Victoria's Cross

by Gary Mead

  Illingsworth had been in the regiment for almost two years when, on 28 May 1982, he was with 5 Platoon, near the Darwin and Goose Green settlements. His platoon was ordered to provide covering fire for an advance section of B Company of 2nd Battalion. As dawn came up, Illingsworth’s platoon found itself on an exposed slope that soon came under intense Argentine machine-gun and rifle fire. As the platoon withdrew back over a crest, a Private Hall was hit in the back. Illingsworth had already reached safety but, together with another private, returned to tend to the wounded Hall. The two rescuers removed Hall’s webbing to give him first aid and left Hall’s gear, including spare ammunition, as they stumbled back to cover, miraculously avoiding being shot. As the fire-fight intensified, 5 Platoon started to run short of ammunition. Illingsworth again left the safety of cover to retrieve Hall’s ammunition, but he was shot and killed. Illingsworth was strongly recommended for a posthumous VC by Lieutenant General Sir Richard Trant, Land Deputy Commander in the Falklands, and Admiral John Fieldhouse, commander of the Falklands Task Force, who in his note on the recommendation form said: ‘Private Illingsworth’s heroic acts of total disregard for his own safety were in the highest traditions of his regiment. He was an inspiration to others and is strongly recommended for the posthumous award of the Victoria Cross.’ Trant commented: ‘In these two acts of supreme courage Private Illingsworth showed a complete disregard for his own safety, and a total dedication to others . . . a display of coolly calculated courage and heroism of the very highest order.’

  At what point does ‘heroism of the highest order’ fail to qualify for a VC? Illingsworth was twice a casualty, first of the Argentine army’s sniper and second of the British army’s rationing of gallantry decorations. Clearly Illingsworth’s recommendation never reached Mrs Thatcher’s desk, but the greater pity is that individual senior officers were alarmed that too many VCs were being recommended – and especially too many for the Parachute Regiment. The Military Secretary at the time of the Falklands campaign was Lieutenant General Sir Roland Guy. He advised the VC committee:

  It is not for the VC Committee to make any judgement on what would be the appropriate number of VCs to award for this campaign in comparison with the numbers that have been awarded in past campaigns. However there will inevitably be great public interest over whether the award is in any way being cheapened if an excessive number are awarded.30

  General Guy’s carefully phrased final sentence was enough.

  The inherent arbitrariness of the system is further highlighted by the decision to award a Military Cross to Captain Gavin John Hamilton of the Green Howards, who was on attachment with the SAS during the Falklands conflict. His citation, published in the London Gazette on 8 October 1982,31 said Hamilton survived two helicopter crashes ‘in appalling weather conditions’ in South Georgia and then, two days later, led the advance elements of the forces that captured the main enemy positions in Grytviken, thereby securing the surrender of all Argentine forces on South Georgia. Ten days later Hamilton led his troop on the ‘successful and brilliantly executed’ raid on Pebble Island in the Falklands, destroying eleven enemy aircraft on the ground. The litany of achievements of Hamilton and his small team continues until finally, on 10 June 1982, he and a four-man troop were in an observation post near Port Howard, the biggest settlement on West Falkland, when they were surrounded by Argentine troops. Two of the patrol escaped; Hamilton and his signaller, Sergeant Fosenka, were pinned down. Shot in the back, Hamilton ordered Fosenka to make his escape under covering fire. Shortly after, Hamilton was hit again and died. His citation states he ‘showed supreme courage and sense of duty by his conscious decision to sacrifice himself on behalf of his signaller’. Why did Jones and McKay get the VC and Hamilton an MC? The official explanation is that no senior officer witnessed Hamilton’s courage, but this, as Lieutenant Colonel ‘X’ acknowledged, is not a formal requirement. Moreover, there was ample testimony from Argentine officers who were present – and enemy testimony has in the past been sufficient supporting evidence for a VC.32

  While no one doubts Colonel H. Jones’s bravery, John Geddes, a corporal in 2 Para who fought at Goose Green, was amongst those who later questioned his leadership. When Colonel Jones ordered A Company to follow him in a frontal attack on a well-established Argentine position, they refused because they ‘had watched the futile loss of three men’s lives . . . [they] knew what was waiting for them up there in the Gorse Gully and they were going to sort it out in their own way and that didn’t include charging into machine guns First World War style.’33 Jones charged recklessly to his death, followed only by his personal bodyguard, who were obliged to follow him in any conditions. That the regiment’s commanding officer rushed to attack a bunker, when he should have directed the attack from further back, was both heroic and foolish. The futility of Jones’s charge and death was a thoroughly nineteenth-century act. His second-in-command, Major Chris Keeble, recalled that ‘he was a man straight out of Boys’ Own . . . he was a guy who ruled by a bullwhip rather than a conductor of an orchestra’34 – and, had he survived, his reckless behaviour may have been more rigorously probed.

