Victoria's Cross

by Gary Mead

  More jaded correspondents, such as ‘An Unamazed Veteran’, voiced a widespread sense that chance had displaced gallantry:

  The young officer, or, for the matter of that, the old officer, who has never seen service has an exceedingly exalted view of the V.C. and what should win it; but as he serves on campaign after campaign and sees who get the cross, how easily it is often obtained, and how unequal the standard, his estimate of it falls lower and lower till he joins with the general ante-room verdict that ‘luck,’ not necessarily bravery, is the predominating factor . . . only conspicuous bravery or devotion to the country should be rewarded, irrespective of rank or wounds or any other consideration. It is the deviation from this strict interpretation of the warrant that has, I assume, raised the present outcry.6

  Twelve years after this was written, the yearned-for ‘strict interpretation of the warrant’ was in tatters, and luck – and politics – were exercising as much sway as ever over who gained a VC.

  Few were luckier than the Canadian pilot Billy Bishop, who rose from complete obscurity to acclaimed hero during the First World War, thanks to social connections and his own aggressively tear-away self-promotion. When William ‘Billy’ Avery Bishop was gazetted with the VC on 11 August 1917, the citation spoke of his ‘most conspicuous bravery, determination and skill’.7 The skill thus acknowledged was for Bishop’s so effectively handling his Nieuport 17 biplane, a plane that sometimes lost its wings in a steep dive and was slower and had less firepower than the Albatros D-III, the main German single-seater fighter in 1917; but many believe it could equally have been for Bishop’s expertise at embellishment. For very few of Bishop’s claimed forty-seven enemy aircraft kills with 60 Squadron in France were witnessed. This was unusual and definitely suspicious: ‘for a claim to be confirmed it was customary for the name of a witness, or witnesses, to be included in the combat report. Only three of [Bishop’s] claims were indisputably corroborated in that fashion . . . as for the thirty claims made while flying alone, obviously there could be no corroboration.’8

  The specific action for which Bishop received his VC took place on 2 June 1917. At 3.57 a.m. that day Bishop took to the clouds alone, although he had asked others, including Willy Fry, his deputy flight commander, to join him in a planned raid on a German aerodrome.9 Bishop flying solo was not unusual; his squadron commander gave him a very free hand. On his return, Bishop claimed to have destroyed seven enemy planes on the ground, and to have shot down three others that had managed to take off and pursue him. Controversy over the veracity of Bishop’s claims for that day will persist; the scanty available evidence is contradictory.

  Born to an upper-middle-class Canadian family, Bishop arrived in France as a junior officer with a cavalry regiment. Always a maverick loner, he soon tired of the grimness of trench life and sought out the greater independence – and glamour – offered by the Royal Flying Corps (RFC). During his first combat tour of duty as an observer in two-seater biplanes, his aircraft crashed and Bishop was hospitalized in England, thus avoiding the grisly summer of 1916, the meat-grinding Somme offensive. While in hospital, Bishop was taken up by an influential London socialite, Lady Mary St Helier, who, like many upper-class women of the day, had discovered a new outlet for their noblesse oblige through visiting injured troops in hospital. Lady Mary’s son would have been the same age as Bishop, had he not died of typhoid in India many years previously; she took the young Canadian airman under her wing. Her London salon, a honeypot to the eminent, was regularly attended by some of the most influential political and cultural figures of the day. Among their number was Winston Churchill, the Canadian-born newspaper magnate Max Aitken, and F. E. Smith, attorney-general in Lloyd George’s administration. Not only did they regularly sip Lady Mary’s champagne; they were all personal friends of the commanding officer of 60 Squadron, Major A. J. L. (Jack) Scott, who was persuaded to take Bishop as a pilot officer in March 1917. Bishop had a baptism of fire; the following month was a harrowing period for the RFC, and thirteen of 60 Squadron’s original eighteen pilots, and seven replacements, were shot down during the Battle of Arras. Bishop, however, proved relentlessly aggressive, and scored twelve of the squadron’s thirty-five confirmed April victories. In late April he was promoted to captain. Bishop became Scott’s protégé, his determination to take on the enemy and unquestioned bravery cementing a lasting friendship. Scott understood that medals had an extra-curricular function – that they were not simply for the brave but also had propaganda value. This view of gallantry decorations was shared by Major General Hugh Trenchard, the RFC commander, with whom Scott had a warm relationship. In turn, Trenchard was highly regarded by Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, who took command of the British Expeditionary Force in December 1915. These ‘friends at Court’, together with the coalition government’s need to publicly identify and reward Canadian RFC fliers, set the stage for Bishop to be granted the highest military decoration.10

