The reluctant legend: Charles Upham, the only fighting soldier ever to win the Victoria Cross twice
A deep-dive profile by NEWS WIRE
There is a story New Zealanders tell themselves about Charles Upham, and it is mostly true. A quiet Canterbury sheep farmer who, when war broke out, packed his kit, walked off the high country, and turned out to be one of the most ferocious infantry soldiers of the twentieth century. A man so embarrassed by his own legend that he begged not to be singled out, refused a farm bought for him by grateful Cantabrians, and wanted only to go home and tend his sheep.
The story is true. It is also incomplete. The Upham who emerges from the citations, the biographies and the recollections of men who fought beside him is stranger and harder than the modest farmer of national memory. He was, by every credible account, a man of disconcerting calm under fire, of an “icy fury” when his men were hit, and of a streak of stubbornness so deep that his German captors eventually shipped him to Colditz because nothing else would hold him.
He is the only combat soldier in history to have been awarded the Victoria Cross twice. More than three decades after his death, on a quiet Canterbury farm, no one has joined him.
A Christchurch boy
Charles Hazlitt Upham was born on 21 September 1908 at 32 Gloucester Street in central Christchurch, the son of a lawyer, John Hazlitt Upham, and his wife Agatha Mary Coates. The family was well established in the city. His father’s lineage included the English essayist William Hazlitt’s brother, the painter John Hazlitt; his mother was a granddaughter of pioneer Canterbury colonist Guise Brittan. By the standards of the day, the boy was born into comfort and connection.
He was not, however, born to easy soldiering. Accounts of his childhood describe a quiet, courteous boy with one leg slightly shorter than the other, prompting at least one doctor to suspect a mild case of polio. What he had instead, even then, was a sense of fairness sharp enough to get him into trouble. At Waihi School in South Canterbury, where he boarded from 1917, and later at Christ’s College in Christchurch, he was remembered for stepping into fights on behalf of smaller boys being bullied — a small detail that, in hindsight, looks less like sentiment and more like a clue.
After Christ’s, he went to Canterbury Agricultural College at Lincoln, graduating with a diploma in agriculture in 1930. For the next six years he worked the Canterbury high country as a shepherd, musterer and station manager. Historians have been quick to draw a line between the man the war found and the country that made him. The official New Zealand history puts it bluntly: he developed his qualities in country where men had to match the ruggedness of nature with their own.
It was unromantic work, and it gave him things the war would later need — physical endurance, an instinct for terrain, an unsentimental view of weather and luck, and what one biographer politely described as a large vocabulary of expletives.
In 1935 he met Mary Eileen “Molly” McTamney, a dietitian at Christchurch Hospital, at the Riccarton Park Racecourse. They danced. He was waiting for her after her hospital shift the next day. They became engaged in 1938. By then he had taken a job with the Government Valuation Department in Timaru, where his combination of practical farm experience and methodical mind made him quickly capable.
Then, in September 1939, the war began.
Sergeant, then second lieutenant
Upham enlisted in the Second New Zealand Expeditionary Force on 18 September 1939, aged thirty. He had five years’ experience in the Territorials and was already a sergeant in that force, but he signed on as a private — a small detail that says a great deal about how he saw the army he was joining.
The army saw him quickly. He was promoted to lance corporal, then sergeant, before his ship had sailed. Sent to Egypt with the advance party of the First Echelon, he initially refused a place at Officer Cadet Training Unit because he was afraid it would delay his deployment. By July 1940 he had relented. He passed out, was commissioned as a second lieutenant on 2 November 1940, and was given a platoon in the 20th Battalion. The men were largely tough West Coasters; he reportedly trained both them and himself hard.
Then came Greece, Crete, and the war he would actually be remembered for.
Crete: the first Victoria Cross
In May 1941, the New Zealand Division — mauled in Greece, short of weapons, short of food — was holding the island of Crete against a German airborne invasion of unprecedented scale. Upham was a second lieutenant in the 20th Battalion. The fighting was close, confused and bitter.
The citation for his first Victoria Cross runs over an extraordinary nine days, from 22 to 30 May. Most VCs are awarded for a single act of conspicuous courage. Upham’s was awarded for a sustained campaign of it.
During the night counter-attack on Maleme airfield on 22 May, he led his platoon more than three thousand yards through heavily defended ground. Three times the platoon was held up by machine-gun positions, and three times Upham personally destroyed them with hand grenades — his preferred weapon. After the failed attack, with four of his men dead, contemporaries described him as possessed by an icy fury. He helped evacuate wounded men and then went six hundred yards into German-held ground to bring out an isolated New Zealand company that would otherwise have been cut off.
Three days later at Galatos, weakened by dysentery and already wounded in the shoulder by mortar shrapnel, he deployed his platoon to break a German attack. He was, by then, also carrying a bullet in his foot.
