Aug2014_Some short stories about VC Recipients

The ‘A J Shout’ on the Roll is Captain Alfred John Shout VC MC MID, 1st Battalion AIF, Australia’s most decorated soldier of the Gallipoli campaign. His VC was posthumously awarded as Shout died of wounds suffered during the incident at the Battle of Lone Pine for which he earned the medal. Men like Shout were often the most ready to concede that the bravery and sacrifice of thousands of other soldiers went unrecorded and remained unknown except to their comrades in arms. 
 

One VC recipient who grew tired of the adulation he received upon his return home wounded from Gallipoli was Corporal William Dunstan. He disliked the civic receptions he was forced to attend given in his honour and finally spoke his mind when he heard that a memorial fund was to be opened to collect money for him. In a letter to the press he declined this money claiming he was lucky to be able to return home to such accolades while the actions of others went unobserved. Dunstan stated that he felt honour was due to that hundreds of other Australian soldiers, who may not, like himself, have had the opportunity of coming into the limelight …but  were killed.

Victoria Crosses, nevertheless, despite the modesty of some who received them, were hard earned. They stand out as official recognition of an act, or in some cases a series of acts, of outstanding courage. The circumstances surrounding the award of the eleven VCs tell the story of the sort of warfare experienced by the ordinary soldiers of both sides as they fought each other at Gallipoli. 

Ironically, the first Anzac area VC did not go to an Anzac. Few of the thousands who commemorate Anzac Day at Gallipoli or in Australia and New Zealand would ever have heard of Lance-Corporal Walter Parker, Portsmouth Battalion, Royal Naval Division. He is not part of Australia’s ‘Anzac Legend’ but his courage under fire between 30 April and 2 May at Anzac Cove when, as a stretcher bearer, he looked after dozens of his wounded comrades despite his own wounds, earned him the Victoria Cross. 

The first VC to an Anzac went to Lance Corporal Albert Jacka, 14th Battalion AIF. Once Jacka was as well known in Australia and undoubtedly as famous as the man whose name is now almost a national symbol for the whole Gallipoli story – Corporal John Simpson Kirkpatrick, the ‘Man with the Donkey’. Statues of Simpson, along with the donkey, stand today outside the Australian War Memorial and the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne testifying to the power of that story of pure Australian ‘mateship’, the rescue of wounded men under fire. Jacka’s VC, and the subsequent bravery awards he gained in France on the Western Front, were all for significant military action which resulted in driving the enemy from part of the Australian line. So famous did Jacka become in the AIF as a fighting soldier that one historian of the 14th Battalion called his account of the battalion’s war experiences, Jacka’s Mob. On the Australian home-front during the war the name and face of Albert Jacka were instantly recognisable but that recognition has long faded. Peter Cochrane writes of Jacka’s fate:

In 1930, the date 19 May 1915 was more widely recognised as the day Albert Jacka won the VC than the day of Simpson’s death. By 1960 Jacka and many other heroes were all but forgotten, yet elementary schooling had ensured that Simpson’s epic deeds were as widely known as they had been during the Great War …

“LEST WE FORGET”

(More VC Stories in our next edition.)