Back in Britain earlier in the month it was fascinating to see how much interest there remains in the First World War.
The 90th anniversary of the end of what was known then as the Great War was marked in Britain on 11th November with memorials that included the laying of wreaths at the Cenotaph in London with three of Britain's four surviving veterans of the conflict present.
A two minute silence was observed; I was driving to Oxford that day for a meeting with a historian at All Souls in connection with my previous posting on this blog. I pulled over into a lay-by and noticed that other drivers had done the same. Amazing.
Nearly 20 years ago I was fortunate enough to have met and become close friends with a veteran of the Great War; two years ago on the 90th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, (July 1st 1916) I retrieved the tape recordings I had made of conversations with Joe Corcoran and wrote a feature for specialist military history magazine The Armourer.
The following is based on that and may be of interest to readers of this blog.
Memories of a Somme Veteran, story drawn from interviews with Joe Corcoran (born 1897) conducted in Coventry in April 1989. Story based on tapes of interviews recorded at the time.
SOMME – Veteran
Joe Corcoran’s voice remains clear and strong as if we were sat across from one another at his old oak table in his Coventry home today and not nearly 20 years ago.
The veteran of the Battle of the Somme was approaching the end of a long life when we met in 1989 in response to a newspaper advertisement Joe had placed seeking Great War comrades from the ‘Cameronians’ – the Scottish Rifles.
It was a long shot and one that, sadly, did not find its mark: at 91 years of age Joe was one of a fast dwindling band of Great War survivors and none of his fellow Cameronians were to be found in Coventry, his home of 70 years.
As a young reporter on the city’s evening newspaper, I spotted the ad and, sensing a story, made contact. A keen student of the history of the Great War – my own grandfather who died long before I was born was also a veteran of battles ranging from Mons through the Somme and Ypres – I yearned to speak a man who had been there.
Joe had and his crystal clear memories spilled out in the stillness of his sitting room in Holbrooks, Coventry, like the unspooling of an old film.
“When I arrived in France in January 1916 at La Bassee and was sent up to my platoon I was not made welcome. I was not a Scot and had not taken part in the earlier battles these men had,” Joe says on the tape in his distinctive native Potteries accent.
“But after the fight at the Quincy Brickstacks I became a hardened soldier and was accepted as a fellow Cameronian.”
Joe had lied about his age when he signed up as a regular soldier in 1915 and was just 18 when he arrived in France – a year younger than regulations allowed men to serve at the front. His secret was discovered but his bravery and steadfastness in battle persuaded his commanding officer to make an exception and he was allowed to stay.
As the youngest solider in his platoon he soon became a popular figure and despite the hardships of frontline trench warfare life – the rats, the lice, the lethal artillery airbursts, the casual deaths of new friends and comrades – his recollections displayed a pride, if not joy, in having served on the Western Front.
“We continued with regular battalion discipline. Stand to at dawn before cleaning up the trenches, checking for casualties and repairing any damage done in the night.
“The German artillery was perfect. Their snipers were perfect. We didn’t even have any trench mortars and no steel helmets until April 1916,” Joe recalled.
When the first Mark 1 Brodie steel helmets were brought up to the front Joe’s platoon was issued with just one. As the youngest soldier he was given the helmet, but first one of the old hands propped it on the end of a rifle and bayonet to test its efficacy.
No sooner had the helmet been raised above the trench’s parapet than a German sniper put a bullet clean through its thin, barely shrapnel-proof, steel.
“I wore that helmet for the rest of my time at the front and was the butt of continual jokes – ‘he’s had a clean hair cut’; ‘it went right through his head’,” Joe said. On the tape there is a hint of a chuckle in Joe’s voice at this point. For a man who was eventually invalided out of the army in February 1917 with shell-shock so severe that he lost the ability to speak for months and left him subject to terrifyingly vivid nightmares for the rest of his life, his capacity to retain scraps of humour from hell was remarkable.
Dark humour was a thread that ran through all of Joe’s stories, told in a matter of fact way with little that could be construed as elaboration of self-glorification. Repeated visits to Joe’s modest home – and the occasional pint or so at his community club where he was considered a true local hero – demonstrated the the consistency of his memory. Months would go by, but when the same story cropped up again the details were always the same, the memory drawn from his own private reservoir of technicolour images as fresh as the days he had witnessed them so long before.
