October 10, 2025 • 35 mins
We return to the memories of WW1 veteran Malcolm Vyvyan MC, who served with 96th Siege Battery Royal Garrison Artillery on the Western Front from 1916, and then latterly the Royal Flying Corps and Royal Air Force. We follow him from the Somme to Arras, until he leaves his Battery for flying training in 1918.
The previous episode covering Malcolm's memoirs: A Siege Battery Gunner.
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Episode Transcript
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SPEAKER_00 (00:10):
At the end of season eight of the Old Front Line, we
featured some bonus episodes,one of which looked at the
memoirs of Great War veteranMalcolm Vivian.
Malcolm was a fascinating andengaging man, and we became good
friends in the mid to lateeighties just as I was about to
go to university.
(00:32):
Living in Saltash in Cornwalland coming from what he always
said was the oldest Cornishfamily, the Vivians, I went to
see him on many occasions, andhe wrote to me frequently, often
pages and pages detailing hismemoirs.
Sometimes letters would cometwo, three, four times a week.
(00:55):
Now the extracts from what hesent me that I included in that
previous podcast, and I'll put alink to it in the show notes for
this episode, seemed to hit abit of a chord with you the
listeners, and many of you askedif I'd ever thought about
turning his letters and accountsinto a book.
I mean that would be wonderful,but publishing is a bit of a
(01:20):
hard world right now,particularly stuff to do with
the Great War, and as I've saida few times of late, there is
this thing called the oldfrontline podcast that gets in
the way of these kind of things.
But of course what the podcastenables me to do is to take
material like that and quickly,more readily share it with an
(01:42):
audience like yourselves.
So considering how popular thatepisode was, what I've done is
to go back into that materialthat I have for Malcolm Vivian,
and I've made another selectionfrom it.
And again, this is only a smallpart of what he sent me and what
(02:03):
he told me over the years that Iknew him, so I'm sure it is
something that we will return toagain in an episode like this
for the podcast.
Now one of the things thatMalcolm would often talk to me
about was how heavy artillerywas used.
Now, on one level, talking to aveteran, you're getting an
(02:24):
insight into their experiences,where they came from, what they
saw, what they went through.
But for someone like Malcolm, hewas kind of on a slightly
different level.
Being an officer and ending thewar as a major, he saw the war
in very different ways.
His responsibilities were verydifferent to those of ordinary
soldiers, and one thing that hehad to be on top of was how they
(02:49):
used the technology that he hadin his unit to fight their war,
which were siege guns as part ofa siege battery of the Royal
Garrison artillery.
And Malcolm was unusual reallyin that because when I reflect
on this, he not only wanted meto understand his own
experiences, he wanted me todevelop a wider knowledge and
(03:12):
understanding of the Great Waras a whole, and where artillery,
particularly heavy artillery,fitted into that, and what I
came to learn, not just fromhim, but from wider research is
how important artillery is inthose battles of the First World
War on the Western Front, indeedon any front.
(03:34):
So I'm forever grateful reallyto veterans like him who taught
me so much.
So to give you a bit of anunderstanding of what I mean,
this is an extract from one ofthe letters where he talks about
the use of heavy guns in a siegebattery of the Royal Garrison
(03:55):
artillery.
In theory a gun was absolutelycorrect and every round fired at
the same range and bearingshould burst in the same hole.
As a check and a guide toranging, one hundred rounds were
fired, and the distance betweenthe nearest and the furthest
burst measured.
This in yardage or equivalentdegrees and minutes was the
(04:18):
hundred percent zone.
The aim was to find when rangingthe correct range by an
equivalent number of overs andshorts on the target.
The assumption became that insuch a case half of the rounds
would be in the middle of thisbracket and hit the target.
If the first round was a plus,you fired the next at the short
end of the bracket, if this wasa short, you halved the
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difference.
This process was continued tillyou were sure you were hitting.
With an accurate gun like the9.2 inch howitzer, if well
sighted and well laid, you couldshorten the procedure by making
exact corrections.
So what he then went on to dowas to explain a bit more what
parameters affected the use ofartillery.
(05:02):
The flight of the shell wasaffected by strength and
direction of the wind,barometric pressure, the number
of rounds fired from each gunand its consequent barrel wear,
temperature of the air andtemperature of the cartridge
store, and these had to bechecked at intervals and
compensations made to the rangeand bearing of the gun.
(05:25):
Malcolm went on to say for aforward observation officer, a
nine point two inch howitzer wasa delightful gun to range on a
target from a trench or othervantage point.
If the day was quiet you mighthear the gun fire, then hear it
passing overhead and so keepyour head down till just before
it was due to burst, and ofcourse such a big shell had a
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big burst easy to observe.
You always, if possible, whenranging from an open trench or
point changed your position toavoid snipers frequently.
My brother, also a forwardobserver, was shot through the
hand, a very close thing.
Malcolm's Siege Battery, theninety sixth Siege Battery,
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Royal Garrison Artillery, formedfrom the Glamorganshire
Territorial Force unit of theRGA, came to France just a few
months before the Battle of theSomme, and that became his first
battle.
I've spoken about his time inthe observation post at Hebuturn
in an earlier podcast, but it'sworth just repeating here, and
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one of the things he sent mewhile we were on this subject,
discussing it through lettersand on the telephone, he said
I'll send you my map, and hesent through the post an
original trench map that he'dused in that dugout at Hebuturn,
observing on the battlefieldaround Gormacore, still covered
in places in some mud and themarkings that he made in
(06:52):
nineteen sixteen.
The map was in poor conditionbecause of its age, and a
miracle really that he'd keptit.
But in those days the WesternFront Association had a
cartographer who was aprofessional cartographer, and I
sent it to her and she verykindly repaired the map, and the
map went back eventually toMalcolm, and he was delighted
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with the repairs and often wouldshow it to people who came round
to see him.
But he describes this time inthe OP at Hebutern in this
account.
The trench system started justby Hebutern Church, which as I
left the trenches on the nightof the first of July after six
days in the observation post wasblazing fiercely.
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An infantry corporal heldbattalion roll call, seventeen
privates answered.
Of course, a lot more driftedback later.
A London Rifle Brigade privatewas building a fire to heat a
cup of tea, a shell burst besidehim.
He would never drink that tea.
Another LRB man asked if I'dseen a private about, a man that
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was his brother.
What I have never seenchronicled was that on the
evening I had seen Germansoldiers jump out of their front
line trenches at Gormacor andstart collecting the wounded.
A padre took some of our ladsout with stretchers, no man's
land was wide, but there was nofraternization.
One day a raw field artillerylieutenant stumbled into our
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observation post dugout whichwas opposite Gormacore, very
much worse for wear, and saidhis OP had been blown in, and
his major and telephonists wereburied.
We gave him a mammoth whiskey inthe usual chipped enamel mug,
and Sergeant Parsons and myselfwent along the trench with him.
One look at the front told usthere was no way in there.
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It was completely sealed withheavy timbers.
The Royal Field ArtilleryLieutenant said there was an
emergency shaft opening into theopen near our wire.
So there was, and a few feetdown the shaft was bisected by a
sheet of corrugated iron, jammedtight and on one side was a
gunner struck unconscious.
Being young and thin and tall, Iwas able to wriggle head first
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into the shaft and get my handsunder his armpits.
