I’m bumping this because he’s been awarded the George Cross. BBC article. Thoroughly deserved IMHO.
Well done, sir!
The GC is well deserved but why not the VC?
Surely an act of bravery such as his deserves the highest award
But his comrades didn’t die.
A true hero.
Sometimes Americans forget that other countries have heroic and valorous military men too. Sometimes people get so wrapped up in American pride that they forget about all of the acts of combat heroism from the soldiers of France, Germany, Britain, Finland, Rhodesia, even the Soviet Union. A man who puts his life on the line to save his comrades is a hero no matter where he is from.
The George Cross is the highest award for gallantry not in the face of the enemy. It is the highest award that a civilian can win and is also awarded to military personnel.
The Victoria Cross is reserved for valour in the face of the enemy. The VC is purely a military award.
Considering it was a booby-trap grenade, the distinction seems to be rather fine to me. I would think “not in the face of the enemy” is for things like rescuing comrades when an accidental fire breaks out in the barracks, or playing a key role in a rescue from some natural disaster. Something placed by the enemy to harm the soldiers should qualify as the “face of the enemy.” But that’s a civilian’s take on it. Bloody good job, anyway.
Airman’s position does confuse me, though. I can fully understand psychological damage if his buddies had died from this grenade or even if they died later in the mission or on some other mission. But he saves this group, some other comrades not with this group dies, and he gets psychological damage because he jumped a grenade those people were never near? I admit I never served so my take is less than authoritative, but the logic escapes me.
Well if his actions were’nt in the face of the enemy then I don’t know what is, unless you mean having the enemy charging at you.
I mean it isn’t as if he was waiting for a number 17 bus is it, he was in action and fully deserving of a VC.
IMHO
Not on that particular instance. I’m sure he has hundreds of comrads who are doing thousands of missions over there. Presumably, some of his comrads will not return home.
Read some of the post-WWI VC citations that are posted on wikipedia, it’ll clear it up.
My favourite:
You’re not disappointed that Croucher survived? Just a little?
Does winning the George Cross mean he can’t be awarded the Victorian Cross, or is he still eligible?
When they say “in the face of the enemy,” does that include a booby trap in a combat zone, or does there have to be actual fighting with a live enemy?
Not for the same incident. He can still be awarded a VC or another medal - even another GC - for something else.
Szlater, I don’t disagree with your reading of the current tradition for modern valor awards (both the VC and MoH) is that unless the recipient did something along the lines of what Rifleman Gurung did, it’s not going to get the highest award. I also think that there’s a lot more political thinking involved in who gets what awards than the actual merits of what the action might have been.
Where I think that both Rifleman Gurung and Lance Corporal Croucher are equal is that both men acted with courage, alacrity, and clear-thinking in some of the most stressful conditions imaginable. Neither one could possibly have done any better in their respective situations, and I think that both should be held up as examples of the best that military personnel can be.
As a standard, “signal act of valour or devotion to their country,” sounds great. But it’s so open for interpretation it’s almost impossible to rigidly define. As for ‘in the presence of the enemy,’ I think IEDs count, in a way that a natural disaster or misadventure wouldn’t. I don’t know if the Royal Marines pay combat pay for duty in a combat theatre - but if Lance Corporal Croucher was getting combat pay, and suffered an attack from an insurgent, it doesn’t matter whether the enemy was there physically to watch the detonation.
Obviously, the British military and gov’t has no reason to care what this pushy Yank might think, but this seems to be paralleling a shift here in the US for awarding the MoH only to those persons whose act of valor was fatal. Certainly some of the other award citations I’ve seen given to living recipients seem to meet any standard, except death, that one might ask for.