The most cinematic moment of the campaign — the one his biographers have never quite let go of — came on the fringes of an olive grove. Cut off, alone, with one arm in a sling, Upham was approached by two German soldiers who believed they had cornered him. He played dead. When they came close, he braced his rifle in the crook of a tree, shot the first, reloaded one-handed, and shot the second so close that the man fell against his rifle barrel.
When he was told he had been awarded the Victoria Cross, he was distressed. His response, recorded simply in the regimental record, was that the medal was meant for the men.
King George VI invested him with the Cross at Buckingham Palace on 11 May 1945, after the war in Europe had ended. The King asked, conversationally, what he had been doing since arriving in London. According to Upham, mostly eating.
Minqar Qaim and Ruweisat: the Bar
By mid-1942 the New Zealand Division was in the Western Desert, and Upham was a captain commanding a company in the 20th Battalion. On 27 June, at Minqar Qaim, the division was attacked by German forces and largely surrounded. Upham, by all accounts, spent the day moving in the open under heavy fire to check on his men. That night, during the division’s famous breakout, he led his company in overrunning enemy positions; in one celebrated incident he and another soldier destroyed a truckload of German troops with hand grenades, suffering minor wounds from his own grenades in the process.
Two weeks later came Ruweisat Ridge.
The attack on the night of 14–15 July 1942 was a disaster for the division. Promised armoured support failed to arrive. New Zealand infantry took their objectives in the dark and were caught by German tanks at first light. Upham’s company was initially in reserve. When information was needed from the forward battalions, he chose to go himself, in a jeep mounted with a captured German machine gun. At one point the jeep became bogged in soft sand, and Upham — by sheer force of expression, the story goes — ordered nearby Italian soldiers to push it free. They did.
Wounded, he led his company in the final assault. He personally destroyed a German tank and several guns and vehicles with grenades. A machine-gun bullet shattered his elbow. With his arm broken, weak from blood loss, he consolidated the captured position before allowing the wound to be dressed, then went back to his men and remained with them through a day of artillery and mortar fire. Severely wounded a second time and unable to move, he and the six survivors of his company were overrun and captured.
The recommendation for a Bar to his Victoria Cross — a second VC, in effect — sat in awkward limbo while he was a prisoner. The British authorities thought it might be better treated as a Distinguished Service Order. Major-General Howard Kippenberger, his former brigadier, kept pressing the case. When the recommendation finally reached King George VI in 1945, the King observed that a Bar would be very unusual indeed, and asked Kippenberger directly whether Upham deserved it. Kippenberger’s reply has entered New Zealand folklore: in his respectful opinion, sir, Upham had won the VC several times over.
The Bar was gazetted on 26 September 1945. With it, Upham became the third man ever to receive the VC twice — and the only fighting combatant. The other two, Arthur Martin-Leake and Noel Godfrey Chavasse, had both been doctors in the Royal Army Medical Corps, decorated for rescuing the wounded.
The prisoner who would not stay
Most VC stories end at the citation. Upham’s keeps going.
After Ruweisat he was hospitalised by his German captors, and he immediately began trying to escape. From an Italian hospital, he made his first attempt while still recovering. Transferred to a German prisoner-of-war camp in September 1943, he tried again. The most audacious of his attempts — the one that finished the Germans’ patience — involved scaling the camp’s barbed-wire fences in broad daylight. He was permitted exercise only alone, watched by two armed guards and covered by a machine gun in a tower; he simply bolted from his small courtyard, ran straight through the German barracks, and out the front gate of the camp. The guard in the tower, according to other prisoners, refrained from shooting him out of sheer respect.
He was recaptured. On 14 October 1944 the Germans sent him to Oflag IV-C — Colditz — the maximum-security castle in Saxony reserved for habitual escapers. He was the only New Zealand combatant officer ever sent there.
The Colditz stories about Upham are characteristic. In one widely retold episode, biographer Kenneth Sandford describes Upham flinging his identity disc to the ground in front of a German officer and refusing to pick it up; the officer drew his pistol, cocked it, and pressed it to Upham’s stomach, ordering him for the last time to obey. Upham did not. Eventually, the officer relented.
He was liberated by United States troops in April 1945. His first reported instinct was to ask the Americans whether he could join them and keep fighting. They declined.
Molly, and the refusal
Upham went to England, found Molly McTamney — who had become a nurse in the meantime — and married her at Barton on Sea in Hampshire on 20 June 1945. He was invested with his first VC at Buckingham Palace less than three weeks before. He sailed home on a troopship that did not take wives; Molly followed in December.
What happened next is the part of the story New Zealanders most often retell, and it is the part that most clearly explains him.
Cantabrians raised £10,000 — an enormous sum at the time — to buy him a farm in recognition of what he had done. Upham politely refused. The money, at his suggestion, was instead used to endow a scholarship for the children of returned servicemen to study at Canterbury Agricultural College or Canterbury University College. The Charles Hazlitt Upham Scholarship was formally established in 1949 and exists to this day.
