Victoria's Cross

by Gary Mead

When war broke out in September 1939, the broad definition of what constituted a VC-winning action – ‘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’ – left ample room for the armed forces to make their own interpretation of the new 1920 warrant. And, left to their own devices and with no public oversight, they tightened considerably the definition of ‘conspicuous bravery’. In the Second World War there were to be no VCs for the kind of futile ineffective action, the dash forward for a ‘glorious’ death, as displayed by Lieutenant Freddy Roberts at Colenso during the Boer War.

  The 1920 warrant was ushered forth in a context of cuts in Britain’s military budget – from £766 million at the end of the First War to £102 million by 1932 – and the belief that the recently ended conflict had indeed been, as the US president Woodrow Wilson said, ‘the war to end all wars’. The UK’s armed forces had shrunk from more than 4.5 million in 1918 to less than half a million by 1921. In the army, conscripted officers and men were the first to go; regular officers who had risen to lieutenant colonels during the war considered themselves lucky to be captains once it was over. It became not just an honour to have the VC, but useful too. An equitable way had to be found to distribute 300 regular commissions in the infantry and cavalry after the end of the war. Age limits were imposed: under twenty-five for second lieutenants, under thirty for lieutenants, and under thirty-five for captains. A ‘mark’ scheme was created to allocate the scarce commissions, with five marks allotted per month of service overseas, fifteen per wound stripe, 250 for each six-month period in command of a battalion or similar-sized unit in a theatre of war, and 125 for the same period in command of the same-sized unit at home. Those with the highest marks were invited to accept regular commissions.3 It was a brutal shake-out; but conspicuous courage had another value, beyond its £10 annuity – a VC holder automatically qualified for 250 marks.

  The biggest change in the 1920 VC warrant was the inclusion of women and civilians, the smallest the standardization of the ribbon’s colour to crimson for all services. The formalization of posthumous VCs was a significant step, the implications of which quickly became clear: half of the ten VCs awarded during the inter-war period were posthumous, and the first VC of the Second World War, awarded to Captain Bernard Warburton-Lee, was also posthumous. Captain of HMS Hardy, Warburton-Lee led a flotilla of five destroyers up a fjord towards Narvik, an ice-free harbour in German-occupied northern Norway. He took a German squadron of five destroyers by surprise and successfully attacked them, sinking two and damaging three others before withdrawing. A shell hit Hardy’s bridge and Warburton-Lee was fatally injured. His last signal was: ‘Continue to engage the enemy.’ Engaging the enemy, even though mortally wounded, had always been a mark of a worthy VC winner; it now became the benchmark by which all were judged.

  In the whole Second World War, just 182 VCs were awarded: 30 per cent less than during the 1914–18 war. The level of expected courage was raised to incredible heights, far beyond the mild-sounding sentences of the warrant. The increased emphasis placed on leadership and example, not just bravery, was partly a response to the perceived degree of threat; as Churchill said in the House of Commons on 20 August 1940, ‘The whole of the warring nations are engaged, not only soldiers, but the entire population, men, women and children. The fronts are everywhere.’4 In the same debate, John Profumo – who in 1961, in his capacity as Secretary of State for War, would sign a revised VC warrant – made his maiden speech, depicting Nazi Germany as a ‘Satanic power . . . menacing the whole of civilisation . . . day after day and hour after hour indescribable acts of gallantry and valour are being performed’. A comparison between the 182 Indian Mutiny VCs and the 182 of the Second World War reveals that, in the former, 101 went to privates and non-commissioned officers, seventy-seven to officers (and four to civilians), including one colonel, two lieutenant colonels, four majors, thirteen captains and the other fifty-seven to lieutenants. In the Second World War, eighty-six VCs went to privates and non-commissioned officers, ninety-six to officers; fifty-one to junior officers, and forty-five to senior officers – majors and above in the army, lieutenant commanders and higher in the Royal Navy, and squadron leaders and higher in the RAF. ‘Leadership’ – at least, as expressed by rank – had become more highly prized.