The others, helped by twoinfantrymen, pulled my legs and
eventually he shot out like acork from a bottle, very shell
shocked.
We put him on the firestep.
Another man come up, but he wasbig and heavy, and I couldn't
move him.
Eventually a medical officercame up and said he was dead.
(09:25):
The groans of the others trappedhad ceased, so we gave up.
By this time other men from theRFA battery had arrived, so we
left them to it.
One remarkable thing was theGermans hadn't machine gunned
us.
I expect our barrage had madethem keep their heads down.
Malcolm spent a long time inthat dugout at the opening stage
of the Battle of the Somme, andhe witnessed the advance of the
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fifty sixth London Division.
It was a division that he wouldcome across quite a lot in his
war, both on the Somme and laterat Arras, and part of his unit's
target, the part of the batterythat he was commanding, dropping
these 9.2 inch shells onto theGerman positions, was lobbying
those shells not into the frontline, not into even the support
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or reserve line, but positionsbeyond that, including a place
called Rossignol Wood,Nightingale Wood.
And in the late 1980s, on one ofmy trips out there, I took a
copy of his map where he'dmarked some of the targets on
there, and I went to RossignolWood and discovered the shell
craters from his shells.
(10:30):
Now that's something thatnormally a gunner officer never
gets to see, and it took him 70odd years to see them, but I
took some photographs of thesequite deep depressions where the
shells had exploded within thewood.
9.2 inch shells are quite bigand they form quite a big
crater, and there all thosedecades later, and they're
probably still there today, wasthe evidence of his gunfire from
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his siege guns from ninety sixsiege battery directed by him in
the opening stage of the Battleof the Somme in nineteen
sixteen.
Arras, the Battle of Arras inApril and May of nineteen
seventeen was a big part ofMalcolm Vivian's war and a big
part of what we alwaysdiscussed.
In the previous account, theprevious podcast episode I did
(11:16):
on his memoirs, I described howhe got ready for the ninth of
april nineteen seventeen, theopening stage of the Arras
battlefield and the attack thatwas made that day, and he went
into the observation postoverlooking the battlefield
where that division that he'dsupported on the first day of
the Somme, the 56th LondonDivision, that's where they were
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about to go into action.
But later on, as the battleprogressed, they stayed in that
sector and they worked more andmore to try and take out targets
on the main Hindenburg line,particularly bunkers.
His unit became particularlyproficient in this bunker
busting.
And he went forward on manyoccasions with his Ford
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observation team, which would behim and a number of signallers,
ordinary gunners, perhaps a fewbombatiers, who would then go
forward and they'd run thesignals for him while he spotted
for the guns.
And one particular incidentwhich we're gonna hear about now
was in front of the Hindenburgline, close to where Rookery and
Cuckoo Passage Cemeteries aretoday.
(12:21):
There's a bit of a sunken lanethere and that's where this
episode takes place.
It's on the high ground abovethe village of Eninel, Heninel.
So this is how Malcolm recalledthat incident.
In may nineteen seventeen I wasobserving from the lip of a
sunken lane and registering ontrench junctions in the
Hindenburg line.
Down in the lane was SergeantParsons and two linesmen,
(12:44):
brewing tea.
It was early morning and the sunwas low in the east.
I was abominably careless.
I should have known better, butthe sun was obviously reflected
from the lens of my binoculars.
Parsons called out Char up, sir.
I took a step down and reachedfor the mug.
It was knocked out of my hand bya shower of clods of earth.
(13:06):
There was a whiz and a crash,and on the lip of the lane,
where my head had been a secondbefore, was a smoking blackened
crater, where a whizbang hadgone off.
With a gun, the velocity of theshell was greater than the speed
of sound, so the shell arrivedbefore the whine of its flight
was heard.
We hopped it down the lane veryquickly before the next salvo.
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One second saved us fromcomplete decapitation, and it
would have been my own fault forgross carelessness.
If your observation posts weredirectly in the line of flight,
gun target, pences and shorts,rights and lefts were obvious.
If, however, you're observing ofnecessity from an angle to the
line of flight, it was not easy,as range and direction tended to
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be confused.
It was a help to study theground to mark the bearing of
any prominent object to thetarget.
No thrill in life equaled minewhen I knew we were on target,
particularly if it was a machinegun emplacement.
And Malcolm mentioned thatbecause he'd seen many attacks
in the Battle of the Somme,where men had gone forward into
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no man's land and been mown downby those machine guns, and he
did, as he often said to me, asmuch as possible to try and
eliminate those machine guns forthe infantry so that wouldn't
happen again.
But he went on to talk about thekind of cooperation that the
artillery did with the war inthe air, something we touched on
in the series that we did aboutthe war in the air, the Royal
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Flying Corps and the RAF on theWestern Front.
And this is Malcolm's memoriesof counter battery work
involving cooperation with theair services.
Counter battery work.
We did a lot of shelling ofGerman batteries, the fall of
each round being plotted by theobserver rear gunner in a
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cooperation mostly with No.
eight or number sixteensquadrons Royal Flying Corps,
flying at first B two Cs, thenRE eight or AW machines based at
Bellevue or Mondicor.
The observer would transmitmessages to us, we had a
wireless mast and three RoyalFlying Corps signallers attached
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to us.
We could only communicate withthe plane by putting strips of
linear material on the ground,each with its own meaning.
The aircraft after calling uswould fly backwards and
forwards, battery target.
It used a clock code to indicatethe position of each of our
bursts, A meaning twenty fiveyards, then one for one o'clock,
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etc.
We made the necessarycorrections, fired again, waited
for the observer's report.
These chut were generally verysuccessful, but the slow
observation planes were atempting target for the fast
German scout planes, especiallythe albatross.
On the other hand, a really goodobserver, with his machine gun,
(16:01):
could put up a fire defence.
Once our position had not yetbeen spotted, we were doing a
shoot when a German recce planecame along.
Not wanting to disclose ourposition, we did not fire twice
when the observer was waitingfor the fall of our shell.
Fed up he wired Fed up C one.
C one meant going home.
(16:21):
That afternoon I was in thecommand post dugout, the major
was away, when a Royal FlyingCorps tender stopped on the road
and two RFC officers,Lieutenants Burund and Howes,
came in and saluted.
Then they said they'd been sentup to apologise for the C one.
They hadn't got gas masks inthat position, and we used to be
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shelled most afternoons for atleast half an hour, having been
located by mixed HE and gasshells.
Fortunately the dugout was wellgas proofed with door blankets,
so the two RFC officers weresafe.
One of the things that I'dlearned fairly early on from
talking to Malcolm about his ownlife and his upbringing, that
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his mother was American, andwhen I looked back on it, I
realised that kind of set himapart in many ways.
The influence of an Americanmother with a different
philosophy to people fromBritain, I think changed him in
all kinds of ways.
I mean he was from a wealthyfamily, privately educated, and
he was at Oxford when the warbegan in August 1914, but he had
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a different attitude to so manydifferent things, and would
often tell me that the wartaught him the value of people
and that despite his upbringinghe never took anything for
granted because he learned fromhis men how lucky he was, and I
think his mother had also givenhim a bit of a sense of that as
well.