  After the death of the RFC’s leading fighter pilot Albert Ball on 7 May 1917, Bishop became lauded as the RFC’s unquestioned rival to the German air ace Baron Manfred von Richthofen. Revelling in his status, Bishop was given command of the newly formed 85 Squadron; more than 200 pilots immediately put themselves forward to join it. As CO of his own squadron, Bishop could confirm his own claims. He registered a remarkable twenty-five victories in twenty-three days between the beginning of April and 19 June 1918, when he was ordered to return to Britain – a living hero had greater propaganda and recruiting value than a dead ace. Bishop’s final and, in later years, much disputed tally was seventy-two, including two balloons. In June 1918 Bishop published a racy account of his flying days. Exceptionally thin on facts but surfeited with derring-do, the book was ghost-written by the Office of Public Information under supervision of the War Office, with the intention of boosting public morale. The final chapter details Bishop’s VC investiture by King George V:

  Following some Generals and Colonels, who were being admitted to the Order of St. Michael and St. George [so much for the VC’s precedence over all other decorations], it came my turn to march in . . . Imagine my consternation, when, at the first of those ten paces, one of my boots began to squeak . . . approaching the King, he hooked three medals on my breast. These had been handed to him on a cushion. He congratulated me on winning them, and said it was the first time he had been able to give all three to any one person.11

  A war-weary Britain – and Canada – got the charismatically glamorous, if perhaps morally ambiguous, hero it so desperately wanted, and probably deserved.

  Bishop was a complex character who in later life seemingly spurned his First War braggadocio.12 He owed his elevation to pilot officer status to a chance hospital encounter with a woman in perpetual mourning for her own son, but he made the best of that lucky break and pursued both glory and the enemy with complete dedication. He has been accused of being ‘an inveterate liar; and no one but Bishop ever told one to get himself a Victoria Cross!’13 But the case against Bishop is circumstantial and unproven; First War pilots often fought in single combat, far from the eyes of reliable (or any other) witnesses, and cast-iron confirmation of victory was often impossible. There is a broader question about Bishop’s VC: did his courage stem from the lack of, or the overcoming of, fear? In a 1982 National Film Board of Canada drama documentary, The Kid Who Couldn’t Miss,14 Harold (later Lord) Balfour, who served in 60 Squadron, commented: ‘Billy Bishop is one of those who I felt did not know fear. The definition of a brave man is someone who is frightened, and overcomes it. The definition of someone who does not fright is somewhat different.’ Either way, the VC makes no distinction between those who were fear-less, and those who were fear-full, yet carried on.

  It would be unwise and unfair, given the nerve it must have taken simply to get into a flimsy aircraft and seek out a skilful enemy equally intent on killing, to suggest that Bishop did not deserve his Cross. It is equally clear that Bishop was groomed for greatness, and that his VC was not awar
ded for courage alone but served a wider political purpose, as did that bestowed on John (‘Jack’) Travers Cornwell.

