Richard Nelson Gale - World War I

World War I

When World War I broke out in 1914, Gale was still below the medical standards required for a recruit and failed to join a Territorial Army unit in London. He finally gained entry to the Royal Military College at Sandhurst in the summer of 1915 and before the end of the year had been commissioned into the Worcestershire Regiment as a Second Lieutenant. When Gale joined the regiment, he put his name forward for a course on training with machine guns and was accepted, being transferred to the Machine Gun Training Centre at Grantham; there he discovered that he had not applied to join a course, but to actually join the Machine Gun Corps. In short order he was posted to the Western Front and it was during his service as a subaltern in France that he won the Military Cross. During the Spring Offensive launched by the German Army in mid-March 1918, Gale was awarded his Military Cross for 'conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty'. He covered the retreat of a British infantry unit with his machine gun section, and when an artillery shell landed by a gun limber, he unhitched the killed and wounded horses under heavy fire to allow the limber to be moved away.