And I think it's one of thereasons he never said this, but
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he obviously got on very wellwith the ordinary soldiers in
his unit, his sergeant, he'sbombardiers, he's signallers,
he's linesmen, and I thinkthat's because he treated them
in a very different way, perhapsto some of the other officers.
And one of the other things thatI got to learn about him was
that he wasn't afraid to poke afinger at authority, as this
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tale that he related tells us.
There was a brigadier generalRoyal Artillery called KK Knapp.
He had a great reputation as athruster for leading from the
front, going to observationposts and making battery visits
on his own.
You know my indignation at theignorance of past senior
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officers of the potentialvulnerability of a nine point
two inch howitzer battery, whileafter a sticky do on the lower
Somme area, we had moved up intoKnapp's command area.
I stood an officer, two gunnersand two signallers down at once
to get some sleep, and put thecooks on to get the meals ready
while everybody else got on withworking on the guns, and
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breaking off for dinner when itwas all done, and then getting
on with the remounting of theguns, preparing for any action.
By the time they'd finished,everyone was absolutely all in.
The linesman had run a line togroup headquarters, and then I
stood everyone down for somesleep.
The posted officer took over asduty officer, and the signal as
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manned the telephone, and theothers became sentry and gas
alert man.
There was of course lots to bedone like building cartridge
shelters, but we were ready foraction.
Then I saw Knapp so reported tohim, and he started to tear me
off a strip.
I let him have his say and thensaid Excuse me, sir, everything
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you say is of course necessary,but there is something much more
necessary.
He said what?
So I said be ready for immediateaction, but not efficient action
until the men have had somerest.
Tired they could easily drop afuse shell, or a gun layer can
make an error in range andbearing, and then I went on
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about the work involved inmoving a nine point two inch
battery.
He said show me, so we examinedthe guns.
He probably knew, of course,while I made a running
commentary, adding If you'd behere in two days, you'd find
everything apple pie.
He came back in three days, waspleased with everything, chatted
to the gun detachments who wereof course old hands.
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At the end he said Good and Isaid, Can we offer you some tea,
sir?
But I'm afraid it will be in anenamel mug and taste strongly of
chlorine, not brigades bonechina.
He said, I'm well accustomed tothe flavour of chlorinated tea
in an enamel mug.
I said, Yes, I know that, sir.
He gave me a cheerful smile andsaid I'll be seeing you.
(20:45):
When the major got back he saidAt it again, I hear.
I said what?
He said ticking off brigadiers.
They are most amused about thetea and mug.
The general said you've got agood battery there.
A few days later I was in theobservation post when Nat
wearing his red staff hat camedown the dugout steps and said
What have you got to show me,Vivian?
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So we climbed the ladder to theobservation post chamber, and I
pointed out spots of interest,including a small mound,
obviously a machine gunfortress, which interested him a
lot.
He said, Is there any way I canget closer to look at it?
Yes, there's a short trench,very little used as the parapet
is too low, and it's enfiladedby a very accurate sniper.
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Show me, Knapp said.
I said, Certainly, but please dome a favour, sir.
Do you know what every man inthe trench said when you passed
by in your red staff hat?
Christ, a bleeding brigadier.
If you wear that hat in thetrench, some German will spot
it, and they'll throw everythingthey've got at us, which I shall
find most distasteful.
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Please take one of thetelephonist steel helmets, which
he did, and we explored thetrench, me telling him to keep
low repeatedly, and he saw whathe wanted.
We returned to the OP, hechanged hats, and left, refusing
my helmet.
I met him a few days later, butwhen he was with an infantry
colonel and his intelligenceofficer, so I crouched into the
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side of the trench, but hecaught my eye, winked, and
touched the edge of his tin hatthat he was wearing.
Sadly, I never saw him again.
Now the man in that story thatMalcolm describes is a very
interesting character.
He's Brigadier General KempsterKnapp, CMG, who had served with
a mountain battery of the RoyalGarrison Artillery and come to
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France in December of nineteenfourteen.
During the war he was mentioneddispatches on several occasions
and decorated with theDistinguished Service Medal and
American decoration by theAmerican Expeditionary Force,
the AEF for supporting their menwith his artillery in the
battles on the Hindenburg linein September and October of
nineteen eighteen.
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It was said that General Knappproved of invaluable assistance
to our infantry by theAmericans.
He showed himself anindefatigable worker, a
brilliant tactician, and a loyalfriend to us.
Knapp later became deputylieutenant of Northamptonshire
and stayed on in the regulararmy after the war, and his son
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John also became a gunner, thecommander of a mountain battery,
and he was killed in Burma innineteen forty five while
commanding thirty third MountainBattery Royal Artillery and is
commemorated on the RangoonMemorial.
And what I found with talking toMalcolm is that all these kind
of characters would come up inhis conversations, and I would
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look them up and find out whathappened to them and where they
went, and all these kind ofconnections, those layers that I
often talk about in this FirstWorld War history, I really
began to kind of understand whatthat meant because everything,
one way or another, seemed to beinterconnected.
Now later on in 1917, afterArras, his unit moved up to the
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area near Toulons, just to thesouth of what was known as the
Luz Salian, which was the linethat was established after the
Battle of Luz in September andOctober of 1915, with a kind of
salient that existed thatincorporated the village of Luz
and the Bethune Lens Roads tothe south, went out towards the
main road that ran from Lens upto Hullock.
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Hullock was still in Germanhands, and the Hohenzollern
Redoubt to the north was alsostill in German hands, forming
this kind of salient thatBritish troops sat in, and unit
after unit kind of passedthrough there.
But in 1917, this was a sectorthat had been held by the 46th
North Midland Division, who'dbeen on Malcolm's flank in the
Battle of Gommercore on thefirst day of the Battle of the
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Somme, and now the CanadianCorps had moved in here with a
new commander, Arthur Curry, whohad taken over after Bing had
been promoted following thecapture of Vimy Ridge in April
of 1917, and the Canadians nowmoved into this sector near Lens
to take part in an attack onHill 70.
And it was during this operationthat I discovered that Malcolm
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had been awarded a militarycross for his bravery.
And it took me quite a while toget out of him that he had been
awarded the MC.
And on one of the trips, when Iwent up to see him, one of the
early trips, I asked him abouthis medals, and he kind of
rummaged around in a drawer andgot this kind of box of medals
out, which was his MC, whichwasn't engraved.
(25:27):
He saw me looking at the back ofit and asked me what I was
doing, and I said, Well,sometimes people like yourself
had your MC engraved, and hesaid, No, I didn't bother with
that.
And then he saw me looking roundthe edges, the rims of his
British War and Victory Medal,and he said, Why are you looking
there?
I said, Well your namesinscribed on this, and he'd had
them all those years, and hedidn't even realise they were
named, and then there was hisSecond World War medals in there
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which also included the AfricaStar.
Now after I pressed him a littlebit, he finally sent me the
details of the award of hismilitary cross, which happened
when they were attached to theCanadian Corps, taking part in
these Hill 70 operations in thesummer of nineteen seventeen.
And this is his officialcitation.
His MC when it was gazetted,there is no citation listed, but
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he had the originalrecommendation that he loaned
me, and this is what it said onit.
For conspicuous gallantry anddevotion to duty.
When his battery was under anintense hostile bombardment, he
rushed out into the open toextinguish a pile of burning
cartridges, and succeeded indoing so, although high
explosive shells were burstingwithin six yards of him, and he
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was completely blackened withsmoke and burning debris.
