Tom Scott in Egypt researching for his book on Charles Upham.
Searching for Charlie: In Pursuit of the Real Charles Upham VC & Bar
Tom Scott
Upstart Press, $50
In his new book, Tom Scott is "in pursuit of" war hero Charles Upham, a burgeoning genre that pairs biography with the author's own journey. Scott carries with him Kenneth Sandford's 1962 biography of
Upham, Mark of the Lion, sometimes correcting its minor errors (Upham never won a knighthood). Scott is convinced that, despite accusations, Charles Hazlitt Upham was no psychopath: instead he was a modest, if determined, Kiwi bloke.
Scott's world-roaming quest is to find the source of Upham's extraordinary courage, well attested by official records and many witnesses. Upham was the only combat soldier to win the Victoria Cross twice and his superiors would have awarded him more if they had not been overruled. If you're going to have a war at all, Charlie Upham was the type of soldier you wanted in the front line. He really did knock out, single-handedly, enemy machine-gun posts and strong points in the counter-attack on Maleme airfield in Crete. He really did organise defences against Rommel's tanks on the Minqar Qaim escarpment in North Africa and led the breakout once the Kiwis were surrounded.
With all the gusto of an old Boys' Own Paper yarn, Scott depicts Upham rallying his men and charging forward, throwing hand grenades at anything that looked like an enemy. The son of a wealthy barrister, Upham may have had a privileged childhood before he morphed into a rugged farmer and soldier but,in Scott's portrait, he has a "defiant, bewildered, almost pathological modesty". He's a regular joker who could swear a blue streak and is "fiercely egalitarian".
Scott travels to the sites of Upham's war experience — Greece, Crete, North Africa, Italy, Germany — though little of the travelogue illuminates anything new about Upham himself. The author's interviews include military historians, Upham's family and surviving fellow soldiers, but Searching for Charlie has only a very modest bibliography and absolutely no footnotes or endnotes to verify sources.
