The Man They Couldn’t Kill

To his son, Brian, Stanley E. Hollis could do anything—like Superman: “He would mend my bike, he would take me into the woods looking for rabbits, he would take me riding in his lorry.” Though a hero to his son, Hollis was also a true hero, a 6-foot, 2-inch tower of modesty who was the only one of almost 62,000 British servicemen to receive the Victoria Cross for his actions at Normandy on D-Day.

Born in 1912 in North Ormesby, Middlesbrough, Hollis apprenticed with a Whitby shipping company to learn to be a navigation officer at age 17. He regularly sailed to West Africa but in 1930 got blackwater fever, ending his merchant navy career. He returned to North Ormesby and got a job as a lorry driver. He married in 1933, and the couple had a son and daughter. In 1939, he enlisted as a Territorial Army volunteer in 4th Battalion, the Green Howards.

With the outbreak of WW II, he was mobilized and joined the 6th Battalion of the Green Howards. He went to France as part of the British Expeditionary Force in 1940 where he served as the Commanding Officer’s dispatch rider. He was promoted from Lance Corporal to Sergeant during the evacuation from Dunkirk. At Dunkirk in 1940, a mortar shell stripped the clothing off his back and riddled him with shrapnel, yet he managed to swim through the surf to a rescue boat. He then fought from El Alamein to Tunis as part of the British 8th Army in the North African Campaign. Hollis was appointed company sergeant major just before the invasion of Sicily in 1943, where he was wounded at the Battle of Primosole Bridge.
 
A bit of a maverick, Hollis lost his stripes more than once for stepping out of line (often for going AWOL to see his wife), but his leadership ability always won them back. He had an explosive temper, huge fists, red hair, and rugged looks. No one to mess with, his comrades nicknamed him “The Man They Couldn’t Kill.”
 
According to Hollis’s memoirs. “At reveille on the morning of D-Day we arrived about six miles off the beaches. We were on a ship called the Empire Lance. Reveille was about 2:30 a.m. to 3 a.m. After having our breakfast— those who wanted it—we spent the rest of our time until we got into the landing craft loading it with ammunition which had to be carried up by the men to the high water mark and dropped on the beach for the follow-up troops.”
He was asked to hand each soldier a condom. To break the worried silence, Hollis joked, “What are these for? Are we going to fight the Germans, or f*** them?” The men laughed. Hollis knew full well they were to cover the muzzles of the weapons to keep them dry. Then they cast off into the rough sea, 18 men to a boat. It took an hour to get to shore. There, he wrote, “Everything in the world opened up from behind us. There were 25-pounders firing off floating platforms, floating platforms firing thousands of rockets in one salvo, cruisers, destroyers, battleships, everything opened up on the shore.…” He described a tank blowing up in front of him, and a German aircraft attacking from above.

After wading ashore in waist-deep water through mortar fire, Hollis and his men negotiated a minefield and crawled uphill toward their objective, a battery of German big guns that were shelling the Allied invasion fleet in the channel. As his company moved inland from Gold Beach, Hollis, a 31-year-old sergeant major, went with his company commander to investigate two German pillboxes. He rushed the first and fired point blank through the slit. Then he climbed on the roof and threw a grenade inside. He killed the men inside and took all but five as prisoners. “I rushed at it, spraying it hosepipe fashion,” he wrote later. “They fired back at me and they missed. I don’t know whether they were more panic-stricken than me—but they must have been.” As he marched toward the second pillbox, Germans ran out of it with their hands in the air. Hollis had single-handedly taken 26 prisoners. Furthermore, by neutralizing the pillboxes, he saved the lives of his own men. These actions earned Hollis a recommendation for the Victoria Cross.
Three hours later, with a face bloody from a grazing wound, he learned that two of his men had been left behind. He said to his commanding officer, “I took them in. I will try to get them out.” Taking a grenade from one of his men, Hollis carefully observed the enemy’s behaviour and threw it at the most opportune moment. Unfortunately, he had failed to prime the grenade, but the enemy did not know it and kept their heads down waiting for it to explode. By the time they had realized their mistake, Hollis was upon them, shooting them down and allowing his men to flee. This action also earned him a recommendation for the Victoria Cross.
In September 1944 he was wounded in the leg and evacuated to England, where King George VI decorated him with the Victoria Cross on October 10, 1944.
Though Hollis was reputed to have killed 100 Germans, he was not a great marksman. Of his ability with a rifle, he said, “If I fell down I couldn’t hit the floor.”
Hollis remained modest to the end about his feats, preferring to live quietly, which made him a lesser known hero. According to his memoir, “There wasn’t only me doing these things, there was other people doing things as well. . . All these fellers were my mates.”
Briefly after the war, Hollis was a celebrity, called on to open festivals and visit factories, all of which he hated. He found it hard to find work after the war, when veterans were often passed over for younger workers. Hollis refused to go on the dole or take the war pension to which he was entitled. He even refused family allowance payments. He finally got work as the landlord of a pub in Middlesbrough, and he remained there for the rest of his life, a hugely popular landlord.
The war had taken its toll on him, however: Bullets and shrapnel remained in his body his entire life. His children remember him standing behind the bar of The Green Howard—renamed by him in honour of his regiment—for hours with blood seeping from old wounds in his feet. He didn’t boast about his achievements and took no pride in killing Germans in battle. If he heard that a journalist was on the way to the pub to interview him, he would sneak out the back.
Hollis’s biographer, Mike Morgan, reveals that Hollis was regularly challenged by locals back home who wanted prove their worth against a VC winner. He walked away unruffled by these encounters. But he did struggle with depression. For days he would stay in his room and push money under the door for the family. Then he would come out and carry on as normal.
He died from a stroke at age 59 in February 1972 at Liverton Mines and laid to rest in Acklam Cemetery, Middlesbrough with full military honours, attended by three fellow VCs. In 2015, following a campaign to raise £150,000, a statue was erected in his memory in Middlesbrough. He is also commemorated in Crepon, France, with a statue of him at the Green Howards Memorial.