His complete disregard ofpersonal safety undoubtedly
saved the emplacement from beingdestroyed.
He added to this, this is takenfrom the official
recommendation.
It isn't strictly true.
What really happened was thatbehind each gun were shells
fused with a new 106 fuse,instantaneous action.
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And if these went up, so wouldthe guns.
The attack on Hill seventy bythe Canadian infantry was time
for the next day, and everypossible gun was needed for the
wire cutting.
The attack was a completesuccess with light casualties,
and I can only suppose that theCanadians were so pleased with
our work that they gave me animmediate gong.
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Just fancy, that was sixty eightyears ago.
I'm not so quick on my feet now.
Like many of the veterans that Iinterviewed, whether it was
about their war or medals thatthey'd been awarded, they always
played that down.
They never pushed themselvesforward, they were not those
kind of men, and many of them,including Malcolm, always said
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to me that there were many thatthey'd seen who'd not survive
the war.
They were the ones that reallydeserved these medals, not them.
That was a common phrase, thatwas a common idea expressed by
many of these veterans that Iinterviewed.
And I remember being a youngstudent then I wrote back to him
and told him that it was verybrave what he'd done, and he
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replied You say my militarycross action was very brave.
It wasn't, you know.
It was just a job of work.
One's sternest critic mustalways be oneself.
What other people may think, youhave to live with yourself
throughout the years.
In that case, every possibleeffort had to be made to help
the infantry attack and savelives by efficient wire cutting,
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so every possible gun had to bekept in action.
It was just as simple as that.
When you've seen lines of men inthe words of their favourite
song hanging on the old barbedwire, you don't argue but act.
And during one of our kind offollow up conversations, either
at his house or down the puboften when I went to see him
(28:47):
we'd go down to a riverside puband have lunch there together
and talk things over.
He mentioned the fact that he'dbeen in an observation post at
Serre on the thirteenth ofnovember nineteen sixteen, when
the Hull Powell's battalions hadmade their attack on the village
right at that end phase of theBattle of the Somme, and he'd
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seen them go out into no man'sland, it had rained heavily, the
conditions were poor, they'dliterally got stuck in the mud,
but the machine guns had notbeen silenced by the barrage,
the barrage had not done itsjob, and they played merry hell
on the men of those hullbattalions and chopped them down
in no man's land, and it was asight that he never forgot, and
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he told me that when the batteryposition came under fire, they
all went down into dugouts thatthey'd prepared, and he was
peeking out and he could see theGerman shells dropping closer
and closer to the guns andcloser to the piles of shells
stacked alongside them ready forthe bombardment, and he knew
that if they got hit the gunswould be wiped out, but he said
(29:53):
he also had a flashback toSayer, flashback to those men
chopped down in no man's land bymachine gun fire.
And that spurred him up out ofthe dugout, out of safety, to
act, as he said, not to sitthere and think about it, but to
do something about the situationthat he was in.
And I think again that is partlydue to his background.
(30:14):
Growing up in the countryside,being a devotee of rugby and
team games, understanding whatteamwork was all about, and also
having that American mother thatI think gave him a different
view of the world, made him aman apart, I think, to some of
those that he served with.
And whenever I tried to suggestthings like that, of course,
(30:35):
again, he would play them down.
After a winter in the EapSalient, Malcolm's unit had been
there giving fire support to theunits in that winter of nineteen
seventeen eighteen, he'd made adecision to put in for a
transfer to the Royal FlyingCorps.
He'd realized in the work thatthey'd done with the RFC how
important the war in the airwas.
(30:57):
He was always proud of his timewith the RFC.
First trained as an observer andthen as a pilot, and then the
war ended before he had a chanceto fly in combat.
And later in the Second WorldWar, when he went off to take
command of the anti-aircraftdefences at Suez as an officer
in the Royal Artillery, he veryproudly wore his RFC wings on
(31:19):
his uniform, and I've got aphotograph of him which I'll use
for this podcast episode whereyou can clearly see his old RFC
wings on there.
But this period as nineteeneighteen dawned, this was the
end of his time on the WesternFront, and perhaps it's a good
point to end this latest episodeof his memoirs.
(31:42):
I always remember one night infebruary nineteen eighteen after
I decided I wanted to fly andapplied for a second to the
Royal Flying Corps, and had beensuccessful.
We were up in the salient, Isaid goodbye to the remaining
Glamorgans in the siege battery,and stood on the duckboards
waiting for my transport.
It was a marvellous night, pitchblack with all the stars in
(32:06):
creation blazing out in thegreat firmament of heaven.
I'd stood and watched them on somany nights, a Ryan wheeling
across the sky and revolving onhis own orbit.
The night was peaceful, anoccasional crump of shells, the
very lights rising and fallingin the line, with the rattle of
(32:28):
a machine gun followed by theslower stutter of a spandau.
I could have howled.
It was the only life I knew.
Why was I leaving it?
I would have given anything inthose moments to reverse my
decision.
But that was the end of his warin France and Flanders.
Perhaps that decision saved hislife, who knows?
(32:50):
And as I've looked this weekthrough those letters of his
written in Biro on blue writingpaper mostly, tucked inside
their envelopes with long out ofdate stamps showing our late
Queen, and many of them fromforty years ago now.
It's taking me back to that timewhen I travelled around, meeting
(33:12):
men, incredible men like MalcolmVivian.
Some I knew briefly, only metonce.
Others came to be close friendslike Malcolm, a man at the end
of his life in some ways, and methen at the beginning of my
adult life.
I think he saw a lot of himselfin me, perhaps that's how we and
(33:34):
why we got along, and he alwaysencouraged me in all kinds of
ways.
He was a good teacher, and notjust about the war.
I learned a lot about life andpeople from him and many other
veterans besides, things that Icarried with me into the
pathways of my own travelsaround the world, and in many
ways still carry.
(33:54):
Malcolm and men like him arepart of my conscience.
They're my moral compass.
They enrich my life, enrich myknowledge of a war that was
then, all those years ago,largely forgotten, and all these
decades later, they have enabledme to tell you the stories like
(34:15):
this, knowing that many of younever got a chance to meet
veterans like Malcolm Vivian.
But more than that, Malcolm andso many other names I could
mention, they walk with me inthe shadows of that past, walk
with me still.
Each time I return to thatlandscape, their spirits form
(34:36):
part of one of those many layersthat we find there.
They exist within those layers,within the culture of those
battlefields, within the veryheart of all that we find along
that old front line.
(34:59):
You've been listening to anepisode of the Old Frontline
with me, military historian PaulReed.
You can follow me on Twitter atSomcore, you can follow the
podcast at OldFrontline Pod.
Check out the website atoldfrontline.co.uk where you'll
find lots of podcast extras andphotographs and links to books
that are mentioned in thepodcast.
(35:20):
And if you feel like supportingus, you can go to our Patreon
page, patreon.com slasholdfrontline, or support us on
buymea coffee atbuymeacoffee.comslash
oldfrontline.
Links to all of these are on ourwebsites.
Thanks for listening, and we'llsee you again soon.
At the end of season eight of the Old Front Line, we
featured some bonus episodes,one of which looked at the
memoirs of Great War veteranMalcolm Vivian.