  Cornwell enlisted in the Royal Navy in October 1915 and was fatally wounded at the Battle of Jutland (31 May–1 June 1916), when aged sixteen. Cornwell was part of a deck gun-crew of HMS Chester, all of whom were killed or mortally wounded by shell splinters when the ship was bombarded by a squadron of German cruisers. When the battle was over, Chester’s medical staff found Cornwell still at the gun-sight, apparently awaiting orders; he died of his wounds shortly after. Poor Cornwell was one of more than 6,700 Royal Navy deaths and one of four VCs awarded at Jutland, an indecisive engagement where both sides claimed victory. The other three names are largely forgotten,15 but Cornwell’s youth – which might have been politically embarrassing, even though boys aged fifteen could join the navy (the minimum age for army enlistment was eighteen) – helped ensure him a lasting place in the national mythology of heroism. Letters to The Times called for his photograph – or, better still, a brass plaque with his story engraved on it – to be ‘placed in every school in the Empire’.16 Cornwell was buried ‘with every honour, military and civil’ at Manor Park Cemetery in London, ‘an extraordinarily impressive funeral both for its details and all that it implied’, with a volley fired over the grave and the Last Post sounded.17 King George V presented his mother, Alice Cornwell,18 with the posthumous VC on 16 November 1916 at Buckingham Palace; the society painter Francis Owen Salisbury was commissioned by the Admiralty to paint ‘Boy Cornwell in the Battle of Jutland’, using Jack’s brother Ernest as a model, and subsequently built his career as a specialist in royal sitters on the back of the painting; the ‘Boy Cornwell Memorial Fund’ was established; Robert Baden-Powell first awarded the Bronze Cross (the highest award for boy scouts, modelled on the VC) to Cornwell, and then created the ‘Cornwell Scout Badge’; streets and schools were named in Cornwell’s honour.

  Yet Cornwell’s VC was a flagrant infringement of the terms of the VC warrant, which the somewhat embarrassing citation – he ‘remained standing alone at a most exposed post, quietly awaiting orders, until the end of the action, with the gun’s crew dead and wounded all round him’ – could do little to disguise.19 If a wounded and no doubt traumatized child, either unable to leave his post or terrified of the consequences of doing so, deserved the VC, then who did not? Not all First War VCs were so obviously outside the prevailing rules; some, such as that of Alfred Oliver Pollard, one of Britain’s most highly decorated First War soldiers, might be said to have over-fulfilled the VC warrant’s stipulations.

  Few First War VC winners committed to paper what it was that drove them to act as they did. Pollard was exceptional in this regard, writing a memoir of his wartime experiences in which his determination to kill as many Germans as possible is the central focus. Pollard had been an insurance clerk prior to joining up as a private in August 1914, and quickly became a specialist in trench raiding and bombing; after the war he became a prolific author of thrillers and crime novels. Pollard wrote that he felt more alive when bombing an enemy trench than at any other time. His account of the trenches of the Western Front – Fire-Eater: The Memoirs of a V.C. – is a refreshing counterbalance to the view that First War soldiers were sunk in despair, universally despising the mud, misery and murderousness. Some soldiers, such as George Coppard, a machine-gunner, found, if not joy, then a sense of shared community:

  Of my memories of life in the trenches, the one thing I cherish more than anything else is the comradeship that grew up between us as a result of the way of life we were compelled to lead – living together under the open sky, night and day, fair weather or foul, witnessing death or injury, helping in matters of urgency, and above all, facing the enemy. Such situations were the solid foundation on which our comradeship was built.20

  Received wisdom is that the First War was loathed by all participants, but this is incorrect; Pollard was intensely proud of being part of the Honourable Artillery Company, the oldest regiment in the British army, where, he said, ‘every man was a potential officer’. He recalled with gusto his first night patrol into No Man’s Land: ‘I was thrilled to the core. This was man’s work indeed . . . To me these excursions were everything. The danger acted like a drug quickening my pulses. At last I was doing something worthwhile. I was as happy as a sand boy.’21 Pollard’s memoir is no literary feast, but his reflections, although often clichéd, have a direct, earthy quality. His weapon of choice was the trench grenade which, with its highly destructive shrapnel, was much more efficient than a cumbersome rifle in shrouded trench mazes, where confusion often required instant reaction. Pollard, an irrepressible and perpetually optimistic survivor, who was wounded on more than one occasion, lacked the capacity for deep intellectual introspection, but was probably all the better a soldier for that. Siegfried Sassoon believed that the ‘better the soldier, the more limited is his outlook . . . One cannot be a useful officer and a reader of imaginative literature at the same time . . . The mechanical stupidity of infantry soldiering is the antithesis of intelligent thinking.’22 After recuperating from a wound, Pollard returned to the trenches as soon as possible: ‘It was good to be back in the line again. One felt one was pulling one’s weight for the Country, doing the right thing. I thoroughly enjoyed it. After a nine months’ gap the knowledge that the Huns were just opposite waiting for an opportunity to kill me if I gave them a chance added a spice to life which I had missed.’23 A typical letter home to Pollard’s mother signed off: ‘Best of spirits and having a good time. By the way, I have killed another Hun. Hurrah! Well, cheerioh!’24