  Almost immediately after Colonel Jones was killed, there was another example of remarkable courage, one that actually did turn the battle. Corporal David ‘Pig’ Abols of the 2nd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment was, according to Geddes, ‘the man who broke the enemy at the Gorse Gully with a fantastic piece of heroism. He’s the soldier that the 2 Para Toms [privates] think should have got the VC.’ The Goose Green situation was deadlocked; Abols was lying exposed, armed with a light anti-tank rocket. Geddes recalled events:

  Pig jumped to his feet in the middle of a howling gale of machinegun fire, lifted the rocket to his shoulder, lined it up on the bunker opposite, breathed out and squeezed down the rubber trigger on the top of the tube . . . In the space of twenty minutes two of our comrades, H and Pig, had carried out attacks that were so brave they would put the fear of God into any enemy. But they were very different in their nature. I believe H’s death-or-glory dash . . . was lion-hearted but ill-conceived and futile. It didn’t make a difference to the battle . . . [It was Abols’s action,] the culmination of a lot of nerve, balls and superb field craft, which broke the Argies, not H’s emotional charge into the Valley of Death.35

  Some get the VC, some get lesser awards, some get nothing at all: perhaps it has always been thus and there is nothing to be done to prevent perceived inequities. ‘No medals policy will ever keep everyone happy’ was the opening remark of Sir John Holmes’s government-sponsored military medals review, published in July 2012. That luck plays a part is, perhaps, palatable; but the pretence that merit alone dictates, or that the system’s integrity functions well, is not. Hamilton may well have been deemed more worthy of an MC than a VC because he was serving with the SAS, from which a higher level of courage and grit is usually expected. The SAS is also intensely secretive; a VC for an SAS member would have provoked uncomfortably intense media interest. Then again, Jones and McKay died during high-profile battles, Goose Green and Mount Longdon respectively, both regarded as crucial steps towards final recovery of the Falklands; Hamilton’s fight, important and tough as it was, may have been seen as a sideshow. Illingsworth may simply have lacked ‘friends at Court’. We simply do not know.36

  There is always a risk that, through excessive largesse, military gallantry awards are cheapened and thus lose esteem among the troops for whom they are intended to be an encouragement. After the 2003 Iraq War, the US Air Force handed out more than 69,000 medals, commendations and other awards, while the US Army gave out some 40,000, with officers the main beneficiaries of the higher awards: ‘A list of medals granted to the American brigade which captured Baghdad shows that of twenty-six Silver Stars, four went to colonels, eleven to captains, and only eleven to non-commissioned officers. Private soldiers did not receive any.’37 In 2000, 185 US Air Force personnel were awarded the Bronze Star, America’s fourth-highest combat award
, for the air campaign against Yugoslavia, NATO’s first all-out military campaign; 90 per cent of those were given to personnel who never approached the combat zone, which President Clinton defined as Yugoslavia, Albania, the Adriatic Sea and the northern Ionian Sea, and the airspace above those areas. One Bronze Star went to a civil-engineering squadron commander for building what the citation called a ‘miraculous’ tent city at the Aviano air base in Italy. This reckless distribution of military decorations might have pleased General Patton; but it renders the identification and individuation of courage laughable.