  Some of the services during the Second War saw a remarkable preponderance of officers over other ranks gain the VC – for example, fifteen of the nineteen VCs gained by Bomber Command went to officers. No rear-gunner ever received a VC, despite the terribly exposed and important position they occupied in the aircraft. Bomber Command pilots were rewarded for initiative and determination – for pressing home an attack – as much as for courage; on bombers all crew members ran the same risk but only the pilot could choose to increase the risk by, for example, continuing to fly a damaged aircraft rather than ordering the crew to bale out. It was exceptional for crew other than pilots to win a VC. One such exception was Flight Sergeant Norman Jackson, a flight engineer on a Lancaster bomber.

  On 26–27 April 1943, Jackson was flying his thirty-first mission with 106 Squadron, a Lancaster squadron, to attack the ball-bearing factories at Schweinfurt. On the return journey Jackson’s Lancaster was attacked by a night fighter and an engine caught fire. Jackson was already wounded by shell splinters, but he put on a parachute, grabbed a fire-extinguisher, and then climbed out onto the wing while the Lancaster’s speed was around 140 miles per hour. He clung on by gripping the air-intake on the leading edge of the wing with one hand while using the extinguisher with the other, but he was badly burned on hands and face. The fighter returned for a fresh strafe of the crippled Lancaster and Jackson was shot in the legs and fell from the wing with his parachute smouldering, but it worked well enough to save his life. The Lancaster’s pilot ordered the crew to abandon the plane; four of the crew survived but the pilot and rear-gunner were presumed to have died in the wreck. Jackson was captured and spent ten months recovering in hospital before being transferred to the Stalag IX-C prisoner-of-war camp. He made two escape attempts, the second successful, when he bumped into a unit of the US Third Army. Jackson’s astonishing exploit only became known when the surviving crewmen of his bomber were released from German captivity at the end of the war; his Victoria Cross was gazetted on 26 October 1945.

  Flight Lieutenant William Reid, a Lancaster pilot who gained his VC on the night of 3 November 1943, later shrugged off any suggestions of heroism: ‘I don’t think I was a hero. I don’t think of myself as a brave man. We were young. All we wanted was to get our tour over and done with.’5 Reid, serving with the 61st Squadron, was headed for Düsseldorf when his aircraft was attacked by a Messerschmitt 110 night fighter as it crossed the Dutch coast. The windscreen was shattered; the cockpit and steering mechanism were badly shot up; Reid sustained serious injuries to his head, hands and shoulders. His aircraft dropped 200 feet before he managed to bring it back under control. Reid said nothing of his injuries to his crew but asked for a damage report, following which he proposed to continue the mission. His plane was attacked again; a Focke-Wulf 190 raked it from stem to stern, killing the navigator, fatally wounding the wireless operator, and injuring Reid’s right arm. He pressed on with the mission, having memorized the course to his target, sustained by bottled oxygen from a portable supply administered by his flight engineer, Sergeant J. W. Norris. The plane reached the target and released its bombs. Reid then turned his aircraft for home, and – semi-conscious at times, freezing cold because of the smashed windscreen, and half-blinded by blood streaming from his head wound – he and Norris, also wounded, kept the plane in the air. As it crossed the North Sea, the four engines cut out and the plane went into a spin: Norris had forgotten to change over the petrol tanks to their reserve supply but he remembered in the nick of time. As they touched down at RAF Shipdham in Norfolk, the Lancaster’s undercarriage collapsed and the bomber skidded along the runway before judderin
g to a halt.

  Reid had another narrow escape. He joined 617 Squadron (the ‘Dambuster’ squadron) in January 1944. In July 1944 he was over a target in France and released his bombs at 12,000 feet. He then felt his aircraft shudder under the impact of being hit by a bomb dropped from 6,000 feet above, which plunged through the Lancaster’s fuselage and severed the plane’s controls. Reid ordered the crew to bail out, and as they did so, the aircraft nosedived, pinning him to his seat. He managed to release the overhead escape-hatch panel and parachute free, just as the Lancaster broke in two. He was captured and ended the war a prisoner.