  Pollard gained his VC for action on 29 April 1917 at Gavrelle, France, when, under fierce attack and sustaining heavy casualties, troops of various units became disorganized and began to flee in panic. Pollard – by then a second lieutenant – took four comrades and started a bombing counterattack, pressing it home until his small band had broken the enemy attack, regained all lost ground, and gained much more. At Pollard’s VC investiture at Buckingham Palace, twenty-four VCs were given, including six posthumously:

  I stood with my arms straight down by my sides and my chest swelling my tunic. ‘God save our gracious King.’ Wasn’t that what we were fighting for? To save the King and all he stood for – our great Nation? . . . Every one of us had done his damnedest and we were there to receive our rewards. Not that we needed them. People do not go into action with the idea of winning the Victoria Cross. They go with the bare intention of doing their duty. The decoration merely happens.25

  Clearly Pollard’s VC was thoroughly deserved, both personally and politically, yet a total absence of fear, either in the moment or over a much longer term – not uncommon among VC holders – is difficult to see as courage. The American general George Patton believed of soldiers that ‘the more intelligent they are, the more they are frightened’.26 On that basis, Pollard was exceptionally dim; he did not know fear. This same point has been made by William I. Miller: intelligence finds ‘good reasons for worry, whereas those without that ability sleep well and march blithely on’.27 Is a trained killer – or even possibly a natural born one, such as Pollard seems to have been – unbalanced? In war, society needs determined killers; yet if unbalanced, even if they are as effective as Pollard, do they merit a VC? Pollard gained the VC, as did Albert Ball, the RFC pilot; but they had completely different attitudes to their task. Two days before Ball died, he wrote to his father: ‘I do get tired of living to kill and I’m really beginning to feel like a murderer. Shall be so pleased when I have finished.’28 Over the course of the First World War – as the certainty of victory receded, and, for monarchy, politicians and generals, the political and personal cost of possible defeat became more unbearable – Pollard’s certainty rather than Ball’s doubts was increasingly valued.

  Bishop’s and Cornwell’s VCs were two of 634 distributed during the First World War, including one for the American Unknown Soldier interred at Arlington Cemetery.29 Bestowed in Novem
ber 1921, the British government had been backed into this overtly political gesture; the previous month Washington had given the Medal of Honor to Britain’s Unknown Soldier, entombed in Westminster Abbey. London resisted pressure to give VCs to the other allies. In a curt memo from the War Office in 1924, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary brushed aside agitation to bestow the VC on France’s Unknown Warrior, ignoring the 1921 US precedent. The view of the War Office was that ‘we should be well advised not to re-open the question of the exchange of decorations for Unknown Warriors. We have already put the Italians off and we could hardly deal with one of the Allies without admitting the others.’30 For approximately every 14,000 men mobilized in the British and Dominions’ forces during the First World War, one VC was awarded – a parsimonious rate of distribution compared to the relative largesse of the nineteenth century. Between June 1857, backdated to the start of the Crimean War, and 1 August 1914, 522 VCs were given – more than one-third of the total awarded as of 2014.

  That there was an informal tightening around the neck of the VC sack during the progress of the First, and even more evidently the Second World War, is clear. How is this to be explained? Not by reference to courage per se, however that might be defined, but by reference to how courageous acts were sliced and diced by the creation of new medals and awards, and by the increased propaganda and morale-boosting value of the VC. The VC came to be seen by the establishment not just as the pre-eminent military decoration, but as a useful tool that could be used to give heart to a nation. Too many heroes would dilute the overall impact and potentially have a diminishing return for national morale.