  American veterans who have already seen their decorations thus cheapened were deeply angered in February 2013 by an initiative of the US Defense Secretary, Leon Panetta, who announced the creation of a new medal specifically for drone pilots, the ‘Distinguished Warfare Medal’. This medal would have been the first combat-related award created by the US military since the Bronze Star in 1944. It was to rank higher than the Purple Heart (awarded to wounded troops), slightly higher than the Bronze Star, but lower than the Silver Star. According to Panetta: ‘The contribution they [drone pilots] make does contribute to the success of combat operations . . . even if those actions are physically removed from the fight.’ The US military is at the forefront of embracing technological change, and now possesses miniature drones that, from a base thousands of miles distant, can crawl, hover, inspect, report back – and finally kill through a variety of means. Pilots who once flew F-16 fighters in aerial combat now sit in front of computer screens watching ‘insurgents’ before killing them. Drone technology changes not just the conduct of war but also what might constitute the demonstration of courage and, by extension, the awarding of military decorations.38 US veterans found it insulting that an armchair pilot whose greatest danger might come from a cup of hot spilled coffee could be eligible for an award that ranked higher than that given for being wounded in combat; underlying those complaints was the further factor that, in the US, grades of medal (commendation, merit, distinguished) play a wider role – each medal grade gives the recipient a certain number of the points needed for promotion. The drone warfare medal was rapidly aborted by the new Defense Secretary, Chuck Hagel, in March 2013; drone pilots will instead be eligible for existing medals and have a ‘distinguishing device’ attached to them. As long-distance slaughter becomes more dominant on the battlefield, close combat will become increasingly rare. Robots, too, threaten the VC’s survival.

  Politicians and the general public are only interested in the VC when there is a war on. In the case of unpopular wars (such as those in Iraq) or wars that have very obscure antecedents and whose original purpose was largely lost sight of (such as the war in Afghanistan), a medal serves the useful purpose of buying good media coverage at a very economical rate, while deflecting awkward questions, such as: why did so many British service personnel lose their lives overseas in a conflict that was utterly remote from British interests? The dilemma for the guardians of the VC – trying to balance too liberal a distribution, thus devaluing the award, against a policy that restricts its award so tightly that the bar to gaining it is set impossibly high – has been at the heart of the award since shortly after its inception. Today, when the contingent of surviving VC winners is just a handful, there should be a publicly transparent debate about who determines when a VC is awarded, and why. The criteria according to which it should be granted have become far too stringent. For politicians and the military hierarchy, the bestowal of gallantry awards serves different but equally useful purposes: for the former, it can deflect uncomfortable public criticism of the way in which a war has been conducted; for the latter, it helps preserve public esteem and demonstrates the vitality of the military’s contribution to the general social good. And for the general public, it answers the yearning to know that we still live in a time when genuine heroes can be found – although the heroes have become scarcer, and the pressure on those identified as such by being awarded the VC have become ever greater.

  It is the task of a Patton or a Napoleon to persuade soldiers that bits of ribbon are intrinsically valuable. The historian’s job, in part, is to spot contradictions and unravel obfuscations, and the history of the VC is steeped in both. The assiduous nurturing of the image of the VC has surrounded the medal with the greatest prestige, an iconic status that it was never originally intended to possess. By the time the last British troops leave Afghanistan, and the final assessment of Operation Enduring Freedom is made, the conflict will have lasted at least six years longer than the Second World War.39 History will judge that Enduring Freedom – and Operation Herrick, as the British contribution was called – was a political mistake, and that NATO’s armed forces were handed an impossible task, as should have been evident from the outset if only politicians and generals read a bit more history. Enduring Freedom has endured for much longer than anyone initially expected, but has resulted in far fewer casualties than the Second World War: 453 British armed forces personnel have died in Afghanistan (as of October 2014) against almost 600,000 British and Commonwealth military fatalities/missing and presumed dead during the 1939–45 conflict. But there is little difference in mortality rates: slightly more than 5 per cent of those serving in the British forces in 1939–45 were killed in action, while of the approximately 9,500 British troops who have served in Afghanistan 5 per cent have died. The Falklands War against Argentina in 1982 lasted just seventy-four days and saw 255 service personnel killed in action out of a total of 28,000 who sailed in the task force – a mortality rate of less than 1 per cent. Two Falklands VCs, two Afghanistan VCs: is the balance right? In the Falklands, the chance of winning a VC was thirty times greater than in the Second World War; even in the Afghanistan struggle, serving personnel were ten times more likely to win a VC than their predecessors in the Second World War. For the Crimean War, the ratio of combat deaths to VCs was approximately seventy-seven to one. If the same ratio of combat deaths to VC awards had been applied in the 1914–18 war, there would have been almost 13,000 VCs. The chance of winning a VC is not dependent on the nature of the individual act performed, but when that act happened.

