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Corporal James Dalgleish Pollock performs actions that will win him the Victoria Cross
The German Army, whose primary war strategy was to hold strategic high ground along the northern parts of France and allow the French and British Armies to wear themselves out attacking strong lines of defense, had constructed a number of redoubts, or fortified strongpoints along the trench lines. The Hohenzollern Redoubt, named after the German Emperor's family name, was one such redoubt. In late 1915 the forward edges of the redoubt were captured during a British offensive now called the battle of the Loos. The British soldiers, suffering tens of thousands of dead, held a small portion of the redoubt after their main attacks, and were told to improve their positions and await rienforcements.
One unit, the Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders, were under increasing machine gun fire and were essentially pinned down into their trenches when Germans counterattack. A standard German tactic of the time was to lightly hold their front trenches, which were ill suited to defend their positions from the rear, and allow British units to gain footholds in a redoubt or trench line, then pin them in place with interlocking machine gun fire. Once pinned infantry would work their way up communication trenches and assault the British from close quarters.
The main tool of this German tactic was the hand grenade carried by soldiers specially training in preparing and throwing these weapons. Called grenadiers by the Germans or bombers by the British, an infantry unit pinned down by machine gun fire was extremely vulnerable to grenades. The French had the previous year developed tactics to take on these attacks, but the British infantry were still mostly trained in bayonet fighting - and all of their tactics were settled on the aggressive charge. In defense there was no doctrine in place to handle infiltrating bombers.
The British though were working on their own grenades, and a new model weapon known as the Mills Bomb was slowly reaching the front. Cpl. Pollock though was likely not armed with this weapon. Instead he had access to a a range of materials that he could use to make dangerous but effective explosives from. Either having these already assembled, or assembling them at the time, he armed himself with a large number of these dangerous explosives.
He then faced a problem. It was impossible to attack the approach trench from his own. He would be vulnerable to his own grenades as well as rifle fire from German grenadiers, and would be outnumbered by a large margin. Taking a moment to assess the situation, he decided the machine gun fire against his trench that was pinning his comrads was not a sustained fire, but was instead harrassing fire from guns that did not command the entire trench line. He thus felt the safest course of events was to leave the trench and face enemy machine gun fire.
Pollock, grenades in hand, proceeded to leave the defensive position which protected him and braved machine gun fire, which proved to be inaccurate, to reach a point where he could throw grenades into the German communication trench while he was protected from return throws by the contours of the ground. For an hour he then proceeded to throw bombs down onto German grenadiers, whose own bombs were innefective in response. The grenadiers were forced to retire with casualties, while Pollock was able to hold up the German advance for an hour until a machine gun finally was able to wound him, forcing his withdrawal.
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