He took out an ordinary war rehabilitation loan, like any other returned soldier, and bought a sheep farm called Lansdowne at Conway Flat near Hundalee, in North Canterbury. He and Molly raised three daughters there. He served on the board of governors of Christ’s College for nearly twenty years. He sat on the local rabbit board and the school committee. His arm, shattered at Ruweisat, never fully recovered, but he was a successful farmer.
He almost never spoke publicly about the war. When his old commander Howard Kippenberger pressed him to authorise a biography, Upham eventually relented; Sandford’s Mark of the Lion appeared in 1962. Attendance at parades and commemorations frequently required, by various accounts, the personal intervention of the Prime Minister.
There is one part of the post-war Upham legend that historians treat carefully. It is widely reported, and apparently widely believed in Canterbury, that for the rest of his life he refused to allow any German-made vehicle or piece of machinery onto his farm. The story is not in his official citations or in the formal biographical record from the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography; it is in the oral tradition and in popular accounts. Whether he held this line as strictly as the legend says, or whether the story has hardened in the retelling, is now impossible to verify. Either way, it has stuck — and it tells us something about how New Zealanders chose to remember him.
The man behind the medals
What were people actually trying to say about Upham when they reached for words to describe him?
The official New Zealand history settles on a particular phrase: modest and selfless, but extremely tough and single-minded. Sandford’s biography reaches for the language of nerveless competence. Comrades described his stillness in moments where stillness should not have been possible — a calculated coolness in the olive grove, a quiet methodical movement under fire at Minqar Qaim.
Two threads run through almost every recollection. The first is his loyalty to his men, which manifested as something close to grief whenever any of them was killed. The second is a streak of moral stubbornness that the war merely concentrated. The boy who broke up bullying at Christ’s College, the recruit who insisted on enlisting as a private, the prisoner who would not pick up his identity disc, the captain who refused a gifted farm — these are recognisably the same person.
He was, in other words, not a man who became extraordinary in war. He was a particular kind of New Zealander — taciturn, exacting, fair, profoundly stubborn — placed in conditions that revealed what he already was.
Death, and what followed
Upham and Molly retired off the Hundalee farm in January 1994 when his health declined. He died in Christchurch on 22 November 1994, surrounded by his wife and three daughters. He was 86.
His funeral was held at Christ Church Cathedral with full military honours. By contemporary accounts, around five thousand people lined the streets of Christchurch as the cortiège passed. He was buried in the graveyard of St Paul’s Anglican Church in Papanui. A memorial service was held in May 1995 at St Martin-in-the-Fields in London, attended by representatives of the Royal Family, senior figures from the New Zealand and British armed forces, and other holders of the Victoria Cross and George Cross.
The recognitions accumulated, as he had always feared they would. There is a bronze statue of him in Amberley, north of Christchurch. The Reserve Bank issued a commemorative $20 coin. The Royal New Zealand Navy named a sealift ship HMNZS Charles Upham — though, in a footnote that might have amused him, the ship was eventually sold off in 2001 after persistent stability problems.
In November 2006 his medals — the VC and Bar, with his other decorations — were sold by his daughters to the Imperial War Museum in London for an undisclosed sum. The then Minister of Defence, Phil Goff, said publicly that the family had quoted the New Zealand government a price of NZ$3.3 million for a domestic purchase. The medals are now held in London, a fact that some New Zealanders still regard as one of the lesser sadnesses of his story.
What he means
Eight decades after Crete, Upham is woven into the way New Zealand thinks about itself in war. He has come to symbolise, in the cautious phrase of the official histories, what many believed the typical New Zealand soldier ought to be: rugged, professional, unshowy, lethally effective. The risk in any national legend is that it flattens the person inside it, and the Upham legend has done some of that. But the documentary record — the citations, the regimental accounts, the recollections of men who served with him — is unusually congruent with the legend. He really was that good a soldier. He really was that reluctant a hero.
There is a small moment, often quoted, that gets at something the medals do not. After being severely wounded at Ruweisat, surrounded and about to be captured, Upham gave water from his own canteen to wounded German soldiers nearby. The water bottle on his belt is the detail the sculptor of the Amberley statue chose to keep. It is, in its way, the part of him hardest to award a medal for, and the part most worth remembering.
He spent fewer than five years in uniform. He spent the next forty-nine years on a farm at Conway Flat, refusing to talk about the first five.
It is, on reflection, a very New Zealand way to be a hero.
Sources and further reading
- Te Ara — Upham, Charles Hazlitt (Dictionary of New Zealand Biography)
- NZ History — Charles Upham
- Official History: 20 Battalion and Armoured Regiment
- Kenneth Sandford, Mark of the Lion: The Story of Capt. Charles Upham, V.C. and Bar (1962)
- Imperial War Museums — photo E 6066
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