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Dear all
A hundred years ago… the to and fro
battles on Eastern and Western Fronts continued throughout the week, with
little ground gained, cities recaptured that had been lost a couple of months
earlier and trench-based attrition the norm, including in Gallipoli where the
action steadied down for a while after June 4’s Third Battle Of Krithia in the
Helles sector… and, supposing an average week for this phase of the war, a
further 66,000 casualties resulted (dead and wounded).
So,
for once in this summary passage before continuing my father’s
just-one-foot-soldier story, a brief account of one man’s courage and tragedy.
This day a century ago (June 7, a Monday then), Sub Lieutenant Reginald “Rex”
Warneford, 23, from Exmouth, of the Royal Naval Air Service, flying a Morane
Parasol wood-and-canvas biplane, became the first aviator to bring down an airship.
It happened near Ghent, Belgium. The Sub Lieut, on his first ever night flight,
climbed above Zeppelin LZ-37 and dropped his 20lb bombs on it. Then, caught in
the flames, he crash-landed behind German lines. But, with a piece of pure
David Niven/Terry-Thomas stiff-upper-lip genius he repaired a broken fuel line
with his cigarette holder, took off again and made it back to base.
Immediately
awarded the Victoria Cross and the French Legion Of Honour, on June 17 he was
flying a new plane when it bucked on take-off and threw him out of the cockpit
to his death. For a time, in 2013 a controversy blew up when, because he was
born in India, the Government omitted him from a list of WW1 VC winners due to
be memorialised –after a couple of months of indignation they U-turned.
Meanwhile...
at St George’s Barracks, Malta, the thousand men of the 2/1st
City Of London Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, including my father, Private Sam
Sutcliffe and his older brother Ted (both underage
volunteers, still 16 and 18 respectively in early summer 1915), and their pals
from Edmonton, north London, had begun learning how to shoot – some eight months
into their Army lives. They’d heard some glimmerings of news about Gallipoli,
but no clue that, in due course, it would turn out to be their first
battlefield. Having signed up as a trainee Signaller, Sam found his group at
the back of the queue when it came to rifle instruction.
FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS
Last week, the young Signallers finally got
their turn at learning how to use the long Lee-Enfield – but loaded with wooden
“bullets” only until they got the rudiments off pat (especially because the
instructor had to lay in front of them staring down the wrong end of the barrel
until satisfied they were aligning the sights and aiming correctly).
However,
toiling in the heat of the Maltese early summer, they all knew this had to get
real at some stage – another rite of passage in prospect for Sam who, at every
new stage of becoming a soldier, felt a profound anxiety that his under-oath
lie about his age when he volunteered would be discovered and result in
humiliating rejection or even a jail term. In his Memoir, he resumed by
referring to all that bullet-less drill…
‘For several weeks, we dedicated day after day to this sort
of repetition, longer than necessary in all likelihood, because the policy was
that, in any given five days, only one Company at a time could be accommodated
on the range where we were all introduced to firing live ammunition. But
finally H Company Signallers got their chance, all of us thrilled and nervous
as, clearly, this would be a crucial time of testing for these would-be
soldiers. As ever at such moments, I was in a state of tension, but determined
to show no sign of it while we marched the two miles to the range along the seashore
in the morning sunshine with prickly lava underfoot.
Waiting for your
turn to fire your first live rounds felt like pretending to read in a dentist’s
waiting room. When, finally, I stepped forward, the instructor showed me once
more how to position myself, lying beside him, facing the sea. Then he reminded
me of two important things about firing a rifle with real bullets rather than
wooden fakes. Having taken aim, I must press the butt of the rifle into the
hollow of my shoulder as hard as I could, he cautioned, or risk having my jaw
broken by the recoil. And then the trigger must be squeezed, not pulled. The
latter would spoil my aim.
He told me that,
lying beside me now, he would take notes and every shot would be assessed – the
man at the butts who controlled the targets would signal by how much I’d missed
the bull’s-eye and at what angle. I knew from others that even my behaviour
would be marked too.
No need to hurry
for the first exercise, he stressed, just concentrate on every detail of what you
have practised. Although the gun is stronger than you, you be the master… I
took aim – the target, at 400 yards initially, represented the appearance of a
man’s head and shoulders, grey with no white background to help the marksman’s
focus… tip of the foresight in line with the shoulders of the backsight, both
in line with the bottom of the bull’s-eye. I pressed the butt back hard and,
with thumb against trigger guard, forefinger on trigger, I squeezed. Nothing
happened.
“What about the
safety catch?” my trainer asked quietly. My right hand fumbled about and
pressed the catch forward. Back to firing position, trigger squeezed… and for a
fraction of a second the gun came alive with awful power. The jolt almost
detached my head from my shoulders, the explosion deafened me, the shock shot
through my whole body.
Firing .22s with
the Scouts had not remotely prepared me and I had to repeat that shattering
experience between 50 and 60 times that day. The old long Lee-Enfield was the
very devil, a hellish shoulder-bruiser.
Every few shots,
the instructors increased the range by 100 yards until we were trying to take
good aim at the unheard-of distance of 900 yards, over half a mile. This has to
be tried to be appreciated; at that distance, although the target was now on a
white background and greatly increased in size – they were mounted on “butts”,
iron frames raised and lowered by chains and pulleys – the whole business
seemed detached from reality. I thought, how can any action of mine affect a
man so far away from me? Perhaps the weapon’s designers had outstripped
practicality.
As each man
finished his first morning stint, he was allowed to make his own way back to
barracks. When I neared my quarters, an awful pain drew down my right shoulder
and I walked into our barrack room in that contorted attitude. Enquiries as to
my trouble I answered with my self-diagnosis that I’d got indigestion, hoping
that was correct. I looked around for a cure. On the table stood a bottle of
Worcester sauce. I promptly unstoppered it and took a long swig of the stuff.
It burnt mouth and throat and probably worked as a counter-irritant, so
gradually I was able to straighten up. Indigestion or battered nerves, I never
found out.
After that first
day, we had to take our noon break for dinner, then return to the range for
repeated drills on various different ways of firing a rifle – in the course of
which I got over the shoulder-bashing ache. Snapshooting at 200 yards proved an
exciting session, but sailing vessels passing close behind the butts distracted
my attention. Then a phone message from local police complaining that fishing
boats were being shot at brought a temporary halt to the work. In truth, some
of the lads, aiming high, had deliberately sent a few whizzing among the masts.’
All
the best –
FSS
Next week: The young volunteers strive to emulate the Old Contemptibles’
15-rounds-a-minute quick fire – but find bayonet drill involves a farcical
hopping semi-crouch like “a man who’s soiled his pants”…
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