  The dividing line between Jackson’s and Reid’s VCs is paper-thin. The first seems more like an attempt at a rescue; the second might be said to represent the kind of spirited determination to press on regardless that, nominally at least, was preferred as good VC ‘material’. Notes in archive files dismissing individual VC recommendations as ‘not up to standard’ often seem random; the truth is that many VCs went to those who demonstrably led and inspired, rather than for heroic rescue efforts – and that generally meant officers. Within that ‘leadership’ aspect of the VC, the class segmentation between officers and other ranks broke down into the more considered or thoughtful courage – determination against the odds – shown by officers and the more instinctive variety shown by a man who, perhaps in a blind rage, charged a machine-gun nest.

  Neither blind rage nor thoughtful determination would get a VC for a woman or a civilian; they were ruled out partly by entrenched military opposition, while ignorance of the facts did not help either. In a House of Commons debate on 8 October 1940, some MPs, who might have been expected to be more au fait with the VC warrant, revealed a total lack of knowledge of what it actually said. Captain George Sampson Elliston, MP, who had served with the Royal Army Corps in the First War and gained an MC, asked Churchill whether ‘in view of recent developments of modern warfare, he will advise revision of the Royal Warrant so that the Victoria Cross may be awarded to any subject of His Majesty who displays supreme courage in countering enemy action?’ Henry Morris-Jones, MP, bluntly asked: ‘Why should not civilians get the Victoria Cross for heroism in the face of the enemy, just as did soldiers in the Army in the last war? The whole standard ought to be changed.’ Rather than point out to Elliston and Morris-Jones that the VC’s terms had changed, Churchill gave a disingenuous reply, omitting the fact that civilians had been eligible for the VC since 1920. Instead he suggested that civilians now had their ‘own’ VC:

  For this honour, men and women in all walks of civil life will be eligible . . . There is no difference in merit between the Victoria Cross and the George Cross; the George Cross ranks equal with the Victoria Cross, and after it in priority only. The whole question has been most carefully reconsidered, and the very far-reaching scheme which has been announced and the new decorations [GC, GM] are the fruits of that reconsideration.6

  Churchill’s formulation, that the George Cross ‘ranks equal’ with the VC, but comes after it ‘in priority only’, has given rise to no end of confusion: what does it mean to be equal in ranking but second in priority? There is no sensible answer, and many have been the efforts to square this particular circle. In truth, the creation of the George Cross was an unnecessary step at a moment of crisis, in an attempt to whip up publicity and boost national morale. There were just too many senior military figures that would have bristled at the thought of a VC going to a woman or someone not in uniform. There was no official announcement that, in this war, only astonishing acts of courage would be sufficient to be even considered for a VC; and indeed, certain VCs were granted when a lesser award would have been more plausible, but for the intervention of that old, all-important influence – ‘friends at Court’. An unwritten rule generally prevailed: only the very bravest need apply, and even then they needed to have been in uniform; and their case would be considerably more persuasive if they happened to have died in the performance of their deed.

  Although the British empire officially fought many more battles in 1939–45 than in 1914–18 – the official compilation, published in January 1956, listed 970 operations, compared to 167 for the First World War – there were far fewer casualties; almost 600,000 British empire armed forces personnel died in the Second World War, against some 1.05 million in the First.7 This lower casualty rate ought to have had little or no bearing on the number of VCs distributed, if merit alone was to be the judge; in fact the ‘pool’ of acts of outstanding bravery was artificially limited by the imposition of a quota system. It is difficult to prove a negative; trying to assess the number of those who might have merited, but did not get, a VC is futile. But some overall numbers are suggestive. Bluntly, the chance of gaining a VC in the Second War was nearly twice as remote as in the First; the number of uniformed dead per VC in the Second War was almost 3,300, against 1,658 per VC in the First. Three-and-a-half times more VCs were distributed in the First World War than the Second; and posthumous VCs were more than 45 per cent of the total in the Second World War, against almost 30 per cent during the First.8 The VC became more difficult to win, and more deadly.

