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Views on VC winners

• Message 1.Β 

  Posted by vesturiiis (U13688567) on Saturday, 28th May 2011

  Recently read a book by Max Hastings on Sir W Churchill in which he went to great lengths bemoaning the inept Allied commanders especially British.
  One train of thought was that some generals who were VC holders were obviously brave men but "empty headed" because those receiving a VC were mostly physical, brash, devil may care types that certainly were not top brass material....ie)overall too stupid
  What do you think?

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• Message 2

  , in reply to message 1.

  Posted by Mutatis_Mutandis (U8620894) on Sunday, 29th May 2011

  I can't think of many British generals who were VC winners. Lord Gort, the unfortunate commander of the BEF in 1940, had won a VC in WWI when he was still a junior officer. That may have helped his ascent to high rank but it cannot have been the only factor. Gort was unable to cope with the situation in May 1940, but he certainly wasn't stupid. No British general of 1940 had the experience to cope with large formations in mobile warfare, and Gort shouldn't be criticised too harshly for failing in this. At least he saved most of his army.
  
  Another VC was the swashbuckling romantic who was sent to Norway, Adrian Carton de Wiart. I can't imagine that Churchill intended to condemn him, he had a weakness for unconventional warriors of this type. Anyway, de Wiart probably wasn't destined for high command, but he acquitted himself well enough in an impossibly absurd situation, for which Churchill was far more to blame than the local commanders.

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  Posted by vesturiiis (U13688567) on Sunday, 29th May 2011

  Actually I meant Mr Hastings felt this about VC holders in "Finest Hour" that these were mostly physical bounders with little upstairs. I can't find his actual description but it was quite denigrating and unworthy of their actions.
  Not sure what prompted his reasoning as their claim to fame required the utmost supreme sacrifice and had little to do with an IQ test.
  The other general he mentioned was General Freyburg of NZ during the Crete invasion.

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  Posted by Herewordless (U14549396) on Wednesday, 6th July 2011

  I think that there were similar mutterings in a book from the late 80's entitled "The Psychology of Military Incompetence"?

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  Posted by Caro (U1691443) on Thursday, 7th July 2011

  Freyberg was certainly a very physical man, being a swimmer of Olympic ability, and never averse to risk. His role in Crete and elsewhere has not been universally praised, but I don't think he took unnecessary risks for the soldiers under him. He became Governor-General of NZ and has always been admired here. (When I googled him to ensure I did have his name spelt right, the first site that came up was one for Freyberg High School, and there are Bernard Freyberg Streets in NZ, if I remember rightly.)
  
  There is something of a stereotype of British generals as what-oh types with moustaches and no great brain (the sort of person you would expect in Wodehouse books perhaps), but doubtless that is most unfair. I also don't think of them as the soldiers most likely to be awarded the VC. I wonder what the percentages are?
  
  Cheers, Caro.

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  Posted by Caro (U1691443) on Thursday, 7th July 2011

  I meant to point you here:

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  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Friday, 8th July 2011

  I think that the comments reflect the presumed superiority of the thinker/intellectual/artist over the man of action that has developed over the last couple of hundred years.
  
  I seem to remember that the citation for a VC usually refers to exceptional conduct in the face of the enemy- or some such expression- and by definition this will select out men (and women) capable of great valour and successful action in the combat zone.
  
  Generalship requires different qualities.. Looking back I can see that a project that I did when I was about 13-14 years old on the way that John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, planned and managed the great Blenheim Campaign played a seminal role in my education.
  
  But there was a First World War cartoon in which a General inspecting manoeuvres is asking a seargant-major to spell out the differences between exercises and real combat. The General gives one difference "The absence of the enemy". The RSM gives a second "The absence of the General, Sir."
  
  But a recent reading of a biography of Group Captain Leonard Cheshire- I believe one of the most highly decorated men in the RAF- revealed a childhood and youth which was full of "devil-may care", including his time at Oxford, where he was apparently always getting up to pranks, and where the chance of joining the University air club and flying was seized upon. Hence he was one of those rare young men with flying ability when the war broke out.
  
  But to call such a person unintelligent would be like saying that a "Micro-Biologist" is not a true Biologist. There are people who feel most truly alive when they exploit their capacity for instantaneous, intelligent and lucid reaction to the immediate.
  