Around Givenchy, where constant shelling and the blowing by both sides of huge mines had turned the battlefield into a moonscape, Joe once got into a dark farce typical of the chaos of trench warfare.
Sent up a front-line sap to the edge of a massive mine crater one night to harass the Germans – whose lines fronted the fringes of the other side of the crater from the British – Joe was told to keep the enemy on his toes by lobbing a few Mills bombs into the crater. The Germans would do the same in retaliation. The explosions were enough to create a racket, but nothing more serious.
“I always thought this was a waste of ammunition and one night chucked a bomb a little too high and a little too far – it landed in the German frontline,” Joe said. “They must have thought a big attack was on and it started up a terrific firefight. Coming back to our lines I was collared by Captain McDonnell who gave me a right talking to, telling me that I wasn’t running the war!”
On another occasion, by now a Number One in a three-man Lewis Gun team after scoring top marks at a machine-gunners course behind the lines at Le Touquet, Joe and one of his gun-team were sent out into No Man’s Land after relieving the Welsh Fusiliers. In the stillness of the night his comrade insisted on chatting despite Joe’s exhortations to zip it.
“Of course the Germans heard his chit-chat and sent four air-burst shells over – two on top of us and two either side. We were buried in earth and when I dug my way out I found my comrade lying there with a big piece of shrapnel sticking out of his back. I carried him back to our lines but the only question the Sergeant-Major had was what had I done with the bolt from my Lewis Gun,” Joe said.
“King’s Regulations I was told – no gun can be left behind that the enemy may make use of. There was nothing for it, I had to go back over the top to collect the bolt.”
After half an hour of so of scrabbling around in the dark Joe found his gun and got back safely, bolt in hand. Other soldiers in similar situations – rescuing comrades under fire – were awarded medals, even Victoria Crosses, Joe said without malice. His reward was to avoid being put on a charge for breaching King’s Regulations.
The clarity and lack of egoistic or self-serving statements were the hallmark of Joe’s recollections. Listening to the tapes again after so many years it is this factual, unemotional retelling of events both horrific and miraculous that is so striking.
Joe had no time for self-pity or even bitterness, although he still held strong opinions.
“Medals didn’t mean much to us then; it was survival. The conditions we lived under were terrible. The old soldiers had two enemies – the Germans and the Top Brass. Some of the orders we were given were ridiculous.”
Joe was a deeply religious young man who always carried a rosary given him by his devout Catholic aunt. Divine intervention saved his life on numerous occasions, he claimed.
He heard his name and as he was arguing with a group of soldiers who denied calling him over a shell dropped on the spot he had being occupying on the trench firing step; going over to a miraculously unscathed crucifix in the ruins of a shelled church, he avoided another blast; a spur of the moment decision to hop over a second-line trench to collect flowers from a field of poppies blooming there to decorate the grave of a friend killed bringing up rations attracted the attention of German artillery observers…the subsequent salvo missed Joe because he returned to the trench at a different spot from where he had left it.
Many veterans of combat have such stories to tell [nb Sigismund Diczbalis, with whom I worked on his Second World War memoirs "The Russian Patriot - A Red Army Soldier's Service for His Motherland and Against Bolshevism" just published by the History Press, tells of avoiding a shell burst during the Prague Uprising of May 1945, because, on a whim, he returned to a room to pick up a statue of the Virgin Mary]; Joe’s had the ring of contemporary conception, not post-war rationalisation.
Ninety years after the Somme among the handful of aged survivors of the Great War there are probably none who went through a battle that has become an icon for the terrible waste of young life.
Talking to Joe in 1989 – and on subsequent occasions up until his death in the summer of 1994 – I can only say that I was left in awe by what he went through as a lad of 18. Joe did not go over the top on July 1st, when 20,000 men died and more than 40,000 were left wounded or missing in action. He and his battalion came up through Albert and Beaumont Hamel on July 2nd, pulling the Lewis Gun along on an eight-feet long barrow mounted with bicycle wheels, passing Canadian artillery batteries and settling down in Death Valley to await their part in the action.
