War hero offers unsettling study into heroism
Author Tom Scott’s journey to discover the true ‘Charlie’ finds a few contradictions. Michael Fallow
SO there was Charles Upham, momentarily indisposed.
The Kiwi POWwas entangled in barbed wire between the inner and outer fences of his prison camp.
Other prisoners roared at a boyish sentry, standing with rifle cocked and barrel raised, not to shoot.
An older German corporal brandishing a Luger came running, shouting: ‘‘I will finish him! I will finish him!’’
Upham then did something that from amodern perspective was as tad regrettable. He slipped a cigarette into his mouth.
Many’s the soldier and many’s the citizen who have told of Upham’s capacity for a blazing stare.
‘‘I refuse to be shot by a corporal. Bring back an officer. F... off.’’
The corporal duly obliged. Next to show upwas Commandant Hauptmann Knapp, who dashed back to his office and returned not with a weapon, but a camera.
The upshot was a good photo. Amemento deserved by what, for two reasons, was a good call.
The wartime legality of shooting an escapee after he’d been effectively re-apprehended was a tad problematic.
What’s more, Germans took war decorations seriously. This man was by this stage a two-time Victoria Cross winner – though he’d ripped the ribbon from his tunic before his capture.
Here’s where we phone
Upham’s latest biographer, Tom Scott, to run over the reason he did that. Scott casts around for an updatedmetaphor and finds one: ‘‘It would have been his Koru Lounge pass’’.
Special treatment, separating him from his comrades, was the last thing this fiercely egalitarian Kiwi wanted.
In fact a couple of the photos in Scott’s book Searching for Charlie, In pursuit of the real Charles Upham VC and Bar, raise an interesting contrast.
Where does Upham look less at ease? Snared in barbed wire and explaining to the Germans why theywere the ones who better watch their step? Or standing rigidly to attention while British General Sir Claude Auchinleck was pinning a VC to his chest.
‘‘People about to be shot by a firing squad have looked happier,’’ says Scott of the famousmoment.
In fact Upham’s sincere discomfort at such ceremonial pomp and his abiding detestation of German bullying, which he saw as a defining characteristic of Nazism, came together, ungraciously, when Knapp – not necessarily the worst guy in the world – held a prison camp ceremony to pin a replica VC medal on him.
He spat in the man’s face. Upham was the only combat soldier, anywhere, to win the Victoria Cross twice, first in Crete in 1941, and then a ‘‘bar’’ was added for his feats at Rusweisat Ridge, Egypt, in 1942. Scott is not alone in his view that he probably deserved more.
Upham’s bravery was universally acknowledged. Not fearlessness, because he felt fear, but his shepherd and mustering work in the high country and hills of the Hurunui District had infused him with more than a rare combination of strength and stamina. He had a feel for terrain.
He could be generous, funny and compassionate but at the same time was a flinty character and no mistake, and in battle was said to fight with ‘‘an almost divinely inspired rage’’.
Scott, however, has no time for the view that Upham was some sort of berserker.
‘‘He had a very fine fury, but it was a calibrated fury.’’
Actions others saw as wild and reckless, Upham considered to be properly judged.
For instance, he reckoned the Germans were prone to firing too high. His short stature gave him added confidence to run under most of it.
Most often, when his fellow soldiers referred to him as mad or crazy it tended to be after witnessing his fearless feats of insubordination.
‘‘Charlie was mad but only in the sense of being rash, reckless, impulsive, quick tempered, rebellious,’’ says Scott.
In fact Scott applies one of the most widely-used instruments for the assessment of psychopaths, the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised to his subject.
It breaks down to 20 distinct categories including a grandiose sense of self-worth, superficial charm, a parasitic lifestyle, failure to accept responsibility for one’s actions.
But it just isn’t Upham.
Far from finding a dark pathology within the man, Scott makes a case that Upham had ‘‘a moral courage that lent wings to his physical courage’’.
Some aspects of his revulsion at bullying came from his school days, standing up for others. But a powerful positive influence in his life was his remarkable uncle and namesake, Dr Charles Upham, aman beloved in his community andwho instilled what Scott calls ‘‘a powerful ethical compass’’.
You could say Upham was a man who contained multitudes. His temper made him a difficult comrade at times; his humour and storytelling abilities drew people to him.
Witty guy. His reaction to his captors’ lecturing assertions that famous figures, such as Shakespeare, were of German heritage?
‘‘Jesus Von Christ!’’
‘ He had a very fine fury, but it was a calibrated fury.’ TOM SCOTT
Scott writes of the time other Kiwi soldiers were concerned to see their ferocious battlefield leader stalking purposefully towards a bunch of captured and helpless Germans, hands tied behind their backs. To their relief, it was to give them each a drink from his bottle as they were baking under the African sun.
Hard as it is to associate such aman with gentleness, Scott in conversation has a raft of stories speaking to Upham’s capacity for that quality.
‘‘After thewar, he started a horse sanctuary as a farmer. Couldn’t bear the thought of old farm horses being sent off to be turned into glue and gelatin. So he accepted any old nag, his farm was completely overrun by horses.
Scott’s research included pilgrimages to Upham’s old battlegrounds, formerPOW cams and childhood haunts and talks with his now-elderly fellow soldiers, more than a few of them hard-cases themselves, and Upham’s surviving family.
He’s respectful of the biography Mark of the Lion penned by Kenneth Sandford, which he read as a sixth-former and found impossible to put down. But now he sees a new generation he wants to introduce to a story that deserves to be told.
Curiously, Sandford’s book makes a big mistake, albeit a common on. It bestows a knighthood on Upham, something he emphatically rejected.
Scott’s earlier writing includes his biography of Sir Edmund Hillary, and he readily agrees that such honours gain more prestige from men such as this than they bestow – Hillary’s standing with the public was no more enhanced by the title than
Upham’swas in any way diminished by the fact he resisted it.
Point out to Scott that his book is titled Searching For Charlie not Finding Charlie and he’s quick to say he wouldn’t be so arrogant; he just wanted the search to be rewarding for himself and the reader.
OK, he did find himself beaming when he received a text message from Upham’s neighbours in Conway Flat, North Canterbury, that they had read the book and ‘‘you caught him’’.
And though he never met Upham, he savours a granddaughter’s observation that the two would have got along like a house on fire.
Why?
‘‘Hewasn’t a bulls...er. I am. Maybe it was his bravery and my cowardice. Opposites attract.’’