Terry Crowdy - Donald Dean VC : the memoris of a volunteer & territorial from two world wars

First published in Great Britain in 2010 by
Pen & Sword Military
An imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
47 Church Street
Barnsley
South Yorkshire
S70 2AS

Copyright Donald Dean 2010

ISBN 978 1 84884 158 1

ISBN 9781844683925 (epub)
ISBN 9781844683932 (PRC)

The right of Donald Dean to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library

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My grateful thanks to Richard whose perseverance enabled this book to be realized; to my family and to all Daddy's friends who died in both World Wars.

Susan Bavin (ne Dean)

Colonel D.D. was my father's first cousin. I was only privileged to know him when I succeeded my father as a fellow trustee of my grandfather's family trust in 1976 a chance to tactfully probe a subject he avoided talking about his experiences as a survivor of front-line active service through World War I (191418) and World War II (193945). These ten years, with nineteen spent as a volunteer Territorial officer between the wars, moulded a most effective amateur colonel from a man whose destined career was the family brick business, Smeed, Dean & Co. Ltd. Had he chosen the army as his life's calling, we might have seen him commanding the 4th Bn of The Buffs at the front instead of the Pioneers in support situations albeit never far from front-line fire through World War II.

I only once saw him in uniform, when I helped him adjust his heavy medal bar to attend a Victoria Cross anniversary at Buckingham Palace. Although aged, he seemed fit and lean with very alert challenging eyes. Indeed he almost seemed to tilt with the weight of medals on his left breast!

I was to learn on my subsequent visits on Trust business to his Sittingbourne home, where, although bedridden with age, he always sat up to attention: alert was the word. He once asked me what had happened to the two previous cheques in the number sequence to the one I was asking him to sign they had in fact been cancelled in error by the auditors. He certainly, as his army reminiscences show, knew some administrative tricks.

I became aware of the existence of these notes and once persuaded him to send me a sample page, saying to me he would give me an idea of what it was like. I received the page recounting his wounding at Passchendaele in 1917.

I pressed him often on bravery with a strategy, as I thought, like those Chateaux Generals who had planned to take their objectives. He always, as in that crucial paragraph of his notes relating to his Victoria Cross, said I would find it in regimental records. He added: I wasn't brave that day, just fortunate to be seen doing my duty. He said he certainly could tell me about bravery and brave men another time and he especially mentioned Boulogne in 1940.

He showed emotion when he observed both colonels of the 2nd Welsh and 2nd Irish Guards receiving DSOs for holding the shrinking perimeter during the evacuation, which could not have been done without help from his Pioneers, using Welsh Guards rifles left behind. He was the last man to be evacuated on the destroyer Vimiera, and still chuckled when mischievously mentioning how he offered the Welsh Guards at Colchester their rifles back, when more than a third of the Pioneers returned to England, still an operational formation under their own officers.

He spoke just as his account of events reads, without emotion or elaboration, but effectively making his point, with a twinkle in his eye reflecting some of the humour he recounts; like Gladys in the 1916/17 winter lady's white cotton night dress camouflage, or General Hunter Bunter Weston and the gas mask that was revealed to be old socks, not forgetting Wilfred the goat in 1944. He betrays much of what he appears to have felt Dogsbody (never volunteer) Dean was under appreciated in the pleasure he took, as the only officer left in D Company during the Asian Flu epidemic of spring 1918, recommending Lt Dean as an officer in whom he placed great confidence.

He briefly describes dealing with gas, but once confessed to me the horror he really felt at the prospect of being blinded for life at the age of nineteen, as he shuffled back holding the man in front as the man behind held him, in a bizarre procession, only to recover sight, two or three days later.

He could be very direct with superiors, as with the women's uniform issue in 1939 or involving Lord Gort in obtaining a second uniform of fatigue denims in France for men working during the Phoney War of 1939/40 (an attitude which, with his TA volunteer status, no doubt did not assist his promotion prospects). He ended World War I still a lieutenant, just twenty-one (age being a factor), although often mentioning he hoped to be confirmed in the rank of captain, having, due to heavy casualties, so often found himself acting as company commander.

Once when I was pressing him to reminisce, he said, With men it is all about leadership. You did not order that company of Pioneers from the Glasgow back streets to whom I gave Guard's rifles at Boulogne, and who had more reason to wish to kill me than the enemy. After all he had kept most of them in and out of the glasshouse he had personally opened for them in Doullen's jail, to deal with the indiscipline of boredom in the Phoney War winter of 1939/40 in France. He just said, Follow me! Today we kill Germans tomorrow you can have me! When an enemy patrol entered the street ahead a clatter of rifles behind made him momentarily think he was on his own, only to see his men rush past and do what they did best in their native city street fighting with knives and razors. He mentions how these same men remembered him, and the glasshouse, almost with affection when they came under his command again four years later in Italy.

Repeatedly, in both wars, he demonstrates how to win over reluctant and sometimes mutinous men. When attacks falter in 1917 and 1918, and he has to rally men from other units, he attributes this not to cowardice but to loss of officers to follow. The lessons learnt by a young subaltern who did not betray the stolen rum in his new command's water bottles, and who bought tea at his own expense for a train load of recovered wounded, being returned to a war of which they were more than weary, prepared him well to control the diverse and numerous labour force he inherited from the Vichy French regime in Madagascar, and to handle the difficulties that arose with African and Indian labour units in Italy. If that is how you wish to play it, so be it, Dean, he quotes General Clark.

His observation and comments tell us much about him that he was reluctant to put into words, although he did once mention with an almost Cheshire Cat grin, the brothel he had found it expedient to open in 1939, and that he had learnt the value of carrying a German firing mechanism to enable him to turn their captured machine guns back on them. Apart from his comments about certain generals, particularly Major General Osborne, who passed him over for command of the 4th Bn of The Buffs, because he was not a regular (age was again probably a factor), and some specific failures like the impossibility of the ground at Passchendaele, and failure to exploit success, he was, like most soldiers of his time, respectfully confident of his leaders, and that they would win both wars.