George Hunter Stirrett: Hero of the Great War

by Dan McCaffery for the Sarnia Observer

(2003) Sarnia-Lambton’s greatest hero of the Great War may well have been George Hunter Stirrett.

Stirrett, who was born in Forest, raised in Petrolia and lived his adult life in Sarnia, won the Military Cross (MC) and the Distinguished Conduct Medal (DCM) for his gallantry on the Western Front. He joined the cavalry shortly after war was declared in 1914 and trained in London with future flying ace, Billy Bishop, who was a close friend. In fact, when Bishop joined the Royal Flying Corps, Stirrett tried to enlist as well. But he was turned down because he was considered too heavy to be taken aloft in the fragile airplanes of the era.

Stirrett won the DCM during the bloodbath that was the Battle of the Somme when he led a group of 60 stretcher bearers into an area exposed to withering enemy fire in order to rescue wounded Allied soldiers. They made several trips, bringing hundreds of injured men to safety. But the cost was high. “I took in 60 men and 16 of us came out. The rest were killed or wounded, but 16 out of 60 was par for the course at the Somme. It wasn’t uncommon to have only that many come back,” he said in a 1979 interview. The official citation to his DCM award said he displayed “conspicuous gallantry” and “great courage and determination.”

Recalling the 1916 battle six decades later, Stirrett said, “the worst fighting of the war took place at the Somme and historians say it was the most stupid thing intelligent nations ever pulled off. We’d capture 100 yards one day and the Germans would take it back the next. Both trying to break the other guy’s army by inflicting as many casualties as possible. There’d be battalions of 1,000 men go into the Somme and I’d ask them when they were coming out how many they had left. Often they would come out with 275 or 330 men left out of 1,000.” The battle dragged on for months, claiming the lives of hundreds of thousands of soldiers on both sides. During one particularly savage day, the Allies lost 60,000 men.

Stirrett somehow survived the carnage and two more years of fighting. In the war’s last few weeks he won the MC for leading near-suicidal forays in search of German machine gun nests. The official citation notes he carried out mounted patrols to gather information on enemy positions “with great dash and courage.”

Stirrett was modest about the award. “They had to put something on those things,” he said of the citation. Prodded a little further, he said, “during the last two months of the war, the Germans were retreating and they were leaving machine gun crews behind to cover their retreat. That’s when the cavalry went into service to find their positions.”

During the war, he rose from the rank of corporal to major. He also helped confirm the exploit for which his friend Billy Bishop won the Victoria Cross. Stirrett was with a group of soldiers who took the crew of a downed German plane prisoner. One of the captured airmen told Stirrett the exploit for which Bishop won the medal, a single-handed attack on an enemy airfield, had been the talk of the whole German air force.

After the war, Stirrett moved to Sarnia, became a city councillor, and lived until 1982. His death, at age 88, was reported on the front page of The Observer, which covered his funeral. Stirrett was buried with full military honours by members of the 1^st Hussars of Sarnia and London, the same unit he had distinguished himself with so many years earlier.