  The burden of being declared a hero by the media, only to find subsequently that mundane life goes on, cannot be underestimated. In Iraq in 2004, Private Johnson Beharry saved the lives of several wounded comrades, suffering severe head injuries. His VC award occupied the whole of the front page of The Sun in its 18 March 2005 edition, with the headline ‘For Valour’ superimposed over an illustration of the VC.40 In September 2006 he confessed to a different newspaper the pressure of being a hero. Although he was proud of his VC, ‘you don’t get something like this for free. You get it and survive with the pain – or you get it and die . . . Everyone thinks that because I receive the Victoria Cross, I receive a wall of money. They expect me to give them whatever they ask for. But the Victoria Cross is just a medal.’41 By September 2010 Beharry, who had been headed for invalidity retirement from the army prior to his VC being announced, was unhappily working in army recruitment; he said that he ‘didn’t join the Army to sit behind a desk. I joined to serve in the infantry. I have been told that I will never serve in combat again . . . I am willing to take the risk but I suppose the Ministry of Defence doesn’t want a VC holder being killed in action.’ A personal burden has always been part of the VC, but in its early, more liberal days, when more VC winners were around, a return to relative obscurity and, in some cases, poverty was more of a problem than the spotlight of public attention. In 1979 the author John Winton identified an unusually high rate of suicide among early VC winners:

  [The] Victoria Cross has always had its sombre side, when paradoxically too much was demanded of its recipients, and then not enough attention paid to them . . . Of the 1,349 men who have won the VC to date, 19 committed suicide and at least as many more died in circumstances where it was charitable to return an open verdict.42

  The professionals of Britain’s armed forces are trained to be courageous, but to become a hero de
pends on public acclaim, and being a hero is a mixed blessing.

  Michael De-la-Noy, in his book The Honours System, wrote that ‘Those who hold the Victoria Cross are a classless band of the elite, in whose dwindling presence other individuals, regardless of their general opinions on war or honours, do well to give way and keep their peace.’ True enough. Less accurate is the statement that follows immediately after: ‘There is no conceivable way in which a Victoria Cross can be canvassed for, purchased or in any other way debased.’ The VC has in the past often been canvassed for, and is at risk not of debasement but of decline through ossification. When the medal first appeared, the network of social ties that bound the monarchy and the armed forces was vigorous and unquestioned; those ties have decayed, as the monarchy has retrenched in power and diminished in esteem. Remarkably, however, the VC remains one of the few British institutions that is untarnished by accusations of corruption, scandal, political intrigue or manipulation. The fact that the VC is not necessarily or simply awarded purely for a heroic deed, or that heroic military deeds that are deserving of a VC go unnoticed – that the history of the medal, right up to the present day, is peppered with anomalies, contradictions, prejudice and favouritism – is discomforting. But voicing doubts ought not to be taken as implying any denigration of past VC winners, who after all are usually passive actors in this interesting ritual, individuals plucked from obscurity, as the bar to be considered for a VC has risen, fallen and risen again. But a soldier who risked his life in the Crimea in 1855 is in no different position from one doing precisely the same thing in Afghanistan in 2010. Yet the fact that the VC has become more difficult to win is obviously partly related to the changing nature of combat. The kind of close encounters that once dominated a battlefield are today few and far between, so the opportunities to show the kind of courage that might merit a VC are rarer than previously. On the other hand, Lieutenant General Stannus wanted to do away altogether with honours for military services, as ‘the best officers in the Army do not value them, knowing, as they do, that they are not distributed with any regard to fairness’.43 He may have been correct, but his advice was impractical. Rather than dismantle a flawed system, it ought to be possible to remove the flaws. The expiring Cross could be revived by a fresh revision of the VC warrant – one that reiterated the necessity of outstandingly noble courage in military operations while eliminating the informal 90 per cent risk-of-death requirement; at the same time it could slim down the number of operational gallantry decorations, so reducing the chance of anomalies. For Victoria and Albert, the VC’s diffident appearance was itself a defiance of the norm, and helped promote a bigger ostentatiousness; the VC’s strength, its incalculable intangible value, is that – unlike other military decorations – it has very wide social recognition. At its simplest the VC was a useful recruitment device; at its most complex it represents an ethical response by an eternally grateful British society.44