Malcolm was a fascinating andengaging man, and we became good
friends in the mid to lateeighties just as I was about to
go to university.
(00:32):
Living in Saltash in Cornwalland coming from what he always
said was the oldest Cornishfamily, the Vivians, I went to
see him on many occasions, andhe wrote to me frequently, often
pages and pages detailing hismemoirs.
Sometimes letters would cometwo, three, four times a week.
(00:55):
Now the extracts from what hesent me that I included in that
previous podcast, and I'll put alink to it in the show notes for
this episode, seemed to hit abit of a chord with you the
listeners, and many of you askedif I'd ever thought about
turning his letters and accountsinto a book.
I mean that would be wonderful,but publishing is a bit of a
(01:20):
hard world right now,particularly stuff to do with
the Great War, and as I've saida few times of late, there is
this thing called the oldfrontline podcast that gets in
the way of these kind of things.
But of course what the podcastenables me to do is to take
material like that and quickly,more readily share it with an
(01:42):
audience like yourselves.
So considering how popular thatepisode was, what I've done is
to go back into that materialthat I have for Malcolm Vivian,
and I've made another selectionfrom it.
And again, this is only a smallpart of what he sent me and what
(02:03):
he told me over the years that Iknew him, so I'm sure it is
something that we will return toagain in an episode like this
for the podcast.
Now one of the things thatMalcolm would often talk to me
about was how heavy artillerywas used.
Now, on one level, talking to aveteran, you're getting an
(02:24):
insight into their experiences,where they came from, what they
saw, what they went through.
But for someone like Malcolm, hewas kind of on a slightly
different level.
Being an officer and ending thewar as a major, he saw the war
in very different ways.
His responsibilities were verydifferent to those of ordinary
soldiers, and one thing that hehad to be on top of was how they
(02:49):
used the technology that he hadin his unit to fight their war,
which were siege guns as part ofa siege battery of the Royal
Garrison artillery.
And Malcolm was unusual reallyin that because when I reflect
on this, he not only wanted meto understand his own
experiences, he wanted me todevelop a wider knowledge and
(03:12):
understanding of the Great Waras a whole, and where artillery,
particularly heavy artillery,fitted into that, and what I
came to learn, not just fromhim, but from wider research is
how important artillery is inthose battles of the First World
War on the Western Front, indeedon any front.
(03:34):
So I'm forever grateful reallyto veterans like him who taught
me so much.
So to give you a bit of anunderstanding of what I mean,
this is an extract from one ofthe letters where he talks about
the use of heavy guns in a siegebattery of the Royal Garrison
(03:55):
artillery.
In theory a gun was absolutelycorrect and every round fired at
the same range and bearingshould burst in the same hole.
As a check and a guide toranging, one hundred rounds were
fired, and the distance betweenthe nearest and the furthest
burst measured.
This in yardage or equivalentdegrees and minutes was the
(04:18):
hundred percent zone.
The aim was to find when rangingthe correct range by an
equivalent number of overs andshorts on the target.
The assumption became that insuch a case half of the rounds
would be in the middle of thisbracket and hit the target.
If the first round was a plus,you fired the next at the short
end of the bracket, if this wasa short, you halved the
(04:40):
difference.
This process was continued tillyou were sure you were hitting.
With an accurate gun like the9.2 inch howitzer, if well
sighted and well laid, you couldshorten the procedure by making
exact corrections.
So what he then went on to dowas to explain a bit more what
parameters affected the use ofartillery.
(05:02):
The flight of the shell wasaffected by strength and
direction of the wind,barometric pressure, the number
of rounds fired from each gunand its consequent barrel wear,
temperature of the air andtemperature of the cartridge
store, and these had to bechecked at intervals and
compensations made to the rangeand bearing of the gun.
(05:25):
Malcolm went on to say for aforward observation officer, a
nine point two inch howitzer wasa delightful gun to range on a
target from a trench or othervantage point.
If the day was quiet you mighthear the gun fire, then hear it
passing overhead and so keepyour head down till just before
it was due to burst, and ofcourse such a big shell had a
(05:46):
big burst easy to observe.
You always, if possible, whenranging from an open trench or
point changed your position toavoid snipers frequently.
My brother, also a forwardobserver, was shot through the
hand, a very close thing.
Malcolm's Siege Battery, theninety sixth Siege Battery,
(06:07):
Royal Garrison Artillery, formedfrom the Glamorganshire
Territorial Force unit of theRGA, came to France just a few
months before the Battle of theSomme, and that became his first
battle.
I've spoken about his time inthe observation post at Hebuturn
in an earlier podcast, but it'sworth just repeating here, and
(06:29):
one of the things he sent mewhile we were on this subject,
discussing it through lettersand on the telephone, he said
I'll send you my map, and hesent through the post an
original trench map that he'dused in that dugout at Hebuturn,
observing on the battlefieldaround Gormacore, still covered
in places in some mud and themarkings that he made in
(06:52):
nineteen sixteen.
The map was in poor conditionbecause of its age, and a
miracle really that he'd keptit.
But in those days the WesternFront Association had a
cartographer who was aprofessional cartographer, and I
sent it to her and she verykindly repaired the map, and the
map went back eventually toMalcolm, and he was delighted
(07:14):
with the repairs and often wouldshow it to people who came round
to see him.
But he describes this time inthe OP at Hebutern in this
account.
The trench system started justby Hebutern Church, which as I
left the trenches on the nightof the first of July after six
days in the observation post wasblazing fiercely.
(07:35):
An infantry corporal heldbattalion roll call, seventeen
privates answered.
Of course, a lot more driftedback later.
A London Rifle Brigade privatewas building a fire to heat a
cup of tea, a shell burst besidehim.
He would never drink that tea.
Another LRB man asked if I'dseen a private about, a man that
(07:56):
was his brother.
What I have never seenchronicled was that on the
evening I had seen Germansoldiers jump out of their front
line trenches at Gormacor andstart collecting the wounded.
A padre took some of our ladsout with stretchers, no man's
land was wide, but there was nofraternization.
One day a raw field artillerylieutenant stumbled into our
(08:18):
observation post dugout whichwas opposite Gormacore, very
much worse for wear, and saidhis OP had been blown in, and
his major and telephonists wereburied.
We gave him a mammoth whiskey inthe usual chipped enamel mug,
and Sergeant Parsons and myselfwent along the trench with him.
One look at the front told usthere was no way in there.
(08:41):
It was completely sealed withheavy timbers.
The Royal Field ArtilleryLieutenant said there was an
emergency shaft opening into theopen near our wire.
So there was, and a few feetdown the shaft was bisected by a
sheet of corrugated iron, jammedtight and on one side was a
gunner struck unconscious.
Being young and thin and tall, Iwas able to wriggle head first
(09:04):
into the shaft and get my handsunder his armpits.
The others, helped by twoinfantrymen, pulled my legs and
eventually he shot out like acork from a bottle, very shell
shocked.
We put him on the firestep.
Another man come up, but he wasbig and heavy, and I couldn't
move him.
Eventually a medical officercame up and said he was dead.
(09:25):
The groans of the others trappedhad ceased, so we gave up.
By this time other men from theRFA battery had arrived, so we
left them to it.
One remarkable thing was theGermans hadn't machine gunned
us.
