Men fight for their ‘mates’ — it is the secret of why they so love war

One of the nicest, gentlest fellows I’ve ever met is a man named Mike Dauncey. He’s so terribly polite that he can’t bring himself to swear even in extremis and if you had to guess what he did before he retired, you’d probably say ‘country parson’. In fact, though, Brigadier Mike Dauncey DSO is a bona fide war hero, known as the ‘sixth Arnhem VC’. Only five were in fact awarded at the battle. Mike was put up for the sixth, only to have the letters ‘VC’ crossed out on his citation and amended to ‘DSO’ by one BLM (that’ll be Bernard Law Montgomery) who felt that, heroism or no heroism, five VCs were quite enough for one debacle.

When you learn what Mike did as a young lieutenant, though, you’re left in little doubt he deserved better. Frustrated by the lack of action in his war so far, he had retrained as a glider pilot. Operation Market Garden was his first taste of combat and he took to it rather well. On landing, he was sent (as many glider pilots were) to defend the guns at Oosterbeek and on three occasions he prevented his position being overrun by superior forces of tanks and infantry, often by leading near suicidal counterattacks.

Grazed across the scalp with a sniper’s bullet, then caught in the eye by a shell splinter — which a comrade agonisingly but unsuccessfully tried to extract with a matchstick — Lt Dauncey went on single-handedly to disable a self-propelled gun with a gammon grenade. After that he was hit in the leg by a bullet, had his jaw broken by a stick grenade and was captured by the Germans. And still he managed to escape from his POW camp and make a home run to Blighty where his beloved Marjorie awaited him.