This sort of fine parsing is particularly annoying to me, because I tend to believe that valor awards are at least in part, a lottery. Before anyone jumps on me for that, let me explain what I mean. In order for someone’s actions to be considered, several things must happen. First off, not only must the nominee perform some astounding act. Then the action had to have been witnessed. At least one of the witnesses must survive. Then the witness has to take the effort and time to begin the nomination process. Then the nomination has to work its way through the chain of command, which has stopped more than one nomination in the past. (Sometimes for the most venal of reasons.) Only then does the action of the nominee get examined to determine whether it meets the justfiably high standards for the award. It is my considered opinion that there are many acts of heroic valor that never get recognized either because no survivor witnessed them, or no one carried through with the nomination process. Hence it’s something of a lottery. And when the nomination process works as it should - like Lance Corporal Croucher’s own case - things shouldn’t be nit picked because someone can point to a worse road that could have happened.
I am not familiar with the list of VC bearers even to the extent that I am the MoH list. But I will crap in my hat and eat it if I cannot find any nominations that seem entirely political and only barely connected to the merits of the action involved. (For a MoH example, consider Admiral Kidd’s citation, here. Which could be trivialized as, he stood his ground while his ship got blown to Hell.*) And while it’s both the goal and the duty of the awards board to avoid cheapening any medal by giving it out too easily, I just can’t describe Lance Corporal Croucher’s actions as easy - for all that he survived their consequences. And I think it’s just as much an error to make the award only for fatal actions as it would be to cheapen it by making it too easy.**
Just my thoughts on the topic, and worth about one tenth what you paid for it. 
*Let me take a moment here to defend Admiral Kidd. I have no criticisms for his actions on the day of December 7, 1941. I believe he acted with honor and courage. He did his duty, and he was killed doing it, but his actions just don’t evoke the awe that I get when I read of the actions of some of the other citations form that day, like Cassin Young’s.
I do not think that Kidd’s award for the MoH was anything but a propaganda weapon. But it was at a time and place where the US needed to have heroes available to point to, and his was an easy name to place in the hat. I’m not even sure it was a wrong decision, for the time. For all that IMNSHO he doesn’t fit in with the majority of the citations for the MoH I’ve read.
** In this day and age of universal media, I have a nasty, and I hope paranoid, suspicion that one of the reasons for only awarding the VC or MoH to dead persons: A dead person is safe. They will not famously go crazy. They will not embarrass anyone with their further action nor inaction. They won’t even try to use the fame of their award to politic on any issue.
I hope you don’t have the impression that the VC is nowadays only awarded posthumously - two of the three 21st century recipients are alive.
Argh. There I go again, making improper parallels. I’d thought I’d heard that both the VC and the MoH had only been awarded posthumously since 9/11. And I didn’t check.
That takes about 40% of the wind out of my sails.
Thank you for correcting me.
First, I was pointing out that jumping on a grenade with a helmet Hollywood style has actually worked; a factual point that would be just the same if we were talking about a Nazi soldier doing the same thing in WWII. My approval or otherwise of the person or war in question is besides the point, which is why I didn’t say anything on the subject. And second, this is Afghanistan, not Iraq, entirely different conflicts in entirely different countries happening for entirely different reasons.
The idea that I and other Iraq war critics are motivated by some blanket hatred of all militaries everywhere exists primarily in the heads of those trying to handwave away our obvious aggression and abuse in Iraq.
That said, the article notes that: “Such is the level of courage required for the medal that it is estimated that the chances of surviving an act worthy of its award are one in ten”.
The other issue is that the George Cross is equal to the Victoria Cross in the order of precedence. The only difference is whether the action took place in the face of the enemy. The VC is not technically a higher award, although as this thread demonstrates, it is percieved that way.
Really? If you have both, then the VC precedes the GC. Of course, no one has yet won both, so the point is slightly moot.
Similarly, no-one ever has won the GC and Bar.
There have been three instances of repeat awards of the VC, two for rescuing wounded men under fire and one for insanely brave deeds of combat itself. (A conversation reported in Upham’s biography, Mark of the Lion, indicated that his senior officers thought that Charlie’s exploits in two separate battles in North Africa, at Minqar Qaim and Ruweisat Ridge, were each worth a VC citation - he had already won one in Crete. In the end they put him forward for “only” one additional award, though his CO, Maj-Gen Kippenberger, was of the opinion that Upham had earned it “several times over” and said as much to the King when asked.)