The Scotsman
A BRITISH infantryman who twice displayed extraordinary courage under fire to save his colleagues from ambush in Iraq has become the first living soldier for 40 years to be awarded the Victoria Cross.
Private Johnson Beharry, 25, single-handedly saved 30 colleagues in one attack in the violence-wracked town of Al Amarah last May, suffering serious injuries in the process, only to return to action and repeat his heroics a month later.
Pte Beharry, who lives in London, but was born on the Caribbean island of Grenada, needed brain surgery and is still recovering from his injuries, said he was “speechless” when he was told he has received the honour. “Maybe I was brave, I don’t know. I think anyone else could do the same thing,” he said yesterday. General Sir Mike Jackson, Chief of the General Staff, said: “His citation is an extraordinary story of one man’s courage, in the way he risked his life for his colleagues not once, but twice.”
The VC is the highest award for bravery under enemy fire for British and Commonwealth troops and today’s award is the first since Lieutenant Colonel Herbert Jones and Sergeant Ian John McKay received posthumous awards following the Falklands War. The last time a VC was bestowed on a living soldier was in 1965.
Pte Beharry is among more than 140 servicemen and women to be honoured in the latest operational honours list for work in Iraq, Afghanistan, Northern Ireland, the former Yugoslavia, Liberia, the Congo and Sierra Leone. The decision to reward Pte Beharry with the VC will be popular with colleagues who had campaigned for his bravery to be recognised.
The armoured vehicle driver, from 1st Battalion the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, was at the head of a five-vehicle convoy which came under attack on the outskirts of Al Amarah on the night of 1 May. His citation read: “Eyewitnesses report that the vehicle was engulfed in a number of violent explosions, which physically rocked the 30-tonne Warrior.” Platoon commanding officer 2nd Lieutenant Richard Deane was left unconscious and presumed dead and the vehicle became engulfed in flames. Determined to get the casualties to safety and create a path for the other vehicles to follow, Pte Beharry drove on through thick smoke and a mile-long ambush.
“As the smoke in his driver’s tunnel cleared, he was just able to make out the shape of another rocket-propelled grenade in flight heading directly towards him,” the citation added. “He pulled the heavy armoured hatch down with one hand, while still controlling his vehicle with the other. However, the overpressure from the explosion of the rocket wrenched the hatch out of his grip, and the flames and force of the blast passed directly over him, down the driver’s tunnel, further wounding the semi-conscious gunner in the turret.”
Pressing on, he had to keep his head outside the hatch to see where he was going while the attack continued. “While his head remained out of the hatch … he was directly exposed to much of this fire, and was himself hit by a 7.62mm bullet, which penetrated his helmet and remained lodged on its inner surface,” the citation said. When he reached a secure area, he twice returned to the vehicle under fire to carry the wounded inside a compound. Weeks later, his Warrior was again ambushed and a grenade exploded just six inches away from him. His citation added: “With the blood from his head injury obscuring his vision, Beharry managed to continue to control his vehicle, and forcefully reversed the Warrior out of the ambush.”
His wife Lynthia, 23, said she was told at the time her husband had only a 50/50 chance of survival.
FOR VALOUR - AN INSCRIPTION THAT SAYS IT ALL
THE Victoria Cross ranks with the George Cross as the nation’s highest military award. The first British medal to be created for bravery, the VC was instituted in 1856, with the initial recipients being personnel honoured for their gallantry during the Crimean War. The bronze cross bears the inscription “For Valour”. It is awarded, “for most conspicuous bravery, or some daring or pre-eminent act of valour or self-sacrifice, or extreme devotion to duty in the presence of the enemy.”
The most recent VCs were awarded for acts that took place on 28 May and 11/12 June 1982. These were awarded posthumously to Lt-Col H Jones and Sgt Ian McKay, of the Parachute Regiment, for their actions on those dates during the Falklands war. The last VC awarded to a British soldier who survived to receive it went to L-Cpl Rambahadur Limbu, of the 10th Gurkha Rifles, for his action in Sarawak, Borneo, in November 1965 during the Indonesian insurgency. The first VC was won on 21 June, 1854, by Mate - later Rear Admiral - Charles Lucas RN in the Crimea. Private Beharry’s honour takes the number of VCs awarded since the Second World War to 12 - six of them posthumously. A total of 1,355 awards have now been made, of which 57 have been won by The Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment and its forebears.
Each VC is made by the London jeweller Hancocks from the bronze from the cascabels of two Chinese cannon captured from the Russians at the siege of Sevastopol - the cascabel is the large knob at the rear of a cannon which held the ropes used to man-handle the weapon. The last remaining cascabel is tended by 15 Regiment Royal Logistic Corps at Donnington, Shropshire. The cascabel is stored in special vaults and is only removed under exceptional circumstances. The two cannon, minus the cascabels, are outside the officers’ mess at the Royal Artillery barracks at Woolwich.
