then they had to send a firing party to the very top of the ravine, a climb of a further 180 metres over a distance of just on a kilometre. It took Charles and his men more than two hours to get into position. They worked above and around the Germans and then fired down on them, wiping them out. One man who took part said:
The going was hard and the men were very tired, but, led by Lt Upham, they toiled up the steep slope until they observed Germans running between rhododendron bushes in the bed of the ravine which was otherwise devoid of cover . . . The sides of the ravine were so steep that one man . . . had to be held by the legs so that he could lean over far enough to fire with his Bren.
The situation had been restored and the evacuations continued that night. A reluctant but very sick Charles Upham, weeping from exhaustion, illness and bitter frustration at leaving some of his men behind, was evacuated to Egypt. After nine days of superb leadership, courage and endurance he was reduced to a walking skeleton.
When the dust settled from Crete, Kippenberger drafted the VC recommendation for Charles Upham and it was announced on 10 October 1941. General Sir Claude Auchinleck presented Charles Upham with his VC ribbon at a ceremonial parade in early November 1941.
As he pinned the award to Charles’ tunic General Auchinleck had an interesting conversation:
Auchinleck: ‘Congratulations, Upham. New Zealand will be very proud that you have won this decoration.’
Upham: ‘I didn’t win it, sir.’
Auchinleck: ‘Then if you didn’t, Upham, I don’t know who did.’
Kippenberger and several other senior officers were worried when they noticed Charles was wearing yellow socks. They were even more worried when he almost forgot to salute as he marched off the parade ground. He marched 20 paces before he remembered.
Charles Upham was embarrassed about the VC. He felt he’d been part of a much larger team effort, and had to be ordered to wear his VC ribbon. He never got used to the public fuss of receiving this highest of honours, but unfortunately for him there was much more to come.
NORTH AFRICA
Daring Attacks
CAPTAIN CHARLES UPHAM
Fighting moved to North Africa, and Charles Upham was promoted to captain and placed in command of C Company.
When the German commander, Field Marshal Rommel, broke through the Allies’ defences in June, the 2nd New Zealand Division was sent to the Western Desert. The division moved against the steady stream of the retreating British Army and occupied a defensive position at Minqâr Qaim. They were supposed to be a mobile force, but it didn’t work out that way, and on 26 June 1941 the Germans had almost surrounded them.
All through the next day Charles was a great example to the other men, at one stage standing on the cab of a truck to attract the fire of nearby German infantry so the New Zealand mortars could target them. As the battalion history records:
Upham, with his usual coolness, moved around his company on foot, crossing open ground swept by small-arms and mortar fire, steadying one platoon which was under shellfire and encouraging his men; he set an example appreciated by all who saw it, except perhaps the field gunners, whose 25-pounders were firing over C Company’s positions over open sights.
When Freyberg was wounded that afternoon, their situation was desperate. The New Zealand Division was surrounded on three sides with no tank support, the guns were down to 35 rounds each, one brigade had become separated from its transport vehicles, and their general had been seriously wounded. They decided to try a night-time breakout spearheaded by 4 Brigade, who would punch a hole through the German line for the rest of the division to drive through.
The withdrawal from Minqâr Qaim was fierce, with savage hand-to-hand fighting with the Germans. Charles Upham and C Company were right in the action. Charles was armed with his pistol and a haversack full of grenades which he used with deadly effect. He attacked vehicle after vehicle with his grenades. When he noticed a truck full of German soldiers trying to escape he ran up to the truck, ignoring heavy automatic fire and destroyed the truck and all its occupants with grenades.
The New Zealanders smashed through the German lines at Minqâr Qaim leaving behind chaos and destruction. Charles Upham had been responsible for a fair amount of it and his performance that night set him on the path towards his second VC.
The breakout from Minqâr Qaim saved the division and disorganised the Germans, who arrived at El Alamein three days later than planned. This gave the Eighth Army time to set up their last line of defence.
