His platoon officer and sergeant having been among several casualties, suffered by his unit, Drummer Bent of the East Lancashire Regiment assumed command of the survivors in his platoon and organised a successful defence against heavy attack at Le Gheer in Belgium. He had already been marked for his gallantry in earlier engagements, and his personal courage was confirmed once again on 3 November, when he braved enemy fire to recover several wounded colleagues from the open. He was awarded the Victoria Cross.
1914 cont: In the Pacific, off Chile, the first major naval engagement of the First World War was fought at Coronel. Vice-Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock commanded a squadron of largely elderly Royal Navy ships, the most modern vessels being concentrated in the North Sea and Mediterranean.
His opponent was Vice-Admiral Graf von Spee, commanding the German East Asiatic Squadron, which was attempting to return to Germany. Cradock had left his most powerful but slowest ship, the old battleship HMS Canopus, guarding the Falkland Islands. In appalling weather, his two armoured cruisers, HMS Good Hope (flagship) and HMS Monmouth, fought gallantly but with little effect against the far more modern German cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, and went down with all hands, including Cradock. The light cruiser HMS Glasgow, and an armed merchant cruiser, Otranto, managed to escape.
The Admiralty immediately dispatched a powerful battle-cruiser squadron to the South Atlantic. Spee's squadron was destroyed at the Falklands on 8 December, both Canopus and Glasgow playing a key part in the action.
1918: At Valenciennes in France, Sergeant Cairns of the South Saskatchewan Regiment single-handedly charged directly into the fire of a machine-gun post, wiping out its five crew. He then attacked a pair of guns, killing or capturing some 30 men. Although wounded, he led forward a small party and successfully overran another battery position. Finally he took command of a patrol which secured another sixty prisoners, but was fatally wounded. He died the following day. He was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross.
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