Allan Mallinson

The bravest of the brave

Gary Mead highlights the many problems involved with awarding the VC. How can courage be graded? And who should be the judge?

issue 06 June 2015

‘It is the task of a Patton or a Napoleon to persuade soldiers that bits of ribbon are intrinsically valuable. The historian’s job, in part, is to spot contradictions and unravel obfuscations, and the history of the VC is steeped in both.’

To this job of de-obfuscating, Gary Mead, former journalist and military historian, might well add ‘though the heavens fall’. For although he concedes that, remarkably, the Victoria Cross remains ‘one of the few British institutions that is untarnished by accusations of corruption, scandal, political intrigue or manipulation’, the procedure for awarding the highest British decoration for courage in the presence of the enemy is ‘peppered with anomalies, contradictions, prejudice and favouritism’, as well as political convenience.

None of this could have been gainsaid 100 years ago, but, he argues, the system now needs urgent reform, not least because the medal that recognises supreme valour is becoming an endangered species.

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