Posted on 04/30/2007 8:56:24 PM PDT by DieHard the Hunter
In many ways a savage war made that inevitable.
Every week seemed to produce yet another to be glorified - and too often mourned.
Some were shadowy figures, relics of a past I had not shared. Like the two streets in Hawera, my small home town, which honoured two of its sons, Victoria Cross winners from World War One - Laurent VC St and Grant VC St.
At first, I knew them only from those unusual street nameplates. Then, stoked by daily war communiques, my boyish curiosity took me into official records to attach human form and courage to them.
John Gilroy Grant, a sergeant with the Wellington Regiment, won his in an attack and capture of a group of German machine gun posts near Bancourt in France in September, 1918.
Henry John Laurent, another sergeant, won his the same month for what the citation described as a daring adventure, conspicuous bravery, skill and enterprise - a blend of Boys' Own prose and Whitehall-ese about another clash on the Western Front that saw more than 140 Germans killed and captured for the loss of only one of his men.
That daring adventure label seems now to be a direct and understandable steal from Chums, massive English boys' annuals my parents scrimped and saved to give me at Christmas.
Like so many books of their time, they were full of the courage of the good and the duplicity of the bad, memorable moments on the North-West Frontier.
That regular annual glorified the feats of fictional men who responded like William James Hardham VC, a peacetime New Zealand blacksmith/Boer war farrier-major, who rode out to rescue a soldier lying wounded after his horse was shot from under him on the veldt.
He dismounted, lifted the man on to his saddle under volleys of Boer fire and led the horse carrying the helpless trooper to the shelter of a rocky outcrop and safety.
Two decades later, Aucklander Reginald Stanley Judson won the Distinguished Conduct Medal, the Military Medal and then the VC all in six weeks of bravery in France - a feat worthy of Chums.
It was through those Chums pages that I followed the fictional daring adventures of characters like the masked pilot - don't ask me why he wore it, but he did while dealing with the enemy and their tri-planes in his Sopwith Camel over the trenches of France.
With that as a scenesetter, it was inevitable that I revelled in the feats of Cobber Kain, New Zealand's first World War Two fighter ace, tousle-haired with the inevitable scarf around his neck, photographed in the cockpit of the Hawker Hurricane.
He had flown on 80 operations, in which he had won the DFC and scored 12 official kills - as the language of the day so bluntly referred to them.
One reference described him having "shot down his 25th Nazi over Rheims". Who knows? Whatever the real total, he was my pilot hero without a mask in those first months of the war - until June 7, 1940. I wept in disbelief when I read the news Cobber Kain, dead at 22. How he died made his loss all the more poignant.
The engine had started in the light plane that was to fly him back to England for a break from flying when he looked over and saw his Hurricane standing as if waiting for him.
The temptation was too much. He told the ferry plane pilot to wait, ran over, climbed into his fighter and minutes later was dead, crashing during a low level beat-up of the base he knew so well.
Dead, like another of my heroes, Wanganui's Jimmy Ward, who climbed out on to the wing of a blazing Wellington bomber after a raid on Germany in July, 1941, to douse a fire in an engine, an act which brought the bomber and its crew home safely. That won him a VC.
Two months later, hit by anti-aircraft fire after a raid on Hamburg, he chose to stay at the controls, allowing his crew to bail out before he crashed and died at 21.
Lloyd Allan Trigg from Houhora was unique, awarded his VC on the evidence of enemy survivors from a u-boat he sank off Morocco in 1942.
Mortally wounded and with his Liberator bomber on fire, he sank the submarine before crashing into the sea. Captured German sailors who survived in a dinghy from the bomber later told the story of his courage and won him his posthumous medal.
Dunedin-born Alfred Clive Hulme, father of world champion racing driver Denny Hulme, won his VC after eight days of courage on Crete where he was credited with eliminating 33 German snipers.
The courage of double VC winner Charles Upham was legendary.
Captured and finally imprisoned with other difficult POWs in notorious Colditz Castle, he outdid anything those fiction-writers could have dreamed up.
Riverton-born John Daniel Hinton won his VC in fierce fighting in Greece and heard of his award announced by the commandant of the POW camp where he ended up. That could have come straight out of Chums as well.
So could the victory over German pocket battleship Graf Spee within months of the war beginning. That feat led to a parade of heroes when the crew of the cruiser Achilles marched in Queen St a few months afterwards.
