Strick

Tank Hero of Arras

Tim Strickland

• Publisher: Casemate
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781612009865
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Biographies militaires

Major-General Eugene Vincent Michael Strickland CMG, DSO, OBE, MM, CStJ, Star of Jordan – Strick – rose from penniless hardship to great military distinction. He was a tank man, a war hero who fought in France, North Africa and Italy during World War II, and whose name is revered even today among regiments that he commanded. His is the extraordinary tale of a man who gained a Regular Commission in the Indian Army from Sandhurst, but resigned soon afterwards. After a series of intriguing adventures, he then enlisted as a private soldier in the Royal Tank Corps. In May 1940, he played a major part in the counterattack at Arras, where two British infantry tank battalions held up the German advance for three days, enabling the success of the Dunkirk evacuation – and perhaps saving Britain from ultimate defeat in the process. Strick's outstanding success as a troop-sergeant in France saw him immediately (re-)commissioned, and his rise to high command was then swift. He commanded the leading Squadron of North Irish Horse in Tunisia 1943, and then commanded the North Irish Horse in its greatest battle, the breaking of the Hitler Line, in Italy in 1944. He served in seven regiments and had four regimental commands. This book focuses on his experience during World War II, drawing out the unique qualities required of leaders in close-combat battle, the particular demands of armored infantry cooperation, and how an individual can make a success of such a rapid rise through the ranks during wartime. This fine story of adventure and achievement is brought alive by Strick’s remarkable correspondence – he wrote home to his family every second or third day throughout the war, except when action was too fierce to write – supplemented by the recollections of his comrades and years of archival research. More than a portrait of a gifted and morally courageous man, this biography also offers an insight into the arts of command and tactical control, and the difficulties of a family life fragmented by war.

CHAPTER ONE

India

Riding down from Naini on a mountain tat,

After nine months mugging and eating ghurrh and fat.

Soon we’ll reach the station and board the down-line train,

Discard our clothes for dhotis and blaspheme old Bro Culhane.

Then we’ll reach our whitewashed homes in cantonments o’er the lands,

Rejoin the goolie-danda¹ teams and other loundah² bands.³

Early Years, 1913–22

Eugene Strickland was born at Rawalpindi Cantonment, in the North West Frontier Province of British India, on 25 August 1913. He was the fourth of five children: Eveleen, John and Mary preceded him and Agnes followed. Both his parents, Vincent and Mary Erina Strickland, had been born and bred in India, into military families which had been established there for generations; and they had married into families who had served the East India Company since at least the early 18th century. Eugene’s mother’s father had distinguished himself in the troubles of 1857–58, and afterwards in the Indian Army on the North West Frontier and in Afghanistan.

The only surviving contemporary photograph of the proud Strickland parents enjoying the company of their little children illustrates a happy time for this young military family, visibly part of the serenity of the Pax Britannica. Vincent and Mary Erina had been educated in India, and India was the only world they had ever known and loved. Their happiness was to be short-lived, however, in the prelude to those events that would lead to world war and mortality on an unprecedented scale, shatter great empires, rearrange the map of Europe, change the course of history and alter their lives forever.

The call to arms reached the Strickland family almost immediately, and Vincent was among the first to leave India for the Western Front. He sailed from Madras Arsenal in the autumn of 1914, en route for Orleans and the 1st Indian Cavalry Division. Not long afterwards, he was posted to the headquarters staff of the 5th (Mhow) Indian Cavalry Brigade. Given the appalling scale of the slaughter that followed, it was almost inevitable that he would eventually be mortally wounded, and would never see his wife and children again.

Meanwhile, Mary Erina had volunteered as a nurse at one of the Presidency hospitals, and her small children had been left in the care of her mother, their Vera-O’Sullivan grandmother,⁴ at Agra. It was a sad time for Mary Erina, where so little could be done for them during the competing priorities of the Great War. But her husband’s letters were treasured, read and re-read over the months and years that followed until, in the end, only much-folded parts of two of them survived. Both she and her children often thought of Vincent’s sad departure to the Western Front and eventual death, so far away from his loved ones.

