Royal Tank Regiment officer who fought in the first British armoured action of the war and with distinction during the advance in Italy
Although experienced in armoured warfare with several dangerous encounters to his credit, Peter Vaux was not a hero in the accepted sense. He was a survivor of the perils of war and, later, of the professional uncertainties of peace. His character combined serene conscientiousness, imagination and a gift for friendship that made him one of the Royal Tank Regiment’s most esteemed officers of his generation.
As leader of the reconnaissance troop of 4th Battalion The Royal Tank Corps, as it then was, he took part in the first major British armoured action of the Second World War: the counterstroke at Arras into the German flank in May 1940, as von Rundstedt’s Panzers rampaged across the lines of communication of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in France while it was struggling to achieve an orderly withdrawal from Belgium.
Well conceived as an attack of two divisions led by the only tank brigade the British commander General Lord Gort had at his disposal, it was executed by just two tank battalions supported by infantry demoralised by dive-bombing. Even so, it caused von Rundstedt to question the headlong drive of his armoured spearheads deep into France. Had the British counterstroke been delivered with greater strength and resolution it might have gained the BEF more breathing space before Dunkirk, but would not have avoided the evacuation.
As the advance of 4th RTC petered out because of a lack of infantry support, Vaux and his troop were isolated and surrounded. Remembering that opportunities for escape tend to occur early, he led his troop out of the trap, killed a German officer in a shoot-out with revolvers and swam across the Somme to safety. But it was a matter of lifelong regret to him that one of his tank crew was drowned.
Evacuated through Dunkirk, Vaux sailed to the Middle East with 4th Royal Tanks to Egypt in December 1940 and fought in the indecisive Western Desert battles that followed General Sir Richard O’Connor’s defeat of the Italians under Marshal Graziani in the winter of 1940-41. “Rested” as an intelligence officer at Headquarters 7th Armoured Division in late 1941, he was promoted to be GSO 2 (Intelligence) at General Horrocks’s 13th Corps for the Battle of El Alamein in October 1942 and then sent to the wartime staff college at Haifa.
Appointed to 7th Armoured Brigade as brigade major (chief of staff) after Haifa, Vaux joined this battle-experienced formation in Italy and took part in the 8th Army’s advance east of the Tiber towards Arezzo after the capture of Rome in June 1944. He was seriously wounded by shellfire at San Marino during 5th Corps’ late-summer offensive of 1944, mentioned in dispatches and evacuated to England, where he spent six months in hospital.
Experience of three campaigns led to his appointment as an instructor at the Staff College, Camberley. With the war in Europe over he joined the staff of Headquarters 21st Army Group at Bad Oeynhausen as a lieutenant-colonel. As with many contemporaries, his postwar career involved reduction to his substantive rank of major and a long wait for regimental command, although he achieved the career leg-up of a lieutenant-colonel’s staff appointment before command, as chief personnel and logistics officer of 11th Armoured Division in Germany, for which service he was appointed OBE in 1957.
He went to Libya to assume command of 6th Royal Tanks in 1958, 18 years after first seeing the desert, but was not to remain there long. The Defence Review that followed the 1956 Suez operation fixed the end of National Service and radically reduced the Army’s order of battle. His task was to bring 6th Royal Tanks to Germany to amalgamate with the 3rd Regiment at Detmold in 1959, an awkward duty but one that won him the accolade of a “compassionate and caring CO” from the sergeants’ mess of the combined regiment. After return to the Staff College as a colonel commanding one of the three academic divisions, he was promoted to brigadier to take over command of the British Army element serving in peninsula Malaysia during the final year of Indonesia’s “confrontation” with the Federation. Most of the action took place in East Malaysia (the former British territories of North Borneo and Sarawak) but an Indonesian parachute drop across the railway line near the north Johor town of Labis carried the “war” to the peninsula in September 1964.
Peter Alfred Lincoln Vaux was born in 1916, the son of Charles A. Vaux, a mining engineer and explorer. He was educated at Margate College and RMC Sandhurst before being commissioned in 1937.
His final uniformed appointment in the Army was as Deputy Director Security (Army) in the Ministry of Defence, but his remit was for the Army as a whole. He started his security work as the Northern Ireland Troubles began their tragic development into an armed insurrection that gradually spread to the British mainland.
Vaux was involved in the protective side of security, working with the other security services, until leaving the Army in 1971. For the next decade he worked as a civilian on special security duties for the Ministry of Defence. During this period and subsequently, he was president of the Farnborough branch of the Royal Tank Regimental Association, a lecturer during the Staff College battlefield tours in Europe and a frequent contributor to journals on armoured warfare.
He married Jean Carleton-Stiff in 1945. She survives him with two sons.
Brigadier Peter Vaux, OBE, tank regiment officer, was born on October 23, 1916. He died on February 6, 2013, aged 96
'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'