Later, for 150 New Zealand navy families, there was the heartache that goes with dead heroes, all lost when the cruiser Neptune struck a mine in the Mediterranean in 1941.
And then with all these events and many more like them epitomising heroism, triumph and loss, we had Percy the Plumber.
Percy was a little-known nephew and cousin who came down the side path of our Petone home late in 1939 to an unexpectedly eager welcome.
The family was coping with a leaking tap or something equally as pressing and he was, at first, hailed by my sister as the plumber we were waiting for.
He was heading for Trentham camp having enlisted in the first echelon training for Egypt.
To us, he was Percy the Plumber from that day on. He even signed his wartime letters back that way. Country boy Percy, in the city for the first time, was the epitome of so many New Zealand young men we saw when we visited him in his Trentham tent, and later scanned the ranks of the marching troops as they paraded through Wellington.
I don't know why Percy the Plumber or so many of his comrades signed up for war. Perhaps they didn't know themselves. But enlist they did and marched away.
They won no medals. They did not seek them, nor did their families later.
Small boys like me did not automatically idolise them. Their individual doings their deaths, were not events that headlines or citations are made of, or that Chums authors of those times made their own.
They did what they felt needed doing, as well as they could, all those thousands who were simply like our Percy the Plumber. It's a time to remember and honour them all.
Pat Booth's Editorial was too good not to share -- hope you all don't mind. By way of terminology: "VC" means "Victoria Cross" -- the Commonwealth's highest honor. Even the King or Queen will salute a VC wearer. It is approximately equivalent to the Medal of Honor, yet with a mystique all of its own.
The Commonwealth's greatest warrior ever, Charles Upham VC and Bar, was a New Zealander from Christchurch. He was awarded this coveted medal not once but TWICE: once for Valor in Crete, and again for Valor in the African Desert.
Last nite at the Henderson RSA it was my privilege to read The Ode: an observance we hold every nite every day of the week at six o'clock PM precisely. Lites are dimmed, all present stop what they are doing (having a beer, chatting, playing snooker, or playing the Pokies) stand at ease and for a brief moment we Remember. These are the words:
THE ODE
"They shall not grow old
Even as we that are left grow old
Age shall not weary them,
Nor the years Contemn.
At the going down of the sun,
And in the morning,
We will remember them."
(Laurence Binyon, 1914, excerpt from "For the Fallen")
Ake Ake, Kia Kaha e!
*DieHard the Hunter*
Great article, Die Hard! Thanks for posting it.
Incredibly brave and valiant men, all.
“The Commonwealth’s greatest warrior ever, Charles Upham VC and Bar, was a New Zealander from Christchurch. He was awarded this coveted medal not once but TWICE: once for Valor in Crete, and again for Valor in the African Desert.”
Hmmmmmmmmm
I thought Upham was at Gallipoli?
Who was the New Zealander who saved several other guys, swimming out of the area with them till they were safe?
My mother lost 3 uncles at Gallipoli....the Harris boys...
And a brother in Italy during WWII...
“Contemn” should be condemn...
Yes I know picky picky...
> “Contemn” should be condemn...
Actually, no...
There’s a huge debate about that one, but “contemn” is apparently the right word — from “contempt” rather than from “condemnation”.
Cheers
*DieHard*
> I thought Upham was at Gallipoli?
No, Upham served with Honor during WW-II and died during the early 1990’s.
I’m not sure who the Gallipoli swimming hero is — I’ll be down at the RSA later tonite and will find out for you.
Sounds like you had a very Valiant family. I am grateful for their Service.
Cheers
*DieHard*
Y’OK
> Incredibly brave and valiant men, all.
They were indeed.
Yet this story is told a thousand times, every day that the Good Guys meet the Bad Guys in combat. There are no shortage of very, very brave and valiant warriors who do amazing deeds on our behalf. A very few get decorated. Most go unnoticed. Others, like the Haditha Marines, get pilloried and treated unfairly. Go figure!
Why is it that Western Civilization feels a need to be nice to the Enemy? Didn’t the Enemy drive aeroplanes into the WTC? Didn’t they start this fight? Aren’t they using unconventional forces? Don’t they hack innocent hostages’ heads off with dull knives? Nobody has ever asked them to behave in this manner or to perform these atrocities: the Enemy has gone out of their way to do so.
Even if the Marines broke the rules (doubt it) why should we care? The Bad Guys are, after all, The Enemy. And this is an Enemy that gives no thought to the niceties of warfare. None.
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