The Second World War North-West Europe operations posthumous M.I.D. group of six awarded to Major C. M. Ogden-Smith, Royal Artillery (H.A.C.), attached Commandos and Special Air Service, who was killed in action in France in July 1944 while serving in an S.A.S. Jedburgh team

1939-45 Star; Africa Star; France and Germany Star; Defence and War Medals, M.I.D. oak leaf; Territorial Efficiency Decoration, G.VI.R., the reverse dated ‘1950’, good very fine and better (6) £600-800

This lot was sold as part of a special collection, The Ron Penhall Collection.

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‘When the sound of trucks was heard, at around 2100, the six men were in a ditch some hundred metres from the farm buildings. Dallow set off down the ditch, followed by his French assistant and Ogden-Smith. As he tried to clamber out, he slipped and fell, landing in a tangle of briars; he remained there undiscovered for the next few hours, despite search parties close by, and then set off, with nothing but his Colt sidearm, in which he judges to be a northerly direction. The next day he stumbled by lucky chance upon a maquis group, and was sheltered until reunited with Lt. Leborgne, three days later.

Major Colin Ogden-Smith was less fortunate. By Leborgne’s account he was shot as he tried to leave the ditch; wounded in the stomach and unable to move, he was shot again as he lay on the ground. The French radio operator, ‘Guyader’, though wounded, hid himself in the nearby river for four hours and then managed to walk and crawl to another farm, where he was given shelter. The S.A.S. trooper, Maurice Myodon, was wounded by grenade fragments during the first exchanges; unable to run for it, he kept up covering fire, first with his carbine and then, when his ammunition was exhausted, with his pistol. When that too was empty he shouted to the Germans that they need not worry, he was out of ammunition; he received a burst of submachine-gun fire in response, and was finished off with a pistol shot to the head. Both he and Ogden-Smith were in uniform. The second of the two French civilians of the party, ‘Deneville’, was also killed during the course of the fire-fight. Leborgne managed to kill the German captain who led the raid and escaped in the resulting confusion. The farmer, a man of seventy-one, was subsequently bayoneted to death. The four corpses were stripped, and left exposed for forty-eight hours before being roughly buried; they were later exhumed and the two parachutists and the maquisard were interred together in the Communal Cemetery at Guiscriff.’

The award of Ogden-Smith’s Territorial Efficiency Decoration was announced in the London Gazette on 21 April 1950; also see Lot 83 for his brother’s Honours and Awards.

Sold with a quantity of original documentation, including letters to Ogden-Smith’s widow from Lieutenant Leborgne, dated at Paris 14 December 1944, in which he states that he has visited the Minister of War to recommend Ogden-Smith for a decoration (‘You have now to wait but I think it will be long, perhaps some months’); from the son of the murdered French farmer, dated 16 July 1946, in which he forwards photographs of Ogden-Smith’s grave; from Rene Le Duigou, a local farmer who gave sanctuary to him on 12-13 July 1944, undated but probably sent to his widow in 1946-47; from R. Gaultier de Carville, a Commandant in the F.F.I. at St. Maur, dated 15 April 1946, in which he proposes the creation of a special vault at Guiscriff to house the remains of Ogden-Smith, Myodon and one of the French resistants (‘The whole population of Guiscriff considers these three heroes as their property and wish to keep them close ... ’); from an English resident at Guiscriff to his widow, describing the subsequent reburial ceremony, dated 28 July 1946 (‘There must have been several thousand people there and they all looked as if it were their own tragedy ...’); from Lieutenant Leborgne’s mother to Ogden-Smith’s, dated at ‘Rennes 17 December’ (‘He was a great officer and believe me that the French people are full of admiration for those who came to liberate the lands of Brittany and Normandy ... ’); War Office letter and War Graves Commission communications regarding a headstone, the former dated 4 February 1948; several old photographs of his gravesite and, poignantly, of the spot where he was gunned down, these latter with reverse captions in French and clearly sent to Ogden-Smith’s widow soon after the war, one of them reading,‘This is the place where Colin died. He was hit (wounded) at the bottom of the tree as he was going over the hedge, and he fell at the spot marked with a cross. From this place he fired 4 or 5 bullets - I found the empty cases’.