Brave Heart

Since 1856, the Victoria Cross has been awarded to 1,354 servicemen. Only 21 survive. And, with modern warfare leaving little room for traditional heroism, we may not see their like again. Paul Vallely tracked down the forgotten few who wear the ultimate badge of courage

Eric Wilson is one of those rare men whom you instinctively want to call "sir". Perhaps it's his age: he's 89. Perhaps it's the aura of empire that lingers about him; he is one of the few surviving district commissioners from the old colonial days, when there were still places such as Tanganyika and Nyasaland on the map. Or perhaps it's because he's one of that handful of extraordinary individuals who, in a different era, won the Victoria Cross, the ultimate award for military courage.

"A different era" is an important qualification. For the received wisdom in military circles is that, even as our elite troops prepare to go into Afghanistan for ground operations, the epoch of the Victoria Cross is over. The last one has been awarded, and, given the changing face of modern warfare, there will be no more. The bronze ingot from which the medals are forged – the remnants of cannon captured from the Russians at the siege of Sebastopol – believed to be sufficient for a further 80 crosses, will remain intact in the vaults of the Ministry of Defence.

But the past is not as dead as we are often led to suppose. Nor is the present as malleable. Sitting in his retirement cottage, amid the green, undulating landscape of the Blackmore Vale, in the heart of rural Somerset, Lieutenant-Colonel Wilson was, when I met him recently, casting his mind back once again to the vast, unyielding scrub of Somaliland.

There, in 1940, he manned a strategic machine-gun post. It was charged with holding up the advance of a powerful mechanised column that included two Italian blackshirt battalions and three brigades of colonial troops. The young Captain Wilson inflicted so many casualties that the enemy had to bring up artillery to dislodge him. His sergeant was killed in the bombardment and his other troops wounded, but Wilson continued, wounded and suffering from malaria, repairing his damaged guns by night. Ultimately he succeeded in holding the enemy off for five days while British forces safely evacuated from the port of Berbera. He was awarded the VC "posthumously", since the retreating British army assumed he had been killed when the enemy finally overran his post on the sixth day.

It is a hero's story. And for six decades Eric Wilson has played the part of the English hero with all the modesty the role demands, retelling his story when requested, but with due reticence. You might have expected that, 60 years on, there was nothing new to say, no fresh insight to add. But you would be wrong.

"You know, I've never said this before..." he said to me, sitting in a room in which the comfortable outlines of English drawing-room furniture sat easily with the keepsakes of a lifetime in Africa, "but I think the British army abandoned me there." He had been able, on the first night of the battle, to send a runner back to HQ to report on the extent of the casualties. "And they must have known, from the hell of a noise, that the enemy were knocking me around a bit. But they never even sent a message back."

From an old manilla envelope, he produced a sheaf of brittle, yellow newspaper cuttings. They were his obituaries, fairly sober from The Times, but splendidly lurid from The Daily Sketch, which gave its account not one but three headlines: "Another Rorke's Drift", "First African VC dies" and "Last stand in the desert". Alongside them was a dramatic "eyewitness" account of the battle from The Daily Telegraph of 21 August 1940. "It's full of mistakes. It has been reconstructed from circumstantial assumptions, just like the citation for my Victoria Cross. People talk about the fog of war, but I am beginning to wonder exactly what was lost in it."

It is the time of year for remembrance. But the conflict in Afghanistan sets up new resonances in the old stories, which are what seem to have set Eric Wilson about re-exploring his own account of the past. If even old stalwarts such as Lt-Col Wilson find themselves asking new questions about truth, myth and propaganda, then what about the rest of us?

There has been, in recent years, something of a remembrance revival. It began when the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the end of the Second World War – VE Day – unexpectedly caught the public imagination in 1995. Since then, the British Legion's campaign for a return of the observation of the two minutes' silence on the anniversary of the Great War Armistice (on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month) has breathed new life into what was a waning commemoration. But an interesting shift is taking place from personal to collective remembering, and on into something else.

Consider the case of another VC-holder, Lieutenant-Commander Ian Fraser. In July 1945 he destroyed a Japanese battle cruiser whose guns were inflicting terrible losses on British troops in Malaysia. He did it by manoeuvring his midget submarine into a 5ft gap under her hull. Fraser persevered with the attack even after his sub bashed straight into the side of the ship with an almighty crash. It took 80 full minutes to attach the limpet mines, in broad daylight, in crystal-clear water. All of his crew were decorated.

One man was not. He was Fraser's First Lieutenant, David Carey, who had been drowned a month earlier, while training for the attack. "I always dedicate my Remembrance Day to him," says Fraser, who is now aged 81. "For me it's a very personal day."

So it is, too, for many survivors of the war, as many as 15 per cent of whom are still experiencing war-related psychological stress 50 years on, according to a study published recently by Duncan Barron, a sociologist at City University, London. Among the "forgotten" veterans of the Korean War, the figure is even higher.

