Just six weeks separated the occasions when Mike Hutchinson won two MCs in the final year of the Second World War. Each time failure of leadership would have cost his battalion the initiative and led to the death of the men under his command. Twice he turned near disaster into success.
The 4th Battalion The Somerset Light Infantry, in which he commanded one of the four rifle companies, had no combat experience in the war until they landed at Arromanches on June 23, 1944, 17 days after D-Day. As part of the 43rd Wessex Division in VIII Corps they were under Lieutenant-General Sir Richard O’Connor, the architect of a sensational victory over the Italians in the Western Desert in the winter of 1940-41.
The 43rd Division was blooded — and seriously so — in the contest for the notorious Hill 112 east of Caen on July 11. No one had thought the battle would be easy but the skill and resolution of the German defenders, including elements of the 9th and 10th SS Panzer Divisions, proved overwhelming. The Somersets lost 19 officers and 479 men killed or wounded out of a complement of 680.
By the time that 4th Somerset had reached the village of Scheifendahl in the German Rhineland in January 1945, Hutchinson’s “D” Company was a battle-experienced and confident team. For the attack on Scheifendahl they were mounted in “Kangaroos”, armoured personnel carriers devised from either British 105mm self-propelled guns or Sherman tanks stripped of their guns and named after the field workshop where they were first converted.
Kangaroos were protection against shell splinters but still vulnerable to anti-tank mines. As Hutchinson’s company advanced on Scheifendahl supported by a troop of four tanks giving covering fire, seven of his 11 Kangaroos hit mines and were disabled in full view of the enemy. Hutchinson leapt from his Kangaroo, reorganised the uninjured men of his company and led them on a successful advance to clear the village and take the surviving enemy prisoner. His action brought the award of an “immediate” MC, that is to say one published in the next operational list with minimum delay. Six weeks later he was to face a similar but more difficult situation as it occurred in darkness.
Advertisement
On March 8, 1945, in the lead-up to the crossing of the Rhine, 4th Somersets were ordered to take the town of Xanten two miles from the west bank. They were supported by two flame-throwing tanks and a troop of Engineer armoured vehicles equipped to bridge an anti-tank ditch.
In circumstances oddly similar to those in which he had won his first MC, the assault by Hutchinson’s company stalled halfway to the objective. They came under intense enemy fire against which the flame-throwers proved ineffective and the Sappers had not yet managed to bridge the anti-tank ditch. Recognising that the battle had abruptly changed to a purely infantry engagement, he made a new fire plan on the spot, suppressed the enemy fire, resumed the advance and led his men into Xanten, taking the surviving German paratrooper defenders prisoner.
Another immediate MC followed in the form of a bar to his first. Hutchinson continued in command of his devoted “D” Company until the 4th Somerset reached the outskirts of Bremen before the end of the war in Europe on May 8.
John Michael Francis Hutchinson was born at Kegworth, Leicestershire, the son of professor of willow husbandry at the University of Bristol. Educated at Bristol Grammar School, he joined the university’s Officer Training Corps but rather than attending the university he joined a chair-making business the family had acquired. On commissioning in 1941 he opted for the Somersets due to the personality of their permanent staff instructor at the Bristol OTC.
On demobilisation he was delighted to find that the foreman of the chair-making business had kept it well in profit. In July 1946 he married Elizabeth Glen Booth, who had served in the WRNS during the war and been awarded the British Empire Medal for outstanding bravery in helping to rescue the observer of a crashed and burning aircraft at Macrahanish, Scotland. They had two daughters: Frances (Fran), a nursing practitioner and Mary, who is a TV producer.
Advertisement
He rejoined the 4th (Territorial Army) battalion in 1950, again commanded a company with three platoon commanders who were to become respectively: a secretary of state for defence — now Lord (Tom) King, a future lord lieutenant of the county of Bristol — Sir James Tidmarsh and George Tricks, the leading partner in a firm of auctioneers in Bristol. Hutchinson described them as “a very competent bunch, great fun and jokey”.
He took part in battlefield tours in northwest Europe. On the 70th anniversary of the liberation by his company of the village of Lochem in Holland he was given a hero’s welcome. Among his favourite wartime stories was how, as a newly commissioned 2nd lieutenant, he was sent to the University of Leeds in 1942 to lecture 200 students due to be commissioned as medical officers on how the war was going to be won. Collective stamping of feet stopped him in mid-flow to be told that he had so far contradicted himself ten times.
Major Mike Hutchinson, MC and Bar, soldier, was born on September 10, 1917. He died on September 2, 2015, aged 97