The man behind the bayonet
Jack Hinton’s fame came from more than his dripping bayonet. The men he served with in World War II’s ill-starred Greek campaign, and later as a prisoner of war, had much to say in his praise. But some of the most appreciative accounts appear to have been about his capacity for straight talk.
They say he had a lifelong dislike for humbug. (Puzzled younger readers might want to ask the older generation for a definition, if only for the fun of watching them try to avoid a particular swear word.)
Before his heroics, that humbug intolerance had kicked in to the startlement of a couple of generals.
The official history of the 20th Battalion tells how, while earlier in Egypt, the troops had been on British rations that they regarded as rather light.
‘‘How are the men shooting?’’ General Freyberg had asked Hinton.
‘‘How would you expect them to bloody well shoot?’’ he replied. ‘‘Not enough bloody rations, stinking heat and sand.’’ ‘‘Repeat that,’’ said the general. Hinton repeated it. ‘‘What’s your name, Sergeant?’’ ‘‘Hinton, sir.’’ ‘‘Oh yes, Hinton,’’ replied the general. ‘‘Carry on.’’
At that stage, the name had no particular honours attached to it. But in that instant, Freyberg made what proved a pretty good call. He didn’t get puffy but contented himself with having a few words with the company commander, who in turn spoke to his sergeant about how to address senior officers in future.
And, make of this what you will, the men’s rations were soon supplemented from divisional funds.
Then came a much more heated encounter with the British Brigadier Leonard Parrington.
With the Greek campaign already effectively lost, a column of German armoured forces started bearing down on about 6000 New Zealand and British troops who were awaiting embarkation on the outskirts of Kalamata. Only a very few were, at that stage, equipped to fight.
Parrington ordered a surrender. Hinton, who had seen scant action, was in earshot and not best pleased. Once again, his language turned a tad colonial.
‘‘Go and jump in the bloody lake,’’ he said.
‘‘I’ll have you court-martialled for speaking to me like that,’’ Parrington said.
‘‘If you’re not careful,’’ Hinton replied, ‘‘I’ll have you court-martialled for talking surrender.’’
The German advance guard contained several armoured cars, 2-inch guns, 2-inch mortars and two 6-inch guns. Hinton, with his .303 rifle, bayonet fixed, and hand grenades in his shorts’ pockets, set off for a defensive machinegun post near the beach.
Assured they could provide covering fire, he went back, rounded up about a dozen New Zealand soldiers and led them back into it.
As he headed towards the weapons someone barked an order for them to retire to cover.
According to the London Gazette, Hinton shouted: ‘‘To hell with this! Who’ll come with me?’’
The Victoria Cross history In the Face of the Enemy asserts that his actual words were much stronger, but deemed unfit for public record.
The covering fire as they went, incidentally came from Private Alan Jones, of Invercargill, on a Bren gun. Jones later wrote, quite wittily: ‘‘I consider any man who was prepared to accept my covering fire should have been awarded the VC for that act alone’’.
In the stale language of formal military citation, what happened was this:
‘‘[Hinton] ran to within several yards of the nearest [German] guns. The guns fired but missed him and he hurled two grenades which completely wiped out the crews. He then came on with the bayonet, followed by a crowd of New Zealanders.
‘‘The German troops abandoned the first six-inch gun and retreated into two houses. Sergeant Hinton smashed the windows and then the door of the first house and dealt with the garrison with his bayonet.
‘‘He repeated the performance in the second house and, as a result, until overwhelming German forces arrived, the New Zealanders held the guns.
‘‘Sergeant Hinton then fell with a bullet through the lower abdomen and was taken prisoner. ‘‘
The lack of detail about exactly what happened inside those houses was surely a mercy. In his later years Hinton was hardly talkative on the subject.
However, he came to trust Christchurch Star writer Gabrielle McDonald with his story, and her biography, subtitled A Man Amongst Men, shows carefully earned insights.
In a later obituary she would describe how, even when she was living with him and his wife Molly to prepare the biography, the VC details were all but taboo and something she could approach only tentatively.
‘‘I’ll give him a couple of whiskies,’’ Molly would say, ‘‘and that should do the trick.’’
They did. And so McDonald’s biography, while empty of gratuitous information about the gory mechanics of it all, vividly tells of his almost unhinged exhilaration leading the charge.
‘‘He was scared, shit-scared really, but over-riding these feelings he had a sense of crazy excitement, almost as if there was some invisible force egging him on, and he was caught up in it.
‘‘It was telling him to do these mad things, throw his life to the wind. Suddenly, he knew without a doubt why he had travelled thousands of kilometres.
‘‘It was so clear to him he almost laughed out loud.’’
Some might say that his preparation for hand-to-hand combat went further back. Many of his comrades had been, like him, hardened by the privations of the Depression years but Hinton had left home at 12 to work as a galley hand on the giant Antarctic whaling ship The Larsen. At least in that respect, he was no stranger to the meeting of blade and flesh.
Severely wounded in his Greek assault, he survived nearly four years in German prisoner of war camps.
That’s where word came that he had been awarded a Victoria Cross.
At the time, he had been banged up in two weeks’ solitary confinement. Suddenly escorted to the middle of the prison parade ground, wearing wooden boards tied to his feet in place of the boots he had lost when injured, he went fully expecting to be the centre of an entirely unkinder sort of ceremony than the one which awaited him.
Instead, he found an unnamed German general, ready to present him with a replica of the VC.
He may have earned it by killing Germans, but his captors were reacting to the implicit bravery.
The general saluted, shook his hand, and the camp kommandant invited him the officers’ club for champagne to toast his medal.
Whereupon Hinton invited the kommandant to shove the champagne up his waistcoat.
He was held high by his fellow prisoners and promptly returned to solitary.
During a subsequent escape he was captured and brutishly questioned on the accusation he must be a spy. This, at least, was something Hinton was later, clearly, willing to recall in detail.
His interrogator was Hauptmann Greiner, the chief Gestapo officer for the district. Their encounter, described in McDonald’s biography, reads, nowadays, like an oh-so-familiar movie or TV series script.
‘‘Awfully sorry old man to keep you waiting,’’ Greiner said when they first met. ‘‘You must think me impolite – pressure of work, I’m afraid.’’
The accent was from Greiner’s prewar education at Oxford.
‘‘Beautiful place, don’t you think, old man?’’
‘‘No. I don’t know. Never been to the bloody place. And don’t call me ‘old man’.’’
The polite facade deteriorated when Greiner, after describing in detail the excellence of the food, wine and bed that awaited Hinton if he co-operated, added that his captured companion had already decided to tell them everything.
‘‘If you know so bloody much, what are you asking me for?’’
Then Greiner, pressing a buzzer under his desk, hissed: ‘‘I don’t think you will find it so funny in front of Hans.’’