  Nothing in the VC statutes stipulated this: it all resulted from unstated and, it might be said, unjustified standards imposed by senior officers. This was not a case of senior officers interpreting the warrant; rather it was an unspoken and only occasionally written-down determination that only certain types of acts – ones that demonstrated absolute courage in the pressing home of an attack, for example – would be deemed VC-worthy. The VC was to be rationed, like all other gallantry awards. Conspicuous bravery became a necessary but not sufficient hoop to jump through; higher priority than ever before was to be given to actions that were demonstrably aggressive, rather than simply noble. Killing – publicly displayed, able to be seen by others and perhaps giving them inspiration – was in; kindness – in the form of helping to rescue the fallen or injured – was marginalized. When the struggle was so extreme, this new emphasis was perhaps understandable. German SS units notoriously shot uniformed prisoners, and word began to arrive of massacres, such as that at Wormhout in May 1940, on the retreat to Dunkirk, when almost ninety British soldiers were captured and killed by the Waffen-SS Liebstandarte Adolf Hitler regiment.9 There was precious little battlefield chivalry and any failure was without honour; national defeat would have meant not a repeat of the humiliation wrought on Germany through the Versailles Treaty, but a form of totalitarian slavery. Determined leadership was required, pressing home the attack no matter what the odds. Helping the wounded was all very well – but that did not inspire others to kill.

  It is almost as if the military establishment began to pay attention to late nineteenth-century warnings that the Cross was being given out too freely. The Broad Arrow said in 1879 that ‘Beyond all question the Cross will be cheapened if it is to be conferred upon every man who puts his powers of physical endurance to their proper use, and carries through the particular service mainly by the natural conduct of a well-balanced act.’10 By 1940 duty – even acts that moderately exceeded duty – was not enough; what was wanted was the unnatural pursuit of acts that would generally be described as unbalanced, even mad. In the build-up to D-Day, General Montgomery presented his plans for the Normandy invasion to George VI. Under the subheading ‘morale’, Montgomery succinctly stated that aggressive heroism was what he looked for:

  We shall have to send the soldiers in to this party ‘seeing red’. We must get them completely on their toes; having absolute faith in the plan; and embued [sic] with infectious optimism and offensive eagerness. Nothing must stop them. If we send them in to battle this way – then we shall succeed.11

  For obvious reasons, serving officers were not prepared publicly to speak out against the Second World War’s quota system, and the anomalies it created, for gallantry awards. According to a Second War major, once the war was over, ‘many deserving acts have been unrewarded, and undeserving acts rewarded – to keep within the ration’.12 Sir Martin Linds
ay, an intrepid polar explorer in the years before the Second War, was a professional soldier who, after Sandhurst, joined the Royal Scots Fusiliers. He rejoined the army when war broke out and ended his military career commanding 1st Battalion, Gordon Highlanders in sixteen operations in north-west Europe during 1944–5. Lindsay was courageous; he was wounded in action, twice Mentioned in Despatches, and awarded the DSO. He retired from the army with the rank of lieutenant colonel and became a Conservative MP. In a 1978 article on gallantry awards, Lindsay considered the VC would always be fraught with difficulty, for two reasons:

  The first is the impossibility of placing noble deeds in any satisfactory order of priority, bearing in mind the vastly differing standards of descriptive powers of those who wrote the citations and supporting statements. The second is the impossibility of reconciling two conflicting considerations: the desirability of keeping the VC a rare and coveted distinction on the one hand, and on the other the always larger number of recommendations than could be satisfied . . . every ‘failed VC’ among officers was awarded the DSO, and in the same way a ‘failed DCM’ normally got the MM.13

  Lindsay cited his own experience of a brigade commander massaging a recommendation to give a soldier what he thought was deserved; the (unnamed) commander ‘deliberately falsified the dates in the citation’ to ensure that an officer commanding a battalion in Normandy, and who was killed in action, received the DSO, despite the ban on posthumous DSOs. Lindsay pointed out that the ration system for gallantry awards led to absurdities:

  For the [crossing of the] Rhine my Brigade (153) was in the lead and incurred 15% casualties. We were then informed that for the whole Brigade the awards would be limited to six, which worked out at 0.4% of those actively engaged . . . 21% of the aircrews in the Mohne Dam operation were decorated, and 7% of those who took part in the sinking of the Tirpitz . . . Having been told that only one award could be considered for a particular operation, the CO could hardly look beyond his leading Company or Squadron Commander if it had not been for whom his battle would not even have started.14