I expect our barrage had madethem keep their heads down.
Malcolm spent a long time inthat dugout at the opening stage
of the Battle of the Somme, andhe witnessed the advance of the
(09:47):
fifty sixth London Division.
It was a division that he wouldcome across quite a lot in his
war, both on the Somme and laterat Arras, and part of his unit's
target, the part of the batterythat he was commanding, dropping
these 9.2 inch shells onto theGerman positions, was lobbying
those shells not into the frontline, not into even the support
(10:08):
or reserve line, but positionsbeyond that, including a place
called Rossignol Wood,Nightingale Wood.
And in the late 1980s, on one ofmy trips out there, I took a
copy of his map where he'dmarked some of the targets on
there, and I went to RossignolWood and discovered the shell
craters from his shells.
(10:30):
Now that's something thatnormally a gunner officer never
gets to see, and it took him 70odd years to see them, but I
took some photographs of thesequite deep depressions where the
shells had exploded within thewood.
9.2 inch shells are quite bigand they form quite a big
crater, and there all thosedecades later, and they're
probably still there today, wasthe evidence of his gunfire from
(10:53):
his siege guns from ninety sixsiege battery directed by him in
the opening stage of the Battleof the Somme in nineteen
sixteen.
Arras, the Battle of Arras inApril and May of nineteen
seventeen was a big part ofMalcolm Vivian's war and a big
part of what we alwaysdiscussed.
In the previous account, theprevious podcast episode I did
(11:16):
on his memoirs, I described howhe got ready for the ninth of
april nineteen seventeen, theopening stage of the Arras
battlefield and the attack thatwas made that day, and he went
into the observation postoverlooking the battlefield
where that division that he'dsupported on the first day of
the Somme, the 56th LondonDivision, that's where they were
(11:37):
about to go into action.
But later on, as the battleprogressed, they stayed in that
sector and they worked more andmore to try and take out targets
on the main Hindenburg line,particularly bunkers.
His unit became particularlyproficient in this bunker
busting.
And he went forward on manyoccasions with his Ford
(11:58):
observation team, which would behim and a number of signallers,
ordinary gunners, perhaps a fewbombatiers, who would then go
forward and they'd run thesignals for him while he spotted
for the guns.
And one particular incidentwhich we're gonna hear about now
was in front of the Hindenburgline, close to where Rookery and
Cuckoo Passage Cemeteries aretoday.
(12:21):
There's a bit of a sunken lanethere and that's where this
episode takes place.
It's on the high ground abovethe village of Eninel, Heninel.
So this is how Malcolm recalledthat incident.
In may nineteen seventeen I wasobserving from the lip of a
sunken lane and registering ontrench junctions in the
Hindenburg line.
Down in the lane was SergeantParsons and two linesmen,
(12:44):
brewing tea.
It was early morning and the sunwas low in the east.
I was abominably careless.
I should have known better, butthe sun was obviously reflected
from the lens of my binoculars.
Parsons called out Char up, sir.
I took a step down and reachedfor the mug.
It was knocked out of my hand bya shower of clods of earth.
(13:06):
There was a whiz and a crash,and on the lip of the lane,
where my head had been a secondbefore, was a smoking blackened
crater, where a whizbang hadgone off.
With a gun, the velocity of theshell was greater than the speed
of sound, so the shell arrivedbefore the whine of its flight
was heard.
We hopped it down the lane veryquickly before the next salvo.
(13:29):
One second saved us fromcomplete decapitation, and it
would have been my own fault forgross carelessness.
If your observation posts weredirectly in the line of flight,
gun target, pences and shorts,rights and lefts were obvious.
If, however, you're observing ofnecessity from an angle to the
line of flight, it was not easy,as range and direction tended to
(13:53):
be confused.
It was a help to study theground to mark the bearing of
any prominent object to thetarget.
No thrill in life equaled minewhen I knew we were on target,
particularly if it was a machinegun emplacement.
And Malcolm mentioned thatbecause he'd seen many attacks
in the Battle of the Somme,where men had gone forward into
(14:15):
no man's land and been mown downby those machine guns, and he
did, as he often said to me, asmuch as possible to try and
eliminate those machine guns forthe infantry so that wouldn't
happen again.
But he went on to talk about thekind of cooperation that the
artillery did with the war inthe air, something we touched on
in the series that we did aboutthe war in the air, the Royal
(14:38):
Flying Corps and the RAF on theWestern Front.
And this is Malcolm's memoriesof counter battery work
involving cooperation with theair services.
Counter battery work.
We did a lot of shelling ofGerman batteries, the fall of
each round being plotted by theobserver rear gunner in a
(14:59):
cooperation mostly with No.
eight or number sixteensquadrons Royal Flying Corps,
flying at first B two Cs, thenRE eight or AW machines based at
Bellevue or Mondicor.
The observer would transmitmessages to us, we had a
wireless mast and three RoyalFlying Corps signallers attached
(15:19):
to us.
We could only communicate withthe plane by putting strips of
linear material on the ground,each with its own meaning.
The aircraft after calling uswould fly backwards and
forwards, battery target.
It used a clock code to indicatethe position of each of our
bursts, A meaning twenty fiveyards, then one for one o'clock,
(15:40):
etc.
We made the necessarycorrections, fired again, waited
for the observer's report.
These chut were generally verysuccessful, but the slow
observation planes were atempting target for the fast
German scout planes, especiallythe albatross.
On the other hand, a really goodobserver, with his machine gun,
(16:01):
could put up a fire defence.
Once our position had not yetbeen spotted, we were doing a
shoot when a German recce planecame along.
Not wanting to disclose ourposition, we did not fire twice
when the observer was waitingfor the fall of our shell.
Fed up he wired Fed up C one.
C one meant going home.
(16:21):
That afternoon I was in thecommand post dugout, the major
was away, when a Royal FlyingCorps tender stopped on the road
and two RFC officers,Lieutenants Burund and Howes,
came in and saluted.
Then they said they'd been sentup to apologise for the C one.
They hadn't got gas masks inthat position, and we used to be
(16:42):
shelled most afternoons for atleast half an hour, having been
located by mixed HE and gasshells.
Fortunately the dugout was wellgas proofed with door blankets,
so the two RFC officers weresafe.
One of the things that I'dlearned fairly early on from
talking to Malcolm about his ownlife and his upbringing, that
(17:02):
his mother was American, andwhen I looked back on it, I
realised that kind of set himapart in many ways.
The influence of an Americanmother with a different
philosophy to people fromBritain, I think changed him in
all kinds of ways.
I mean he was from a wealthyfamily, privately educated, and
he was at Oxford when the warbegan in August 1914, but he had
(17:27):
a different attitude to so manydifferent things, and would
often tell me that the wartaught him the value of people
and that despite his upbringinghe never took anything for
granted because he learned fromhis men how lucky he was, and I
think his mother had also givenhim a bit of a sense of that as
well.
And I think it's one of thereasons he never said this, but
(17:48):
he obviously got on very wellwith the ordinary soldiers in
his unit, his sergeant, he'sbombardiers, he's signallers,
he's linesmen, and I thinkthat's because he treated them
in a very different way, perhapsto some of the other officers.
And one of the other things thatI got to learn about him was
that he wasn't afraid to poke afinger at authority, as this
(18:13):
tale that he related tells us.