  In Cheshire's case this came through many many times- as for example when he showed that with the superior flying capabilities of the Mosquito a skilled pilot like himself able to react seemingly instinctively with the right reflexes could do much more damage by delivering a smaller weight of bombs more precisely than could be achieved by the established high level heavy bombing campaign.
  
  This focus on what happens at a more human scale then re-shaped Cheshire's life.
  
  As the British distant observer on the Nagasaki bombing he initially only saw the technological advance, and was amazed when the American pilot flying their observation craft expressed a view that such a weapon should never be used ever again. Cheshire just saw it as an ultimate "big bomb". That is until he actually visited post-war Germany and saw the human impact of the bombing. This sent him on a totally different journey- that of trying to care for the victims of war.
  
  It was a journey that led him to embrace the existing macro-structure of the Roman Catholic Church, ignoring all of the theological debates and disputes-for his emphasis once again was on the implications at a purely human level.
  
  The biography I found ended in the late Fifties, when Cheshire himself was very ill with cancer. But Googling helped me to discover that the care homes that he started just after the war are now, along with those started by his wife Sue Ryder, possibly the largest organisation of charity care homes in the world.
  
  The man of action is certainly not an inferior. LIfe is about doing and being, not thinking.
  
  Cass

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  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Friday, 8th July 2011

  As for the "decayed aristocracy" stereotype as in PGW- this surely owes a great deal to the Age of Revolution, when the Age of Reason produced the library expert and then the spin-off the arm-chair expert.
  
  Historians identify the Wilberforce anti-slavery campaign as an important pioneering innovation that harnessed the power of moral indignation that could be generated by the mass media- particularly in Britain of that period by those excluded from membership of the establishment by the laws of religious exclusion.
  
  As one of those many people who grew up in a family where the News of The World was delivered every Sunday to feed a vicarious fascination with sex, sin, evil, violence etc , the whole tradition of "power without responsibility" ascribed to journalists seems particularly relevant today and to this thread.
  
  The Crimean War was followed by a great investigation into just why "somebody had blundered"- as Tennison put it in the poem that entertained countless homes. But Christopher Hibbert brings out very clearly in his book "The Destruction of Lord Raglan" the problems that the British Army faced after so many decades without a major war. And this would perhaps not have been so fatal had the successful accomplishment of the original mission not been followed by a great public outcry, manipulated by the Media, that demanded that the British Army should accept "mission creep", and take on the challenge of pushing the Russians out of the Crimea, which was not the original mission at all.
  
  Early in the twentieth century J.M.Keynes in essays he wrote at Eton was considering that democracy was on trial, being very much concerned at the prospect of policies being shaped by the majority who had no more than at best an elementary education. And, if they read the news at all, were most likely to read "The Daily Mirror", which Lord Harmsworth said made no attempt to educate or elevate the views, prejudices and understanding of its readership, but rather set out to mirror them- thus reinforcing and sanctifying their ignorance.
  
  And while this was good business for a newspaper magnate, pandering to the majority and attacking the minority made obvious good sense to the professional politicians and bureaucrats.
  
  In post-war Germany the Nazis managed to make the German Jews scape-goats for Germany's problems. In victorious Britain it could appear that the Age of Revolution- the age of monarchy, Empire and aristocracy- had eventually proved its limitations in the Great War, while politicians and bureaucrats had proved themselves on the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Front, with a massive extension of State control. For many- for example in the key coal mining industry- the attempt to return to the pre-war situation, handing the mines back to their owners, and the railways back to their multiple companies- all seemed a retrograde step, when the war had been a "great leap forward".
  
  Of course one of the results of the success and failure of the old establishment had been that so many sons of the old establishment grew up in a situation in which they were severed from contact with their fathers at a very early age and entrusted to the care of the library and arm-experts through the huge network of boarding schools that were essential in an age when Britain had huge commitments around the world. Girls like Joanna Lumley could grow up as "daughters of the regiment" travelling around with various overseas postings, but their brothers were in England learning the facts of life from books and playing fields.
  
  Interestingly at the time that Leonard Cheshire was born his father was slung up high in the air in a basket under an observation balloon guiding the artillery on the Western Front. But after the war he returned to his law post at Oxford University, and so Leonard grew up playing games and having adventures with an intrepid father whom he knew intimately, even though he also attended the rather progressive Stowe School, where T.H. White his English teacher was himself a man of action and adventure. David Niven has written of Stowe School as being something different, set up to cater for a new rich business class that had emerged from the 14-18 war.
  
  Cass

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