WITH the world becoming an ever more dangerous place – witness the Middle East and Eastern Europe – it’s a question that crops up occasionally. Would the nation collectively fight for survival like it did during World War II? And maybe with Remembrance Sunday approaching on November 10 it's one worth thinking about. Of course, there is the belief wars like that will never happen again.
Some say future conflicts will be nuclear with no more physical effort than pressing a button. But that’s not what is happening in Ukraine or Palestine, where by and large boots on the ground of whatever side are doing the fighting, albeit with powerful air support. And it certainly wasn’t like that in the autumn of 1915 when 38-year-old hay baler Fred Dancox, of Dolday, Worcester, one of the city’s worst slum areas, answered the call and joined the fight against Kaiser Bill.
World War I was 15 months old and like more than three million other men he went to serve his country in what was supposed to be “the war to end all wars”. Fat chance of that. Two years later Fred died a hero but not before he had been awarded the Victoria Cross.
On November 30, 1917 he singlehandedly captured an enemy machine gun blockhouse and took 40 Germans prisoner during the Third Battle of Ypres. The machine guns had been causing carnage among his colleagues, killing officers and men as they prepared to advance. But, by running from shell hole to shell hole under heavy fire, he managed to get to the .