There was a brigadier generalRoyal Artillery called KK Knapp.
He had a great reputation as athruster for leading from the
front, going to observationposts and making battery visits
on his own.
You know my indignation at theignorance of past senior
(18:34):
officers of the potentialvulnerability of a nine point
two inch howitzer battery, whileafter a sticky do on the lower
Somme area, we had moved up intoKnapp's command area.
I stood an officer, two gunnersand two signallers down at once
to get some sleep, and put thecooks on to get the meals ready
while everybody else got on withworking on the guns, and
(18:57):
breaking off for dinner when itwas all done, and then getting
on with the remounting of theguns, preparing for any action.
By the time they'd finished,everyone was absolutely all in.
The linesman had run a line togroup headquarters, and then I
stood everyone down for somesleep.
The posted officer took over asduty officer, and the signal as
(19:19):
manned the telephone, and theothers became sentry and gas
alert man.
There was of course lots to bedone like building cartridge
shelters, but we were ready foraction.
Then I saw Knapp so reported tohim, and he started to tear me
off a strip.
I let him have his say and thensaid Excuse me, sir, everything
(19:40):
you say is of course necessary,but there is something much more
necessary.
He said what?
So I said be ready for immediateaction, but not efficient action
until the men have had somerest.
Tired they could easily drop afuse shell, or a gun layer can
make an error in range andbearing, and then I went on
(20:01):
about the work involved inmoving a nine point two inch
battery.
He said show me, so we examinedthe guns.
He probably knew, of course,while I made a running
commentary, adding If you'd behere in two days, you'd find
everything apple pie.
He came back in three days, waspleased with everything, chatted
to the gun detachments who wereof course old hands.
(20:23):
At the end he said Good and Isaid, Can we offer you some tea,
sir?
But I'm afraid it will be in anenamel mug and taste strongly of
chlorine, not brigades bonechina.
He said, I'm well accustomed tothe flavour of chlorinated tea
in an enamel mug.
I said, Yes, I know that, sir.
He gave me a cheerful smile andsaid I'll be seeing you.
(20:45):
When the major got back he saidAt it again, I hear.
I said what?
He said ticking off brigadiers.
They are most amused about thetea and mug.
The general said you've got agood battery there.
A few days later I was in theobservation post when Nat
wearing his red staff hat camedown the dugout steps and said
What have you got to show me,Vivian?
(21:07):
So we climbed the ladder to theobservation post chamber, and I
pointed out spots of interest,including a small mound,
obviously a machine gunfortress, which interested him a
lot.
He said, Is there any way I canget closer to look at it?
Yes, there's a short trench,very little used as the parapet
is too low, and it's enfiladedby a very accurate sniper.
(21:28):
Show me, Knapp said.
I said, Certainly, but please dome a favour, sir.
Do you know what every man inthe trench said when you passed
by in your red staff hat?
Christ, a bleeding brigadier.
If you wear that hat in thetrench, some German will spot
it, and they'll throw everythingthey've got at us, which I shall
find most distasteful.
(21:49):
Please take one of thetelephonist steel helmets, which
he did, and we explored thetrench, me telling him to keep
low repeatedly, and he saw whathe wanted.
We returned to the OP, hechanged hats, and left, refusing
my helmet.
I met him a few days later, butwhen he was with an infantry
colonel and his intelligenceofficer, so I crouched into the
(22:11):
side of the trench, but hecaught my eye, winked, and
touched the edge of his tin hatthat he was wearing.
Sadly, I never saw him again.
Now the man in that story thatMalcolm describes is a very
interesting character.
He's Brigadier General KempsterKnapp, CMG, who had served with
a mountain battery of the RoyalGarrison Artillery and come to
(22:34):
France in December of nineteenfourteen.
During the war he was mentioneddispatches on several occasions
and decorated with theDistinguished Service Medal and
American decoration by theAmerican Expeditionary Force,
the AEF for supporting their menwith his artillery in the
battles on the Hindenburg linein September and October of
nineteen eighteen.
(22:56):
It was said that General Knappproved of invaluable assistance
to our infantry by theAmericans.
He showed himself anindefatigable worker, a
brilliant tactician, and a loyalfriend to us.
Knapp later became deputylieutenant of Northamptonshire
and stayed on in the regulararmy after the war, and his son
(23:17):
John also became a gunner, thecommander of a mountain battery,
and he was killed in Burma innineteen forty five while
commanding thirty third MountainBattery Royal Artillery and is
commemorated on the RangoonMemorial.
And what I found with talking toMalcolm is that all these kind
of characters would come up inhis conversations, and I would
(23:37):
look them up and find out whathappened to them and where they
went, and all these kind ofconnections, those layers that I
often talk about in this FirstWorld War history, I really
began to kind of understand whatthat meant because everything,
one way or another, seemed to beinterconnected.
Now later on in 1917, afterArras, his unit moved up to the
(24:00):
area near Toulons, just to thesouth of what was known as the
Luz Salian, which was the linethat was established after the
Battle of Luz in September andOctober of 1915, with a kind of
salient that existed thatincorporated the village of Luz
and the Bethune Lens Roads tothe south, went out towards the
main road that ran from Lens upto Hullock.
(24:23):
Hullock was still in Germanhands, and the Hohenzollern
Redoubt to the north was alsostill in German hands, forming
this kind of salient thatBritish troops sat in, and unit
after unit kind of passedthrough there.
But in 1917, this was a sectorthat had been held by the 46th
North Midland Division, who'dbeen on Malcolm's flank in the
Battle of Gommercore on thefirst day of the Battle of the
(24:44):
Somme, and now the CanadianCorps had moved in here with a
new commander, Arthur Curry, whohad taken over after Bing had
been promoted following thecapture of Vimy Ridge in April
of 1917, and the Canadians nowmoved into this sector near Lens
to take part in an attack onHill 70.
And it was during this operationthat I discovered that Malcolm
(25:07):
had been awarded a militarycross for his bravery.
And it took me quite a while toget out of him that he had been
awarded the MC.
And on one of the trips, when Iwent up to see him, one of the
early trips, I asked him abouthis medals, and he kind of
rummaged around in a drawer andgot this kind of box of medals
out, which was his MC, whichwasn't engraved.
(25:27):
He saw me looking at the back ofit and asked me what I was
doing, and I said, Well,sometimes people like yourself
had your MC engraved, and hesaid, No, I didn't bother with
that.
And then he saw me looking roundthe edges, the rims of his
British War and Victory Medal,and he said, Why are you looking
there?
I said, Well your namesinscribed on this, and he'd had
them all those years, and hedidn't even realise they were
named, and then there was hisSecond World War medals in there
(25:49):
which also included the AfricaStar.
Now after I pressed him a littlebit, he finally sent me the
details of the award of hismilitary cross, which happened
when they were attached to theCanadian Corps, taking part in
these Hill 70 operations in thesummer of nineteen seventeen.
And this is his officialcitation.
His MC when it was gazetted,there is no citation listed, but
(26:13):
he had the originalrecommendation that he loaned
me, and this is what it said onit.
For conspicuous gallantry anddevotion to duty.