Vincent had written good letters, in a style that was the product of the Sikár’s⁵ equivalent of a good English private education. He had also taken great care in writing them to hide the realities of his suffering, and eventual approach to death, from his family.⁶ Near the end, the hospital matron wrote movingly to Mary Erina. Such letters were usual and necessary, of course, but the warmth, friendliness, knowledge and length of her frequent letters indicate that Vincent’s charm had made him much liked by the nurses at Grosvenor Crescent.⁷ He was also much liked and admired by the Reverend Green, the hospital chaplain, who became close to Vincent and wrote of him thus: His mind was a noble one. The most wonderful thing of all was his Communion on the Sunday before he died. It was his great and earnest wish to receive the Blessed Sacrament and I wish I could describe to you the devotion with which he received it. We all realised that Christ was present at his deathbed: it is one of the things that I shall never forget. We buried him today at Kensal Green Cemetery with Military Honours, true soldier that he was.⁸ Vincent died, lamented by many, at Grosvenor Crescent on 10 May 1917.⁹ He had had likeable and faith-filled qualities that his younger son, Eugene, inherited.¹⁰

The 5th (Mhow) Cavalry Brigade was commanded by Brigadier-General Neil Haig.¹¹ Vincent had done well with them, was known for his decency and gallantry and had been mentioned in despatches,¹² and the general had also grown to be interested in and fond of him. He had visited Vincent during the latter’s convalescence in London, and afterwards wrote to Mary Erina, to whom he expressed how well her husband had been doing. Dear Mrs Strickland, the general wrote, Your husband was with my Brigade for some time and he did very, very good work for us and I can’t say too much for him. I happened to be in England on leave and was able to call and see him the afternoon before he died. I promised him that I would do anything I could for you and the children.

Despite the happiness of her marriage, the desolated Mary Erina felt more at ease among her own family and relatives and, thereafter, had only occasional contact with her husband’s mother. Small children are unaware of the muted strains of adult relationships, and Eugene’s childhood memories convey the impression of a happy time, filled with vaguely remembered meetings with relatives, adventures and unsupervised children’s escapades. Although these memories were those of a small boy, they convey a vivid picture of an early childhood in India during and in the immediate aftermath of the Great War; also the sadness of later reflection on a life and world that have gone forever.¹³

Your mother’s house in Agra stood in its own compound and had a central hall from which the other rooms led off. In the hall on a table in one corner stood Granny’s tea-caddy from which she issued tea to the servants. Granny was a small upright woman with a good figure and very firm opinions. She was always dressed in black clothes that reached to the ground.

I can remember, as one remembers in a dream, that house in Agra. I can still picture the compound and the trees and my brother, John, throwing at and hitting squirrels with tennis-balls. I have recollections of long, dusty but clean, roads running into and between the Officers’ Lines, the Civil Lines. Not far away was the Indian city from which there always seemed to emanate strange sounds and smells: the former rather frightening shades of the Great Mutiny, while the latter were often intriguing. I suppose that old and once so familiar language of Empire – embracing cantonments, lines, the ‘natives’ and ruling behaviour – must die just as it must have died in Britain when the Romans had to leave; the conveyances – ekkas, tikka gharries, camel and ox-carts, and the ubiquitous tonga, with the driver sitting on the shaft, cracking his whip, twisting the horse’s tail, and the horse showing from beginning to end exactly how to clear its bowels; that pleasant smell of horse and gurrh; the strange and rather worrying sight of an Indian funeral-procession moving rapidly towards the burial-place, with the outline of the deceased clearly visible under the thin cotton shroud; the pathetic Indian graves with their little oil- and food-pots and ever-present yellow flowers. The water-wells also remain in my mind, with the patient oxen going up and down the earth ramp, the drawer squatting, as only ‘natives’ can, on the edge of the well and tipping the nice-smelling water into sluices from the dripping leather buckets as they came to his hand. He would be singing a song full of those seemingly interminable voice-quavers so liked by all Oriental peoples.

Over all, there is the distinct memory of the howling of jackals at night, monkeys in the compounds and those huge bats or flying-foxes. The wonder of Indian sweets exists forever: ludhoos, pera, gulaab, jaman, the glorious melting bhuta, and above all gelabies. For years we have had in our possession a book of yours called ‘My Garden in the Wilderness’¹⁴ and its words and pictures easily conjure up the Old India. There was a peace and graciousness about it all that has gone from life now.