In mid-July the 2nd New Zealand Division was ordered to take Ruweisat Ridge. The ridge was a gently sloping ridge which ran in an almost dead-straight line from east to west for 16 kilometres. Although it was only 10 metres high, the ridge dominated the flat desert around it. The job of capturing Ruweisat Ridge was given to the New Zealanders and 5 Indian Brigade. The 1st Armoured Division was ordered to give tank support.
The New Zealanders carried out a silent night advance of more than 9 kilometres, over broken ground, through the enemy positions. Two brigades of infantry set off at 11 o’clock on the night of 14 July. Enemy resistance was fierce but the New Zealand and Indian infantry pushed through and by dawn on 15 July they had taken the ridge. However, there was no sign of the armoured protection they had been promised.
The 20th Battalion was held back in reserve. Brigadier Burrows needed to know what was happening on Ruweisat Ridge so he asked Charles to send an officer to find out. Charles refused to send an officer, and went forward himself in a jeep. He was soon under heavy fire but set up a German machine-gun on the jeep and returned fire as his driver edged towards the ridge. The jeep ran into German tanks and skirted around them, still trying to find the lead battalions. Charles found what was left of them and made an important discovery. The main enemy positions were well forward of the ridge and the battalions on the ridge were deep in enemy territory and cut off from support. The scene on the ridge was desperate. Charles later reported:
I could not find 19th Battalion when going forward and 18th and 21st were in confusion. So were the Germans. They were getting trucks out, pulling guns back by hand. All this went on under cover of fire by tanks which in groups of three were covering the withdrawal. It was a very colourful show with flares going up, tanks firing red tracer bullets from machine-guns. Two German tanks were put out by 18th Battalion with sticky bombs [a form of hand grenade with a sticky outer coating]. They went up close to me. The German troops were being badly cut up while the Italians were surrendering in hundreds. They were out of all proportion to our people and really broke up the attacks with their crowds . . . All the time this was going on, and even before it, there was a rumble of tanks on our exposed left flank. We thought it came from our tanks which were supposed to be there.
An hour after he set out on his dangerous mission, Charles Upham was back and reporting the situation to Burrows. He went back to his battalion and they were soon thrown into the fight.
The 20th Battalion was trying to take Point 63, an exposed rocky outcrop on the ridge, but it ran into a German artillery position sheltering in a depression. Charles’ C Company was ordered to clear out the enemy while another company raced on to Point 63. There was little time, so Charles led the attack against the enemy position in a direct frontal assault. Soon he was seriously wounded in the left arm, when machine-gun bullets ripped through his biceps and smashed his arm at the elbow. The force of the bullets threw him to the ground, but he got up and staggered on, leading the attack with his left arm dangling at his side.
After a bayonet charge of about a kilometre, Charles’ company took the position and he went to the RAP for treatment. Here is his account of the action:
In the valley the Huns were making a stand. It was broken ground with a small rise or pimple in it and beyond that the rise on the far side of the valley. On the floor of the hollow were guns, trucks and Huns in confusion. So we went into it with a bayonet charge for half a mile past the slit trenches o
n the forward slope . . . and consolidated on the far side under intense fire . . . I remember saying to someone this was the greatest victory yet. There was everything a soldier wanted lying about — an enormous heap of rifles, another big heap of unopened mail, stores galore and loaded trucks, several half-tracked vehicles and six field guns (two of them 88s), and a group of German wounded.
Charles Upham’s company had taken the position and 142 POWs but there were only 50 men left and most of the officers had been killed or wounded.
Ruweisat Ridge was taken, but the situation was dangerous. The battalions on the ridge were isolated, lacked support and couldn’t dig in. There was no sign of the armoured support they had been promised and that morning the Germans attacked the ridge with tanks and infantry.
The 22nd Battalion was overrun except for a platoon which escaped, led by Sergeant Keith Elliott, whose story starts on page 132. Meanwhile, Charles Upham tried to rejoin his company but had to return to the RAP. Later that day he tried again to rejoin his men but was wounded by a mortar shell, this time in the leg. Now unable to walk, Charles was with the six survivors of his company when German armoured cars and tanks arrived to take them prisoner.