When his battery was under anintense hostile bombardment, he
rushed out into the open toextinguish a pile of burning
cartridges, and succeeded indoing so, although high
explosive shells were burstingwithin six yards of him, and he
(26:37):
was completely blackened withsmoke and burning debris.
His complete disregard ofpersonal safety undoubtedly
saved the emplacement from beingdestroyed.
He added to this, this is takenfrom the official
recommendation.
It isn't strictly true.
What really happened was thatbehind each gun were shells
fused with a new 106 fuse,instantaneous action.
(27:01):
And if these went up, so wouldthe guns.
The attack on Hill seventy bythe Canadian infantry was time
for the next day, and everypossible gun was needed for the
wire cutting.
The attack was a completesuccess with light casualties,
and I can only suppose that theCanadians were so pleased with
our work that they gave me animmediate gong.
(27:22):
Just fancy, that was sixty eightyears ago.
I'm not so quick on my feet now.
Like many of the veterans that Iinterviewed, whether it was
about their war or medals thatthey'd been awarded, they always
played that down.
They never pushed themselvesforward, they were not those
kind of men, and many of them,including Malcolm, always said
(27:42):
to me that there were many thatthey'd seen who'd not survive
the war.
They were the ones that reallydeserved these medals, not them.
That was a common phrase, thatwas a common idea expressed by
many of these veterans that Iinterviewed.
And I remember being a youngstudent then I wrote back to him
and told him that it was verybrave what he'd done, and he
(28:04):
replied You say my militarycross action was very brave.
It wasn't, you know.
It was just a job of work.
One's sternest critic mustalways be oneself.
What other people may think, youhave to live with yourself
throughout the years.
In that case, every possibleeffort had to be made to help
the infantry attack and savelives by efficient wire cutting,
(28:27):
so every possible gun had to bekept in action.
It was just as simple as that.
When you've seen lines of men inthe words of their favourite
song hanging on the old barbedwire, you don't argue but act.
And during one of our kind offollow up conversations, either
at his house or down the puboften when I went to see him
(28:47):
we'd go down to a riverside puband have lunch there together
and talk things over.
He mentioned the fact that he'dbeen in an observation post at
Serre on the thirteenth ofnovember nineteen sixteen, when
the Hull Powell's battalions hadmade their attack on the village
right at that end phase of theBattle of the Somme, and he'd
(29:09):
seen them go out into no man'sland, it had rained heavily, the
conditions were poor, they'dliterally got stuck in the mud,
but the machine guns had notbeen silenced by the barrage,
the barrage had not done itsjob, and they played merry hell
on the men of those hullbattalions and chopped them down
in no man's land, and it was asight that he never forgot, and
(29:32):
he told me that when the batteryposition came under fire, they
all went down into dugouts thatthey'd prepared, and he was
peeking out and he could see theGerman shells dropping closer
and closer to the guns andcloser to the piles of shells
stacked alongside them ready forthe bombardment, and he knew
that if they got hit the gunswould be wiped out, but he said
(29:53):
he also had a flashback toSayer, flashback to those men
chopped down in no man's land bymachine gun fire.
And that spurred him up out ofthe dugout, out of safety, to
act, as he said, not to sitthere and think about it, but to
do something about the situationthat he was in.
And I think again that is partlydue to his background.
(30:14):
Growing up in the countryside,being a devotee of rugby and
team games, understanding whatteamwork was all about, and also
having that American mother thatI think gave him a different
view of the world, made him aman apart, I think, to some of
those that he served with.
And whenever I tried to suggestthings like that, of course,
(30:35):
again, he would play them down.
After a winter in the EapSalient, Malcolm's unit had been
there giving fire support to theunits in that winter of nineteen
seventeen eighteen, he'd made adecision to put in for a
transfer to the Royal FlyingCorps.
He'd realized in the work thatthey'd done with the RFC how
important the war in the airwas.
(30:57):
He was always proud of his timewith the RFC.
First trained as an observer andthen as a pilot, and then the
war ended before he had a chanceto fly in combat.
And later in the Second WorldWar, when he went off to take
command of the anti-aircraftdefences at Suez as an officer
in the Royal Artillery, he veryproudly wore his RFC wings on
(31:19):
his uniform, and I've got aphotograph of him which I'll use
for this podcast episode whereyou can clearly see his old RFC
wings on there.
But this period as nineteeneighteen dawned, this was the
end of his time on the WesternFront, and perhaps it's a good
point to end this latest episodeof his memoirs.
(31:42):
I always remember one night infebruary nineteen eighteen after
I decided I wanted to fly andapplied for a second to the
Royal Flying Corps, and had beensuccessful.
We were up in the salient, Isaid goodbye to the remaining
Glamorgans in the siege battery,and stood on the duckboards
waiting for my transport.
It was a marvellous night, pitchblack with all the stars in
(32:06):
creation blazing out in thegreat firmament of heaven.
I'd stood and watched them on somany nights, a Ryan wheeling
across the sky and revolving onhis own orbit.
The night was peaceful, anoccasional crump of shells, the
very lights rising and fallingin the line, with the rattle of
(32:28):
a machine gun followed by theslower stutter of a spandau.
I could have howled.
It was the only life I knew.
Why was I leaving it?
I would have given anything inthose moments to reverse my
decision.
But that was the end of his warin France and Flanders.
Perhaps that decision saved hislife, who knows?
(32:50):
And as I've looked this weekthrough those letters of his
written in Biro on blue writingpaper mostly, tucked inside
their envelopes with long out ofdate stamps showing our late
Queen, and many of them fromforty years ago now.
It's taking me back to that timewhen I travelled around, meeting
(33:12):
men, incredible men like MalcolmVivian.
Some I knew briefly, only metonce.
Others came to be close friendslike Malcolm, a man at the end
of his life in some ways, and methen at the beginning of my
adult life.
I think he saw a lot of himselfin me, perhaps that's how we and
(33:34):
why we got along, and he alwaysencouraged me in all kinds of
ways.
He was a good teacher, and notjust about the war.
I learned a lot about life andpeople from him and many other
veterans besides, things that Icarried with me into the
pathways of my own travelsaround the world, and in many
ways still carry.
(33:54):
Malcolm and men like him arepart of my conscience.
They're my moral compass.
They enrich my life, enrich myknowledge of a war that was
then, all those years ago,largely forgotten, and all these
decades later, they have enabledme to tell you the stories like
(34:15):
this, knowing that many of younever got a chance to meet
veterans like Malcolm Vivian.
But more than that, Malcolm andso many other names I could
mention, they walk with me inthe shadows of that past, walk
with me still.
Each time I return to thatlandscape, their spirits form
(34:36):
part of one of those many layersthat we find there.
They exist within those layers,within the culture of those
battlefields, within the veryheart of all that we find along
that old front line.
(34:59):
You've been listening to anepisode of the Old Frontline
with me, military historian PaulReed.
You can follow me on Twitter atSomcore, you can follow the
podcast at OldFrontline Pod.
Check out the website atoldfrontline.co.uk where you'll
find lots of podcast extras andphotographs and links to books
that are mentioned in thepodcast.
(35:20):
And if you feel like supportingus, you can go to our Patreon
page, patreon.com slasholdfrontline, or support us on
buymea coffee atbuymeacoffee.comslash
oldfrontline.
Links to all of these are on ourwebsites.
Thanks for listening, and we'llsee you again soon.
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