Schooldays at Saint Joseph’s, Nainital, 1919–22

When he was six years old, Eugene started at Donaldabad,¹⁵ the prep school to the famed Saint Joseph’s College, run by the Christian Brothers, 7,000 feet up in the Kumaon Hills, above the lake at Nainital. This fine Roman Catholic school was well known to Mary Erina from her own childhood days at Naini in the 1890s, and she was sure of a generous welcome for her sons there. Soon after Vincent’s death in London in 1917, Mary Erina had moved her elder son, John, to Saint Joseph’s, and he was already settled there when it was decided that his little brother, Eugene, would join him. It was thus with the Christian Brothers that Eugene received his first formal education. Mary Erina took her two sons there by train in September 1919, at a time when she must have been struggling to come to terms with what life would have in store for her as a young widow and mother of small children in the aftermath of the Great War, in receipt of what seems today to be a shockingly tiny pension. Eugene’s memories of those days give a vivid picture of the last two years of his childhood in India.¹⁶

The Hills. I wonder if people still talk of the Plains and the Hills? For me, of course, the Hills are represented by Nainital and its environs. My first recollections there are of Saint Joseph’s College: a huge stone, brick and wood edifice on the top of what seemed to my very young eyes to be a very high mountain. I cannot remember where I slept but I can still see in my mind’s eye the smaller preparatory-school, known as Donalabad [sic], and my first primer: a red book full of fascinating pictures of the old myths and legends. The fox still sits under the tree, talking to the crow – two wily old things trying to tempt each other.

There was a long winding stairway, roof-covered but open at the sides, which led up from Donalabad to the main school-building. As one arrived at the top one found a long row of lavatories on one side, a splendid view of the distant Plains on the other, a football ground in front with the long pile of the school beyond it. I had a nightmare at Donalabad once, in which I was trying with aching arms to hang on to a climbing-rope and could make no progress, while a naked giant was asleep at the bottom end of the rope. I suppose I had eaten too much pudding and always had great difficulty in climbing the rope in Physical Training.

The six- to eight-year-old Eugene never afterwards forgot that short and idyllic time high in the ‘Hills’ at pleasant Naini. But his mother was usually far away, sometimes with her own mother at Agra, occasionally with her mother-in-law at Dehra Dun, and all the time trying to come to terms with a still uncertain future in which it was becoming increasingly likely that a farewell to India, the only home that she, her husband and children had ever known and loved, might be necessary. Mary Erina was still young, full of energy and determined bravery, however, and she had very clear ideas and convictions about the social culture, religious faith and education which she wanted for her children. Her selection of Saint Joseph’s College for her two sons had much to do with all these things. She knew she could leave them there, in what seemed to her to be the reliable hands of those Roman Catholic monks. In those days, too, there were still at the school, and in the Naini area generally, people who had known the Vera-O’Sullivans; so for the boys it was a friendly place.

Difficult as her circumstances were, Mary Erina had no intention of abandoning her sons altogether, and made time to visit them whenever she could get away. She never failed to take them up to Bhowali and to show them her childhood haunts and what had once been the home and estate of the Vera-O’Sullivans,¹⁷ which her parents had named ‘Cappanacusha’ after their lost patrimony in Kerry. She had had a very happy childhood there, up among the high forest clearings of her parents’ land, framed by the distant serrated backdrop of the snow-clad high peaks of the Himalayas – those ‘Far Pavilions’ of romance – towering above Ranikhet; and it must have been fun and interesting for her to show it all to her children. It was there, as a young girl, that her father – great horseman that he had been – had taught her to ride and jump bareback. Her enthusiasm about her childhood must have been catching, and it is hardly surprising that Eugene’s memories and mental pictures of Bhowali remained vivid, and uncannily accurate, for the rest of his life.

Bhowali. The long winding road from Nainital to Bhowali – a beautiful road cut out of the mountainside; and it was along this road that your father, wild Tim Vera-O’Sullivan, must have galloped when visiting his friends and cronies in Naini, or doing estate-business. I can remember the Indians travelling the road in large groups, for safety in numbers against the ever-present dangers of bear, tiger, leopard, wolves and badmaashes.¹⁸ There was always the bell-man leading the group, with his staff bristling with bells, the tinkling sound of which was supposed to drive off lurking danger, which included the proverbial thousand-and-one-devils of Hindu belief. On this road one met rich and fat bunyas¹⁹ – I always think of them as having exposed navels – with the occasional glimpse of their wives behind the curtains of the conveyance: eyes enlivened in the time-honoured way with kohl, their foreheads carrying the red mark of Hinduism, and their lips and mouths made redder than any lipstick, with paan.²⁰

Half-way to Bhowali, the road crossed a stream and there was a bhutia²¹ village, the houses made of wood and of one or two storeys, with the ground floor containing the usual shops. Sitting outside these shops we would see hill-porters resting, with their enormous loads beside them on the ground. These hill-porters ...