But while it is individuals who remember in the literal sense, it is social groups that determine what is memorable, and also how it will be remembered. That is why some remembering is reduced to nostalgia, which is memory with the pain removed. And other major experiences are subjected to collective amnesia – in France, the Algerian war (1954-1962) has been wiped from public memory, probably because there is no accepted sense of its legitimacy. But even when memory is publicly enshrined, something happens to transform the "duty to remember" into something else.

The surviving members of the dying generation try to fight that tendency. "Young people need to know the story of how our nation developed and why we should be proud of it," says Lt-Col Wilson. "Instead, we have a trend to minimise the past."

"It's a key to your identity, part of what makes you English," says Lt-Cdr Fraser. "And to know that, over the centuries, this country would have been overrun by the French, Spanish and Germans if Englishmen had not stood up and done their bit."

The colonel adds: "Even when us old buggers with the medals have gone, young people will need something which doesn't glamorise war, and which promotes reconciliation, but which shows some kind of pride in what we did and gives people time to think." Yet the process of remembrance is already passing from the hands of such old heroes.

New conflicts change the way we see the old ones. And the face of war, even a pseudo-war such as the one against terrorism, is changing. "Take the Gulf war," suggests the military historian Eric Morris, a former deputy head of war studies at Sandhurst, where British officers are trained, and author of Jane's World Insurgency and Terrorism. "In a war of mechanised armour and blitzkrieg bombing, the pace of war is such that the scope for individual acts of heroism is much reduced. In the Gulf war, there were no VCs; Sir Rupert Smith got the DSO for 'leadership of a division'. And that's the way things are going," he adds.

The statistics of history seem to support his argument. The Victoria Cross was instituted in 1856 by Queen Victoria, who, during the Crimean War, wanted to reward signal acts of bravery with a medal that, uniquely, was to be available to all ranks. Since then, it has been awarded 1,354 times, around half of them posthumous. In the First World War, 634 VCs were awarded. In the Second World War, there were 182. Since then, there have been just 11 – four in Korea, four to Australians in Vietnam, one to a Gurkha in a clash between Indonesia and Malaysia in Sarawak, and the final two in the Falklands 20 years ago. The number of surviving recipients has dwindled to 21, many of whom are nearing the ends of their lives.

Even those Falklands awards, according to Morris, may have had something political about them. "There was no doubting the bravery of the two men, but in previous conflicts what they did would have got the DSO, not the VC. For the Government, the award of two VCs indirectly endorsed the legitimacy of the conflict." Many people would not agree with that. "What Colonel H Jones did in the Falklands was terrific – a classic act of bravery," insists Ian Fraser. But VC veterans do acknowledge some of the other reservations that military professionals have voiced.

Professor John Potter used to teach psychological warfare at Sandhurst. "A new syndrome first showed up in the Falklands," he says. It is driven by three key changes. "A lot of the organisational power and standards in the forces are set by NCOs. Over the past 30 years, the expectations of life of this key group have shifted. First, they are materially more comfortable – they all have their semis and their Volvos. Second, they live in a world where authority is more routinely questioned. Third, they are more thoroughly professional, but professionalism now means greater risk–benefit analysis, rather than blind courage." All of that has a subconscious psychological impact.

"That is not to say they are any less brave," insists the psychologist. "But more questions are asked, both consciously and subconsciously. They take calculated risks rather than foolhardy ones. There's a fine line between bravery and stupidity – and people make decisions, both strategically and tactically, that keep them away from dangerous situations."

From an entirely different perspective, Bill Reid agrees. Flt-Lt W Reid, now 79, won his VC after continuing with a Lancaster bombing-raid on Germany despite having been injured over Holland by enemy Messerschmitts, whose bullets smashed his windscreen, wounding Reid in the head, shoulder and hands. The temperature suddenly dropped to -40C, and the young pilot's blood froze on his eyes. Despite an attack by another German fighter, which killed his navigator and wireless-operator, Reid continued to Düsseldorf and dropped six tons of bombs bang on target, crippling the Mannesheim steelworks. He then served 24 more missions with the Dambusters.

"In my war, most of us were just boys," he said. "I don't say it was harum-scarum, but it was an adventure for us to be able to fly a plane when most of us could hardly drive a car. Today's soldier will have a degree, a wife and a family. He has many more responsibilities. Subconsciously, it all weighs in the mind."

Ian Fraser disagrees. He has a military man's doubts about the politicians' analysis of the "war on terrorism", and yet he foresees that the shadows of the past could flicker again in the caves of Afghanistan. "They're going to have to get bloody close to Osama bin Laden to kill him," he said. "It's a situation that could well lead to acts of personal valour. Life may have got cushier for the modern British soldier, but when it comes to the crunch, I don't think they'd let the country down. They'll be just as brave, valiant and resourceful as we were."

In war, and in the remembrance of it, some things change. But some things, perhaps, do not.