WHO WILL BE THE FIRST?
Thirty years after its creation, the Canadian Victoria Cross still sits, unused, in a display case in Rideau Hall
If you want to see a Canadian Victoria Cross, you won't find it pinned to the chest of a war hero.
To see Canada's highest award for combat bravery, you'll have to book a tour of the Governor General's residence in Ottawa. When you get to Rideau Hall, you'll need to find your way up a staircase to the second floor, through the cavernous ballroom, and there, beside the flamboyant “tent room” with its candy-striped walls, is the tiny ambassador room holding the various honours our country hands out.
In a glass case in the corner is a dull metal cross with the words “Pro Valore” inscribed below a crowned lion.
Get a good look, because it's the only place you'll see one. You might be able to find the rest of the honours out in the wild because, unlike the Victoria Cross, they've actually been awarded. No one, so far, has been given the highest award within the Canadian military honours system.
In fact, no Canadian has been given the British Victoria Cross since 1945, when Lieut. Robert Hampton Gray earned it posthumously for leading an attack against a Japanese warship. It's been nearly 20 years since a Canadian recipient of the British Victoria Cross walked among us, since Sgt. Ernest “Smokey” Smith died in 2005 at the age of 91.
According to the government, the Victoria Cross is only “awarded for the most conspicuous bravery, a daring or pre-eminent act of valour or self-sacrifice or extreme devotion to duty, in the presence of the enemy.”
While these are the technical criteria for the award, a more vivid demonstration of what it takes to get the Victoria Cross pinned to a soldier's left breast comes from the gallantry of Smokey Smith.
On an October night in 1944, Smith's Seaforth Highlanders were met with a vicious enemy counterattack while establishing a bridgehead across the Savio River in Italy. In torrential rain, Smith almost single-handedly held off three German tanks and 30 soldiers with an anti-tank gun while rescuing an injured comrade.
According to the citation that accompanied his award, Smith showed “utter contempt for enemy fire” while he pulled his injured friend to safety to receive medical aid and then returned to his position to ward off further possible attacks.
Like the medal he won, Smith was from a different era.
When he was about to be awarded the Victoria Cross, Smith was locked up in Naples, apparently to keep him out of trouble until he could travel to meet King George VI. Smith was annoyed about this turn of events until they gave him a couple of beers, which he said cheered him up considerably.
When a Buckingham Palace guard demonstrated to Smith how he would have to bow to the king — a deep bow from the hips — the Canadian wasn't impressed. Instead, he saluted the king, put the medal in his pocket and kept it there until the British recipients received their awards and the newspapers could be notified.
“So for three days, I'm sitting in a bar in London drinking to beat hell. Someone came and said, `OK, Smokey, you can put on that medal now.' So I took it out and put it on my chest, and I never bought another drink that day,” Smith later told Maclean's magazine.
The Canadian Victoria Cross had a long and uncertain path to its creation. In 1967, the Pearson government created the Order of Canada and then decided the Canadian government should stop recommending its citizens for British awards.
Canada created new bravery awards in 1972, but nothing comparable to the Victoria Cross and, pressed on the issue, then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau seemed to imply that Canadians would no longer receive the British Victoria Cross. For decades, the Royal Canadian Legion urged the government to clarify if the Victoria Cross was still the country's highest honour for combat gallantry, to no avail.
Finally, Queen Elizabeth approved the “Canadianized” version of the Victoria Cross in 1993, to almost equal amounts of fanfare and consternation among veterans and military historians. A possible sign of the ambivalence surrounding the new award could be found in the fact that then-prime minister Brian Mulroney was happy to leave the news conference to a Red Deer member of Parliament who had sponsored a private member's bill on the issue.
Since then, no Canadians have been deemed valorous enough to receive the Canadian Victoria Cross.
Eighty-one Canadians who served in Canadian military forces were awarded the British Victoria Cross for valour in earlier conflicts, mostly the two world wars, but also including four veterans of the Boer War. Other countries with similar awards, such as Britain, Australia, New Zealand and the United States, have all awarded them for valour in recent wars, such as Iraq and Afghanistan. But Canada has not.
There has been advocacy to change this, especially in the case of Pte. Jess Larochelle, who is credited with saving many of his fellow soldiers' lives after a Taliban rocket destroyed an observation post in Pashmul in October 2006.
The account of Larochelle's heroism in the citation for the Star of Military Valour is reminiscent of Smokey Smith's gallantry in Italy.
Larochelle provided covering fire for his company's position while severely injured and receiving sustained enemy fire in an exposed position. Through Larochelle's bravery, the company was able to to fend off an attack from more than 20 insurgents.
As an MP inspired by Larochelle's case, former Conservative Party leader Erin O'Toole proposed a Military Honours Review Board in 2022 to re-examine medals and decorations, with a wide mandate to re-evaluate historical awards, including failure to fairly consider Indigenous or minority soldiers. The motion was defeated by the governing Liberals. Larochelle died last summer, aged 40.
Smith believed that soldiers who showed that kind of bravery were simply doing their job. He never thought of surrendering, even when he was massively outnumbered and considered anyone who did a “coward.” He also didn't believe in taking orders and he considered killing Germans “fun and games.”
Asked by Maclean's in 2005 what made Victoria Cross recipients different from the average soldier, Smith said simply that they would fight instead of sitting around. Pushed on the question, Smith came up with a theory.
“Crazy,” he laughed. “They were all crazy.”