There had already been a lot of fighting by the time Joe went into action mid July around Mametz and High Wood.
“We were sent into Mametz Wood – two or three lines were sent in there to clear the Germans out, but nothing serious really,” Joe said with characteristic understatement.
By July 19th the fighting around High Wood was reaching a culmination and the once thick woods were now a death-strewn collection of skeletal shell-riddled stumps that had been taken and retaken four or five times.
“We of the 19th Brigade were supposed to be the last resort. On the 19th of July we went into the front lines opposite Mametz Wood. At the top of an incline sat High Wood and at the bottom there was a sunken road. We moved up and went over the top along with the Welsh Fusiliers. We went out in extended order and ran smack bang into two German machine guns using enfilade fire [firing from the sides] where one bullet can take out two or three men at a time. Enfilade fire was very unpopular.”
At this point Joe’s memories become a kaleidoscope of images: he found himself covered in mud along with his gun – “We must have had a shell under us” – but otherwise uninjured. He lost contact with his company but eventually, after dodging German artillery running and jumping from shell hole to shell hole, dropped into a hole holding 13 men and an officer from his regiment, to whom he could report.
With German shells falling all around and a fierce fight going on in and around High Wood, the officer said there was a desperate need to bring up ammunition from the sunken road behind them.
The artillery barrage was so intense that to minimise losses, the officer instructed the men to make the dash down the slope in groups of five at a time. The men did as told and began bringing up ammunition as the German shells did their dreadful work.
“We had lost seven and another five went out. We lost three out of that five. We did another run and did not lose so many that time. We had managed to bring up most of the ammo from where it had been stored in recesses of the sunken road. There were three of us left. The officer looked at us and said: ‘We had better go once more; we must do our best.’ We did a roll call back at the sunken road and it was just me and the officer,” Joe said.
“The officer looked at me and promised that if we got through this final run he would write up a report on the good job I had done. ‘You may be rewarded,’ he told me. The Germans put a curtain of fire across it and opened up with the heavy stuff. It was clear a counter-attack was coming. The officer said we may just get through the barrage during a lull. I was 18 and had a bit of running power in me; the officer was in his 30s and was lagging 10 yards behind me. Two shells dropped. One landed at the officer’s feet, so I knew I was alone. The other blew me over.”
When Joe came to he was shaking all over and his pockets had been rifled. He realised he must have been left for dead and eventually learned that he had been lying unconcious for two days. Wandering around a now silent battlefield, in the sunken road he found a corpse draped over a Lewis Gun, but from the brass buttons on the uniform knew it was not a Cameronian – which as a light infantry regiment wore black buttons. Shell-shocked and “one the point of tears” he eventually found a survivor of his regiment – from another gun team who was distraught after having lost a brother in the fight – and was sent back for a 48 hour rest after seeing a doctor.
The regiment and 19th Brigade were pulled out to be brought up to strength, such had been the casualties suffered during the battle, Joe recalled.
After a period behind the lines Joe was sent back to the front and served in France until December 1916 when another shell blast put him in hospital suffering shock so severe that he lost both his memory and ability to speak. Transferred to hospital in back home in ‘Blighty’ at the end of the month, Joe passed his 19th birthday on December 30 1916 fast asleep aboard a hospital train bound for Glasgow.
His shell-shock was so severe that doctors initially did not believe his symptoms and thought he was “swinging the lead” – as Joe put it – to avoid a return to active service. To test their theory the doctors pulled out three of his teeth without anaesthetic to see if he would scream. He did not. Joe was eventually given a medical discharge in February 1917 and although he eventually recovered both voice and memory, he remained subject withdrawn and subject to nervous episodes for many years.
Joe Corcoran became a engineering draughtsman and was involved in the early development of the Coventry car industry – working with many of the names that subsequently became famous inb the British car industry. Despite his severe shell-shock and a major stomach operation in his 40s, he outlived all of them and died in 1994 aged 96.
It was my privilege to have known Joe for the last five years of his life – during which time we became good friends. Shortly after his death I had a vivid dream in which I found him packing up boxes in the attic of his house. In the dream he turned to me and handed me a war-time searchlight, saying: ‘This is for you’. I like to think that this remarkable man’s spirit is still helping light my way.
